The Nation Newspaper

Tag: physical

  • Me and my Books – I prefer physical books to electronic

    Me and my Books – I prefer physical books to electronic

    Yejide Kilanko was born in Ibadan. She is a children’s mental health therapist and a writer of poetry and fiction. Her debut novel, Daughters Who Walk This Path, was published in 2012 and was in 2016 longlisted for the prestigious Nigeria Literature Award (NLNG).  Her second book, Chasing Butterflies, is forthcoming. Yejide lives with her family in Ontario, Canada and has her website as www.yejidekilanko.com. She spoke with Olayinka Oyegbile on her favourite books.

    What sort of books do you like most?

    I enjoy books which educate and entertain.

    When you read a book, what are the salient things you look out for most?

    I try not to approach a book with preconceived notions. The books I remember are the ones in which the writer makes me care, positively or negatively, about the characters.

    Who are your favourite authors in the world and why?

    The late Buchi Emecheta is one of my favourite authors. I read her books as a teenage girl trying to find my place in a patriarchal society. Her life is an inspiration to me as a female, Nigerian writer. I love Gillian Flynn’s books. Her thrillers appeal to my psychotherapist mind. Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories drag me into a world that is both strange and familiar. I can see myself dealing with the same issues. Maya Angelou’s poetry offers a safe space.

    When and how do you like to read?

    I’m a night owl, so I do most of my reading when my family is in bed. I own two Kindles, but my preference is for a physical book. There’s something about the feel and smell of paper.

    What is your preferred literary genre?

    I read across genres.

    What book or books have had the greatest impact on you and why?

    The first books I read came from my father’s library. I was about seven or eight when I read Alex Haley’s Roots. My father bought the mini-series box set because he didn’t think I understood the novel. It was my introduction to the topics of race, exploitation, and identity. For me, the Bible is the truth and a life changer.

    As a child what books tickled you most?

    I remember reading Animal Farm and being fascinated by the idea of animals taking over a human farm. I also enjoyed books from the Macmillan’s Pacesetter Series.

    At what point in your life did you begin to nurse the idea of becoming a writer?

    I started writing poetry at the age of twelve. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was just something I did.

    How has writing shaped or reordered your life?

    Writing is still the best way I make sense of my world. It anchors me when everything around me spins.

    If you meet your favourite author face to face what would you like to ask him/her?

    I’ll love to have a chat with Gillian Flynn. I want to know how she taps into the interior world of her characters.

    Of the plays you’ve read which character struck you most?

    That will be Uloko from Zulu Sofola’s Wedlock of the Gods. At one time, I could recite his famous speech.

    What book do you plan to read next?

    My last book purchases were Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s The Golden Son. It will be one of them.

    How do you arrange your private library?

    I wish I could say I arrange my books alphabetically or by genre but my compulsion for order dictates I arrange them by height.

    Are you a re-reader and how often?

    I’m a re-reader. I do it as often as the book appeals to me.

    Disappointing, overrated, just not good: what book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

    There are books I’ve abandoned midway. I would rather not name one.  I also would not use those terms to refer to anyone’s work. I equate books to clothing. For me to commit, it has to be the right season and the right fit.

    If you could require the president of Nigeria to read one book, what would it be?

    The book which came to my mind is The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. I must say that in recent months, I’ve come across several articles linking the emperor to Donald Trump.

    Within the context of Nigeria, I think it’s a cautionary tale about how a leader caught up in the pursuit of legitimacy can ignore that necessary internal compass. And how elected and appointed sycophants drown out the voices of reason. In the story, a child spoke up and changed the narrative. In Nigeria, we drown out young voices. Old men head youth organizations. As a nation teetering on the brink of an all-out war, we need everyone at the table as the president focuses on the challenging business of leading.

  • THREAT TO PHYSICAL AND HEALTH EDUCATION

    Today I want to examine an imminent threat to the survival of physical and health education as a discipline in our tertiary institutions. I remember as an undergraduate student there was no clear division between physical and health education as a course of study but as the year goes by we have been able to see some sort of competition and division within the department of physical and health education giving rise to the production of students of physical education and students of health education.

    I am not interested in knowing why this came to be but I am convinced that most of our students especially at the undergraduate level are been denied the opportunity to make a choice about what area they would prefer to specialize on in their post graduate programme. A situation whereby a student of physical and health education department that specializes in health education is prevented from participating in sport practicals is highly uncalled for in my view.

    I challenge any lecturer of health education to prove to me that he or she was not a product of physical and health education at the under graduate level. This threat has affected sport development generally. Those who are supposed to at least serve as the foundation for sport impartation are themselves deprived of the knowledge from their university.

    Many of the graduates from either side of the divide end up lost in the labour market.  While I am not against people wanting to specialize in Health Education at an advance level, I strongly will want the National University Commission to please correct the anomaly that is going on in some of our universities in Nigeria.

    A student of the department of physical and health education should be a proud student exposed to the basic principles of sport and health education. This helps to produce a balance graduate in that field as such a student will know the effect of exercise on the human body as well as the effect of drug miss-use on the human body. But when this knowledge is divided as it were, then we are producing graduates that will not be relevant in the labour market.

    It is very easy for some lecturers to sit down in the comfort of their office and propose that students of health education have a ready-made market for them outside the university. But I say such students are limited to just health education which to me is currently very competitive as we have medical doctors, public health professionals, nurses etc competing in these same sector.

    Our original take off point which is sport cannot be contested. We have very prominent sport administrators who were specialist in health education but whose foundation was in both health and physical education. Today I have seen a couple of health education graduates that cannot play any sport nor teach any sport; this to me is an aberration to our noble profession.

    Our professional colleagues in the university should stop deceiving these undergraduate students by encouraging division in a combine subject matter like physical and health education. The world is reclassifying itself into strata of relevance and sectorial dictates of professions. If I may ask which profession or area of discipline will a first degree holder in health education claim to belong to in Nigeria or outside Nigeria? Is it sport or the health sector?

    Rather than produce students that will not be able to fit into their core area of discipline, I feel it is much better for the truth to be told to all those advocating for the outright division of health education from physical education. However, if they insist I will suggest that they be relocated to the public health department away from sport so that the quota of sport undergraduates will not be affected by the students of health education at the undergraduate level.

    I am open for discusion on this concept of division which to me is a threat to the existence of our common heritage. A student of the department of physical and health education should be grounded in both sport and health related matters not one knowing sport and the other knowing health at the detriment of the industry at large.

    We have lost so many grounds as a result of these and today if asked what is the constituency of a physical education graduate he or she will quickly say sport and what about a health education graduate I am not sure he or she can claim to be a sport professional yet we have a lot of them in our ministries of sports knowing nothing relating to sport other than the fact that they graduated from the department of physical and health education.

    My final appeal is to all departments of physical and health education to please stop this division and go back to the basics of producing graduates that are grounded in these two disciplines with the opportunity to expand their interest at their post-graduate level. This has become imminent as many graduates of physical and health education have failed to measure up in the labour market. A word is enough for the wise…..

  • Ikpeazu: Combining physical and stomach infrastructure

    Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State may have drawn from recent history to drive the two concepts of physical infrastructure and stomach infrastructure simultaneously. He is running on the two lanes; building the badly dilapidated roads of Abia and particularly renewing the city of Aba and at the same time building human capacity by attending to the people’s immediate needs.  Two of his pet projects – the Friends of Abia Schools Adoption Initiative (FASAI) and Feeding of School Pupils obviously fall in the line of stomach infrastructure.

    Indeed, until Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State popularized the concept of stomach infrastructure and drove on that plank to oust an incumbent governor out of power, Nigerians never knew the dangers of ignoring the concept and the inherent power and goodwill derivable from the practice for a leader. It is today a proven theory that upholding the practice of stomach infrastructure must be an essential character of a political leader and political leadership in Nigeria of today.  It has since entered into our political books that the victory of Fayose over the incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi in the June 21, 2014, was the vindication of the wisdom in stomach infrastructure.

    The lesson that emerged thereafter from the Ekiti scenario was that, for effective and impactful political leadership, both physical and stomach infrastructure must be given due consideration by any leader who wants to remain a legend in the hearts of the citizenry. The two are meaningful goals of democracy and therefore none must be emphasized above the other. The two must run concurrently. Okezie Ikpeazu got this message, loud and clear.

    What then is physical infrastructure as against stomach infrastructure? Physical infrastructure relates to the building of physical projects – roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, monumental buildings, etc. Today, Ikpeazu is constructing 45 roads and two bridges in Abia and these  cut across the three geopolitical zones of the state. It is no more news, also, that he is constructing four roads in Aba with cement technology or what experts call, rigid pavement technology thereby blazing a trail as far as this technology is concerned in Nigeria. This is because apart from the airport tarmacs and factory platforms where big engines and machines are installed, cement technology is not yet a common experience in Nigeria, especially in road construction. He is daring the nationwide economic crunch to execute this high cost intensive project at this straightened time.

    On the contrary,  stomach infrastructure  looks down to the people’s immediate needs: empowerment programme for unemployed youths and widows; maintenance assistance to the aged; health foundation to assist the poor; agric facilities for the rural poor farmers; skill acquizition centres for poor unskilled men and women; loan grants to enable them take off in little measure; direct food relief to the poorest of the poor; borehole in rural communities to  solve water scarcity problems;  establishment of small-scale cottage industries in the villages where the rural community can work and also acquire experience on how to produce minor things and many more.

    Indeed, it is from this perspective that the governor has launched his pet project of Feeding School Pupils in 170 primary schools in the state, three times a week. Under the Universal Basic Education provisions, the governor is driving a pilot arrangement of feeding primary school pupils three in 10 schools in the 17 local councils of the state. The pupils are to be fed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This action will have to be executed in schools in the rural areas with high indigent population. The target public is the poorest of the poor, pupils from indigent homes who study under very unhealthy situations. The governor wants to create an enabling environment for them and share his little milk of human kindness.

    Also, as part of his 51st birthday celebration, the governor also launched the school adoption initiative and invited the friends of Abia to come and rediscover their roots and give back to the communities that made them by adopting indigent pupils and volunteering to renovate the dilapidated structures of the schools. This project is a novel idea which is a bit different from government tradition of renovating and equipping primary schools in rural, urban and semi-urban areas.  The approach is to identify the worst primary schools in each of the local councils and give them a facelift with the hope that when the worst of these schools are upgraded, the effect on the entire primary school system will be enormous.

    The governor regretted that the primary schools which form the base of the entire school system have long been  neglectted  for long due to a number of factors, which   include lack of Old Boys Association, Parents Teachers Association etc. He noted that pupils in these schools are exposed to extreme weather conditions including sitting on bare floors. Thus, the aim is to use the project to turn around the poorest primary schools across the state. The project is designed to give hope to pupils from poor schools by getting well-to-do individuals within and outside the state to adopt such schools and in the process enhance their fortunes and by extension the intellectual horizon of the benefiting pupils. Most of the influential members of the public are products of these schools which in their heydays were glorious institutions. Ikpeazu’s motive in this project is to provide an opportunity for these notable citizens to give back to the society, in this case, the schools that produced them.

    In the same vein, the governor also announced a N20,000 monthly stipend for the first 125 intakes of the newly commissioned Skill Acquizition Centre built by the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) at Otueke in Ugwunagbo Local Council of the state.  His wife is also running another pet project, Vicar Hope Foundation, through which she is attending to the immediate needs of widows, the handicapped and the less privileged in the society.

    Stomach infrastructure, indeed is a moral suasion which is about giving governance a human face.  It is about understanding the bottom-top, gradual approaches in developmental strides. It is about carrying everybody along, everyone in his own pace. By identifying the need for a convergence between physical and stomach infrastructure in Abia State, Governor Ikpeazu is interspersing power with remorse. Remember Shakespeare? “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.”

    Adindu is Chief Press Secretary to Abia governor.

  • Nutritionists: Daily breakfast ‘ll ensure cardiac, physical health

    Nutritionists: Daily breakfast ‘ll ensure cardiac, physical health

    The Nutrition Society of Nigeria (NSN) has recommended daily intake of breakfast to maintain a healthy body weight and cardiac health.

    The Vice President of the society, Mr. Bartholomew Brai, said breakfast skipping had been found to pre-dispose people of various age groups to obesity and low levels of physical activity.

    This is because skipping breakfast leads to over-eating later in the day and, as such, encourages nibbling on high calorie snacks during the day, he added.

    He spoke at the re-launch of Milo with Activ-Go in Lagos.

    According to Brai, regular breakfast eaters have higher dietary quality as they usually have increased intake of fibre, calcium, vitamins A & C, riboflavin, zinc and iron as well as decreased intake of fat, cholesterol and calories.

    “Breakfast also provides people with the energy to keep going throughout the day. This encourages them to stay active which, in turn, helps to burn unwanted fat,” he said.

    Giving other reasons why breakfast is important, Brai said it breaks the overnight fast and supplies the energy to kick start the metabolism for the day.

    “It also supplies many beneficial nutrients and re-fuels glycogen stores. Regular eating  of breakfast has been shown to improve performance (memory recall, attention span and creativity) in school children and children who eat breakfast are known to be more physically fit and active,” he said.

    Describing breakfast as the ‘most important meal of the day’, Brai expressed regret that this meal is, however, usually the most likely meal to be skipped in a day.

    Nutritionists, he said, recommend that people take breakfast within an hour of waking up and not later than 8 o’clock in the morning to get its full benefits.

    While breakfast foods vary from place to place, culture to culture, household to household and from individual to individual; breakfast should include: carbohydrates (e.g. grains or cereals, bread); Protein (e.g. beans, eggs, fish, meat); Beverages (e. g. Milo, tea, coffee, milk, yoghurt) and Fruits & Vegetables (e. g. apple, orange, banana, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, cucumber).

    Recommending its addition to a healthy breakfast formula, Dr. Bartholomew Brai said Milo has been re- formulated and is now fortified with ACTIV-GO made from PROTOMALT extract and a specifically designed combination of nine micro-nutrients including six vitamins and three minerals. He said the Nutrition Society of Nigeria took time to do the analyses of the Milo product and found out that it is first in its class.

    “The Milo Activ –Go re-launched is another momentous achievement of Nestle Milo. I really commend the innovation that went into the new Milo with Activ-Go which is a unique blend of vitamins and minerals that help the individual to achieve the Milo promise.”

    The NSN Vice President insisted that the specific size and type of breakfast is not too important as the goal at breakfast is to replenish liver glycogen.

    The Category Manager-Beverages at Nestle Nigeria Plc, Olufemi Akintola who traced the history of Milo since it was first formulated in Australia in 1934, stated that ‘“Milo, through its unique delicious coco malt  taste  provides winning energy for daily success.

    “Activ–Go supports energy release, muscle function and bone maintenance that are essential for physical activity in children”.