Mazi Nwonwu's blog

Boko Haram and the finger pointing nation

2013-04-04T17:20:00.003+01:00

My constantly changing Twitter and Facebook timelines are announcing news of another attack in Kano as I write this.

It’s Easter Sunday and I am lying sprawled on the now child-battered centre rug that used to be my pride and joy. Coming from the kitchen is the sound of something sizzling in oil and the scent of spices. My wife is cooking a feast for the Easter Celebration. I do not call out to her to inform her of the latest bomb story. I actually stopped telling her about the bombings long ago. On her part, gone are those exclamations, which used to be her response to news of another mass killing. Ewuchim o! She used to exclaim—an expression that encompasses the pain and helplessness that mark such situations. These days, when she hears of another attack she just shakes her head sadly and say “eeyah”.

I used to post reaction to the news on my Facebook page, from where one of those combined social media apps takes it on to Twitter, and perhaps Linkedin, but I don’t do that anymore, at least not with the same conviction or purpose. Fewer and farther in between are those angry words directed at the perpetrators.

I also no longer see the propriety in wishing that the dead peacefully rest when those who took their lives remain free to kill again and again. Effectively, I am numb and I can easily say same for most of my compatriots. We no longer react as sane human beings world over would react to the violent premature deaths of scores of innocents.

I am ashamed that I am this way, even though I try to take solace in the fact that my state of mind is a side effect of how routine news of death by Boko Haram has become. This state of mind extends across the whole country.

Now and then, Boko Haram and its sister terror vessels take the horror metre up a notch, enough to make a nation largely acclimatised to their brand of evil shake off the numbness and take to social media pages to vent for a day or two, then we go back to the new normal. The new normal appears to be death by grenade or AK47 on a daily basis, and death by bomb once, twice or trice in a blood soaked week.

In my mind – though I need to dig to find it – there are still memories of a time when stories of road-side bombing, suicide bombing and killers who scream “Allahu Akbar” as they take the life of men, women and children created by that same God, was something we attributed to the Middle East and American movies. Though the Middle East continues to face that same problem, it has extended its reach to Nigeria. As it is, something that even the most pessimistic of us would not have envisioned, lives with us.

Truthfully, when the bombs came to Nigeria, they did not come via what many believe is the physical expression of the misinterpretation of a prophet’s teaching. They came through a bunch of gunmen who purported to fight for the ecologically damaged oil producing communities.

I recall I was in Bori Camp army barracks in Port Harcourt job hunting after my Youth Service in 2005 when a car bomb went off in the major road in the barrack. I can’t recall if that incident made the news then, but since that was before social media changed how news is distributed and accessed, I think not, especially since it happened in a military barrack.

That attack could possibly be MEND and its fellow travellers’ first use of bombs to drive home a point. Bomb culture MEND style soon became a staple of those so-called freedom fighters and they continued claiming responsibility until things came to a head when the Independence Day bombing was attributed to MEND.

The bomb detonator then moved to the Islamic militants who already, it appears, have an affiliation with bombs via their brothers in arms and ideology in the Middle East. Boko Haram, in whatever form, embraced suicide bombings with the same ferocity Islamic insurgents in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq did and brought us to where we are today.

Boko Haram and the question of reason

Unlike the Niger Delta gunmen, the Boko Haram guys appear—they’ve stated this as well—not to be driven by economic gain or social empowerment (I do not buy all that John Campbell-esque argument about marginalisation of the North and other similar bla bla blas). For Boko Haram and its affiliates, the call of Jihad seems to be the major motivation.

True, we must not forget, how the high handedness of the Nigerian Police played a big role in the morphing of a localised Islamic belief system into an insurgency that has now achieved international dimensions, but we must not lose sight of the horror that is Islamic fundamentalism and how it has become a reoccurring decimal in much of the Muslim world.

That said, this does not mean that poverty and unemployment are not catalysts here. A hungry youth with little to live for in the now is more easily sold to the idea of the immeasurable beauty of life in the hereafter and would more readily embrace a trip to that waiting paradise, especially when all he needs to do to get there is to kill some folks.

Still, as Abdulmutalab and other upper class insurgents have shown, this is not as accurate a depiction of fundamentalists as many of us would want to believe. Fanatical religiosity is not a disease peculiar to the poor, neither is the desire for a place in heaven. However, it is the responsibility of government, or those in control of what many call our collective commonwealth, to see that any one that can be saved from the grip of the sort of fanaticism that Boko Haram and like-minded groups represent is saved. If providing access to qualitative education, employment and an all round good life is the key to achieving this, then it behoves on the government to explore this path. If you think not, then you had better remember what they say about idle minds.

The above may sound very much like an affirmation of the Campbell theory of Northern Nigeria Insurgency, but it is only a take on a probable solution. We may do the usual finger pointing about how the north has had more than their fair share of power, but since that will only lead to further finger pointing, I would rather go on.

But permit me to ask if any of the former or present leaders from the north has had a child, brother, wife, sister, mother and father killed in this insurgency? I will also like to ask if any of them are sending their kids to the schools or hospitals in the north? Same question may be asked about the leaders in the south?

Time to stop the finger pointing and deal with this

Boko Haram insurgency is a very complex one. It is probably the most complex of its type in the world. I see the Boko Haram story as consisting of different elements that together amount to a very deadly mix. So we have religion, ethnicity, poverty, illiteracy, politics and some other things finding expression in it one way or the other. And I doubt if we can tackle any one of them in isolation.

Boko Haram and its associate insurgents are a very difficult case, but it is not an impossible task. It can be done, but those who have a stake in the solution must come together to do the needed. Finger pointing is the order of the day and the fallacy of this method of fighting an insurgency, or anything for that matter, can be better addressed by an analogy.

In late 90s, prophetess Helen Nkume was making some serious waves as a gospel singer in the South East. With a knack for danceable beats and barrelful of wise saying, Prophetess Nkume was one of the better-known Gospel musicians expressing themselves in Igbo language then. One of her songs predicted woe for the enemy pointing accusing fingers at her. According to Ms. Nkume, the enemy should be aware that while he/she is pointing at her, four fingers in that same hand (It is actually three fingers, I checked) would be pointing back at the pointer. There is a lesson in this, a lesson for our political and religious class who insist on laying the blame elsewhere instead of admitting to themselves that they are at fault.

If the lesson is learnt by all—read political, cultural and religious leaders across the country—there would be better understanding and cohesion in the push to make the country safer. The situation where everyone is chasing shadows should not be allowed to continue. While we may never agree on what Boko Haram is or what they are really fighting for (even the self identified leader of the group seems to be clueless in this regard), we surely must all agree that the group and its copycats are destroying the social and economic fabric of an integral part of this country. We must also agree that the actions of Boko Haram is inflicting on us a mindset that sees the deadly carnage they wrought as normal—a deadly psychological no no if you ask me.

Instead of everyone reverting to type when the bombs go off: The government spokesmen mouthing the usual no-stones-unturned mantra or a not so well reversed version of it, my fellow Igbos talking about plans against our race, the people of the West fronting and declaring “Dem no born Boko Haram well to bomb here”, and the people of the North wringing their hands, accusing the government of being responsible or not doing enough, after all what is good for the Niger Delta bandits should equally be good for the Boko Haram bandits.

Instead of all that, Nigerians should learn that talk and finger pointing solves nothing if it does not stop the senseless killings. Don’t count on it sha.

READ: Umar Bello: ‘Hausa-Fulani’ — The Nigerian Scapegoat

So, I was talking about my wife’s cooking

I chew on a piece of chicken as I write, wondering if as a result of the fresh attack in Kano, somebody’s son or daughter would never know the taste of food ever again. I shake my head, but the image of mangled bodies once implanted refuse to go away.

I look at Twitter for a bit and am not surprised that an update on the bombing is sandwiched between a tweet from a celebrity musician about her difficulty in choosing between brown and white rice and another from someone directing people to visit a site and download the latest Nigerian club banger.

So in effect we continue to party while the bombs go off. We act as if everything is ok. We may be numb to it all, but like Naeto C said “things are not the same”.

Originally Published by TheScoopNG.com

A walk in the other side of music

2013-02-28T11:57:00.000+01:00

Music is a part of human Culture. culture itself is universal. One aspect of culture that best exhibits this universality is music.

All over the world, from Lagos to New York; from manila to Rio; from the icy deserts of Greenland to the tiny islets of New Zealand, musicians, just like others involved in the arts, shape the way the world is viewed. Be it through the captivating moves of Michael Jackson, the mind numbing guitar tunes from Carlos Santana or the soul stirring vocals of Sade Adu, the world feels music and music fills the world.

Perhaps, my choice of music acts is not universal, but still, my point is out.

Like world shapers, artists mould culture. Consciously or not, they manipulate the choices of their subjects, shaping what we wear, where we sleep, what we eat and even in the extreme, who we marry.

Since Human minds are attuned in different ways; the artist, being human, are given to diverse idiosyncrasies that have a bearing on their creations. This character can either be infused with good or suffused with the dark side that we all obviously have.

Recently, just like in the distant past, the arts seem to lean more towards this dark side, exemplified by the runaway success of films like ‘Twilight’ and others of like ilk.

Music, like the movies, appears to be interpreting the times through lyrical content and visuals –the disturbed imagery of accompanying music videos- that some have interpreted to somehow glorify the darkness, personified by a Judaeo-Christian Satan.

Artists like Jay-Z and his wife Beyonce, Rihanna, Lil Wane, to name a few, are some of those walking the part already taken by metal rock artists in the past.

Undoubtedly, Jay-z is one artist that has over the years delved into what many would consider the occult, if not in fact, then by insinuations.

Jay-Z, who has long been rumoured to belong to an occult order—probably Freemason—fuelled more speculations with the use of occult imagery in his latest video called “Run This Town” (featuring Rihanna and Kanye West).

But this is not the first time Jay-Z is showing signs of occult affiliations. Years earlier he propagated the massively popular ‘Roc sign’ that incorporated a widely known symbol of the Illuminati cult, the left eye within a triangle. Wild fans usually throw the salute during Jay-Z’s stage performances, probably not knowing the origins of the sign or perhaps, not caring.

Jay-Z also has appeared in public wearing a black hoodie with the words “Do What Thou Wilt” engraved on it. Though the words are suggestive in themselves, the fact that they are the official dictum of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and of its reformer, occultist Aleister Crowley, leaves a whole lot to imagination (The O.T.O. is a hermetic order modelled after Freemasonry and German Illuminism).

Truth is, Jay-Z knows a lot about occult imagery and seeks to either make their use more mainstream or just wants to build an aura of mysticism around his persona, thereby tapping into the growing leaning of the west’s teenagers to the dark side. A phenomenon that has resulted in the cult like following of various vampire movies of which Twilight is a very good example.

Both Beyonce and Rihanna have done songs that centre on possession, with Beyonce taking it further by naming her possessed/possessing persona: her alter ego Sasha Fierce, who she affirms is the fun, sexual and aggressive side of her.

She says: “I have someone else that takes over when it’s time for me to work and when I’m on stage, this alter ego that I’ve created that kind of protects me and who I really am”.

Sasha Fierce is at times depicted wearing a dress adorned with an occult symbol of a goats head, otherwise known as Baphomet’s head.

On her part Rihanna, in the video of her song Disturbia explores the bleak world of mind control and demonic possession. Not only does she play with the dark side, she appears to have recently embraced it completely as her recent videos show.

Though this use of occult imagery in video did not start with rap and Hip-hop acts, they appear to be taking it to the next level. If they do this to get recognition, then they have definitely succeeded--if the number of awards some of the artists mentioned above garnered at the last Grammy awards are anything to hinge ones assertions on.

Article first published by Side View magazine in 2010

Governor Chime has done well, but...

2013-01-25T22:47:00.002+01:00

The continuing absence of Enugu state governor Sullivan Chime leaves a sour taste in my mouth, but it is not for the reasons you might think.

I am from Enugu state and the present state of affairs falls, as they say, on my doorsteps. It is unprecedented in Enugu history for a governor to—if we are to believe the official statement—be on accumulated leave for this long. Despite all the political and constitutional rules this lengthy absence is said to be breaching, I do not intend to dwell on what laws has been broken or how that will impact the polity. Rather, I want to dwell on how much the man’s tenure has affected my community and what his absence means to my constituency and me.

I am from the hills of Anike. My ancestral home is the hilltop town of Nkwe: one of those places that development seems to ignore perpetually, until recently that is. This lack of development may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that aside from meagre cassava, vegetable and palm produce that our women take to the markets in Awgu—where our LGA headquarters is situated—and neighbouring towns, we appear, on the surface, to largely lack much to offer in terms of commerce. This argument, that we don’t contribute much to the state to warrant attention, was used to justify the lack of government presence in the villages that make up Anike for decades by successive governments.

In truth, my village, located within the hills of Anike—where terraced farmlands, beautiful hills and valleys, forests, meandering rivers and other gifts of nature are readymade for tourism, where an abundance of that particular type of stone used for building in the south east meant quarrying would take off once big trucks could make it into the hills, where the highland climate calls for a different kind of agriculture, the kind that makes South Africa billions in wine sales—has more potential than any myopic minded government would see even if you place the evidence right under their nose.

The thoughts of tourism and its associated economic empowerment have always being on the mind of my people, but devoid of effective representation for years and lacking the economic power to begin the required transformation from rustic rural settings to a town with enough modern amenities to draw the potential tourist, we could only do so much. If you don’t believe the tourism potentials of the hills of Anike, think of a more accessible Obudu, rolling hills and all; think ancient hill terraces that are hundreds of years old; think fauna protected by ancient gods and flora that produces the freshest air you can dream of.

Like what obtains in many communities in the south east, social and infrastructure development in my village has been based on the communal self-help system for years. My people carved their own roads from the slopes, built their own schools, began building their own health centre, before the intervention of a son of the soil, Uche Uzochukwu, drew government’s attention to a land too far off the beaten track for anyone to take notice.

Government completed the health centre and the secondary school, all built within the last ten years, and we celebrated what was an unprecedented feat in our eyes: government providing infrastructure to us, the usual rejects. This was in the days of Chimaroke Nnamani, who despite his regrettable lack of ambition actually had some spark of grassroots development, in his first term that is.

If you know my village, or similar villages in Nigeria, you would understand when I say that I never expected to see a paved road snaking towards it in my lifetime. If you’ve ever been to my village, you would not be amazed when I say thoughts of pipes bearing water to homes in the village was as improbable as Nigeria putting a man on the moon in the next decade. Public power supply was something we spied from across the hills when we look towards Mbana in Isioche LGA of Imo state, we dreamt of it but for sure weren’t expecting to see those cables crisscrossing our hamlets any time soon.

The summary of it is that within the last 4 years all these farfetched dreams came to pass.

I had returned home earlier in the year and beheld a scene that appeared surreal: a very big water storage tank in front of my father’s stone and brick house, with public taps located by our entrance, one of several in the village; just behind the fetching point is a big PHCN transformer, one of two in the village. Now my trusty generator rests when it should be doing its duty of powering our house. However, the wonder of public power supply and pipe borne water from the two water schemes in the village diminished when I got home for the Christmas celebrations—in the face of black tar climbing the hills towards my village to transform what naturally is the remotest place in Enugu state into 21^st century compliant village.

I do not give in to praise singing easily and I still hold that much of our leaders are rouges who are raping us ceaselessly, but in Chime, I have found a man, who though operates from a deeply flawed system, delivers the promised good governance to the people.

The story of Nkwe is not peculiar, a one off, it is something Enugu state holds in common, the story of a silent, but hard working governor.

It will be very sad if Chime is not able to complete his tenure, or if his illness takes much away from a man that feels the pulse of the grassroots and is willing to do the right thing in a region where democracy does not exist.

Enugu state is dragging, every facet feels the absence of the governor, and something needs to be done soonest. While I hope his return happens soon, it may be wise for the man to look at himself well and speak truth, to himself. Even if he can’t go on, his legacy is assured.

Governor Sullivan Chime has done well, but he needs to watch it less he gets carried away with his achievements and sense of importance and fall into the trap that ate his predecessor: overblown sense of self worth, that disease that afflicts politicians and makes them think they alone have all the right answers.

Rape and the Nigerian society

2013-01-25T06:07:00.003+01:00

I encountered rape very early in life. I was perhaps 14 when a random visit to the home of a local ruffian presented me with my first glimpse. A girl, lying on the bed, with only a tiny towel to cover a miniscule part of her honour, stared at me from a threadbare mattress, her eyes pleading yet seemingly resigned to her fate. I had been sent to the room to “take kola”. I remember her clothes were in a bucket by the door, a bucket filled with water. Her story was sad. A visitor from the east, she had only asked for directions to her brother’s house in Angwan Kanawa and was lured to the house of Baba Wani’s aged grandmother, where he and his boys took turns on her. I got to the house on the second day. The monsters were clearly done with her and were offering her as kola to any young man that came to the house. I recall crying as I begged them to let her go, I recall the girl saying nothing, defeated I think. I recall she kept her legs parted, tired of fighting, she existed in a state of ‘cooperation’.

They let her go the next day. Fate however, knows how to mete out poetic justice.

She never said, but her brother, the one in Angwan Kanawa, was a police officer. I still remember the raid, more than twenty boys, some as young as I was then, some younger, were picked up. I remember the girl’s face as the police men brought her to my father’s shop. There was little gratitude in her eyes as she shook her head and said, “This one no follow, he came to beg them to let me go”. I still remember the pain of the cane across my back as my father wiped me mercilessly for being acquainted with Baba Wani and his then notorious gang. My father refused to consider that his shop was located in that house until a few years before and we still had a ‘packing store’ in the compound, next door to the rape room. Baba Wani did not make it out of the police cell alive. He was probably 18 or 19, his story was the story of dozens of the local terrors we had then.

The second time I met rape was also as bad as the first. Again, a group of boys cornered a girl, the girlfriend of one of them, and took turns on her. The guy in whose room it occurred used to run with our group in Government College Kaduna. He stopped following us when the Kaura—gang—life drew him to its bosom. Babylon lived with his sister who worked with a construction company and was hardly at home. He said later that the girl was not his girlfriend, but refused to see it from our point of view that since he ‘toasted her’ and she agreed, she actually was and thus deserving of his protection. I don’t know if fate ever caught up with Babylon and his co-conspirators. I know they denied everything and the girl’s family never reported to the police. I recall the noise died after a week or so and Babylon and his group, who had all ran away in the heat of the moment, returned with exaggerated swaggers to their steps as their street credibility shot through the roof.

The third time I encountered rape was closer to home and very personal. I had gone with my female cousin and her female neighbour to an Mbaka crusade in Enugu. My cousin’s house was walking distance to the then ‘Adoration’ ground inside the technical college beside IMT’s Campus too. It was raining, the place was over crowded, the ground was muddy, we were miserable and regretting the whole ‘adoration’ business. I can’t recall who suggested we go home, but three of us walked under the starry night enduring the slight drizzle. We had just crossed the Trade Fair complex and were about to negotiate the next slope—where my cousin’s house is—when perhaps a dozen guys swooped on us.

There was no weapon to fight them off and before I knew what they were up to, three of them had me pinned to the wall of the Trade Fair complex and the others were bearing my cousin and her neighbour away, in two different directions. I begged, I cried, reminding the smelly urchins that they have sisters at home, but it was to no avail. I felt my heart break into a million pieces and I knew then that I could not live again if they had their way, but no super human strength came to help me throw off my restrainers and save the girls that were then calling out to me. It was a nightmare become real and the fact that more than twenty thousand people were stumping the sandy stoned Enugu earth a few metres away as they called for the heavens to send more showers of blessing made it all the more surreal.

I had given up, promising myself I will struggle the more and perhaps be fortunate enough and the boy with the knife to my throat will lose his patience and take my life. If ever there was a better alternative, dying at that moment was it.

Then the scream, blood curdling, from the depth of a stricken soul, reached my ears. Initially, I thought the worst had began, but as I looked towards my cousin I found she was still standing, struggling with her attackers as scream after scream poured from her. Her neighbour joined in and then I did too. I screamed with all the strength I could muster. I recall falling to the ground as my restrainers let go of me suddenly. I remember how relief flooded my heart with fire so cold I almost passed out from it when my whispered ‘did they…’ was replied with ‘mba’.

We went back to the Adoration ground—they went, hugging themselves tight, I followed behind them, dragging my feet as shame washed over me in torrents. I am the man, I thought, but I couldn’t protect them.

The security men at the gate followed me back but we saw no one. We later concluded that they must have taken refuge in the hundreds of buses packed along the road, buses that ferried worshipers from across the south east to Mbaka’s weekly ‘Adoration Mass’.

It took me months to recover from the trauma and took my cousin longer to start seeing me as a ‘man’ again. It was a close shave, a very close shave, one that still makes me shiver, one that brings home what that young man in India must have gone through.

I read an article where a lady said Nigeria has a rape problem and I picked offense that some responders felt not soiling Nigeria’s already battered image is more important issue she addressed in the article. I gave the examples above to say, yes, we have a rape problem and it is not new. I say let the image of the country be soiled further if that is what will get us to take notice of the ills around us.

I agree with the writer of the article that Nigerians condone a lot of evil and rape is one of them. Aside from the high number of case that go unreported, what do we do to rapists?

Most times than not we try to excuse rapists by blaming the victim:

What was she doing there in the first place?

She must have lured him with her dressing!

How can she tell me one man raped her, haba, how is that possible?

Had she been wearing a very tight jean, the robbers would have had a harder time raping her.

Nne, next time abeg, wear very tight jean to bed.

Unbelievable inanity is our normal response to rape and the victims of it. Like Babylon and his crew who celebrated their successful rape, we unwittingly grant rapists the space to rub it in. Yes, I heard of the girl that was forced to marry the man that got her pregnant after forcing himself on her. This man should be rotting in jail, now we gift him the very person he abused. Talk about absurd, criminal even. In the face of such uncivil behaviour from the society, we can’t blame the women who chose to suffer in silence, who chose to not reveal the wrong that have been done to them.

The Nigerian media also need to come to terms with the way we respond to rape. They are grossly tilted towards glorifying the rapist and making rape seem like fun, or what how else can we interpret headline that go, “Randy man ravages neighbours daughter”?

I still don’t know what pushes men, or women even, to rape, but I say cut off the offending member of the guilty party and I will thank you for it. And no apologies.

My next BIG Thing!

2013-01-16T22:22:00.001+01:00

Social media will be celebrated whenever and wherever the story of the generation of Nigerian writers that I belong to is written. And that story will surely feature how writers of my generation, managed, despite the odds, to create something grand out of the possibilities inherent in social media. The story will be big and surely, the tales of how aspiring writers searched for and connected with thousands of like minded individuals would be an integral part of it. While I don’t particular feel I am qualified to write this story, I won’t deny the fact that what you are reading now is a facet of that story.

I met Gbenga Awomodu, online, I can’t recall if it was on Facebook or in the early days of Naijastories, but we connected online and since we both live in Lagos and shared an interest in event reviews and journalism, the chances of us meeting outside of the electronic world of social media was high. We met a couple of times outside of social media before the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop brought us face to face again in August 2012. The story of my generation of writers actually played out in that workshop. Of the 22 participants, I had only ever met Gbenga in person before the workshop, but Richard Ali, Abdulaziz Abdulaziz, and Samuel Tosin Kolawole were already (Facebook connected) friends of mine, even though I had never met them in person. I still shiver at that social media strangeness that allows you know people intimately before you meet them in person. I was also meeting Yemisi Ogbe for the first time, but I knew her work as a food writer with the now sadly defunct Next Newspaper, where I also had the privilege of contributing articles, and we happen to have mutual admiration for each other’s work—I discovered that out during the course of the workshop. I summarised my workshop experience here and Yewande Omotosho did here, so we can skip all the long tori and bite into the meat of this one.

So, Yewande sent me an email—actually a mail, a twitter DM and a Facebook inbox, in that order—about the Next Big Thing project. Since I was ensconced in my ancestral village getting cozy with the spirits of my fathers, I only got to see the messages after she had posted her Next Big Thing story. Since our mutual connectivity is still in play, it was natural that one of the persons (Gbenga and Nana) she handed the baton over to would look my wayJ

So—I so like that word, so tori tellerish—that is the story of how you came to be reading this, perhaps, boring narrative.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about my Next Big Thing as Yewande, Nana, Gbenga and many others did before me, so let get to it.

What is the working title of your book?

Death is a woman—I know, e no sweet for mouth, but that’s why they call it working title J

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I must confess here, and I have elsewhere, that the idea came from Clive Barker’s Imajica.

What genre does your book fall under?

Crime fiction, maybe, I am not so much into labels

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I actually play with scenes from the WIP in my head and try to see my characters from camera angles, so visualising actors as the characters should be easy, but it is not J. However, I would love Omotola as Bimbo Kasim, Idris Elba would definitely fit in as her husband Balogun Kasim and that Dumalo guy from Ghana would be perfect for Sola—he would have to lose some pounds though J. Omotola would be apt because of her built and her personality—you can say I used her as a model for Bimbo. Idris has a stern exterior and from what I have seen him do with the roles he has played, he would perfectly embody a streetwise politician with a taste for literature and fine women. I don’t really know why I picked Dumalo for Sola, maybe because I couldJ. Thinking about it now, I wonder if he can handle Lagos street lingo.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Balogun Kasim, a wealthy street-bred politician discovers his wife Bimbo is having an affair, consumed by jealousy, he makes plans to have her killed, believing it’s a justifiable punishment for her betrayal, fate has other plans and the contract falls into the laps of a gang Bimbos former boyfriend Sola is affiliated with, then things get very crazy and interesting. In the end, Bimbo kills Balogun in self-defence and somewhere in the mix they discover that Sola and the Balogun are actually brothers. Like I said, it is still a work in progress so...

When will your book be published?

I hope in 2014. I am doing my best to ensure the story is captivating enough for publishers to want it, so my fingers are crossed.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I started writing it in 2009. Actually, I wrote the first three paragraphs in 2009 and later published a longer version in Naijastories in 2011. I should have finished writing now, as the story is already complete in my head, but I had several book projects in my head at once—I finished a short story collection last year and it is already with a publisher, I also began working on a science fiction short story collection. We have to keep food on the table—I write for a living, and that is grounds for serious conflict between personal projects and the day job thingy. However, this book, which is half way done actually, will be finished this year.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I actually wanted to write a story about relationships, about the inability for people to break with their past, no matter how hard they try. With this story, I tried to get into the skin of the individuals and show why they do the things they do, the reason behind their decisions. It is more the story of Sola and Balogun Kasim than it is about a man reacting to his wife’s infidelity. It is also a story of Lagos’s underside, that place people don’t really talk about.

I don too tuk. I am handing this baton over to two super guys, two of Nigeria’s brightest literary talents: Emmanuel Iduma and Nze Sylva Ifedigbo. They really don’t need introduction (Google should have automatic links to them by now) but formality sake calls for it.

Emmanuel Iduma is the author of Farad, a novel. A Lawyer by training, he works mainly as a writer and manager of creative projects. His first book, Farad, was published in July 2012 by Parresia Publishers, and has been warmly received across the country. Iduma is co-publisher of Saraba Magazine, editor of 3bute.com (recipient of a 2012 Highway Telkom Award for Innovative Use of Media) and content management supervisor of Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project. Check out his blog here. As for Emma’s Next Big Thing, with a TEDx event and another, hopefully crazily brilliant, book in the works...I can only say wait and be wowed.

Sylva Nze Ifedigbo prides himself as being a core Nigerian. He hails from the east, grew up in the north and now lives in the west of the country. He is an award winning fiction writer and essayist whose works has appeared both online and in print. Nze, as he will prefer to be called, trained as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Nigeria Nsukka but today pursues his other interests in writing and public relations. He has written for a number of online platforms including NEXT, Nigeria Village Square, and Daily Times. Last year he served as ambassador for the Coca-Cola Nigeria “A billion reasons to believe in Africa” campaign. He has two published work; Whispering Aloud a novella (Spectrum Books 2007) and The Funeral Did Not End a stories collection (DADA Books, 2012). Nze is working on a full-length project, a novel that will tell in part, his Lagos story and his fascination with death.

Come January 23rd, Emma and Nze will blog about their next big thing. expect to be captivated.

Of traffic snarls and the land of the rubber men

2013-01-07T01:26:00.000+01:00

It is a hot day.

Another of those days that traffic stretches as far as the eyes can see causing people in cars to share something other than the unity of crawling traffic and sweltering heat: short fused temperament.

This is Lagos, the heat and traffic snarls are constant realities that we have learnt to live with, no matter how hard that is. Nigerians, we are special breeds, rubber men that defy the laws of elasticity—we are yet to find that elastic limit and we continue to adjust to constantly shifting challenges. Nothing seems to shift more constantly than our traffic laws. Perhaps they don’t really shift, change, rather the government finds new way to express them. That way they keep us on our toes, sweating in choking traffic.

We do have constants, those things that remain the same year in year out. The danfo bus, a modified Volkswagen van that perhaps ferried goods from one point to another in the European country that hosted its first incarnation, is one of the things that remain the same. A testament of our dump mentality, the danfo, like millions of other automobiles in Nigeria, comes second-hand: Europe’s discard serving faithfully here, still.

There is little to see in the scrap-like drabness of the danfo bus I boarded in the hope that their street and alley meandering ability would perhaps shorten the time I would otherwise spend in the traffic snarl—a vain hope. The clammy intensity of the heat that comes from within and without did not gift concentration, so Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I will Write About This Place rests in its place in the side pocket of my well-used bag. Yes, I had discovered that the three hours spent in traffic heading to work and the three hours spent on the way back is a good time as any to catch up on reading. Before One Day I Will Write About This Place, one of those Ikeja-under-bridge-paper-backs—a novel by John Varley—occupied the space in the bag. Victor Ehikhamenor’s brand new book Excuse Me!, a testament of where Nigerian literature is headed, will replace Binya’s in a few days.

My BlackBerry—a mobile phone that typifies the Nigerian experience: expensive, problem prone, essentially not worth its hype, but a must have for any forward thinking hustler—had already exhausted its morning charge, so social media exerts no pull. In search of somewhere, something to lay my eyes, I turn outwards, looking across the young lady between me and the window, away from the drab interior, the equal drabness of my fellow sardines-in-scrap-metal-confine.

In the close past, the view would be of hawkers darting between the traffic, Okada’s snapping side mirrors as they sweep through and drivers leaning out of windows to hurl abuses at their receding backs. Now all one sees are cars, cars and more cars. The new view is a thank-you-Lagos-for-for-the-second-term gift from erstwhile man of the people, Babatunde Raji Fashola, governor of Africa’s most populous city. The Road Use Bill he signed into law a few months ago is said to have brought sanity to the roads, but that remains debateable. Who decides what sanity is? I guess the people in the cars with humming air conditioners would call this sanity. I stare at them, in their choice brand new cars—not for these ones the more common second hand cars we call tokunbo—that seemed immune to the dents that are the lot of any lesser-priced car on a Lagos road. I could spy an executive kind reading a newspaper in the owners corner, a suited banker type working on his laptop, and a couple of youngish professionals watching a movie on a backrest screen. These ones, the ones that have connected with success, can afford to call this traffic, devoid as it is, of hawkers and okada operators, sane. They are immune, with drivers to do the driving, with ACs to keep the air western-cool, with music, probably indie rock, or jazz, or R&B—not the shrieking fuji in the danfo—to help them coordinate money making thoughts. I wonder if their thoughts go to the man who only recently saved enough to buy a second-hand motorcycle, only to find that its engine capacity falls below the 200cc that the new traffic law demands for motorcycles before they can cruise hundreds of major highways in Lagos.

Yes, the rich own motocycles, the type we call power bikes, mostly above the 200cc engine capacity. They can still ride the forbidden roads. The law has a way of protecting the rich. The poor can go to blazes.

Hence, the executive type reads a newspaper, suave-like, in real-leather interiors. For these type, it is super cooled office to super cooled car, to super cooled home, an Island of opulence within the oppressive heat of the tropic.

It is when I look away from these ones, the comfortable, that I see her, no it is they, they are two, similarly dressed, but one more eye catching. It isn’t the garish colours that call attention—I have already gotten used to the colour blind madness they call colour blocking—it was the hips of the plump one.

Turned into an unsightly 8 by jeans obviously meant for some flat assed chick, with the part that spilled out of the jean flapping with each step she took, it should serve as a bum lover’s nightmare. Grotesque; that’s the word that came to mind. As I pull my eyes away, I wonder where her fashion sense came from.

My eyes wonder still, searching that which will hold my fancy.

We crawl away from the expressway. We attempt the meandering that I had hoped for. We don’t get far. The gridlock in the side streets of Mushin is worse than what we left in the expressway—there we crawled, albeit very slowly, here we are stagnant. The driver cuts the ignition, to conserve fuel.

This is an old neighbourhood. The heart of the city in the days that white lords walked this city, when our allegiance was to a king, then a queen, from lands across seas our ancestors feared to sail. Now we pledge allegiance to a two colour flag, but in our hearts wonder what that means. Feeling no strings pulling at our heart, we wonder what it means to be patriotic, to love ones nation. Same way we wondered what the chant of God bless the King/Queen meant in the days when concrete forests sprouted here for the first time, replacing building of raffia and mud, replacing forests of lush green vegetation and the abodes of proud sons of the earth.

I see men, beaten men, devoid of the pride that was their ancestor’s mien. They stare at the cars, at the sweating passengers, catching eyes, their body language suggesting shared understanding, all hope faded in the face of stark reality. There is no future here, only a cyclic hopelessness. The staring eyes, the aged eyes, they know this for sure, they’ve seen it before.

On the wall of one of these buildings, a poster, A5 paper, announces a welcome back party for “Iyabo Martins, USA returnee”. I stare at it, wondering why visiting or living in the United States of America is worth a party, but I understand, I really do.

Somehow, we are on an expressway, another one. Beyond the front windscreen, Oshodi looms.

Here, far away from the officious nature of Ikorodu Road, the atmosphere is relaxed, lower class friendly. A few hawkers now dart among the cars, ears, eyes and nose flaring alertness as they quench thirst here and assuage steaming body heat there. As I pour ice-cold bottled water down my throat, I wondered what we would do without these hawkers and why the government thinks they do not provide essential services.

The hawkers scatter. An AK47 wielding police officer, riding home on a motorcycle, one of the outlawed variety, waves at them. Don’t worry. They return, nervous. I smile.

I wonder about my country, this rubber society. What would happen if we ever reach the breaking point? Would we turn on these ones in cars whose price can build three to four health centres in the ancestral villages of their owners, ancestral villages they don’t visit anymore? Would we replace what we have for something worse or like the Egyptians, trade a secular tyrant for a religious one? Would we like the Libyans destroy our country and become the client nation of a super power, all because we hate the guts of our leader? Would we learn to trust the voting process enough to become a real democracy?

Thoughts, near and far, new and old, flow through my mind as the Danfo jerks as if in time to the beat of the raunchy fuji song that blasted from ill-tuned car stereos. Two hours have gone by; I am not even half way home. I lean back, avoiding seeing the same scene that have become a constant feature, seems a good idea. From further back comes the sound of sirens, an oga type using the power of the lords of the land to break through the gridlock, wanting to spend as little time as possible on the road. Looking around, seeing the intense tailgating, I did not even bother to question how they would get through. Though it seems impossible, they always do.

A nation of rubber men, Nigerians are very amiable to change. Stretch us all you want, we just adjust to accommodate the extra strain and soon that becomes the normal from which further stretching emanates. We're super elastic. Dr. Reed Richard has nothing on us. This is a survival skill that allows our continuing rape. I am scared of what would happen if we lose this power to adjust, to stretch, to accommodate.

The sky is turning cobalt. Rain looms in the horizon. The traffic continues to crawl.

A version of this article was published in The Guardian

Omawumi: Wonder woman?

2012-12-19T13:53:00.000+01:00

The intro for Omawumi’s debut album ‘Wonder woman’ was supposed to show off Omawumi’s humorous side but it did not really work; as the humour is not immediately obvious.

‘Ma fi mi shere’ feat Eldee is the first song. The vibrancy of Omawumi’s voice is comes through in this track. But, both beats and lyrics are a little too high tempoed. The song flitters by before it can be assimilated (yes, even after several replays). Eldee delivers his lines too fast, as if chasing the quick beat and his short verse is not enough to convey his usual dexterity.

Whatever misgivings the previous track might have caused were cured by ‘today na today’. This is definitely Omawumi at her very best. The beat is again high tempo, with a techno feel, but unlike in the previous track it works here, the lyrics really get to you. Heads are definitely going to bob to this one.

‘Love nwantinti’ may not appeal to teenagers, but the older generation will have a blast rocking to the highlife flavour. Omawumi’s vocals in this track sounds one somewhat like that of Nigeria’s old school Diva, the Late Nelly Uchendu, yes, she has that kind of voice.

‘Love it’ featuring Shank does not quit cut it, the tempo, fast and unfocused, drowns out Omawumi’s voice most times. Shank, known more for his hit dancehall single ‘julie’, did not bring the captivating flow he is popular for into this track. In all Omawumi’s strong voice is the only redeeming feature of this track, once again she showed she can sing very well, even in an average song.

One of the best songs in this album is ‘when breeze brow’, a sultry love song about heartbreak and cheating spouses that incorporates a clever use of a popular Nigerian adage “when the breeze blows the anus of a fowl will be exposed”. Omawumi really expressed herself here. This song might not get the hype of some of the other tracks in this album, but it will surely outlast many others, a candidate for any soul lover’s collection of timeless love songs.

‘The way that I feel’: Though with a catchy and rhythmic tone that can get one dancing, this song still suffers from the ills that have marred some of the songs in this album, the overshadowing of her powerful voice by instruments that are supposed to accompany her singing.

‘chocolata’ feat Naeto C is another good song, the cadence is infectious and Omawumi is clearly in the driving seat directing things with her vocal controls, Naeto C did not disappoint, enough for none rap heads to feel his flow. This is one of the songs that shine through.

The skit ‘stand’ should have being the intro; it has everything that is Omawumi.
‘In the music’ is another very good song. With South African pop style sound, the song incorporates Nigerian pidgin lyrics to provide a very danceable tune that also spreads a very powerful message, music is all there is.

Omawumi went the reggae route with ‘brighter day’ and actually pulled off a commendable performance.

‘I miss my baby’ took Omawumi back to her comfort zone, those songs that give her control, devoid of the interference of loud beats. Expectedly, she made it rock, enough for one to want to go back again and again, just for the love of it.

‘As I dey’ is another good one. It is a love song, sort of, that implores the need for people to be accepted the way they are.

Like most Nigerian artists are inclined to, she went back home with the song ‘Niger delta’, another good one. Here she preaches the peace message, calling the people of Niger Delta to work together towards the uplift of the troubled region.

‘Same guy’ features waje and Kel , and showed the vocal dexterities of Omawumi and Waje singers and then Kel spiced things up with her cool rap style.

‘Blessing flow’ is the last track before the outro and she didn’t save the best for the last. Good enough beat, good flow. Not a powerful song but all together ok, for a gospel song.

Then came the outro and it was a wrap.

For a first offering, Omawumi did a very good job. Though, she should stick to songs that allow her express her vocal prowess. Songs must not get played in the clubs to be relevant.

Omawumi sings more about relationships than anything else though one will notice that she dwells more on loneliness and problem prone relationships.
Many of her songs are laced with underlying humour and she seems to be having a good time singing them.

For a new artist, she appear well rounded, experimenting with several genre in one album, but her mainstay appear to be R and B soul. She will go far, but needs the input of good song writers.

Her next offering should make for an interesting wait.

D’lameone 2010-02-21

Nigerian girls should be mad!

2012-12-14T12:52:00.002+01:00

In the last decade, since the Plantation Boys and Remedies before them began a revival of Nigerian music’s fortunes, Naija music has eclipsed Africa and is presently showing the world that Africa has got some groove. With YouTube views in the millions, brands such as P square, D’banj and Flavour have become household names and veritable representatives of Nigerian popular culture.

If music is the expression of a nation’s popular culture, whether adopted or not, one would expect the visuals that go with it to reflect that culture as well as the people that embody it, however, in Nigeria, this expectation doesn’t hold.

Close your eyes and call to mind popular Nigerian music videos of the moment. If you were true to yourself, you’d admit that these videos are very unfair to the Nigerian woman. Video after video, American copycat artiste name after another, all we see is the depiction of women as playthings, playthings that come with the money, the cars, the dope houses and the choice wines—a property that success acquires.

This disrespect of women jars the nerves and grates like mad. More so because most of the so called Nigerian feminists, ever ready to cuss a Nigerian man out on social media, pretend not to notice this constant demeaning of the sex they purport to represent—I don’t want to believe they are okay with this.

Thinking about video vixens (who coined that phrase sef?) made me realise that most of them, at least the stars of the videos, look nothing like Funke, Elenu and Chidera—unless the trio are ‘mullato’ chicksrocking the Nigerian dream. The video vixens are increasingly looking like Vanessa, Tamara and Nadine. Asian, European and mix race girls are the rage. It seems Flavour, Dare, Wizkid, Banky W and the rest can’t fall in love unless the girl has a high percentage of Caucasian gene—except when they are lusting after girls with big ‘bakassi’.

I swear I will gag if I see more of these western compliant girls strut about half nude in another music video. Sheesh! The way this girls own music video after music video, someone who doesn’t know any better would think we have a large population of European types in Nigeria. Truth is, Nigeria is not East or South Africa. The mosquito and its brother malaria ensured we never had shiploads of Europeans coming to settle here during the colonial days. As such our half-castes are few and in-between and we love them to high heavens—perhaps because they remain a novelty, too few of them around, makes you wonder why they dominate our music videos.

Nigerian girls should be mad, but they are not, they are okay with playing supporting cast. These days they bleach their skin, starve themselves and wear the discarded hair of Brazilian, Asian and Caucasian girls to blend into image our recent popular culture imposes on them. They struggle to claim foreign accents and afford the once off visit to any country overseas to get the stamp of approval needed to wield those accents. These ladies represent the new-age Nigerian woman, the one that sees nothing wrong with the fact that those who shoot and direct music videos think that they are not beautiful enough to star in it beside their Naija brothers. They should be mad, but since the black woman is the most self-depreciating being created by God, they won’t see anything wrong there, it would just be another white girl dancing awkwardly to Flavour’s chant of ‘Baby Oku’. Yes, they would give a life to trade skins with that girl, and their menfolk agree—or why else would they chose the most European looking girl above them 9 times out of 10.

First published by Ynaija.com

A good year to be a writer!

2012-10-26T10:43:00.000+01:00

This is ending as a very good year for me as a writer.

First off, I finally got a publisher to take interest in my collection of short stories. The collection “Footsteps on the Hallway” will be published Jan-Feb 2013 by Melrose books Nigeria.

I was also able to attend the Farafina Trust Writers workshop on the third attempt and learnt so much from superb teachers.

Then there are two of my short stories appearing in two PAN-African anthologies, African Roar and AfroSF in Dec 2012.

I sure have come a long way and perhaps should start feeling like a writer. We’re moving on. J

‘Moom!’ Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Home Affairs’ Sarah Lotz, ‘Five Sets of Hands’ Cristy Zinn, ‘New Mzansi’ Ashley Jacobs, ‘Azania’ Nick Wood, ‘Notes from Gethsemane’ Tade Thompson, ‘Planet X’ S.A. Partridge, ‘The Gift of Touch’ Chinelo Onwualu, ‘The Foreigner’ Uko Bendi Udo, ‘Angel Song’ Dave-Brendon Burgh, ‘The Rare Earth’ Biram Mboob, ‘Terms & Conditions Apply’ Sally-Ann Murray, ‘Heresy’ Mandisi Nkomo, ‘Closing Time’ Liam Kruger, ‘Masquerade Stories’ Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu, ‘The Trial’ Joan De La Haye, ‘Brandy City’ Mia Arderne, ‘Ofe!’ Rafeeat Aliyu, ‘Claws and Savages’ Martin Stokes, ‘To Gaze at the Sun’ Clifton Gachagua, ‘Proposition 23’ (Novelette) Efe Okogu.

Afro SF and African Roar will be available to download in December!

Aluu 4 and the state of our mind

2012-10-25T10:30:00.001+01:00

I want to be numb, but my soul cries too loud for me to ignore. I am supposed to have grown accustomed to pain, but things happen that remind me that I am a man and that in the heart of man, pain has an abode, try as much as you can, you can never escape its grip.

As I type this, the voice of two promising young men cut down in their prime by the kind of unmitigated blood-lust that our country have come to identify with, booms out from my laptop speakers. Like voices from the grave, the young men cry out that there “ain’t no love in the heart of the city”. It is eerie, like prophesies of that kind are, especially when one considers that the boys had pleaded for their lives to flesh and blood men that refused to show them a little love, people that refused to spare their lives.

Jungle justice, the general term for what was meted out to those boys who Nigerians have come to identify as the Aluu4, is nothing new, but it is not that old either. In the days when our fathers walked proud with their destiny in their hand and the state of their stomach a question of how much their hand can till and the benevolence of the old Gods, mob jungle justice was not obtainable. Yes, our fathers killed when they have too, but the Gods of the land frowned upon reckless killing and apart from when sacrifice demanded it, they frowned upon extra-judicial killing. Thieves, when caught are usually paraded round the village and punishments that usually do not go beyond well-placed canes to the buttocks are meted out. Back then, the shame of being paraded round the village as a thief was enough detriment and banishment for bigger crimes more so.

Then came the west with their tailor made solutions to every foreseeable problem. They brought new laws and frowned on the ones that have worked here for centuries. We got a police force that replaced the communal checks and balances; we got courts to dispense the new justice, we adopted new ways and left the old. As the new ways failed to answer the yearning for justice, a yearning that in the past were mostly satisfied upon appeal to the old Gods, we decided to take the laws back, back from the new ways that failed to satisfy us, back from the courts where justice could be bought with money, back from the police that have become complicit. That gave birth to jungle justice, a mob justice, a faceless justice, a travesty of the natural order of things and the new way, a bastard form of justice.

I don’t know who coined the phrase “jungle justice”, but I know it has little to do with backwardness or lack of education. If anything, it stems from deep pain, from suffering, from hurt caused by those who in the past broke the law and went scot-free. This may be hard to understand when you’ve had something dear stolen from you at gun point, or watched those you love hurt by people who aim to take by force of arms. Anyone who has suffered thus tends to be unsympathetic to victims of jungle justice. It is justice all right, that’s why they call it “taking laws into your own hands”.

Jungle justice would have been fine and good if the society could ever manage to match the crime with the punishment, and ensure that the crime is proven beyond reasonable doubt. This, is the tragedy of the Aluu 4. The community did not investigate enough, did not even try to investigate—beyond alleged forced confessions. As such, the boys were murdered pure and simple and those involved should be brought to book. I recall the people in Ibori’s community celebrating his genius for theft and known criminals walking away with chieftaincy titles in my native Igbo land. Even now, big thieves are in our offices and rule over us, thieves that deserve worse than those boys got. If our big thieves are from Aluu, they won’t be giving the jungle treatment, they would instead be celebrated and choice goats will die to sing their prowess as thieves. That is the kind of country we live in, the poor hurt the poor and the thieves smile to the banks and glory.

I call for a “bringing to book”. This is rather and urgent call, this bringing to book, because Nigerians are throwing caution to the wind and mob killings are becoming a major attraction. The Aluu 4 are not the first to be videoed while being brutalised and killed for alleged offences. We’ve have stories like that from Lagos, Abuja and so on. These images and videos are available on the internet and mostly show the faces of the perpetrators. Surely, it doesn’t take rocket science for the police to have reacted against this or issued wanted pictures sourced from the videos. The Nigerian police, our so-called law keepers, as usual waited for social media to roar before acting. Too late, too late for the Aluu 4, too late for thousands of Nigerians that have suffered the same fate, too late for grieving families, too late for us all.

Thinking about it, I know very few have the stomach engage in such barbarity, but when you stand by and watch those who do commit the act, you are equally guilty. True that one man’s voice may not make a different, but one plus one equals two. Next time, don’t wait for someone else to speak up against evil, do it and you will find that you are not alone.

The voice of those two, now back with their ancestors—who would surely be shaking their heads at how far away from the path we as a people have strayed—continues to burn my ears as I write. I feel a poem coming, I suppress it. Naija is already poetry, only not one in any positive motion, at least, not a motion towards any light. Darkness becomes us, the choices we make, make this so. Let’s move towards light.

First published in DailyTimes.com.ng

Achebe and the Igbo narrative: not a single story

2012-10-09T17:30:00.003+01:00

“Shege Inyamirin, arne kawai!” the man screamed at me as I sprawled on the red earth, my 20 litre water container, which a few moments ago was balanced on my head as I hurried across the railway track, was not too far away. I looked from the container, which jerked as it expelled the water I had just fetched from Isa Kaita’s Dutse Close home, to the snarling man that had just pushed me, wondering why my being Igbo merited that much callousness. I looked towards my father’s chemist shop a few metres away, more worried about what he would do if the container was broken than going back to the long queue of people waiting their turn at the tap Alhaji Isa Kaita (CBE) had graciously provided for the public inside His expansive compound. Yes, the man had pushed me, and beyond his expletives that can only be summarised as "Igbo infidel", he offered no explanation and people around did not ask. Surely, why he pushed me, hampered as I was by my large container, was a question that should have been asked, especially as I had not impeded him, or brushed against him. My crime was having tribal marking beside my eyes that identified me to be Igbo, an ethnic group that everyone not Igbo seemed to hate—at least that was what my young mind felt then.

The event above happened about two decades ago in Angwa Shanu, a town in Kaduna North LGA, Kaduna state. It was one of several instances where my siblings and me were singled out and abused because we are Igbo. I recall it here to buttress the point that the Igbo have not had it easy in post war Nigeria and that the hate for the Igbo runs deeper than many care to admit. However, we do not need anyone to admit anything, that we know this fact is what is important, to us that is.

Growing up, I can’t recall my father telling us to be cautious, or to deny our Igboness, but we knew the ability to survive in a society hostile to our kind is our only defence. So, we learnt Hausa, learnt to recite the more common Islamic creeds and learnt to deny our Igboness. To avoid the Igbo stigma, we became Southern Kaduna, Benue, Cross River, Bendel or any other grouping, but never Igbo if we could help it.

We survived, but then there were instances where those who aim to punish the Igbo, who are mostly in the minority, an ill-informed minority, like the man above, saw us, knew, and gave us the treatment reserved for the Igbo—contempt. These experiences were not peculiar to my siblings and me. Many Igbo, especially those who live outside the Igbo home region, faced something similar or worse. Igbo bore the brunt of ethno-religious conflicts in the North, even though they more time than not live peacefully with their neighbours. Across the north, once bloodlust runs high, our businesses are targeted, looted and burnt, our women are raped and killed, our brothers die, our fathers die, our mothers die, the Igbo die.

We run back to our ancestral homelands after the fact, licking wounds, wondering why we sojourned in a land that has become the graveyard of our kind, but then, we go back again, only to repeat the process.

I used to blame people who engage in this cyclic movement, but one only has to spend time in the Igbo homeland to understand. The Nigerian government, perhaps to punish us for being so bold as to want to leave an European creation, treated the Igbo same way we treated our outcasts. The government engaged in an unwritten policy of ensuring the Igbo makes little headway economically and otherwise. We were denied schools, denied infrastructure and our people in the civil service were suppressed.

While many other ethnic groups would have fallen to bits in the face of such oppression, the Igbo looked within, and rediscovered that thing that made them formidable enough to elicit the envy many Igbos feel the other tribes have for them, their drive to succeed despite the odds, a drive that is both good and evil--as many would recognise. The astonishing number of community primary and secondary schools in the South East attest to this fact, as does the markets across Nigeria, to which our people transferred to when education and a job in the civil service stopped being a viable option for the Igbo, and the factories in many Igbo towns that survive without much government help.

Despite the common narrative when people talk about the Igbo, we did not abandon education. I bet you you'll hardly find and Igbo shop keeper anywhere that can't read and write, but that is story for another day, a story of stereotypes. However, the story of people who were kept off the Nigerian Defence Academy, the Police Academy and most federal employment opportunity in the years following the Civil War, is one I have heard about, witnessed, and lamented upon time and time again. I know of brilliant people who could not make any headway in their career because they are Igbo, I recall how until recently it was impossible to think of an Igbo head of the Army, Police of any armed service. I recall my father saying Igbo are usually giving challenging position that others find difficult and still look at the names of those who occupy positions that require more than political connection and wonder at his words.

Now, the truth is that in the Igbo heartlands and elsewhere, the Igbo too are known to discriminate against people not of their race and even fellow Igbo. This narrative however focuses on the Igbo narrative, because that is the experience I know, that is the experience Achebe and other Igbo writing about this current controversy know. We ask for our views to be respected, and that is not too much to ask.

As for the Civil War, the fact that Nigeria chose to ignore it meant little to the Igbo. My father died proud to have fought for Biafra, and every Biafran soldier I have had the honour to meet feels same way. We grew up with their stories; we didn’t need history books to know about what happened in Abagana, or how markets were bombed by war planes, or how girls were carried away by randy Nigerian soldiers. We know the massacres, we know of those promising young men who died in the war, we know of relatives, too young to fend for themselves, who died of starvation. Every village in Igbo land has a story, and none of it is a story of gratitude to the people who led Nigeria during the war. You will also find that the story is one of pride, pride of place, of being of a people who repeatedly defied enormous odds.

Somebody used starvation as a weapon of war, he supported a policy that blockaded aid meant for a starving population and defended that action, which invariably led to the death of millions, and people are up in arms because someone else gave and opinion as why that someone would have approved of such drastic action. The questions that beg answers are these: were the Igbo not intentionally starved during the war? Did that policy not led to acute suffering and loss of life—over two million babies, women, young children and other civilians? Is intentional starving of a civilian population not a war crime? Is the man that formulated and saw to the implementation of that program not culpable if it is indeed a war crime? Has the Nigerian state ever truly worked to reintegrate the Igbo into the country? How can people justify the payment of 20 pounds to every Igbo with a bank account no matter how much they had in the banks prior to the war?

The reason for all this yarn is to point out that the issues arising from the war is personal to the Igbo, we lived it and are still living it, no one can tell our story better from our point of view. Also, I can’t recall markets in Lagos of Kaduna getting bombed during the war, or girls in Ibadan dragged screaming into jeeps in the aftermath, or the smell of rotting corpse pervading Maiduguri, or the people getting hurt by unexploded ordnance in Akure forty years after the war.

The Igbo has come of age and we claim the right to be respected too.

Pa Achebe, May the Gods of our fathers bless his soul, has said his own, in a book that I am eagerly looking forward to read. Those who played a part in the war, who are still alive, should say their own.

My Farafina Creative Writing Workshop Experience

2012-09-29T20:31:00.003+01:00

It was my third application. I paused a while before I typed the address into my mailbox. Twice before, 2010 and 2011, I had answered the call for entries for the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop. On both occasions, I got an email informing me that though I made the long list of thirty five, I unfortunately didn’t make into the final list of fifteen.

While I was saddened by the first mail, the fact that it came from Chimamanda Adichie, whose “I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your entry – and to send my best wishes for your continued writing”, eased the disappointment. For me, that mail was a tacit stamp of approval that I was on the right path. In 2011, when I got a similar response, I was mad. How can they turn me down two years in a row? Does this mean I am not good enough or have not improved at all despite my efforts? So, I penned this.

Now, you understand the reluctance with which I applied for this year’s workshop. I felt I did not need any coaching from any writer, no matter how renowned. It was easy to learn about writing, especially with the internet. Having convinced myself that I didn't need to learn from people who turned me down twice, I tried to forget about the call for entries, to ignore the nagging urge to type a small bio, copy and paste one of my numerous short stories and send another mail to Udonandu, whoever that is.

I sent the mail. And forgot all about it. Instead, I put my effort into getting a place in the Fidelity Bank sponsored programmed headlined by Helon Habila. I didn’t get into that one and no mail came to tell me to continue writing or anything. The depression came then, followed by the usual questions: what the hell am I doing pretending to be a writer? Should I really be wasting my life struggling to write? What have I gained pretending to be a writer? Am I a fraud?

Unlike the past, the depression did not last too long as I found reasons to keep writing and to interact with my writing family—we call ourselves Nerdz 21. Through Blackberry, Nerdz 21 talk about everything; there, I got hints about the Farafina shortlist mails. First, Richard Ali announced that he was in, then Abdulaziz Abdulaziz. I was still hailing their success when an incoming mail alert beeped. I stared at the Farafina Trust address for a while, just dreading another rejection. I had just announced my own good news when Samuel Oluwatosin Kolawole, indicated that he too is in. We celebrated. 900 entries from across Africa and four people from our group of twenty five made it, worthy of some virtual champagne popping if you ask me. This post is not about Nerdz 21 or its membership, so let’s take a step back and continue along the right path.

I should tell you how I packed for the workshop, the books I took with me and how I got to Waterside Hotel in Lekki Phase 1 to find most of the participants already waiting before my Lagos-based body got there, but that won’t serve much here. Let’s skip that; what I won’t skip is the hotel room.

Richard, Abdulaziz and Tosin, my fellow Nerdz, greeted me just as I stepped into the first floor lobby. We all walked to my room near the end of the hallway and they, cheeky guys, stood back as I marvelled at the large room I would be spending ten days in. The room is almost as big as my sitting room and the mirrored wardrobe is one I was sure my wife would bug me about when she sees it, and she did when she came visiting: can’t we get something like this, it’s fine o.

I love that room, still do. I even miss it. Now I shouldn’t be talking about hotel rooms with nostalgia, but I recall us Nerdz lounging in that room that first day, planning how we would rock the ten-day holiday. That was before the classes started and the intensity of the work caught up with us.

Thinking about it now, I can’t help but wonder if the facilitators had not planned to ensure we work hard for the comfort provided. I remember complaining to a friend that the time I had spent sleeping on the large bed in my room wouldn’t have amounted to ten hours, and this was five days into the workshop. We had piles of stories to read, assignments to do and little time to do it. Ok, I am doing it again, running ahead of you.

From the first day at the workshop, preconceived notions started falling like ripe mangoes whose host branches are under the ministrations of an eager youth. First, though the introductions did not say much about the abilities of the workshop participants, once we started reviewing entry stories, the quality of each person started to emerge, and the mark for each person was astonishingly high. In the group were Nigerians, a Nigerian-American, a Ghanaian, a Cameroonian, an Indian American and a South Africa based Nigerian. We had published authors and others whose work had been accepted for publication, but then there were greenhorns whose workshop entries were their first stab at writing. We had people from the middle class and upper middleclass, with degrees from universities overseas and we had serious ajekpako types who are products of the worst Nigerian education could offer. With this mix, you would be forgiven for thinking there were underdogs in the group. Well there wasn’t, not one. At the end, I could not point to one person and say, he/she has a brighter future on the literary scene. It could be anyone, or everyone.

Second, Chimamanda defied all preconceived notions about her person, we knew we were coming to see an intellectual, but met a genius. One hour after I met her, I knew I was fooling myself thinking I only came for the networking. The lessons came, flowing through her soft words and finding willing receptacles in my hungry mind. She opened my heart to the craft in ways I never thought possible and she did it not by teaching in the conventional sense, but by talking to us as equals, as writers in our own right. After Chimamanda, it was easy to flow with the other teachers:

· Aslak Myhre, the Norwegian who showed us the dangers of allowing outsiders write what should naturally be our stories;

· Jeffery Allen, the black American that embraces his African heritage more firmly than we do, who taught the importance of writing with confidence;

· Robert Spillman, the American writer and publisher, who opened our eyes to the possibilities that exist for our writing and showed us not how, but why our writing should be worth something;

· and Binyavanga Wainaina, the force of nature, whose intellect can only be experienced, not described.

From them, we learnt valuable lessons about ourselves and our place, as writers, in our communities. Beyond lessons, we bonded. I can’t recall anyone in the group who wasn’t sad when Aslak had to go back to Norway days before the end of the workshop or who wasn’t touched by his “intelligence quotient” video that the class watched and reviewed. With the other teachers, we had our goodbyes at the literary evening that marked our graduation from Farafina Trust Writing Workshop.

It was just ten days, yet it seemed like years. In all, it took ten days to make us not just better writers, but better chroniclers of our individual realities. We have been Farafina certified, and our work henceforth will speak this truth.

Originally published by GCLF

What you don’t know about me

2012-09-06T15:35:00.000+01:00

My earliest memories were of landscapes, or put in a better perspective, hillscapes: beautiful scenery of hills and valleys; the freshest green foliage infused with flowers of diverse make amongst the tallest palm trees imaginable, all swaying gently or violently, as the elements will have it, in a land that could rival any ever seen by man.

Both my maternal home and my father’s hometown are situated in the hills of Anike. While my ancestral home sits atop a windswept plateau, my maternal home was situated in a valley—my use of the word ‘was’ is acceptable here because as a result of the tragic influence of modernity, the people of my maternal homeland have moved en masse to a barren hill a few miles from the land that was their ancestors abode. Their new abode’s only importance is the fact that an asphalt road dissects its white soiled length.

I weep for the town of my youth that is now a ghost town, abandoned by its inhabitants. It is the only ghost town I know in Nigeria, but this story is not about it. It is not about my homeland either. The story is about my life, my situation and me. This story walks the path of my fears and caresses my elusive salvation. To write about this, I must travel back to those early days, I must call to mind those things that captivated my soul’s root, the sights that I saw cradled in mother’s arm, looking out at the valleys bestriding hills that seemed nearer than they were.

I could tell you about the trips to Ezi-agu, the farm where spirits were said to dwell and where on moon light nights, farmers trudged to harvest the late yam meant for the barn. No! That will be dragging you into the mud bath of long befuddled memory. I rather prefer to talk at length about my childhood and its peculiarity.

But, where does one start? Yes, I think we should start from my very first and last act of stealing, not for any reason, but because it is a good place to start as any.

I was not caught stealing. Far from it, I successfully palmed the 5 kobo and bought ‘chart’, a banana flavoured sweet with a sturdy wooden shaft that offers a good handhold while you battle with it (I have not seen the like of it in ages, it must have gone with many other memories, into oblivion). In addition, I escaped with the big opiola mango left in a big iron pot to ripen. I recall that it was while I was enjoying the rather juicy fruit at the bush ward side of our mud compound wall that a thought struck me. Why not ask mother? I must have looked rather comical with a big wet dripping mango sticking out of my little mouth, my eyes so wide open it must have radiated the brilliant light of discovery. “Why not ask mother?” I know that she will not say no and even if she initially says no, I can pester her until she agrees. I immediately set out to try out my hunch. It worked. I have not had any cause to steal again.

I recall the joy of running downhill to the stream to fetch water. That, is the easy part and not as fun as being allowed by the bigger kids to lug a can back up the incline. I remember vividly the several falls as we graduated from carrying 1 litre cans to 1 gallon and from that progressively to 25/30 litres ‘the ultimate for any adult’. At first, we needed help to lift them onto our heads—a competitive business if there was ever one. Later we could all do it easily and turned our competition to who can run or walk fastest with a full can on his/her head. The unwritten rule was for the age grade ahead to show the younger ones the way that we followed with enthusiasm.

I recall the masquerade games, were I usually had the honour of wearing the mask. Yes, I was energetic and carefree, a leader of my peer group and a noted face at the moonlight games. But, all these were before polio came knocking on my leg’s door.

Before this, I have started playing football, a goalkeeper I was and people still remember the skills I exhibited at that early age. I was fearless and was always selected amongst the first six during our 4-6-year-olds’ monkey post matches.

When did polio come? I can’t say. Perhaps my father knows, but he is not here anymore to tell. Mother doesn’t know, she says three years, or four years. She knows one thing for sure: it was before primary school.

I cannot recall all that happened or the sequence of events even if I tried, because time and age has made all of it murky and tattered to my mind’s eye. Telling it like my mama tells it would not do much good either for she cries bitterly anytime she narrates it that her tale is left with too many sob breaks to make much head of. The summary is rather simple and plain—as stories of polio, attacks usually are. She left me with a niece as she headed for the market one day and returned to meet me on the floor trying bravely to rise on a flabby leg to welcome her. She said that she immediately knew that something was wrong with my leg but did not know what it was then.

The story is that after some consultations I was diagnosed with polio and at about three and a half years lost the use of my left leg.

Mother did everything she could. I know she still blames herself to this day. She feels it is her fault, had she not gone to the market maybe, just maybe, she would have seen the sign before it is too late.

They did not know it was not too late, who was there to tell them about therapy, about the whirlpools, pedals and support straps that would have helped my strong spirit.

I see the look of intense sadness that crosses her eyes when we talk about things I can never do. I noticed how she looks away when the need to use a cane comes upon me like it does more often than not these days. I know she agonizes about it day and night. I know but I do not say anything. I rather not say anything that will deepen the pain, hers, everybody’s, mine.

Yes, I at times get mad at a world that fails to understand a handicapped person’s frustration. Yes, I could have being a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer, even a musician, but perhaps you should try to imagine a situation where I have a choice. What if I wanted only to be a soldier, a policeman, a footballer or even an athlete? No! Do not tell me I am lucky I am alive or that I can, and have survived.

I still I wake up on certain days to the stiffness on my hip, I beg for sleep other nights as a numbing pain keep my eyes alight. The taunts that followed me from childhood are a part of me now, I have accepted the moniker ‘the lame one’ and it is who I am and that begs no lie.

I surprise a few people these days with the truth about my ‘swagger’. They thought my limp is a sort of fashion style that they would love to emulate. Suddenly my limp is now a fashionable style that is in vogue. Pardon me; will you like to learn my swagger?

You know, the funniest thing happened the other day, I heard over the radio that the government was trying to administer a polio drug to some babies and somebody, probably a traditional chief or holy man, advised people against the proffered vaccine. I laugh at his stupidity, I see him as a mental cripple who needs to see more of us around in other to convince himself he is whole. Aaaagh! I wish I was close enough to hit him.

You know some diseases have cure, but polio once acquired is to the grave.

I look out my window in the concrete forest that I now live in, I wonder at the grit and scum that evades everywhere and wrinkle my nose at the nauseating stench from open drains. Yes I miss my home in the hills, there where the sunset is full of colours and the air is sweet and filling. That thought takes my mind away from the throbbing in my left leg.

I want to go back, but sustenance keeps me tied to this wreck of an existence.

What else about me don’t you know?

The North burns: can we talk about us?

2012-07-27T13:19:00.002+01:00

Once again, like uncountable times in the past, the north is in the throes of ethno-religious crisis. As usual, the security agencies are caught napping and aside from accusations of complicity in the crisis, seem to be all thumbs, with little or no idea of how to handle the situation – besides their age-old ‘shoot on sight’ solution that is.

In a previous article, written some years ago, I dwelled on the nature of the north and after examining the numerous crises I witnessed and luckily escaped while living in the north, concluded that ethno-religious crisis and the north of Nigeria are Siamese twins that may forever remain conjoined, unless the drastic is done.

I warned then that the north would blow up again way before the Boko Haram clash and the first Jos affair. My forecast was not based on any form of prescience, but as a result of a brief study of ethno-religious clashes in the north.

In the north of Nigeria, from Jos and beyond, the truth about Ethno-religious crisis is not if it would occur, but when it will occur, again.

Let us not be deceived, the fight is more ethnic than religious, it is more about land than which prophet is greater, it is ultimately more about the language of ancestors than the language of any sacred text, ultimately, it is more about political control.

This fight is about the rights of the individual to exist with all benefits that accrue to a Nigerian anywhere in this country. In Jos, the Hausa-Fulani is fighting for relevance. They could not get the control they sought through the ballot; hence, the resort to violence, something evidence over the years have shown them to have a large stock of – fuelled by large-scale poverty and miss-education, something very common in this country.

The so-called natives of Jos – the Birom et al – are fighting to hold unto what they say is ancestrally theirs.

However, before we accuse the people of Jos of ethnic discrimination, let us remember that every Nigerian is guilty of this one way or the other. Many Nigerians will argue this point, countering that the Nigerian constitution grants liberty to every Nigerian, but when you think about the possibility of an Igbo becoming governor of, let’s say, Lagos state, the point looms clearer and then you really understand what is at stake.

I grew up in the north and can say without fear of contradiction that the Hausa-Fulani is as prone to bigotry as the Igbo, Yoruba or Birom. I recall the policy of indigenisation during my primary and secondary school days, which allowed for two separate sets of school fees, one for the so-called settlers another for the so-called indigenes. I still laugh anytime I remember the name changes that many of my friends had to endure in other to benefit from the considerable lesser school fees meant for the so-called indigenes. I still recall the dropping of surnames and the adoption of perceived Hausa names by many of my Igbo and Yoruba neighbours just to belong to that class. It was as if being Nigerian was not enough, you have to be something else too, in this case a pseudo-tribesman.

I am not a lawyer and have not paid much heed to the Nigerian constitution (this will change soon), but it has always been my belief that people are indigenes of where they are born. That should be the standard. However, Nigeria is a peculiar place with peculiar ways – uncanny most times – of interpreting the law. In Nigeria, you are an indigene of where ever your father/grandfather hails, whether you know that place is not of consequence; hence the dropping of names native to any tribe by those who want to be seen as indigenes in their present domicile.

There lies the genesis of the problem in Jos, the Hausa-Fulani, having lived more than 150 years in the area, feel they should be treated as equals. They seek to wield political power, to have a say in how they are governed. While there is nothing wrong, fundamentally, with this desire, the peculiarities I mentioned earlier deny them this right, just as it denies millions of other Nigerians every day.

As an Igbo man in Kaduna and now in Lagos, I cannot recall the number of times I have been reminded of my status as a visitor. I was a visitor in Kaduna, despite spending my first 22 years there before leaving because of the constant threat that hangs over the neck of any southerner in the far north and the constant, unconscious, seeking of fastest routes to an army or police barrack as Friday prayers wind up. Though perceived as a visitor in Lagos, that fear of decapitation by a seething mob is gone, but not altogether, as I now endure fear of one chance and whatnot. Its naija, you are not really safe anywhere.

Yes, Jos burns, again, and will do so again. Just as many other trouble spots in the north will too unless we stop deceiving ourselves, continuously believing, perhaps hoping, after every blow up, that we have seen the last. Far from it, we will continue to see these crises until we wake up and admit that we need to rethink and rephrase the laws that hold us together, albeit loosely, as a country.

Let us look into the past and learn. Let us set far-reaching goals that will ultimately make us a greater country. Let us not fear change, for it is inevitable. I believe the solution is a simple one; it only needs a willing leader to get it done. Some say this is one crisis to many, I say it is the hundredth of many more to come if we do not address the root causes.

Let us sit together and answer the question that desperately needs an answer, “are we Nigerians first and members of a tribe second?” Let us throw away this constitution if it is not working properly and draw up a new one that will guide us into the light we so seek, or if need be, grant it the muscle it needs to properly work.

I say let the talks begin! Enough is enough!

This piece was first published by 234Next in January 2011

Of Heroes, Villains, and dollar baits (1)

2012-07-07T13:48:00.000+01:00

Superman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I grew up with comic books. I discovered comics in primary two or three. I can’t quite recall, but I think Voltron, Super Ted and other TV cartoon shows played a large part. Anyway, I discovered comics and life was never the same again. While my friends outgrew the habit I kept at it and still find it difficult to turn down the chance to read a comic book today.

Anyone who have ever held a comic book , especially the variety that made DC and Marvel household names, the sort that gifted us Superman, Batman, Spiderman and all the others whatever-mans, would be conversant with one thing: comic books are about the battle of evil and good. There are good guys, bad guys and some who appear to saddle the line between both worlds. In the world of comic books, called universe, the good guys are called Super Heroes and the bad guys are called Super Villains. The Heroes usually do not associate with the Villains and even when they do, it’s usually for the greater good.

A comic book hero is expected to go out of his way to ensure that the greater good prevails, even if this entails sacrificing his/her own life in the process. The Villain on his/her part is expected to pursue personal interests with no recourse to the greater good. Heroes are lovable characters, godly, good and usually happy. Villains are hateful characters, vengeful and constantly on the quest for happiness—hence they keep dreaming up dark schemes to undo the hero and achieve personal gains.

The heroes that made comic books great reads are not obtainable in reality, as such, no matter how much one strains to get his hands to shoot Lightening bolts like Lightening Boy or morph substances like Element Lad to get that armed robber hammering at the burglar bars, nothing will ever happen—sorry kids.

However, heroes, of a different sort, but possessing the same desire to better the lot of man, have been known to grace societies through the ages. Every town, village and hamlet has heroes, legends, people of extra ordinary constitution, who did great deeds that lifted their fellow man to greater heights. With stories of these great ones abundant, it is understandable why societies still look for traits of heroism in man.

In Nigeria, the heroes list would surely make for one contentious topic, so I would rather plead the escapist’s creed and leave it be—as they say, one man’s villain is another’s hero. While the heroes of yesterday have come and gone, leaving behind words and actions by which we may judge their worth, the dearth of new-age heroes to fill their shoes or, at worst, walk their paths, stares us in the face. So hungry are we for champions that we embrace anyone that appears to have a spark of selflessness in them. We search long and hard for these ones, shifting through the murk that is our political landscape, looking for hearts that beats as one with ours. Once one is identified, we embrace him/her, feeling hope’s tired embers glow in the face of their expected wind of change. Sadly, it usually comes to nought, our supposed heroes more often than not turn out to be sheep in wolves’ clothing, who use our collective desire to hoodwink us, then rape us.

We applauded recently when Farouk Lawan appeared to embody our collective desire, that craving for equity and justice in the face of bare-arsed thievery. Unfortunately, Lawan fell, unfettered, like a heavy rock under the power of gravity. With him went our growing hope that some within the ruling party can lift Nigeria from the doldrums of criminal leadership. With his betrayal, that’s what it is, went the heightening hope that perhaps the future would not be as dark as many had predicted.

Farouk Lawan, whose prior history did not indicate had the propensity to dance with villains, is increasingly looking like a mark—a villain that acted like a hero to buy us over.

Funny enough, hero worshipers such as myself, still hold out in the vain hope that all these would be a dream. Sadly, even we know this hope is in vain, for our professed heroes are nothing more than shrouded villains.

True, there might be true heroes out there, but how long will we continue to search before salvation comes. To believe in the existence of heroes in our political-scape is to believe that chickens would garner the power of light overnight. Yes, our heroes are still chickens and villainous hawks rule the world they habit.

Recently, someone called me ignorant for refusing to believe that our present leaders are any different from those that walked the path before them. However, in a land where the difference between the Villain and the hero lies in the amount of dollars on offer, how can one keep believing?

Holding a Nation to Ransom

2012-06-22T06:25:00.001+01:00

As has become customary, the murderous Islamist group, Boko Haram, attacked three churches in Kaduna state on Sunday, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Also, in what is becoming a saddening routine, youth affiliated to the Christian faith carried out reprisal attacks on nearby mosques and many innocent Muslims got caught up in the ensuing violence.

On Monday, not sated by the blood they drank on Sunday, Boko Haram launched another attack, this time on Damaturu, Yobe state. More blood flowed, more lives untimely taken.

As extreme as the news items above read, it is very factual and the final body count from the bombings, the reprisals and the Damaturu carnage is still being awaited as I write this.

While no one in Nigeria, at least anyone old enough to reason, can readily claim to be unaware of the activities of Boko Haram and the atmosphere of fear it has created across northern Nigeria, most people really can’t pinpoint why the group is hell bent on destroying the economic and social structure of a region they call home. Many have pointed to the very nature of Islamic fundamentalism, which they say allows for wanton killing and destruction as a means to an end, but the inconsistent posture of Boko Haram cancels this argument and makes it very impossible to understand what their target is. They have gone from randomly shooting police officers on the streets of Maiduguri, to bombing police station, government buildings, educational institutions, and, with increasing ferocity, churches.

Continue

Death And A Mourning Nation

2012-06-20T09:56:00.002+01:00

Before that Dana plane crashed into a tenement building in Iju-Ishaga suburb of Lagos, Nigerians died in the hundreds every day. They died on the road, victims of bad roads or the highwayman’s bullet. They died in their homes, bodies riddled with bullets fired by armed robbers. They died in churches and mosques, victims of those who say evil deeds can be used to achieve godliness. They died across Nigeria, untimely and unpleasant deaths, victims of a government’s insistence on continuing paying lip service to progressive social development.

While some of these untimely taken belong to the class people have come to believe are elites, the larger percent are masses, the new age commoners, without renown beyond their immediate environment, these ones are not mourned by the nation. No media adverts extol their qualities, no social media buzz is generated around their pictures, no websites are created to tell about their lives and the deep pain their passing wrought on those they left behind. Nothing is heard of them other than the wailing of relatives and friends, and that too is soon muted as the world winds on. While the government habitually gives last warnings to those who kill the masses and promise to fix the roads that mangle their flesh and suck their blood, the dead are buried, sometimes in mass graves, their deaths in vain still, unknown in life, silent in death.

However, these are the nameless dead, the ones without keys to the fabled rainbow’s end. Their fate is not for those who could zip around in airplanes. For these ones, the passing is loud, with a nationwide call to tears.

It is common street knowledge that planes are not for the poor, even those who eat three solid meals with meat to spare have nothing to do with it. For many of us, it is a privilege to travel from Lagos to Abuja on a plane. Why not, the cost of a one-way ticket is more than the national minimum wage. So it is a testament to the privilege and position of the victims of the Dana Air crash, at least those on the plane proper, that the buzz generated by their fate remains at giddying heights, or how else would fellow elites and wannabes mourn the passing of their peers?

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Democracy: An African burden

2012-06-09T08:42:00.001+01:00

English: The King of Swaziland Mswati III at the reed dance festival 2006 where he will choose his next wife.. Deutsch: Der König von Swasiland Mswati III bei dem Reed Dance Festival 2006 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Uneasy, they say, lies the head that wears the crown. That adage, apt for a time when kings were a law unto themselves, when they had the power over life and death, still finds strong expression in this age.

These days, kings, except they are of Middle Eastern or Asian stock (let’s add Swaziland to the number), are largely without the powers to decide the fate of a nation. The powers that made them all-powerful in the past now reside with the commoners; or so it would seem.

Nations, having shed that feudal system that perpetuates the lordship of one family over the whole generation after generation, have now generally embraced the one that allows people to have a say on who rules over them. People now have the liberty to put their views to vote and the purview to remove a leader that is not working up to par—in an ideal scenario. Democracy, the system of having a say in the selection of one’s leaders, in its ideal sense, is one that cannot be faulted.
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A black Sunday in a Nation already in darkness

2012-06-05T14:10:00.000+01:00

The first news of a suicide bomber attacking a church during Sunday service was not strange or overly surprising, not in a nation already used to bomb blasts and the attendant casualty rate. The second news, of a plane ramming into a Lagos suburb, was more alarming and elicited more than the resigned “not again” that greeted the first. With social media abuzz, two things struck me: The plane crashed in Iju Agege and the proximity of my house from the scene.
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The General, GEJ Voltrons and Hyperboles

2012-05-27T21:02:00.001+01:00

I used to admire General Mohamadu Buhari a lot. In him, I saw an Incorruptible Nigerian, whom given the chance, could rid our country of its greatest challenge—corruption in high places.

My view of Buhari’s incorruptibility remains unchanged, but in view of his actions and inactions in the wake of the crisis that followed the April 2011 elections, I do not consider him qualified to air ideas about Nigeria’s snail paced crawl towards political and economic emancipation from the brigands that now hold her captive.

Buhari, I have said before, lost all rights to talk when elder statesmen are called upon, just as he has lost the goodwill that has ensured he returned time and time again to compete for that exalted but oft raped position of this nation’s president. While I still say that Buhari did not ask his supporters to take to the streets and slake their rage on innocent Nigerians, doing nothing to call them to order painted him in colours that are not so different from those he was seeking to oust.

Anyway, this post is not really about what the man did, or didn’t do, after the elections last year. This post is about what the man is doing now and what he intends to do come 2015. Buhari as he is wont, warmed his way back into national consciousness by declaring in no small words that come 2015, naija masses will revolt if INEC does not allow for free and fair elections.

Hmm...here we go again, was my reaction when I saw reference to the statement on twitter, knowing the dams would soon burst and all hibernating GEJ Voltrons, as tweeps call them, would awake and be up in arms. My, my, was I right? Reno Omokiri, a young man most armchair activists like myself have come to expect the most uncouth behaviour possible in the course of defending his government pay cheque did not disappoint—kind of reminds one of pre-activist FFK’s brashness. Reno attacks on Buhari’s audacity to attack the hallowed PDP machine signalled other hibernating voltrons into action and the battle to ‘call Buhari to order’ was on in earnest.

While I think the PDP, and GEJ’s camp, are right to defend themselves if someone wrongly accuses them of wrong doing, in this instance they are absolutely wrong.

Why? Simple.

First: Because Buhari, though he might have accused them of rigging elections in the past, was only warning of the fall out of any attempt to rig the 2015 ballot. Second: Other, both highly and lowly placed, Nigerians have issued similar warnings in the past, and no one bothered to send out the verbal attack dogs.

I think GEJ is still missing the whole point of being president. He has to understand that as president he is number one and therefore the first target when things go wrong, and also the first when praises for things being done right are dished out.

Also, most of the technocrats drafted into government to help this unassuming man navigate foggy landscape of government-citizen relation are still dozing in the zombie days of military dictatorships, where any and every ‘his/her Excellency’ is sacred. Gaddem! This is a democracy, no matter how flawed, and people should be allowed to have opinions. I think it would serve GEJ and those who purport to speak for him to stick to the substance of opinions, not insinuations and hyperboles.

For PDP and its supporters: you may have ruled naija for the past 12 years, but you are not Nigeria and do not represent the masses. It is not given unto you to react to every statement from perceived political opponents as if you are Nigeria.

For Buhari: you lost your chance when it was clearly there for the taking. Go home, rest and advise younger protégées on how to take political opportunities. Also, talk smart, you are no longer in the army.

For the naija people: it is coming again, and we are losing ourselves once again to that sectional divide. When did Boko Haram stop being a PDP invention abeg? We need to wake up and smell the beans before it burns once again.

Our Roads; Our Death and a Nation Where Life is Cheap

2012-05-14T15:46:00.002+01:00

It is almost impossible for anyone travelling between towns in Nigeria not to pass a recent road carnage. These carnages, usually auto accidents with fatalities, are becoming more commonplace in Nigeria and are exacerbated by the extremely low road maintenance culture that is synonymous with every government since the Gowon years. If you are in a mass transit bus; as you pass by the twisted chunks of metal and mangled body parts, you hear gasps of sorrow and shouts of ‘Jesus’, as fellow travellers call on higher powers to ensure they do not meet the same fate.

We do not really understand what is at stake when one talks about death on and by our national highways. To make it clearer and perhaps bring it home, I will dwell on my own personal experience. This year is yet half way through but I have lost three people close to me to auto accidents in the three geographical zones of Nigeria. The first was my cousin, Eddy Oha, whose journey to Lagos from Akure where he resides with his wife and children was truncated at Ijebu Ode when the commercial bus he was travelling somersaulted severally. He died later that evening at the University of Ibadan teaching hospital—where little was done to save his life.

A few weeks ago, I learnt of the death of Adolphus, a cousin’s husband, in an auto accident as he was returning to his base in Malunfashi from a business trip to Kano. Another shock came on 28 April when the news of Kenechuckwu Igbo’s death via an Okada accident in Enugu reached me.

The above mentioned people represent numbers in the statistics for those lost to all manners of auto accidents. They are numbers on a sheet of paper to the government employee that will type them out by this year’s end, they are numbers to the head of the FRSC that will read them out to show whether safety on our roads have increased or decreased when 2012 is reviewed. To people who study the charts for thesis and whatnot, they are numbers on a page. Whether those who write them down or those who quote them remember that these numbers represent individuals, represent dreams untimely broken, represent tears and sorrow, is a guess that I do not think of dwelling on at this time.

Millions of Nigerians are travelling along our highways as you read this. Chances are that many, passing wreckages not yet removed or recent carnages, will have tales of near misses or other gory scenes witnessed in times past. They will wail and gnash teeth at the thought of lives lost, but soon minds are forced to less depressing thoughts, after all, the death of a stranger is not much of an incident—or so the old Igbo adage infers. However, chances are, in passing vehicle, or even the unfortunate ones, there is someone heading to the funeral of someone who died in an auto accident. To people like the fore mentioned, the scene just witnessed poses deeper meanings, for them the statistics represent loved ones, untimely taken, for them it is more than just a number.

For me, the statistics stopped being a number about three years ago when I lost my best friend to an auto accident in Kaduna. My friend, Chimezie Okieyi, survived an earlier accident in 2003, which kept him at in a ward at the orthopaedic hospital in Enugu for a year and maimed his left foot, but the second one took his life—here again the hospital were helpless.

Our hospitals, our death

Of the people we have buried in my ancestral village this year, the vast majority died as a result of accidents, deaths I feel could have been prevented in more ways than one.

To give a perspective, I will dwell a bit about my cousin’s death. Eddy Oha was involved in the auto accident at about 9 am on Tuesday the 31^st of January 2012. As is the Nigerian experience, good Samaritans rushed him to a hospital, where nothing was done to save his life. It took calls on his phone for his friends to find out about his situation. His friends rushed from Akure to the hospital in Ijebu Ode to meet him lying on the floor with only a drip on him, still the hospital charged N25000 for that drip, a tranquiliser and the floor space he had occupied for about five hours before his friends got there and they were allowed to move him to another hospital. The debate of whether to take him to LUTH or University of Ibadan Teaching Hospital was quickly solved on account of Lagos’s perpetual traffic jam. All the hope of prompt attention expected for accident victims disappeared on getting to Ibadan where the hospital officials appeared more interested in documentation and payments than diving in an attempting to save a life. Eddy Oha, with broken legs but no external injuries, died at about five PM, two hours after arriving at the teaching hospital. In the two hours, he was there, only a drip was administered to him, while we ran around, queuing up to pay for this and that. I still believe that had instant medical attention being provided for him, my cousin would be alive today.

A few years ago, I witnessed an instance similar to the one that played out with my cousin when a fence collapsed on a woman in my then neighbourhood. We had rushed the woman to Ikeja General Hospital, thinking they would be better equipped to attempt saving her life. The woman was conscious, talking all through the episode, but it was obvious to all that she was in deep pain. We go to the hospital anxious and keyed for the type of haste we see in western movies in emergencies, only to be disappointed by the lackadaisical attitude of the hospital staff. We had to beg and plead before an attendant made the move to take the woman from the danfo bus we came in into the emergency ward. From there it was downhill. We were asked to go and register, pay for x-ray and whatnot. By the time we raised the money required (it was about 12 midnight) and the woman was wheeled into the x-ray room, she gave up the ghost, like my cousin, a victim of the careless attitude of our hospitals, from internal bleeding.

Our Commercial vehicle, moving coffins

How safe are our commercial vehicles? How sane are our drivers? How greedy are owners and operator of transport companies? How concerned is the government and it agencies?

These questions are very important if we ever hope to save lives on our highways. If we can find answers to why the people who are empowered by government to oversee the cars that ply our highways, fail to see dangers of improvised seats in commercial vehicles, then we are well on our way to abating premature deaths on our highways.

If no law exists to prohibit nonstandard seats in commercial vehicles in Nigeria, perhaps it is time to legislate on one. We all know how much research goes into designing cars, and how disastrous any alteration that goes against the design can be. People in other climes have claimed billions of dollars in damages from car companies because of defective parts. Here, we knowingly distort the design to create space for more passengers and make more money.

While the greed of the owners of commercial vehicles knows no bounds, the acquiescence of the security agents, who do little to secure the lives they are mandated to, should not be forgotten.

Why do we insist on having these little Toyota buses and van transport our people? We all know the bigger buses are safer and better. Is it not time we make them the transport vehicles of choice.

Our cars are death traps, our roads are death traps, our hospitals are no help, and the government looks on, mute to our spilled blood. Death, it appears, is our lot in our travels everyday—unless we have the means to fly.

That is our dilemma, our circles of inefficiencies kill our people, and no one cares enough to make a change.

I am all about change. We have to make a difference; we have to save lives, to force government to make the effort and accept that every Nigerian has the right for a chance at life. We have to question why almost everyone with internal bleeding, but without the means to go to a well-stocked private hospital, stands little chance of surviving at any government hospital.

To do this, I say we put a name to the statistics as I have done above. If you have ever lost someone dear to an accident on a Nigerian road, please comment on this post and put a name to the number. We can change the attitude.

Before you 'kill' Zimmerman

2012-04-30T14:41:00.000+01:00

There is no doubt of George Zimmerman’s guilt in the shooting that led to the death of Trayvon Martin, there however remains doubt as to whether the killing was in cold blood or an act of self defence. The trial that is ongoing is primarily expected to answer that question, at least beyond reasonable doubt.

Of the killing, Zimmerman says it was an act of desperate self-defence, against a boy he thought just a few years younger, an admission that many contest on grounds that he had a gun, and was more physically imposing that the unarmed youth he say he was fighting off. There is also that commonly held belief, within black America and elsewhere, that there is a racist undertone to Zimmerman’s action and the reaction of the police to the case afterwards. That Zimmerman insisted on going after the boy after the officer answering his 911 call indicated that he not do so, is a clear sign he racially profiled the boy and marked him as guilty of something, many contend.

Though Zimmerman and his backers say this is not the case, he couldn’t have profiled the kid that way, his background would not allow him do that—discriminate on grounds of colour—the doubt still rests heavily on his shoulders.

The whole argument on racial profiling seriously begs the question: what is racial profiling and how could that have led to the death of a boy that harmless and young?

Racial/tribal profiling exists in different forms in different places. Some are negative, other not so much so. In Nigeria, the belief that people from Warri have a high sense of humour, that the average Hausa man is honest to a fault, that the Igbo can do anything for money, that the Yoruba are cowards are some of the milder forms of racial profiling. The extra security that a green Nigerian passport or a Semitic appearance triggers in airports in the west is a more unsavoury form, at least for those on the receiving end.

For blacks in America, ethnic profiling of the negative kind is a reality and has existed for centuries in various forms. I read somewhere that the whites perceive the average black American as lazy. For a community that effectively raised America to its present status on the strength of their toil on the cotton fields, tobacco fields and countless other slave labour engagements, laziness should be the last thing that mention of them evokes. Nevertheless, there is that other one, the one that sees blacks as having a lower IQ than whites, one so well expressed by John Derbyshire is his viral article. Other unsavoury profiles, for both blacks and whites, do exist in the American society and they have for centuries and may well continue to for a long time to come.

No one can readily say when or how these negative profiling started or what their purposes are, but it is not farfetched to see in them the inherent mistrust man have for anything that looks or feels different. Perhaps, wanting to live apart from those of other races/tribes worked well in the past, but the world today is a global community. It is just not possible to be exclusive.

That said; one would not shy from arguing that the black American community have not exactly done much to dispel the negative profiles that have hung around it for decades, if not centuries. Unlike the white American community that tries hard to show it is a community of contrasts where you have the good and the bad, there seem to be an unconscious move by the blacks to cultivate the aggressive image, perhaps as a kind of defence mechanism after years of oppressive living under the whites. I really don’t know, just grasping at straws here, but the stereotype of the black American that is commonplace is that of highly strung individuals with ill repressed anger that is always threatening to blow up, with disastrous consequences.

While this description would in reality describe only a minute amount of people in the black community, the others chose to wear it as a garb, a kind of communal identity that only spells doom. I have heard mention of the nature of the American system and how it predisposes black to drop out of school and fail, how that is the cause of a higher percentage of them than whites in America’s prison system, how it makes it harder for them to find work. However, coming from where I am coming from, I say they, and only they, can make good no matter the situation. Well, that is my take, I know the debate of whether the system set black up to fail is still on and will continue for much longer.

Getting back to Zimmerman, if we are to agree with those insisting he racially profiled Trayvon Martin, then, we are agreeing that the common racial profiling of black Americans is negative. That being the case, Zimmerman, A neighbourhood watch volunteer (I think they operate in much the same way neighbourhood watches operate in Nigeria, with police as the authority and the volunteers referring cases to them), saw a black youth in a hoodie walking by a thought “crime”. He gave case, pulled his gun at some point and shot the youth dead, only it turned out the suspect was just an innocent boy out for some snacks.

Trayvon Martin is dead; nothing that happens now can change that fact. We have to keep in mind that black youths have been breaking into houses in that neighbourhood for some time before this incident, and that this might justify Zimmerman’s profiling, but does that change much? The boy is dead. In his death and in the death of thousands of people world over, we see further evidence of man’s inability to live with man without conflict, in his death lies the shame of our age.

In his death lie lessons for his community and everyone else. While incidents of history like this one may make it seem expedient to glorify the thug life, to see offense as a form of defense, we have to be wary that times have changed. The celebration of the criminal life, something sagging pants and a hoodie pulled over the eyes to hide the face at night tends to glorify, is not the way to go.

The world needs to take another look at the music stars that encourage the gangland lifestyle, who rap and talk about killing one another in glowing terms. Black America need to adopt more positive role models for their kids, they need to show them the many positive examples being set by the children of immigrant family, of which their president is one, who have taken the opportunities available and made good. They need to tell people like 50 Cents and Lil Wayne to stop being bad influences on their kids by mouthing negative lyrics, they need to learn to stay married and raise kids in decent homes. Most importantly, they need to stop complaining of white America’s ill treatment and take the immense opportunities their society offers.

For the zimmerman’s of this world, whatever reason caused him to kill the youth, the right to take a life is not yours, and “standing your ground” does not make it right when the person you are confronting is unarmed.

For the people angry and gunning for revenge, think about how many blacks were killed in black on black violence in America this week before you kill Zimmerman in your head.

Justice is from above.

Trayvon Martin: Beyond the Outcry

2012-04-13T10:06:00.000+01:00

Everyone that pays attention to the media, especially international media from the west, must have at this point in time heard about Trayvon Martin. If by chance you happen to have crawled under a rock in Mars for the last one month and thus missed the whole commotion, Trayvon Martin is the 17-year-old boy shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer.

If you don’t know about the details of the case, as many still don’t, you might not think much of a headline that says “boy killed by guard”. But why should you think different, News headlines are replete with such news stories anyway.

However, the Trayvon Martin case is unique in more ways than one. Not only is the late Trayvon Martin a minor, he was unarmed and not partaking in anything illegal at the time he was fatally shot by Zimmerman. Sad, you might say, another young boy at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yes, Trayvon Martin was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong time and place for a black youth to be in 21^st century America. Wrong place to be, but right sort of place to get a bullet in the chest. A bullet fired by a white adult male who clearly outweighs him.

For those who have had the time in this dreary economic climate to follow the ruckus that emanated after the news sipped out that Mr. George Zimmerman, the killer of that innocent boy, was allowed to walk free after the fact, two truths ring clear: Zimmerman pulled the trigger of the gun that took the young boys life, the victim was armed with skittles and a cup of ice tea at the time of the shooting and was not doing anything untoward—except we follow George Zimmerman’s contention that the boy was walking aimlessly around the neighbourhood and agree with him that that constitutes a crime.

I feel profound sympathy for the family of the late Trayvon Martin and can only hope they find the strength to bear the loss, but the issue at hand is deeper than the death of a boy that made his parents proud.

I also feel sympathy for black Americans, who have had to contend with similar killings by high-handed and often times racially motivated white gunmen. I watch the news story and share the rage and confusion of those who ask that the boy’s killer face justice, not because I am of the same race with a majority of those I see carrying placards calling for justice, but because I never ever believed in extra-judicial killing by anyone.

As a Nigerian who has not personally experienced the blind racism that many allude to in the west, that one reads about, sees in movies and TV debates, I cannot claim to fully understand what it feels like to be discriminated against because of one’s colour. I know many say tribalism is similar, but I think it is only superficially so as one’s tribe cannot easily be decoded at first glance--one’s race is usually as clear as day.

However, as justified as my anger and that of millions around the world itching for justice is, I also know that getting justice for Trayvon Martin should not be the end of it. It is easy to march on the street and call for the arrest of one man, but forgetting that the arrest and possible imprisonment of one man does not change the situation on the ground that made his alleged crime possible. There is now greater need for people the world over to look at how we relate to ourselves. Should we continue hating because we don’t understand, or seek knowledge to make us better understand?

Across the world, people continue to hate more than they love, to kill more than they save and the destroy more than they build. Life, particularly human life is considered most sacred by religions world over. Yet, in this earth, man continues to see killing as a means of settling real and perceived disputes.

Trayvon Martin is just another notch on the pole that marks the billion untimely taken as a result of man’s resolve to take rather than give life to his kind and George Zimmerman, whether he pleads self-defence or not, broke the law of nature, he killed Trayvon Martin.

Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards 2012 launched to celebrate top business journalism on Africa

2012-03-06T18:11:00.000+01:00

Diageo, the world’s leading premium drinks business, today launched its annual Africa Business Reporting Awards for 2012. The Awards, initiated by Diageo in 2004, recognise journalists and editors who provide high quality coverage of the business environment in Africa. Diageo believes that better and more accurate reporting plays a critical role in framing Africa’s economic prospects and challenges. It encourages greater interest in doing good business, which in turns creates the right environment for sustained prosperity on the continent.

Nick Blazquez, President, Diageo Africa, outlined the importance of the Awards:

“Business interest in Africa has clearly accelerated as the world focuses on the continent’s impressive growth prospects. As a company that operates right across Africa, we at Diageo understand the increasingly important role business journalism has in creating the right environment to operate successfully and to attract long-term investment. As I look back over the development of these Awards, I recognise a sizeable shift in the standards of business journalism and the increased efforts of the media both inside and outside of Africa to promote trade and enterprise on the continent. I take great pride that Diageo can celebrate these achievements and look forward to another year of outstanding contribution.”

As the Diageo Africa Business Reporting Awards approach their tenth anniversary, Diageo is continually thinking about ways to evolve the Awards’ relevance, impact and reach. Diageo hopes to build on the success of previous years, welcoming entries from all media platforms and from all over Africa and beyond. This year, the New Media category has been removed as a separate category to reflect the ubiquity of multimedia use in modern news-telling. Submissions of pieces using new media are now encouraged across the board: all media, including blogs and other online material are eligible in every category.

The awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, 28 June 2012 in central London. The closing date for entry is Friday, 23 March, 2012. Entries can be submitted online at: ww.diageoafricabusinessreportingawards.com. There is no entry fee.

The Categories

1. Best Information and Communication Technology (ICT) feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that examines any aspect of the ICT sector in a thoughtful and engaging way.

2. Best Finance feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that examines any aspect of the finance/banking sector in a thoughtful and engaging way.

3. Best Infrastructure feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that examines any aspect of infrastructure (physical or otherwise) in a thoughtful and engaging way. Features addressing issues of energy and transport can enter this category.

4. Best Agribusiness / Environment feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that examines any aspect of agribusiness or environmental issues in a thoughtful and engaging way.

5. Best Tourism feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that examines any aspect of the tourism industry in a thoughtful and engaging way.

6. Best Business News story

A news story or series of related stories delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that:

· Addresses a breaking news story from the time period of the awards

· Answers all basic questions in a clear and balanced fashion

· Demonstrates journalistic flair – a style that is engaging, thought-provoking and

accessible to its audience

7. Best Business feature

A feature or series of related features delivered on any media platform (print, broadcast, online) that:

· Examines business or the economy in an African context

· Provides useful and relevant background material for readers

· Provides the bigger picture and importance to Africa, as well as specific issues it might be addressing

· Brings the business and economy to life through examples and use of language, while answering the serious questions

8. Best Newcomer

A portfolio of three features (can be across different platforms) by a journalist who has been working as a reporter for less than five years. Proof of first date of accreditation will be required.

9. Media of the Year

A print publication, broadcast programme/channel, website or blog that is a comprehensive resource for its audience providing sustained coverage of Africa’s business and economic news, issues and analysis (sector-specific or otherwise).

10. Journalist of the Year

A portfolio of three features (on any one or a mixture of media platforms) of no more than 5,000 words or 1 hour each. Submitted pieces can cover different topics, industries or people, or be part of a series of reportage. Judges will be looking for features that reflect journalistic integrity and ethics and a true commitment to reporting that does not sensationalise stories or individuals.

For more information, visit www.diageoafricabusinessreportingawards.com or contact:

Alexandra Reza, Awards Secretary, areza@africapractice.com, +44 (0) 207 087 3788

Ciara O’Keeffe, Corporate Relations, Diageo Africa, Ciara.OKeeffe@diageo.com, +44 208 978 2876

About Diageo plc and Diageo Africa

Diageo is the world's leading premium drinks business with an outstanding collection of beverage alcohol brands across spirits, wines, and beer categories. Diageo is a global company, trading in more than 180 countries around the world. The company is listed on both the New York Stock Exchange (DEO) and the London Stock Exchange (DGE).

Diageo Africa is primarily a beer and spirits company whose brands are sold in more than 40 countries in Africa. Diageo has a long established presence in Africa with the first recorded exports of Guinness to Sierra Leone in 1827. Guinness is a truly pan-regional premium beer brand brewed in over 20 countries throughout the continent and is exported to many others. Diageo’s businesses also produce and sell a range of local beer brands including Tusker, Senator Keg, Premium Serengeti Lager, Meta, Harp and Bell. Diageo is also the leading premium spirits company in Africa, and its great brands include Johnnie Walker Scotch Whisky, Smirnoff vodka, Baileys and Gilbeys gin.

Diageo Africa employs over 5,000 people accounting for one in four of Diageo’s workforce worldwide. In some key markets it has built its own in-market businesses with distribution access to trade channels, some of which have listings on local stock exchanges. In other markets, it will look to partner with a local business, through licensing brands or through third party distribution. All of these companies have active community investment programmes, covering initiatives in water, farming and rural value chains, health, education and other areas of value to the communities in which they operate across Africa.

Diageo has recently published its report on its business approach in Africa. You can download it at http://www.diageo.com/en-row/CSR/Pages/resource.aspx?resourceid=1078

The Nigerian Police and ineptitude

2012-02-16T14:01:00.000+01:00

What comes to mind when you think about the Nigerian Police? Surely not smartly dressed law keepers, making sure the society’s wheels are oiled – well enough to see to the smooth running of things – and the protection of you and yours.

I will not be far from the truth if I state that the image that comes to the average Nigerian’s mind, following questions of this nature, is that of an AK47 toting, ill-fittingly-dressed bugger whose major objective is to collect illegal tolls from commercial drivers.

I will also not be incorrect if I go further to add that what comes to mind when you behold them during crisis is not a feeling of relief, but mind numbing fear that compels you to take off faster than the guilty party, or risk becoming a victim. Little wonder witnesses who would have been instrumental to solving cases seldom turn up when called to do so. Even when they do turn up, or are compelled to do so, accompanying tales of sordid experiences in police cells make it difficult for would be witnesses to toe their path.

These and other more horrifying images have for years remained the general perception of the police, and despite cosmetic attempts by the government and police authorities to change this, it has so far remained thus.

How did the police, an institution that in other climes exude perfection and is many a nation’s pride, get to the sorry state where it is being viewed with the same consternation one does a terrorist organisation? The answer, and consequently, the truth, is the fact that the police in Nigeria has never been a people-centric institution. From its early days as a colonial enforcer, the police have acted as an enemy of the people and a friend to the subjugating authorities.

The Nigerian Police has for years, whether institutionalised or not is a question for another day, maintained the image of brutality that have become synonymous with them by implementing very little attitudinal changes – beyond pasting the slogan “the police is your friend” on the walls of their offices, and cars.

They are more likely to shoot suspects in cold blood, than thoroughly investigate crimes – the present Boko Haram crisis is traceable to this heinous penchant. Even when they arrest suspects, they are apt to dump them in the nation’s equally pathetic prisons, where they add to the number of awaiting trial inmates whose cases stalls for months on account of missing or non-filed case files.

The rot in the Nigerian Police Force touches all strata of the institution. I am personally yet to meet a police officer who would not take a proffered bribe or demand for such. However, this is not to say that they do not exist, it only shows that they are very rare and the practice is in effect, a culture. Furthermore, the professionalism that one would expect is largely absent. Records are still being kept in old style file cabinets – in this age of info technology when seamless coordination is at the beck and call of even secondary school students.

However, the most visible evidence of the state the Nigerian Police Force, as well as the mindset of its leadership and rank and file, is exemplified by the state of their vehicles, which, after a few months of use, look nothing less than moving scraps. A situation that portrays a dearth of maintenance culture, especially when similar vehicles belonging to other security agencies, bought or donated at the same period, remain in prime condition.

The lack of entrenched professionalism in all cadres, unwillingness to adjust to present realities by the police authorities, and the consistent resort to the force attached to their name while dealing with the man on the street, makes the Nigerian Police ill equipped to deal with the realities of the day.

However, like in most problems that afflict the world we live in, there are solutions.

For starters, modernising the Nigerian Police Force; this can be achieved by connecting all police stations in Nigeria to the Internet and providing basic IT knowledge to the men. This will go a long way in addressing the lack of coordination that result from the widespread use of archaic filing methods, which make it impossible to share information between stations at the click of a button.

Another thing that needs urgent and serious checking is the penchant for plain-clothes policemen to be indistinguishable from armed robbers, or how else would one describe men in shoddy tee-shirts and jeans, toting AK47’s?

That brings us to another salient point, manning the police with intelligent, dedicate officers. There are thousands of intelligent, dedicated and resourceful graduates currently walking the streets of Nigeria looking for any job to do; harnessing this ready manpower would go a long way in addressing many of the issues relating to image and intelligence.

I doubt, however, that the police, as presently constituted, is geared for change. If that hunch is infallible, then Nigerians have no option but continue existing in a society where their avowed protectors are already incapacitated by ineptitude.

Wrote this article last year for DailyTimes.com but thought to re-post here after the event described by the picture below culled from Sahara Reporters

Mazi Nwonwu's blog

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