Notes From Atlanta

Labor’s Treachery against the “Occupy Nigeria” Revolt

2012-01-21T01:14:00.000-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

There is no doubt that the last unprompted mass revolt against President Goodluck Jonathan’s cold-blooded economic war on Nigeria’s middle- and working-class families was a damp squib, as the British call something that turns out to be a disappointment after good expectations.

Here was a splendidly promising, spontaneous, unscripted, and unexampled mass insurrection against an evil ruling class. Its promise—and initial success—filled us all with renewed faith and enthusiasm for our fatherland. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, a broad scope of Nigerians across our traditional primordial fissures of religion, region, ethnicity, etc. united in the face of a common threat from a greedy, unimaginative, and unconscionable elite that is dedicated to exterminating the masses of our people piecemeal. There is no parallel for that historic coalition of the oppressed in Nigeria.

Then Nigeria’s thoroughly compromised labor movement hijacked the revolt, lulled the people into a false sense of solidarity, and finally extinguished the revolutionary fire that was burning down the foundations of Nigeria’s ruling elite.

The Nigerian Labor Congress and the Trade Union Congress didn’t join the mass protests until at least three days after the fact. They were obviously drafted by President Jonathan and his agents to help contain, and if possible snuff out, the conflagration that was going to consume them.

From the very start, I privately expressed concerns that the Nigerian Labor Congress would infiltrate and dilute the people’s revolt. My friend, Auwal Musa Rafsanjani, who is president of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center, thought I was being overly suspicious. He said he could vouch for the credibility of NLC president Abdulwaheed Omar. I wasn’t convinced. I told him his trust would be betrayed. I didn’t say that because I had oracular powers. I don’t. But I had this steadily escalating sense of premonition that the labor leaders would commandeer and crush the spontaneous mass revolt from within. And they did.

Finanice Minister Ngozi Okonjo_Iweala congratulates NLC president Abdulwaheed Omar and his TUC counterpart for a job well-done.

The signs were evident for anyone with even the wispiest perceptual capacities to see. First, the current leaders of the NLC are unapologetic protégés of Adams Oshiomhole, the most cunningly duplicitous labor leader Nigeria has ever produced—but who for a long time enjoyed an unearned and undeserved reputation as a dogged and forthright defender of the Nigerian masses, a reputation he fraudulently exploited to become governor of Edo State.

Second, Adams Oshiomhole, NLC’s puppeteer, is an unapologetic advocate of petrol price hike—as he has always been, although he had done a great job of pretending to be for the people. It has now come to light that all the strikes he led against previous petrol price increases were all grand, elaborate, and carefully choreographed performances. Since NLC’s current leaders are his puppets, they couldn’t possibly perform anything independent of their controller.

Third, in the course of the mass revolt, a government document I saw showed that the NLC, in fact, had given its imprimatur to government’s plans to increase the pump price of petrol (which is now cleverly masked as “fuel subsidy removal”) many months back. So labor had been in cahoots with the government to fleece the masses all along. All their pretensions to the contrary were mere theater.

NLC and TUC leaders’ hijacking, neutralizing, and extinguishing of the people’s revolt reminds me of Malcolm X’s witty dramatization of how the popular revolt of black Americans against racism in the 1960s was contained by the government through “civil rights leaders.” These civil rights leaders weren’t originally part of the “March on Washington” during which Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Like the “Occupy Nigeria” movement, it was a spontaneous grassroots revolt that took the American black bourgeoisie by surprise. The government was scared to death that a “black steamroller was going to come down on the capital,” as Malcolm X memorably captured it.

Then the government quickly called the black civil rights leaders of the time and told them to stop it. "Boss, I can't stop it, because I didn't start it. I'm not even in it, much less the head of it," Malcolm said in an imaginary conversation he made up between the conniving black bourgeoisie and the John F. Kennedy administration. Malcolm said this during a December 10, 1963 speech he delivered in Detroit, Michigan, titled “Message to the Grassroots” .

When the black bourgeoisie said they were helpless before this black steamroller, Malcolm again made up a response that the government gave to the compromised black civil rights leaders: “I'll put you at the head of it. I'll endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.”

There are eerie analogues between the events Malcolm X brilliantly dramatized, some would say over-dramatized, in 1960s America and what happened in Nigeria last week. The “Occupy Nigeria” mass revolt took both the Jonathan government and the morally bankrupt labor aristocrats at the NLC and the TUC by surprise. When government told them to stop the revolt, they probably said, like the black bourgeoisie in 1960s America, they couldn’t stop what they didn’t start. So the government put them “at the head of it,” to use Malcolm’s words. It did this by choosing to “negotiate” with labor, the same labor that was never a part of the revolt, that joined the revolt three days after it had started.

Soon enough, the masses of the people began to look up to NLC and TUC leaders as the “leaders” of the revolt. Then they “became” the revolt. They took it over. As they took it over, they took control of its rhythm, form, compass, and denouement. And they are being rewarded for their skillful performance. I read that TUC president Peter Esele has been rewarded with membership into the Special Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) Task Force. That’s such a swift compensation for treachery!

But we shouldn’t despair. The leaderless, unstructured, spur-of-the-moment, if for now unsuccessful, mass upheaval that we saw in the past few days has restored many people’s optimism about Nigeria’s future in more ways than one. First, it has disproved the time-honored national myth that Nigerians can never unite over anything other than football.

Second, for the first time in Nigeria’s 51 years of existence, Muslims and Christians signed a covenant to live in peace in Kano, the hotbed of sanguinary religious convulsions. Pictures of Christians guarding Muslims while they prayed and of Muslims reciprocating the gesture by visiting churches and assuring Christians of protection and fraternal solidarity warmed my heart beyond measure.

Lastly, this battle isn’t over yet. The suicidal and clueless Nigerian elite are unlikely to relent in their cowardly and egomaniacal violations of the poor. When the combustion does erupt again, it would take a decidedly different course. Labor leaders would no longer be able to stop what they didn’t start. A wise government would learn from this, retrace its steps, and respect the will and wishes of the people it claims to govern. But is any Nigerian government wise?

Related Articles:

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Why Ordinary Americans are also Angry with Goodluck Jonathan

2012-01-14T01:36:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

On Monday January 9, my 7-year-old daughter and I joined many Americans from the “Occupy Atlanta” movement or, as they like to call themselves, “Atlanta’s 99 percent,” to protest against President Goodluck Jonathan’s revoltingly conscienceless war on the poor though his thoughtless and ill-conceived hike in petrol prices.

We converged at the Nigerian Consulate in Atlanta in symbolic solidarity with the admirably dauntless Nigerian people at home who have chosen to bracket their differences and unite in defense of their common humanity against a notoriously malevolent and incompetent government.

Atlanta is just one of several cities where ordinary Americans of all races came out forcefully and passionately to support Nigerians against this embarrassingly inept, IMF/World Bank-controlled government. Across major cities in America, scores of Americans are joining Nigerians in America in demonstrations against the most usurious petrol price hike in Nigeria’s entire history.

But why would Americans who live thousands of miles away from Nigeria and who have a reputation for being provincial and indifferent to world events that have no direct consequence on their lives be interested in what goes on in our country?

There are three reasons. First, the Internet, especially social media, has annihilated the boundaries of time and space in hitherto unthought-of ways. A lot of Americans became aware of the desperate conditions of the Nigerian people at home not through their legacy, mainline news media, but through online social networks and citizen blogs.

I take delight in saying that my October 22, 2011 article titled “Fuel Subsidy Removal: Time to ‘Occupy’ Nigeria!” and a sequel titled “Biggest Scandal in Oil Subsidy Removal Fraud” were major catalysts in this awakening. The articles went viral on the Internet, attracted an unprecedented traffic to my blog, and caused scores of inquiries to be directed at me Of course, as I said on my Facebook page, I don't claim any credit for the “Occupy Nigeria” movement. I think its emergence is the product of a spontaneous outpouring of righteous anger against a smothering and insensitive government policy. Of course, several other Nigerians also wrote many thoughtful articles and analyses on the cruelty, fraud, and illogic of the Jonathan government’s inhuman petrol price hike. These disparate initiatives all coalesced to form a compelling social media narrative of what is going in Nigeria.

The second reason ordinary Americans identify with the current struggles of the Nigerian people is that many of them were intensely scandalized to learn that Nigerians, 80 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, were paying more for petrol than they who live in the world’s wealthiest nation. The lowest paid worker in America receives the equivalent of 185,00 naira per month. Nigeria’s current minimum wage of 7,500 naira translates into $47 dollars a month. If the Jonathan government honors its promise to increase the minimum wage to 18,000 naira, that would translate into $112 per month.

A softhearted American friend of mine who saw this statistic wept profusely a few days ago. “That’s just not fair!” she cried. “Someone with a 47-dollar-a-month wage pays $3.6 for a gallon of gas while a minimum wage worker in Georgia who receives nearly $8 an hour pays $2.99 for the same? That’s just wrong on so many levels!”

She would probably have literally cried her heart out if she knew that the Nigerian government actually pays millions of dollars to an avaricious cabal of primitive capitalist vultures to import toxic, low-grade refined petrol into the country. As I said in a previous article, the petrol price comparison between Nigeria and the United States— and other countries— is, in fact, grossly inaccurate because all of the petrol that is imported to Nigeria is so low-grade that it’s a criminal offense to use it in America, Europe, and other parts of the world.

Thirdly, and most importantly, contrary to the intentional lies being hawked by the economic policy thugs of the Jonathan administration, the American government heavily SUBSIDIZES the fuel consumption of its citizen. Most responsible, socially sensitive governments do.

According to a TIME Magazine article of January 3, America’s 50 states collectively spend $10 billion a year to subsidize the fuel consumption of their citizens. In America, with all its vast material prosperity, the surest way for any government to collapse irretrievably is to encourage any policy that causes the price of petrol to go up. As TIME put it beautifully, “One of the fastest ways to alienate voters is to be seen supporting anything that intensifies pain in the pump.”

American state governments subsidize petrol prices for their citizens through low taxes on their oil companies. During the 2008 presidential election, for instance, Hilary Clinton and John McCain, in fact, advocated a “gas tax holiday” regime. That meant oil companies would not be taxed at all for an extended period so that gas prices would come down by about 18.4 cents a gallon for petrol and about 24.4 cents for diesel.

According to TIME, “politicians’ refusal to increase gas taxes in line with inflation and construction costs starves needed infrastructure of funding.” Sounds familiar? The perennial reason our governments in Nigeria advance to increase fuel prices is that the government needs money for “infrastructural development,” which by the way is a fat lie. (They should be honest for once and admit that they need more money to steal). But the point is that no responsible government starves its people to death because it wants to build infrastructure. Only the living use infrastructure.

There is an instructive example in the Midwestern state of Iowa of how a caring government, faced with a cash crunch, responded to recommendations for an increase in petrol prices to raise money. I will reproduce parts of the story, which is from TIME, without authorial intervention:

“In Iowa, which hasn’t raised its tax in 22 years, a citizen advisory panel recommended an 8 cent to 10 cent bump per gallon in November. Republican Gov. Terry Branstad quickly took any increase off the table, instead asking his Department of Transportation to look for savings.

“‘Everyone realizes that we need more funding for roads and bridges,’ said Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for Branstad. ‘I don’t think the legislature was especially willing to put a burden on Iowa’s tax payers at this time.’”

So an American state was in dire need of money to fund projects that would benefit the people and a panel made up of professionals not affiliated with the government recommended that the government increase the pump price of petrol to raise cash.

What did the government do? It said no. It said increasing petrol prices by just 8 or 10 percent would impose an unbearable burden on its citizens. It then said the state should raise money by SAVING. And this is a state in the wealthiest country on earth. Do you see any parallels here with Nigeria?

Well, that’s why every American who is familiar with what is happening in Nigeria is deeply angry with Jonathan on our behalf. So don’t give up, Nigerians. The whole world is watching you, supporting you, and celebrating your extraordinary gallantry!

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Nigeria’s Unique Telephonic Vocabulary

2012-01-08T16:20:00.000-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

With the exponential growth and flowering of mobile telephony in Nigeria, a corpus of uniquely Nigerian telephonic phraseology is emerging. What follows is not intended to be understood as grammatical errors. A word or phrase isn’t a grammatical error simply because its usage deviates from the norms of native-speaker varieties. On the contrary, it may indicate linguistic creativity. But it helps to know the communicative limitations of uniquely local phrases for international communication.

1. “Toss” or “toos.” This is Nigerian English’s first telephonic vocabulary. It is now outdated. It’s short for “temporarily out of service”— a voice prompt that Nigeria’s notoriously incompetent state-run NITEL (Nigerian Telecommunications) invented for telephone lines that were suspended for failure to pay monthly service bills. Although the initials of the words that make up the phrase are “toos,” Nigerians preferred “toss,” perhaps because it sounded more English than “toos.” Or maybe it was because a word with that spelling already exists in the English language. Nigerians later invented creative phrases around the term, such as “my line is on toss,” “my line has been tossed,” etc. Interestingly, one of the meanings of “toss” in English is to throw or cast away, which is somewhat similar in effect to what happens when a phone subscriber’s line is suspended.

2. “Flash.” I have written several articles on this word which, in Nigerian English, means to drop a call intentionally before the intended recipient picks it up. The closest approximation of this term in native varieties of English, especially in American English, is “missed call,” that is, intentionally dropped calls.

In the Third World, intentionally missed calls are used to communicate several messages. In Nigeria, for instance, it can mean “I have no minutes in my phone; please call me back,” or “Hi. This is just to let you know I’m thinking about you,” or “I’m ready. Come pick me up.” It can also function as a code between people, such as when somebody says, “When I ‘flash’ you, it means he is here.”

In the Philippines, “flashing” is called “miskol.” It’s formed from “missed call” and functions both as a noun and as a verb (as in: “That was a miskol”; “I will miskol you”). It won the “word of the year” in the country in 2007.

In England and Australia it’s called “prank,” (as in: “I don’t have your phone number; can you prank me?” Or “That wasn’t a real call; it was a prank”). In the U.S. it’s called “drop call” (used both as a verb and as a noun, although it’s a rare urban slang term). In Rwanda it’s called a “beep,” and it’s also used both as a verb and as a noun. See my previous articles titled “In Defense of Flashing and other Nigerianisms” and “Top Hilarious Differences between American and Nigerian English” for other examples.

3. “Handset.” This is the Nigerian English word for what speakers of the dominant varieties of English simply call a phone. In popular usage in both the US and the UK, a handset doesn’t refer to a mobile phone receiver; it usually refers to the detachable part of a landline telephone that is held up to speak into and listen to. Americans also call it “French telephone.” In British and American English, “handset” can also refer to a handheld controller for any piece of electronic equipment such as a remote control for TV, a walkie-talkie, or a video recorder.

This is what native speakers call a "handset"

I recall reading former Nigerian presidential spokesman Segun Adeniyi’s experience in America about this. He wrote that no one understood him when he said he had misplaced his “handset.” After a lot of explanation, he said, someone vaguely understood what he meant and asked, “you mean your phone?” To be sure, technically, a mobile phone receiver is also a handset; it’s just that native speakers of English hardly call it by that name in informal, conversational contexts.

4. “Call off.” Many Nigerians use this phrase where speakers of British and American English would use “hang up.” This arises from a very literal understanding of the phrase: When you dial people’s numbers, you call them, and when you cut the call you “call off.” But “call off” is an idiom and idioms, by definition, are expressions whose meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words that make them up. “Call off” chiefly means to cancel something altogether or to postpone it indefinitely. Example: The Academic Staff Union of Universities will call off its strike tomorrow. “Call of” has no connection with telephony, but Femi Kusa, a former Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian, wrote in a recent article that a reporter called him and “called off.”

5. “Engaged.” This word for what Americans call “busy” isn’t uniquely Nigerian. It is the preferred British English word to indicate that a telephone line is unavailable because it is already in use. Thus, “engaged tone” or “engaged signal” is the sound you get when you dial a number that is “engaged.” The first time I told an American that I called his number and it was “engaged” there was a communication breakdown. If I had said it was “busy” or that I got a “busy tone” he would have understood me immediately.

6. “Network problems.” This is the phrase Nigerians use when there is a high incidence of what native English speakers call “dropped calls.” Where Americans and Britons would say “the signal (strength) is weak,” or “reception is poor,” or they are “experiencing access failure,” Nigerians say “the network is poor” or “there are network problems.” Interestingly, “network problems” is now becoming a catch-all phrase for all kinds of technological failures outside of telephony. For example, a friend recently told me he didn’t respond to my email on time because of “network problems” with his Internet! Synonymous expressions for “network problems” are “service problems” or simply “service,” especially in Nigerian Pidgin English.

7. “Interconnectivity.” This is not an everyday word in native varieties of English, but it is in contemporary Nigerian English. It is used to denote poor signal exchange between Nigeria’s wireless phone service providers. Even uneducated Nigerians habitually talk about “interconnectivity problems” between, for instance, MTN and Glo. That word would make no sense to most people in the UK and the US for three reasons: First, the idea that two phone companies can’t exchange signals is beyond their experiential repertoire. Second, that word is too big, too stilted, and too pretentious for informal, conversational purposes. Third, the word is never used in connection with telephony. But I think it speaks to the linguistic creativity of Nigerians that they have “hijacked” this word and “force-fed” it with extraneous semantic properties in the service of expressing a phenomenon that is unique to their telephonic experiences. There is absolutely no reason to discourage its use in this context.

8. “Killer numbers.” From about the midpoint of 2011, maybe earlier, several hoaxes emerged in Nigeria that claimed that answering certain mysterious phone numbers could result in the instant death or paralysis of the receiver. The Nigerian press dubbed such numbers “killer numbers.” The phrase is now integrated into the everyday speech of a broad spectrum of superstitious Nigerians because the hoaxes have endured to this day. Native speakers of English will find this phrase puzzlingly incomprehensible.

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Boko Haram as an Empty Signifier

2012-01-07T14:31:00.002-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Semioticians (i.e., people who study the function and meaning of signs and symbols) deploy the term “empty signifier” (also called “floating signifier”) to denote things or concepts that have no fixed, stable meaning, that have vastly variable interpretive renditions, or that “may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean,” to quote Jeffrey Mehlman who wrote an influential essay on the subject in 1972.

The original Boko Haram isn’t exactly an empty signifier in the classical conception of the term since it has an identifiable ideological character (antipathy to Western modernity, etc.), a locational identity (northeast Nigeria), and a recognizable operational modality (violence against people who oppose its wacky ideology).

However, over the past few months, the perceptual consensus about the group in the popular imagination has mutated radically. For many mainstream northern Nigerian Muslims, Boko Haram initially just meant an embarrassing lunatic fringe that would sooner or later dissipate. Over time, however, the term came to be understood as a scurrilous linguistic marker deployed by southern Christians to describe all northern Nigerian Muslims. As a result, many northern Muslims who truly detest the ideology and operational modalities of Boko Haram have been pushed to the uncomfortable situation of tacitly defending the group. But in reality they’re merely defending their northern Muslim identity that is now being unfairly linked with Boko Haram.

For many southern Christians, Boko Haram initially represented this omnipresent monster of violence that wants to wipe out Christians from the surface of the earth. Over time, the term became a stand-in for northern Nigerian Muslims. On Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet deliberative arenas, Boko Haram has become the shorthand for northern Muslims.

For Jonathan administration officials, Boko Haram is this shadowy, sinister group formed by resentful northern Muslim politicians as a bargaining chip to win concessions from the reigning government, although the group’s emergence predated Jonathan’s ascendancy to the presidency by at least 8 years.

For international observers, especially in the West, Boko Haram is al Qaeda’s representative in Nigeria that could target Western interests in Africa. It is divorced from Nigeria’s local politics.

These characterizations are, of course, broad strokes that ignore many subtleties. For instance, it is not every Christian that invariably associates Boko Haram with all northern Muslims. And many northern Nigerian Muslims don’t feel compelled to defend Boko Haram in order to protect themselves from stereotypical generalizations.

But it can’t be denied that the current popular conceptions of Boko Haram are not exactly consistent with the original identity of the group. Boko Haram has now transmogrified into a catch-all devil term for any and every violent deed in (northern) Nigeria. When robbers dress in stereotypical northern Nigerian Muslim robes and utter “Allahu Akbar!” before dispossessing their victims, they are “Boko Haram” members. Any church that goes up in flames in any part of Nigeria is invariably attributed to Boko Haram. The Christian man who was caught attempting to burn achurch in President Jonathan’s home state of Bayelsa while dressed in traditional northern Nigerian attires would have been dubbed a Boko Haram member had he succeeded.

(Some months back, a lady identified as Lydia Johnson was stopped dead in her trackswhile attempting to set a church ablaze in Bauchi. Not long after that, seven men who were neither northerners nor Muslims were arrested by law enforcement agents for posing as Boko Haram membersand threatening, through text messages, to bomb prominent politicians andWestern embassies in Nigeria.)

Boko Haram members, like other murderously wacky fringe groups, are enjoying the over-sized attention they are getting from everywhere. But many other people who not even remotely associated with them are helping them, too. Minutes after every tragedy, several “Boko Haram” representatives always claim responsibility. (Compare this to what happened in Norway: an attention-seeking Middle Eastern terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks until it came to light that a Norwegian citizen by the name of Anders Behring Breivik was responsible for it.)

The latest appropriation of Boko Haram is the alleged email the group sent to media houses giving an ultimatum to Christians in the north to leave the region. From my point of view, it is implausible that such a directive would emanate from the “original” Boko Haram for two reasons.

One, Boko Haram primarily operates in the northeastern states of Borno and Yobe, and these states have a robust indigenous Christian population. Some people estimate that as much as 30 percent of the populations of these states are indigenous Christians. I won’t be shocked if some Boko Haram members have distant relations who are Christians. How plausible is it for a group located in such states to ask its indigenous Christian population to relocate to the south? The notion of a wholly Muslim north is a fallacy that gets repeated many times by people who have no clue about the complex religio-cultural architecture of the region.

Second, when Boko Haram emerged in 2002, it wasn’t violent. It was merely a ludicrously crazed group that derided Western education, venerated its leader as God’s divine representative on earth (which is blasphemous in mainstream Islam), preached for the enthronement of its version of Islamic rule in Borno and Yobe, and ridiculed other Muslims who scoffed at its eccentric beliefs.

Then in 2009, the Yar’Adua government sent law enforcement agents to raid the group’s headquarters because its members were allegedly stockpiling arms in readiness for a violent confrontation with Muslims who disdain their beliefs. Scores of the group’s members and leaders were murdered in cold blood without due process. It was after this brutal suppression that the group became violent. Its violence was initially directed only at law enforcement agents and Muslim scholars who openly criticized them. It’s difficult to account for their transmutation into a Christian-hating group.

Many people believe the Jonathan administration and the “new Boko Haram” may be one and the same thing. In this moment of extraordinary unity in adversity that the senseless hike in petrol prices has activated in Nigeria, the government has a compelling reason to keep the people divided and distracted. And what better way to do it than to exploit Nigeria’s traditional fissures: pit Muslims against Christians and southerners against northerners.

I am not completely sold on this theory. Boko Haram does exist. And its capacity for evil is boundless. There are also despicably homicidal thugs in Muslim garbs whose thirst for innocent non-Muslim blood cannot be denied. I have written about and condemned these groups on this page many times in the past (see related articles below).

But a government that arrested an alleged Boko Haram leader but gave him a slap-in-the-wrist jail term at a comfortable, secluded location outside Nigeria’s prison system after an unusually speedy and secretive trial, that tells its citizens to learn to live with the burden of perpetual violence and deaths, that declares a state of emergency in selected parts of some states in the country only as a smokescreen to jerk up petrol prices, that has earmarked an insanely and unprecedentedly gargantuan proportion of the national budget to “security,” and that is gripped by a monomaniacal obsession to visit horrendous misery on ordinary Nigerians at any cost in obeisance to IMF/World Bank directives is capable of anything.

Fortunately, Nigerians have risen superior to the distraction. There is no greater proof of this—and of the floating nature of the Boko Haram signifier— than the popular protest slogan in the demonstrations across the country that says “Goodluck Jonathan is a Boko Haram.” How apt!

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Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests

2012-01-05T01:02:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

From January 2, Nigerians have taken to the street to protest government's cruelly insensitive hike in gas prices cleverly disguised as "fuel subsidy removal." Below is a pictorial essay of the protests. I will update this page as more pictures come in:

First, IMF president Christine Lagarde visited and told her "house Negros" what to do.

From left: Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Christine Lagarde, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala...

Lagarde and Okonjo-Iweala laugh at the thought of the misery they will inflict on Nigerians

The conspiratorial scheming of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Christine Largarde, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Sanusi and Okonko-Iweala, after successfully plotting, take Lagarde to the leaders of Nigeria's government

President Goodluck Jonathan shakes hand with Christine Lagarde

Okonjo-Iweala introduces Lagarde to Nigerian Senate President David Mark who grins from ear to ear like an idiot

From left: Deputy Speaker of Nigeria's House of Representatives Emeka Ihedioha, Christine Lagarde, House Speaker Aminu Tambuwal and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

The deal has been sealed: fuel prices must be hiked. Case closed. From Left: Vice President Namadi Sambo, President Goodluck Jonathan, Christine Lagarde and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Pump price of petrol rises from 65 naira per liter to 138 naira in government-owned gas stations and up to 170 naira elsewhere

Unimaginably long lines follow

The masses of the Nigerian people couldn't stand it, so they "occupied" Nigeria first through social media

And later on the streets

Add caption

Katsina

Even members of Jonathan's Ijaw ethnic group joined the protest

An unprecedentedly massive crowd in Abuja

Occupy Nigeria in London

The man should be re-christened Badluck Jonathan

Massive crowd in Lagos

Even the elderly joined the protest in Kano

Hmmm.....

Police launch unprovoked attacks on peaceful protesters in Kano

In a rare show of unity, Christians keep watch while Muslims pray...in Kano

Some protesters slept over night at Kano's Silver Jubilee Square, which has now been renamed "Freedom Square"


Unfortunately, one protester was shot dead by the police in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital in north-central Nigeria

The fuel price hike has also inspired creative humor in Nigerians

Goodluck Jonathan as a petrol attendant. Given the president's legendary cluelessness, this is probably what he should have ended up being


Goodluck Jonathan as the devil

What a Terrible Way to End the Year!

2011-12-31T12:27:00.003-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

With every passing day, my faith in Nigeria dissipates. The wicked and meaningless bombing of Christians while theywere celebrating Christmas in their churches dramatize the hopelessness that Nigeria is mired in. Why would any sane person brutally murder innocent, defenseless men, women, and children who merely chose to practice a different faith and who did no one any harm?

I wept profusely when I saw pictures of dead children torn to shreds by bombs at a Catholic church in Madalla near Abuja. What kind of bitterness can animate that magnitude of savage bloodthirstiness? What happened to our humanity, our sense of compassion, our spirit of neighborliness?

While ordinary folks, who are more alike than unlike, are killing each other senselessly, the cabal of predatory usurpers who rule us will soon visit unexampled misery on working- and middle-class Nigerians through the impending IMF/World Bank-inspired fuel price increase fraudulently disguised as “fuel subsidy removal.” What are Nigerians doing to confront this?

In the past few days, my November 5, 2011 article titled, “Biggest Scandal in Fuel Subsidy Removal Fraud” where I called attention to Jonathan administration’s signing of a multi-billion-dollar contract with Trafigura to ship toxic, low-grade fuel to Nigeria has generated unprecedented traffic. It has received nearly 30,000 hits in a matter of days—and counting. None of my articles has ever received that much attention.

I got word from people in Nigeria that the article was repeatedly mentioned at the Nigerian Senate's public hearing on the removal of fuel subsidy and in many radio programs and informal discussions across the country. That probably explains the explosion of interest in it.

The truth is that the Goodluck Jonathan administration, goaded by the IMF/World Bank which recently paid a “thank you” visit to their minions and foot soldiers in Nigeria, has declared war on Nigerians. They are not only going to increase fuel prices beyond the reach of ordinary Nigerians, they are also investing trillions of naira to import toxic fuel that will wipe off Nigerians from the surface of the earth. Instead of uniting to extirpate this monster of depravity that masquerades as government, savage, bloodthirsty atavists are busy murdering innocents who are just as screwed by this IMF/World Bank controlled government as anybody else.

President Jonathan, IMF president Christine Lagarde, and Nigeria's Finance Minister and IMF "house girl" Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

I am taking the liberty to reproduce below a few of the encouraging comments that readers have left on my website and on my Facebook page. But I am deeply saddened that the indignation and unity revealed in the messages I receive daily from all over Nigeria are undermined by the senseless acts of annihilation we have seen in the last few days. Until we learn to live with our trivial, incidental differences (such as our religious and ethnic differences), we will all be screwed.

This nation is being undermined on all front, i am just wondering what divine string has kept us together this far. But sure ignorance is a factor, how i wish i could translate this into forty Nigerian languages and mass produce it for continuous public sensitization for 4 months let’s see if a REVOLUTION will not sound!

Shittu Fowora

I will never forget the word 'Trafigura.' What a nice piece, Prof! Keep it up.

Phili

Dr. Farooq, thanks for this enlightening eye-opener piece. Since we have leaders who dumped themselves on us and who are themselves poisoned petrol, it becomes easy for foreign firms to dump poisoned petrol on us. And now at a higher unsubsidized price--if we allow them and their local corporate (sorry, political) collaborators.

Anonymous

The truth is that we get to hear a whole lot of these but the question is who ACTS.......we have a big problem in all sectors. Solution is farfetched, unless one is ready to take the bull by the horns and not get deceived by the milk that is not even from the bull.

Chikata

This piece is soul-touching, a clear signal of what is to come from the Mighty PDP, Nigerians 2 decide positively or otherwise; God help us.

Awwal Bashir

Great to have this revealed. Next thing is 'what do we do'? We are a people not familiar with violence such as experienced among some Arab nations. Something needs to be done. It’s unfortunate that our media do not carry out investigative journalism and bring this out to the public. They've all been bought.

Anonymous

Thank you for bringing this devilish act to the open. I hope Nigerians will stand up and fight for their rights. To the NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT: What goes around comes around.

Zainab Zubairu

Thanks to Kperogi for this highly edifying piece! If the facts exposed here are accessible to my fellow countrymen, the much clamoured "Nigerian spring", or better still, Nigerian "winter", if you like, is inevitable.

Samaila Yandaki Suleiman

It is only a fool that will not appreciate this well-researched article by Prof. Farooq Kperogi. You know what? Maybe the Arabs were impatient for starting the 'Arab Awakening' because it should have started in Nigeria, where the government doesn't even care about, much less listen to, the masses which it represents. Prof Farooq, YOU ARE THE TYPE PERSON NIGERIA NEEDS.

Anas Iliyasu

Dr. Farooq, I’ve read your piece and found it quite revealing. I AM SORRY FOR ANY COUNTRY WHICH DOES NOT HAVE INTELLECTUALS LIKE YOU; I AM EVEN MORE SORRY FOR A COUNTRY THAT HAS PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND REFUSES TO LISTEN TO THEM. I am glad that your article found mention in the Senate. But I will not praise them until they are able to pursue this issue to a positive conclusion, particularly now that news has filtered in that the 2012 Appropriation Bill has no oil subsidy allocation.

Tajudeen Sanni

My brother, prof, Jonathan just wants to satisfy the cabals who put him into Aso rock most of whom are importers of this deadly, toxic so-called "petrol." Investigation has revealed that Nigerian masses don’t benefit from the fuel subsides but only a few high-placed people. We shall resist if our Ghana-Must-Go lawmakers fail to act to save us from these cabals.

Ibrahim Baba

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Fuel Price Increase: Time to Occupy Nigeria!
Biggest Scandal in Fuel Subsidy Removal Fraud

Top Hilarious Differences between American and Nigerian English

2011-12-18T22:38:00.000-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

This was serialized for two weeks in my Sunday Trust column. That's why it's unusually long.

I could have titled this piece “Top Hilarious Differences between British English and American English” because Nigerian English is, after all, a progeny of British English, with which it still shares many structural, grammatical, and lexical characteristics. However, as the examples below illustrate—and as I have pointed out in several of my writings—Nigerian English has significantly weaned itself from British English and has acquired some distinctive stylistic and lexical imprints that mark it out as a classifiable national variety.

In what follows, I identify the top humorous differences between the English spoken and written in Nigeria and in the United States.

1. “You’re so silly!” In Nigerian English—which is, of course, derived from Standard British English—this phrase is decidedly an insult. In British English “silly” is chiefly an adjective of disesteem. It usually denotes and connotes stupidity or foolishness. Nigerian English inherited this sense of the term.

Sometime in 2005 when I told my intercultural communication students at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, about cultures in southern Nigeria where prospective brides go to “fattening rooms” for months to grow “flesh in the right places” so that they would be desirable to their husbands, they thought I was overstretching the bounds of the truth. One of them asked if I was “just being silly.”

Silly? My pride was violently wounded. However, I realized that nobody was shocked by the unwarranted “insult.” That warned me to restrain my emotions. It turned out that in American demotic speech, to be silly means to be willfully and affectionately funny or playful. So the student just wanted to know if I was merely kidding because she didn’t imagine that there were cultures anywhere in the world where “fat” people are not vilified.

An African-American professor friend of mine who teaches political science at the University of Ohio had a reverse experience in Ghana. While on a one-year sabbatical at the University of Ghana in Legon, a male professor almost physically assaulted her because she told him he was “so silly.” She, of course, meant that he was affectionately funny. “I never used ‘silly’ again for the rest of my stay there,” she told me.

I went to elementary school with children of white American Baptist missionaries who habitually called their parents “silly” and the parents would smile and even hug them. We used to be mortified. We thought Americans had no culture of respect for their parents.

To be sure, the notion of silliness as foolishness also exists in American English, but it co-habits with the denotation of lighthearted joviality. Americans can often tell the difference between the two meanings of the word through context and nonverbal cues. In American English “silly” is also used as a noun to describe misbehaving children, as in: “Don’t be a silly!” But when it is used as a noun in British English, usually as a form of address, it means a foolish person, as in: Come on, sillies!”

Interestingly, according to etymologists, when “silly” first appeared in the English language, it was written as “seely” and meant fortunate or happy. Isn’t it fortunate that the notions of “silly” as stupid and jovial still happily co-exist in American English?

2. “It’s a shame.” As an expression, “it’s a shame” simply means “it’s regrettable” or “it’s unfortunate.” In the US and the UK, the phrase is used both with a tone of approving empathy and of disapproval, but mostly the former. Examples: “It’s a shame your mother died when you needed her most”; “It’s a shame you missed getting a First Class degree by only a few points”; “It’s a shame students of English can’t write good English these days,” etc.

In Nigeria, the expression is exclusively disapproving. That’s because Nigerians isolate the meaning of the word “shame” from the expression and understand the entire phrase to mean disgrace, dishonor, or embarrassment. The preferred expression in Nigerian English (which is fortunately also present in all other varieties of English) to express approving regret is “it’s a pity.”

If you’re a Nigerian and you’re reading this, please don’t fight an American or a Briton who says, for instance, “It’s a shame that your country is associated with Internet scams.” The person could actually be saying that he thinks that Nigeria’s reputation as a nation of scammers is undeserved! In both British and American English, the idiom that unequivocally expresses the sense that one should feel embarrassed or ashamed over something is “for shame!” as in: “That’s a terrible thing to say to your parents. For shame!”

3. “You’re so homely.” An American woman I met recently told me she stopped communicating with her Nigerian online lover because he described her as “homely.” She said that was the rudest, meanest, unkindest, and most gratuitous verbal violence she had ever suffered in her life. In American English “homely” means “ugly.” But in Nigerian English it is used of a woman to mean she is warm, friendly, responsible, decent, and worthy of being kept as a wife. This meaning is derived from the (earlier) British sense of the word. The American lady was rueful after she learned that her friend was actually complimenting her.

4. “Are you mad or something?” This question got my undergraduate thesis adviser, the late Professor Mike Egbon, to break up with his first American girlfriend when he was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The lady wanted to find out if he was angry (which is what “mad” means in American English), but in British (and Nigerian) English “mad” means insane, crazy. My professor understood his American girlfriend as calling him a mentally disturbed person. So he got REALLY “mad” and broke up with her! The lady was flummoxed. When she tried to explain what she meant, my professor said he rebuffed her. A few years later, he realized his error, by which time the woman had moved on.

Curiously, as Ipointed out in previous write-ups, the American usage of “mad” to mean “angry” is faithful to the original meaning of the term up until the late nineteenth century.

5. “Let me take my drugs.” In American English the default meaning of “drugs” is a substance used as a narcotic. In Nigerian English, however, it’s a synonym for medicine or, as Americans now prefer to say, medication. To be sure, both senses of the term exist in both varieties. That’s why, for instance, Nigeria’s anti-narcotic agency is called the Nigerian Drug Law Enforcement Agency and why Americans call chemists (or, if you will, pharmacies) “drugstores” and call pharmacists “druggists.”

Early this year, I read of a Nigerian traveler to America who was detained at the airport for hours because she told Custom and Immigration officers that the traditional African herbs she had in her checked-in luggage were “drugs” for her malaria. The “malaria” bit escaped the officers. They were unnerved by what they thought was her forthrightness. After putting the herbs through every imaginable crucible to determine what kind of “drugs” they were and finding that they tested negative, one of the officers had the good sense to pause and wonder if by “drugs” the Nigerian meant “medicines.” It was then they remembered the bit about “malaria” and thought it unlikely that anyone would treat malaria with narcotics. That was how she got her freedom from detention.

My daughter, whose linguistic idiosyncrasies have now become fully American, also recently jumped out of her chair when I said I was going to the pharmacy to buy drugs for her cold. She had just had a “drugs-free day” in her school where she learned about the deleterious consequences of drug use. So she protested, “Daddy, NO WAY will I take drugs for my cold! Drugs are bad!!” I smiled knowingly and told her I meant “medicines.”

6. “I’ll knock you up.” In British and Nigerian English this phrase literally means you’ll knock on somebody’s door. In American English, however, it’s a colloquial expression for “I will get you pregnant”! So don’t say you’ll “knock up” an American woman who isn’t your wife. You could end up in jail for attempted rape!

7. “Girlfriend.” In Nigerian English, “girlfriend” only means a woman with whom a man is romantically involved. But it means more than that in American English. It can also mean a woman’s female friend. The first time an American woman told me she would be meeting with her “girlfriend,” I thought she was an in-your-face lesbian. So I told her she didn’t need to be that direct. She then explained that she merely meant her female friend. I wonder why American men don’t also call their male friends their “boyfriends.”

American women also use “girlfriend” as a form of address when talking to women who are not necessarily their friends, as in: “look here, girlfriend!” I must mention that contemporary British English also uses “girlfriend” to mean a woman’s female friend. My daughter still says “Ewwww!” when her friends call her “girlfriend.”

8. “Offer a course.” In Nigerian English, students, not schools, “offer” courses. A Nigerian reader of my columns recently wrote to tell me that an American university admissions officer was bewildered when she told him she wanted to “offer a course in petroleum engineering”! I told her in America—and in Britain—students don’t offer courses; only schools do. To offer is to make available. Students can’t make courses available in schools; they can only take or enroll in courses that schools offer.

A slightly related but by no means humorous usage peculiarity is the tendency for Nigerian English speakers to “write” tests or exams where Americans “take” them, or for Nigerians to “run a course” where other English speakers are “enrolled in a course.” (I should point out that students in India, Pakistan, Ghana and other Commonwealth countries also “write,” not “take,” tests and exams, indicating that this usage has British origins or influence).

9. “You’re welcome” vs. “welcome.” In American English—and increasingly in British English—the expression “you’re welcome” functions only as a polite response to the expression of gratitude through the phrase “thank you.” In other words, Americans only say “you’re welcome” when someone says “thank you” to them. But Nigerian English speakers say “you’re welcome” where a simple “welcome” would do. An American friend of mine once told me how bemused she was when everyone in Lagos said “you’re welcome, madam” to her upon being introduced to them. “I didn’t say ‘thank you’ to anybody. Why were they saying ‘you’re welcome’ to me?” she recalled.

After the “you’re-welcome-madam” pleasantries became unbearably omnipresent, she quickly figured out that it’s the Nigerian English way of saying “welcome ma’am.” It should be noted that British grammarians initially sneered at the expression “you’re welcome” in response to “thank you.” They preferred the cold, curt, detached “don’t mention it” or “think nothing of it.” Now “you’re welcome” is in common use in British English.

10. “We are managing”/ “we are surviving.” As I wrote in a previous article, in Nigerian English, “managing” means struggling to make ends meet, i.e., not doing well. Example: "My brother, the country is hard. I am just managing.” In American and British English, however, to be managing is to be successful. So where Nigerians would say they are “managing,” Americans and Britons would say they are “just surviving.” In Nigerian English, however, to be surviving is to overcome, to be in control.

An American researcher by the name of Rachel Reynolds who wrote about the Nigerian immigrant experience in America for an academic journal was struck by this intriguing dissimilarity in our usage of these expressions. She interviewed Nigerian immigrants in the Chicago area in the course of her research. Even though her interviewees didn’t seem content with their material lot in America, they said they were “not surviving”; that they were “managing.” She was initially dumb-stricken. When she finally figured out that Nigerians use “managing” to mean “surviving” and “surviving” to mean “managing,” she titled her article: “‘We Are Not Surviving, We Are Managing’: the Constitution of a Nigerian Diaspora along the Contours of the Global Economy."

11. “I will flash you.” This is my favorite Nigerianism. Every Nigerian knows “flashing” to mean a split-second call to another person’s phone with no intention to have a phone conversation. It’s usually a subtle way to say, “I have no units in my phone; please call me back” If the “flashing” takes place in the presence of the recipient, it usually implies: “that’s my number; store it.”

Although “flash” has a multiplicity of meanings in American English (see my previous article titled “In Defense of ‘Flashing’ and Other Nigerianisms”) the first thing that comes to the minds of American—and British—speakers of English when you say you will “flash” them is that you will briefly expose your naked body or genitals to them in public! That was precisely what happened to a white American Baptist missionary friend of mine by the name of John Dunaway who was born in my hometown in the early 1950s and who, sadly, died last year. (I wrote about him in my Weekly Trust column on May 1, 2010).

When he visited Nigeria in 2008, a long-lost friend of his asked for his Nigerian phone number. After getting the number, the friend said, “hold on—let me flash you.” My friend said he ran for cover as fast as he could. “I didn’t want to see the naked body of an old man!” he recalled. He later learned from reading one of my articles in 2007 that in Nigeria “flashing” doesn’t mean indecent exposure. In fact, that sense of the word is completely non-existent in Nigerian English.

12: “I will ring you up.” This expression became a part of Nigerians’ demotic speech since the late 1990s when mobile phones became the single most important instruments of communication. When people don’t “flash you,” they “ring you up.” Of course, the expression came into Nigerian English by way of British English where it also means to make a telephone call to somebody. However, in American English, “ring (you) up” has a completely different meaning. It means to check out purchased items on a cash register.

When you buy things in American stores, the cashiers “ring up” what you buy and tell you how much you need to pay for your purchases. In my first few months here, I recall telling an American friend of mine that I would "ring him up.” His response threw me off balance. “When did you become a cashier? In what shop do you work?” he asked.

13. “I passed out.” Nigerians “pass out” from secondary schools. The British only “pass out” from military colleges, not secondary schools. In both senses of the term, nonetheless, “pass out” is used to mean “graduate” from some kind of school. But when Americans “pass out” they always need to be resuscitated by a doctor. As you’ve probably guessed (if you didn’t already know, that is), the only meaning of “pass out” known to American English is to “faint.” This sense of the term is completely absent in Nigerian English, but it’s present in British English.

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The Hypocrisies the Nigerian Gay Debate Masks

2011-12-17T02:48:00.003-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Many readers have asked for my opinion on the ongoing debate over the bill that seeks to outlaw gay marriage and criminalize any form of homo-sociality (as same-gender social interaction is now fashionably called in Western academic circles) in Nigeria. My view is that both the unhealthy fixation on the issue by Western governments and the populist grandstanding of the Nigerian Senate mask multiple layers of vexatious, scorn-worthy hypocrisy.

The intrusiveness, arrogance, and downright condescension of Western governments, particularly of the US government, on the issue just make you want to scream. It is hypocritical for Western governments to not realize that the Nigerian anti-gay bill is just as discriminatory as their own anti-polygamy laws are.

In the West, polygamy, a common and culturally accepted practice in over 70 percent of the world’s population, is criminalized. In the United States and Canada, for instance, it’s a felony in the class of murder, arson, etc. for which people are sent to prison for several years.

You can marry and divorce 100 different people in 100 days and you’re perfectly within the bounds of the law. You can also live with multiple sex partners and even have children with them and you’re fine so long as you’re not officially married. But the moment you are discovered to be married to just two wives (or husbands) for one day or for life, you’re toast. How is that for justice and equality? People with this kind of unreasonably discriminatory law want to preach to us about equality.

President Goodluck Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo dance like clowns while Nigeria burns

The landmark ruling that institutionalized the criminalization of polygamy in the United States is particularly noteworthy for its racist condescension and invidious “othering.”

In turning down the appeal by a man named Reynolds who wanted America to recognize polygamy as a legitimate conjugal union, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1878 disparaged polygamy as “almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people.” Notice the racist particularism of the ruling. Since this ruling hasn’t been overturned, that’s still the official position of the law: that polygamy is bad because it’s an African and Asian peculiarity.

Now, why do Western governments get thin-skinned when Africans also say homosexuality is bad because it’s a Euro-American sexual perversion? Both arguments are, of course, false. According to many accounts, there are as many as 50,000 polygamists in the US, mostly from the Mormon Church. That’s more than two percent of the U.S. population. There are homosexuals in Africa, too.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s subsequent rulings on polygamy uncannily resemble the phraseology that Nigerian critics of gay marriage and homosexual lifestyle in general deploy. In one instance, for example, the Supreme Court described polygamy as “a blot on our civilization.” In another ruling, it disdained it as "a return to barbarism" and likened it to human sacrifice. Yet another Supreme Court ruling dismissed it as "contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western World."

Of course, these are all lies. As Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University observed in an October 4, 2004 article in USA Today, “Contrary to the court's statements, the practice of polygamy is actually one of the common threads between Christians, Jews and Muslims.”

So where am I going with this? A part of the world that criminalizes an enduring cultural practice of 78 percent of the world’s population has no moral right to insist that the rest of the world should not criminalize gay marriage and in-your-face homo-sociality, which they themselves, in fact, are only just now coming to terms with.

There is this insufferably haughty presumption that whatever is good for Euro-America must be good for the rest of the world. When Europeans thought homosexuality was a terrible sin, they criminalized it in their societies and extended their laws to other parts of the world that they colonized. Now they’ve had an “epiphany” about homosexuality and they want the rest of the world to just immediately give up all that they believed in and accept the newfangled idea about gay rights—or risk sanctions.

Westerners say homo-sexuality is the business of two consenting adults whose activities don’t hurt anyone. Fair enough. But polygamy is also a consensual union between adults. It also does no harm to anyone. In fact, it guarantees reproductive futurism.

Most importantly, the American government that is making the forced feeding of homosexual orthodoxy on Nigeria a cardinal foreign policy goal is at the same time encouraging our government to increase fuel prices. We know that much from the lavish praise the US ambassador to Nigeria recently showered on the Nigerian government over its plan to increase fuel prices next year, an action that will certainly inflict death and misery to millions of working- and middle-class Nigerians.

Given President Jonathan’s proverbial cluelessness, I won’t be shocked if it comes to light that the whole “subsidy removal” scam is carefully and stealthily dictated by Uncle Sam whose approval Jonathan so desperately and pitifully seeks all the time. (Recall his laughably juvenile gripe about how Nigerians dare criticize him when almighty Obama patted him on the back for the good job he’s doing?).

Anyway, the same American government that pays $20 billion a year in subsidies to its farmers (a reason food is incredibly cheap here), that gives monthly allowances and food stamps to its poor and unemployed, and that has all kinds of social safety nets for its weak is encouraging another country to hike the consumer price of its main economic product! I’m calling attention to this because the homosexual hysteria in Nigeria is happening at the very same time that the National Assembly is about lend its imprimatur to fuel price increases.

America’s—and Britain’s— unbearably arrogant pronouncement on gay rights in Nigeria has created the basis for the National Assembly to flex populist legislative muscles and to numb the Nigerian masses to the real tragedy that awaits them next year when fuel prices will jump higher than they have ever done in Nigeria’s 51-year history.

In almost every Nigeria-centered discursive arena on the Internet, I’ve read people praising the gallantry of the Senate and even suggesting that Senate President David Mark deserves to be Nigeria’s next president for standing up to Western bullies. The National Assembly has never been more popular. But the legislators are going to ride on the crest of the wave of this popularity to strike Nigerians a deadly blow.

The anti-gay bill is absolutely needless and the National Assembly deserves no praise for it, although I understand why Nigerians are united in their support for it. But the truth is that the Nigerian socio-cultural soil is already infinitely infertile for the growth and flowering of the kind of homosexuality that exists in the West. So we don’t need a law to curb something that is not even remotely in danger of happening. The laws we inherited from our British colonial invaders (who have now become aggressive born-again gay rights protagonists) sufficiently criminalize homosexuality.

And most Nigerian languages don’t even have a word for homosexuality because it had never been a part of our experiential and conceptual repertoire.

For me, the whole debate is a conspiracy of the hypocrisies of Western governments and our government. The real goal is to increase fuel prices. Western governments’ provocation and the Senate’s response are probably planned to keep the people distracted from the real issues. I hope I am proved wrong.

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Re: Femi Kusa’s Perverse Dance on Ibru’s Grave

2011-12-10T12:12:00.001-05:00

Just as I anticipated, my last week’spiece with the above title was very controversial. While most people agreed with the thrust of my sentiments in the piece, others thought I went overboard in registering my displeasure against Mr. Kusa’s “tribute.” Still others thought I had no dog in the fight I inserted myself into. Below is a sample of the responses I received from readers through email, by Facebook, and on my blog.

Sir,

I read your article on Mr Femi Kusa's article on the late Alex Ibru with interest. I am linked to the issue in three ways. I worked at The Guardian when Kusa was there. I am currently a member of The Nation's Editorial Board, and in that capacity wrote the paper's editorial on the passing of Alex Ibru (published on November 25, 2011). Even though I may be mistaken, I believe I did a good job, and adhered to many of the prescriptions for obituary writing laid out in your article.

However, I was surprised to see that Dr Tunji Dare, in his weekly column of the following Tuesday (published on November 29, 2011), appeared to deliberately contradict many of the points made in the editorial. He was not as crude as Mr Kusa, in my opinion, but I feel he certainly attempted to damn the late publisher with faint praise. May I request that you examine the Ibru editorial and Dr Dare's column and honour me with your thoughts? Both can be found at The Nation’s website. If there is any difficulty in locating them, I can e-mail them to you.

Thank you.

H. Olufunwa

Femi Kusa

Candidly, you are a rational, free mind. I’ve been reading you from the first time I saw your column in Weekly Trust, and all the time I’m always impressed with your open-mindedness and logical rationality towards every issue, especially what you love to do most: correcting grammatical errors. But Dr., I’m puzzled that you took on a fight that wasn’t yours.

Perhaps, it’s for the sake of posterity and not to set a bad precedent. You gave Kusa a treat from the same journalistic pot. I know you won’t be surprised. After all of these guys talk from both sides of their mouths. If one day we hear Rueben Abati wearing the garb of Kusa, I expect you to be a big heart who will call a spade just a spade. Kusa is nothing more than a coward; if not, why couldn’t he say all that when Ibru was still alive? Well, tongue and faith may differ, but in true journalism you stand

Engr. Ibrahim Mustapha MNSE, Minna

Thanks, Dr. Farooq. Though it hurts to make bad comment against the dead, it seems Femi Kusa has suffered in the hands of Ibru. By the way, let them kill themselves. They are in the same boat. I believe if it [were] a Northerner that wrote that ungrammatical write up as Kusa did, they would disturb us with nonsense that we are semi-literates.

Ibrahim Musa Gwammaja

This will be the first time I will disagree will Kperogi. I just finished reading Kusa's write-up and from my understanding of it there is nothing offensive therein. Lo, when has it become an offense for one to narrate personal experience with others? My surprise is that Kperogi could stoop low as to devote his popular column to an innocuous tribute. May be there is more to it than we know!! However, I agree with Kperogi that the timing is wrong and badly written by the standing of Kusa in journalism profession.

Abdulrahman Abdulyekeen

The late Alex Ibru and Bill Clinton

I just finished reading the write-up on Kusa's article on Ibru. Well, I did not read the original article by Femi Kusa, but I took away some stuff from Kperogi's article: narcissistic, vacuity, mortifying solecisms, swellhead, inebriated, apotheosis, nonpareil, traduce, swath, trammel, sybaritic, pestiferous, facticity....OK. I know you are a prof. of English but sometimes, it's necessary to carry some of us along...especially those of us who are a little bit challenged in the Queen's language. I knew a Kperogi in Okuta, Kwara State. Are you related?

Anonymous comment

Thank you, Prof. It's very fortunate and apt to remind people how to maintain decorum, especially when a man has unwittingly decided to expose his cowardly disposition in print. However, I doubt the quality of education some of these writers have in journalism. A simple principle of sensitivity was blatantly ignored. What a poor piece!

Orji Ekpezie

Like Farooq said in his very articulate piece, Kusa basically waited for Ibru to die to get his pound of flesh. He tried to persuade us that he is a paragon of professional and private virtue but what came across is a man who is small minded and bitter. I have worked for Alex Ibru twice so I know that he was no saint, but there is no excuse for that Kusa's rambling exercise in posthumous assassination...

Paul C. Nwabuikwu

It's an interesting read. People usually show their worst side when you least expect it. It's unfortunate.

Uche Echi

Mr Kusa just hung his dirty linens for the world to see. Such a show of shame and heartlessness!

Labeeba Bulama

Fascinating piece. There is always mirth in negative occurrences.

Sheyi Babatunde

Hey, learn not say or write dirty things about the dead. Farooq, more ink to your pen. There will be the greatest peace when every bad mouth and hand padlock is hung.

Abubakar Yakubu

Thank you, prof. Don’t get bored. Keep dishing out the stuff. You are simply great.

Zubair Abdulkarim

Someone drew my attention to the fact that Femi Kusa does not work with The Nation.

Danlami Nmodu

Dear Prof:

I have just read your piece with the above title. I am glad.

Osaro Odemwingie

Related Article:
Femi Kusa's Perverse Dance on Ibru's Grave

Q and A on Usage, Articles, and Tenses

2011-12-04T01:29:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Question:

Is the phrase “the reason why” correct? Or should it just be “the reason”? Examples: Should I say “the reason why I left is…” or should it be “the reason I left is …” Thanks!!

Answer:

Both phrases are correct. However, historically, conservative semantic purists in Britain have dismissed "the reason why" as tautologous and redundant since both “reason” and “why” denote causation. That’s why they dismiss the expression as “causational overkill.” However, “reason why” is considered perfectly correct in contemporary British and American English. All modern dictionaries and usage guides in both the UK and the US accept “the reason why” as a legitimate usage. The objections of conservative grammarians to its usage have been, for all practical purposes, blunted.

For instance, two leading British grammarians, Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut, in their celebrated Longman Guide to English Usage, noted that “Only very conservative writers object to ‘the reason why’.” In America, almost no grammarian objects to “the reason why.” In fact, “The Reason Why” is the title of a 2010 album by an American musical group called Little Big Town. And there is a classic American military history book titled, TheReason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade.

Nevertheless, somewhat similar causational phrases like “the reason was because” and “the reason was due to” are met with strong objection in most usage guides across the Atlantic (that is, in both the UK and North America). So instead of writing “The reason he failed was because he was ill,” it is advised that you write, “The reason he failed was that he was ill.”

I must add, however, that this objection seems arbitrary and churlish to me. “Reason why” and “reason was because” both exemplify causational overkill. Why one is preferred to the other is beyond me. But as I've said in my previouswritings, grammar, especially English grammar, isn’t always governed by logic. It’s sometimes just the product of the arbitrary “commandments” of snooty prescriptivist grammarians or the tyranny of popular usage.

Question:

What is the difference between “alright” and “all right”? Or are they different spellings of the same word?

Answer:

In both British English and American English “alright” is considered an uneducated approximation of “all right.” For instance, The Associated Press Stylebook, considered the “bible” of American journalism, forbids the use of “alright” in news copy. Many prestigious British English usage guides also object to its use in serious writing.

However, some grammarians (who are, for now, in the minority) argue that “alright” is a legitimate word that is not necessarily an illiterate approximation of “all right.” They contend that it is in the category of words like “already,” “almost” and “altogether.” Just as “already” (as in: “he is already here”) is different from “all ready” (as in: “they are all ready to go”), “almost” (as in: “it is almost interesting,” meaning it is nearly interesting) from “all most” (as in: “it is all most interesting,” meaning all of it is interesting), and “altogether” (as in: “it is altogether different,” where “altogether” means “completely”) from “all together” (as in: “they sang all together,” meaning they sang all at the same time) the two spellings “alright” and “all right” are needed to mark a distinction between “The children are all (i.e., all of them are) right in their answers” and “The answers are alright (i.e., they’re OK).”

This makes sense to me. But since “alright” is met with disapproval by most grammarians in all the dominant varieties of the English language, I’d advise that you should avoid it at least in formal writing. I predict, however, that in the next few years “alright” will enjoy the same respectability and acceptance as “almost,” “altogether,” and “already.”

Question:

It truly throws me off when indigenous Africans declare that they “hail from” Washington DC, for instance. “Born in,” “hail from”? I need clarification.

Answer:

"Hail from" can denote one of the following: 1. come from, 2. be native of, 3. be born in. That means you don’t necessarily have to be born in a place to hail from the place, at least in America. Recent immigrants “hail from” any part of America they are registered to vote. That means, in essence, that it's perfectly legitimate for naturalized African immigrants in, for instance, Washington D.C. to say they "hail from" that city whenever they are in America or are involved in America-specific conversations. Of course, it would be absurd for them to say they hail from Washington D.C. when they are in Africa.

Question:

My question is on the omission of the definite article before some singular common nouns and after 'as', e.g. 1. He is captain. 2. He is king. 3. He is elected as chairman. Are those sentences correct? If yes, why is it that the articles are omitted before the nouns: captain, king, and chairman?

Answer:

Articles are tricky in the English language. That’s why I can’t do justice to your question in this limited space. I will only say this for now: “captain” and “king” should be preceded by either a definite article (i.e., “the”) or an indefinite article (i.e., “a” or “an”). So “he is a captain” would mean he is one of several captains, while “he is the captain” would mean he is the one and only person known by that title in a specific area. Same rule applies to “king.” In the third example, the sentence should be “he was elected chairman.” Chairman is not preceded by an article here because the sense is non-specific. Also note that I omitted “as” in the sentence. Other examples: “He was elected president.” “He was appointed commissioner,” etc.

Question:

When I watch American soaps, they seem to not care about tenses. Or maybe it’s something beyond me—I don’t know. For instance, a typical dialogue goes like this:

“Daughter: 'dad, do you snore ‘cause I do.

Dad: 'yeah you GET that from me'.”

Should not the “get” be GOT? Could you clarify this for me, please?

Answer:

Well, it's not true that Americans don't care about tenses. They do. The example of the use of present tense in the dialogue you cited is called the “historical present” in grammar. It's perfectly legitimate even in British English. It functions to make a past event seem more vivid, or to signal continuity between the past and the present. In conversational English, it's particularly used with such “verbs of communication” as “get” (as in: “OK, I get it: you’re a genius!”), “forget” (as in: “I forget his name”), “tell” (as in: “your dad tells me you want to talk to me”). Other verbs of communication that are expressed in the historical present in speech are “write” and “say.”

I agree with you, though, that Americans tend to use the historical present more often than the British do. The historical present is rarely used in Nigerian English, except by our creative writers who deploy it in their fictional narratives. In the hypothetical dialogue you cited, however, it would also be perfectly legitimate to replace “get” with “got.” In fact, in formal contexts, “got” would be especially appropriate.

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Femi Kusa’s Perverse Dance on Ibru’s Grave

2011-12-03T01:12:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

The Nation Editor-in-Chief Femi Kusa’s thoughtless and unkind tribute to the late Guardian publisher Alex Ibru outraged my sensibilities in more ways than one. It’s a poorly written, unbearably narcissistic, petty, vindictive, and cowardly piece. Kusa was clearly not in the right frame of mind when he wrote it. This is evident from the essay's crying lack of internal coherence, its embarrassing structural deformities, its avoidably ugly grammatical errors, and its general vacuity.

How could someone who is inviting us to see him as the reason—or at least one of the reasons— for the distinctive style and editorial success of the Guardian not know enough to know that there is no such word as "confusionist" in the English language (except as an alternative spelling of Confucianist, i.e., a follower of Confucius), or that the expression "he called off" should have been "he hung up," or that "inseperable" is properly spelled "inseparable," or that "sleepless" is not spelled "sleepness," etc.? (Has this man's computer's spellcheck been disabled?) I have noted several other mortifying solecisms that I don't expect from my undergraduate students. And he is supposed to be one of Nigeria's journalistic "icons"!

But let's even ignore his inexcusable grammatical incompetence for now, although he earns a living correcting other people’s grammar. Kusa comes across as a coarse, mean-spirited, juvenile, and egocentric swellhead who is inebriated with an exaggerated sense of his importance and who has a fragile ego that needs constant rejuvenation through scorn-worthy self-congratulation.

Somebody died, his family and loved ones are still in a state of emotional turmoil, and all that this narcissist can do is to exploit this tragic situation to construct an image of himself as the apotheosis of moral uprightness, as Nigerian journalism's nonpareil personification of morality, and as the patron-saint of "principles" who is unblemished by the faintest sprinkle of ethical dirt. And he does all this at the expense of a dead person, nay dead people (because he also savagely maligned the late Andy Apkorugo), who can't defend themselves.

Let me be clear: I am NOT defending the late Ibru. I don't know enough about him or how he ran the Guardian to refute or confirm what Kusa wrote about him. But having recently lost a wife and having taught obituary writing and journalism ethics for years, I DO know that it's distasteful and insensitive to the survivors of the dead to so carelessly traduce their departed kin just days after his passing. Of course, clearly evil people who brought death and misery to large swaths of people are exempt from this consideration. Ibru, with all his foibles, hardly fits that description.

The late Alex Ibru

I also do not want to trammel Kusa's right to free expression. My whole point is that his piece is intolerably indecent and beneath the dignity of a person of his accomplishments for at least three reasons.

First, the occasion of a person's death is hardly a fitting and proper moment to draw unflattering character sketches of the person as a cold, ruthless, "unfeeling," "scheming," [Kusa's words] vainglorious, and soulless hedonist. This is not necessarily because of the person (after all the dead can't be injured in a material sense, a reason the courts have ruled that a dead person can't be libeled) but because the survivors of the departed who are at the early stages of the grieving process deserve some consideration. Showing sensitivity to the sensibilities of survivors of the dead, at least in the first few days or weeks of a death, is a basic virtue in journalistic writing.

We like to say in Nigeria that it's "un-African" to speak ill of the dead. But there is nothing uniquely African about that precept; it's a universal human precept. As I once wrote here, it's one of the supreme ironies of our humanity that it is tragedies and traumas, more than successes and prosperity, that usually bring out the depth of the humanity in us. Perhaps it is because these tragedies remind us all of our own frailty, our own vulnerability, and our own mortality. Well, Kusa has bucked this enduring human predisposition to radiate warmth and tenderness, however transitory, in other people's moments of distress.

Second, why did Kusa wait till Ibru's death to write what he wrote about him? I have no facts to impeach the credibility of his character portrait of Ibru, but there is something eerily sinister about the choice of occasion to do this. It shows neither valor nor "principles," which Kusa is persuading us to believe he is an embodiment of.

Third, there is nothing that is, in fact, particularly revealing or informative in Kusa's piece. It is more about Kusa than it is about Ibru's death and life. He merely highlighted the weaknesses of Ibru's life to validate himself. The summary of the piece is basically this:

I was told Ibru died. Too bad. But he actually doesn't deserve to be mourned. He deserved his fate. He was a devious, avaricious, nepotistic, niggardly, and cold-blooded capitalist pig who was, in addition, given to sybaritic lavishness and opportunism. I—and others—actually made the Guardian for which he became famous. [Never mind that Kusa has not been able to replicate his “genius” in the defunct Comet and in the Nation]. He wanted to use me to further his baleful boardroom politics, but being the principled, upright, and unblemished person that I am, I resisted—to his astonishment. I finally left his company because I couldn't stand his staggeringly pestiferous intrigues any longer. I have never looked back. Look, this dead man had no redeeming qualities. Well, I hope his wife somehow finds comfort and learns from her husband’s terrible life and failings.

This may seem like a grotesque caricature of what Kusa wrote, but go read the piece both on the lines AND between the lines. It’s a viciously violent animadversion against a dead person that could wait—that is, if it must be written.

My concern, as it should be obvious by now, isn't about the essay's facticity. It's about its inopportune timing, its rank insensitivity, its downright cowardice, its smug, perverse self-flattery during other people’s moment of personal tragedy. I don't know what kind of journalism Kusa practiced and still practices. But he certainly hasn’t given a good account of his journalistic judgment. That’s such a crying shame!

Funding your American Education

2011-11-26T09:38:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

The questions that my last week’s write-up onAmerican education provoked from readers can be thematized into two: questions that sought information on how to finance one’s education in America and questions about whether holders of the Juris Doctor (JD) degree can prefix the title “Dr.” to their names. I will respond to the first set of questions this week and the second set next week.

Let me start with how to finance undergraduate education in America. American citizens and legal permanent residents (“Green Card” holders are classified as “legal permanent residents”) have a variety of options to fund their education. But I will talk about three here.

People from well-heeled homes, of course, directly pay their tuition fees. That's the first option. But such people are in the minority. University education in the United States is inordinately pricey. For example, it costs $ $39,849 (that is, about 6.3 million naira) a year to attend Harvard University. (Yale University, another Ivy League university in the league of Harvard, costs over $40,000).

Good public universities (that is, universities owned by state governments; there are no federal universities in America) charge between $27,000 and $30,000 (that is, between 4.4 million naira and 4.7 million naira) in tuition per year. Low-end public universities could charge as low as $10,902 (about 1.7 million) in tuition per annum. Note that these figures exclude accommodation and living expenses.

As you can probably guess, more than 70 percent of Americans who attend private and public universities don’t pay tuition fees directly from their pockets. Many fund their education through financial aid and student loans from their government. No application is turned down. The loans are repaid piecemeal once students graduate and have a job.

Another popular source of funding for undergraduate education is merit- and need-based scholarships. In the state of Georgia, for instance, they have what’s called HOPE Scholarship (HOPE stands for “Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) that pays most of the tuition fees for students who have a B average in their high school GPA and maintain same throughout their undergraduate education. Students who drop below a B average will be excluded from benefiting from the scholarship. Unlike financial aid or student loans, it is free and not repayable upon graduation.

Almost every state in the United States has the equivalent of this program. Of course, to be a beneficiary, you not only have to be an American citizen or a legal permanent resident, you also have to be a state “resident,” which means you or your parents have to have lived and paid taxes in the state for at least one year prior to enrolling in a university located in the state.

As it should be obvious by now, non-Americans have few, if any options, to finance their education outside of paying directly from their pockets. But that’s for undergraduate education. Graduate education is an entirely different ball game.

In America, very few people use their personal funds to finance their graduate education. This fact is as true for American citizens and legal permanent residents as it is for non-Americans. Graduate education is funded, for the most part, by universities. The exceptions are professional degrees like MBA, JD, MD (Doctor of Medicine), etc.; students enrolled in these degrees must either pay their way or get student loans. (President Obama finished paying off his student loans for his JD and bachelor’s degrees only in 2007, that is, 24 years after his bachelor’s degree, 16 years after his law degree, and one year before he became president!)

Most universities here hardly admit students into their academic master’s and Ph.D. programs if they have no resources to finance them. That’s why admission to graduate studies is very competitive and why not every qualified applicant gets accepted. Compare that to the UK where almost anyone with a bachelor’s degree, any bachelor’s degree, AND the capacity to pay steep tuition fees is admitted into graduate programs. I am not saying this to disparage UK graduate education. I only want to point out that private and public universities in America (NOT for-profit American universities, mind you) don’t expect people to fund their graduate education. This used to be the case even in the UK until the 1970s.

OK, there are basically three sources of funding for graduate education here. The first is graduate teaching assistantship. It is awarded to applicants who have high GRE scores, an impressive undergraduate GPA, relevant work history, and capacity to teach. People awarded graduate assistantships often teach lower-level undergraduate courses under the supervision of a senior professor. For their work, their tuition fee (which runs into thousands of dollars, that is, millions of naira) is waived. In addition, they get a monthly stipend (which adds up to a decent amount when converted into naira) to help with living expenses.

Most Ph.D. programs, in fact, require that doctoral students teach undergraduate students in the course of their studies.

People who have no capacity to teach but who have great potential to succeed in graduate studies are granted research assistantships--if they qualify. This requires the beneficiaries to assist professors with their research in exchange for a full or partial tuition waiver and a monthly stipend. The funding for the research assistantship can either come directly from the department where a student is enrolled or from a generous research grant won by a professor. Research assistantships are more common in the physical sciences than they are in the social sciences and humanities.

The third source of funding for graduate education, especially for doctoral studies, is fellowships. A fellowship is money granted by a university or a foundation or other agency to support advanced study or research. (Note that not all universities have fellowships). Prospective graduate students competitively apply for a limited number of fellowships each year, and they are often awarded to applicants with high GRE scores, excellent undergraduate or graduate GPA, compelling research proposals, etc.

Fellowships pay for the entire cost of students’ graduate education plus a generous monthly stipend. Best of all: beneficiaries are not required to do anything in exchange for the tuition waiver and stipend—unlike teaching and research assistantships. They only need to be “in good standing,” which means they must never fall below a B average in the course of their doctoral coursework. (This is true, by the way, for all graduate students in all American universities, whether or not they receive financial support from their schools).

How do you know which type of funding to apply for? Well, the answer is simple: check the websites of the universities you are applying to. They usually list the kinds of funding they have available for students, including non-American students. Applicants wishing to be considered for financial support are usually required to apply early. So check the deadlines and send inquiries to graduate program coordinators.

I hope my readers find this helpful.

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Studying in America: What You Need to Know

2011-11-19T10:39:00.001-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

In the last few days, I have received scores of inquiries from parents and prospective students about studying in America. Because I can’t respond to all the queries individually, I have decided to revise and republish an article I wrote on this subject on May 20, 20006. Hope you find it helpful.

The American educational system is driven by standardized tests. For students wishing to undertake graduate studies in the United States, the standardized test that all universities in the United States require from all students—whether they are American or international students— in most disciplines in the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences is the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE). Their website address can be found here

Students seeking to enroll into MBA and other management-related programs are required to take the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). Check their site here to register for the test. If you want to study medicine (you must have a bachelor’s degree before you can apply to medical schools here) you must take the Medical CollegeAdmissions Test (MCAT).

To study law (you must also have a bachelor’s degree before you can apply to read law) you must take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and the web address of the body that administers it is can be found here. Note that the LSAT is required only for people wishing to study for a JD (Juris Doctor), which is the qualification needed to practice law in the United States. (Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have JDs). People wishing to study for the LLM degree (i.e., Master of Laws) need not take the LSAT. While the JD is a three-year program, the LLM is a one-year program. Note, too, that the LLM does not qualify you to practice law in the United States and Canada.

(To study for an undergraduate degree, you must either take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which can be found here or the American College Testing (ACT), which can be found here.

Most American universities also require candidates whose native language is not English to take the Test of English as a Second Language (TOEFL). See the site here. Some other schools, however, waive this requirement for Nigeria (and other Anglophone countries) where English is the language of instruction at all levels of education.

TOEFL scores are valid for two years while GRE score are valid five years, which means you can use the test scores to apply for admission more than once. It is unusual for any university to waive the GRE requirement for anybody, although there a few that do that. For more information on standardized tests for graduate school in the United States, go to www.ets.org.

So what is GRE? It is basically an exam that tests prospective graduate students’ preparedness for graduate studies in the United States. It has three segments. The first segment tests students’ familiarity with verbal reasoning. You need to have an impressive reservoir of intellectually fashionably vocabulary to be successful in this section. The second section is the nightmare of numerophobic journalists like me: quantitative reasoning. As the name suggests, it tests students’ skills in mathematics. (A great and FREE website to help people prepare for the verbal and quantitative portions of the test is www.number2.com).

The third segment tests students’ skills in analytical reasoning and writing. Here, test takers are given two tasks: to critique the logical inadequacies of an essay and to write a logically coherent and conceptual response to a subject-matter that will be presented during the test.

The verbal and quantitative sections are worth 800 points each, and are usually combined. The analytical writing segment is a stand-alone section. Different schools have different cut-off points for entry into their programs. However, the minimum requirement to be admitted into graduate programs here is a combined score of 1000 in the verbal and quantitative sections of the test. Competitive programs have higher requirements.

The analytical writing segment is graded differently. The lowest point a candidate can get is 1.0 and the highest grade is 6.0. Most schools require at least a 4.0 score in the segment to consider a candidate for admission, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.

Where do you take these tests in Nigeria? The best place to find out is the American Embassy in Nigeria. But I took mine with a company called Touché Nigeria Limited. It used to be in Sheraton Hotel and Towers in Abuja. I hear it’s no longer there. But the website addresses I provided above do a good job of identifying their legitimate country representatives.

After taking the tests, the next thing to do is to apply to the program you want. Fortunately, all universities now accept online applications. However, unlike in our system, American universities require applicants to pay application fees. This can be as low as $30 and as high as $150. Payment of the application fee does not guarantee admission, but it must be paid before a candidate’s file can be acted upon. The fee is used to process candidates’ application.

American universities also require applicants to submit what is called the statement of purpose. It is a personal essay that outlines the candidate’s reasons for applying to the program—his research goals, his professional aspirations, why he chose the school and the program to which he is applying, and what he expects to achieve with the degree he hopes to acquire.

Parts of Kennesaw State University campus

Doctoral programs require students to identify professors they want to work with, and give reasons why the professors are the best people to provide mentorship to the prospective students’ research. (Americans use “dissertation” for the doctoral treatise and “thesis” for master’s treatise; they reverse our—that is, British—usage of these terms).

Another important requirement for acceptance into graduate programs here is the reference or recommendation letter from people, usually your former university teachers, who are capable of commenting on your academic and professional preparation for your proposed course of study.

So don’t burn your bridges with your teachers just yet! Their opinions are respected in the admission process here. If you did burn your bridges, go repair them.

An area of the requirement for admission that usually presents problems for Nigerians is the Grade Point Aggregate. Because we use the British grading system, most American universities are not usually impressed with our transcripts. As I said in an earlier write-up, in the American system, A starts from 90 to 100; B from 80 to 89; C from 70 to 79; D from 60 to 69; and F from 0 to 59.

This means that even our First Class degree can look like a “C” average here—that is, just a step away from the bottom. However, things are improving now. Most universities now use the services of educational experts who help institutions compare and contrast transcripts across the different educational systems of the world.

The other good news is that in arriving at a decision whether or not to admit a student into a graduate program, most American universities look at the whole picture: GRE scores, GPA, recommendation letters, and statements of purpose. A weakness in one area can be offset by a strength in another. Admission decisions are purely merit-driven and can’t be influenced

Where is the Fuel Subsidy?

2011-11-12T13:08:00.001-05:00

By Moses E. Ochonu

I endorse all that Farooq Kperogi has written on the fuel subsidy debate. Even if it doesn’t sway a government in search of novel ways of inflicting economic pain on its citizens, it will have exposed the grand rip-off that is the “subsidy” regime.

I want to take Kperogi’s excellent analysis in a new polemical direction by questioning the taken-for-granted truth of subsidy. Fuel subsidy is an elaborate fiction that needs to be deconstructed. Much of the public debate on “subsidy removal” has proceeded from a problematic premise that there is a massive and growing government subsidy on fuel that enables Nigerians to access the product cheaply while threatening to bankrupt the state. We are told that to avoid this impending bankruptcy, subsidy must be removed.

With the exception of Professor Tam David West and a few other commentators, those who have challenged the government’s “subsidy removal” plans in the public square have conceded this crucial premise by either declaring their agreement with it or skirting it. This error has enabled the government to escalate its alarmism on a coming financial Armageddon. The strategy has been to spook and blackmail unsuspecting Nigerians into submission to the government’s case. The first stage of this persuasive endeavor is to get Nigerians to accept the myth of an unsustainable government spending on subsidizing cheap fuel for Nigerians.

Fuel is neither cheap nor subsidized in Nigeria. And it is not fuel subsidy that is threatening our economy. To begin with, the official diagnosis of our troubled economy, issued by the government’s economic voice, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, contradicts the argument that fuel subsidy is the cause of the government’s financial troubles. Iweala announced with fanfare recently that the culprit in Nigeria’s financial and infrastructural woes was recurrent spending, which she put at an astronomical 75 percent of revenues.

She was referring to the cost of maintaining the government—salaries, services, and supplies. The biggest chunk of this cost comes from funding the highest-in-the-world salaries and perks of elected and appointed public officials. This is unsustainable, Iweala argued, as it sucks up resources that should go to investments in education, healthcare, roads, and electricity. She vowed to push for a reduction of this figure by 5 percent. This was a paltry ambition on her part, but we applauded her for correctly identifying the source of Nigeria’s financial and infrastructural predicament.

The government cannot have it both ways. It cannot claim that the enemy is government’s bloated recurrent spending and that its reduction holds the key to avoiding bankruptcy and then turn around to cast the blame on so-called fuel subsidy. It is possible that both factors are a drag on our fiscal wellbeing. But why target the price of fuel, which is a strategic national product that has a bearing on the livelihood of all Nigerians while effectively sparing the luxuries of a government incapable of fulfilling even the most rudimentary obligation of governance: public safety? Why seek a solution to our financial trouble that will further decimate the masses while protecting the perks of a tiny political class?

Even posing the above questions concedes too much. For the more pertinent question is: what and where is the subsidy? We must be clear about what the government is subsidizing. It is not subsidizing cheap fuel for Nigerians. It is subsidizing the unmitigated greed of the fuel importation cartel and their friends in high government places.

The government is routinely overbilled for fuel imports, as the scandalous $100 million Trafigura overbilling scandal clearly illustrates. The fuel importers have Nigeria by the jugular. Already rendered incapable of confronting this powerful cartel by its own entanglements, and unwilling to risk an economy starved of imported fuel, the Jonathan administration is doomed to pay whatever fictitious claims the fuel importers submit. With no regulatory oversight over fuel importation and no independent review of importation claims payments, the importers have been having a bazaar at the expense of Nigeria. They can bill Nigeria many times over their actual expenses and pad their invoices with scandalous margins of profit and Nigeria will pay, as long as importation remains our formula for meeting domestic fuel consumption.

Whatever subsidy exists then is not subsidy qua subsidy. It is largely a windfall payment to fuel importers. These payments subsidize the insane profits of the fuel importers and are thus not the main reason why fuel is priced at 65 naira a liter. To call the payments subsidy is to engage in mythmaking of the most callous kind. Unless we separate the legitimate costs of importation from the massively inflated costs and then adjust for the abysmal quality of the fuel dumped on Nigerians, any talk of subsidy is deception on a grand scale.

If the government actually subsidized fuel, if true subsidy existed, Nigerians would not be paying 65 naira for a liter of petrol. We would be paying much less than 65 naira, which, as Kperogi has demonstrated, is the highest among the oil-producingcountries.

The government’s deceptive narrative suggests that once “subsidy” is “removed,” and the fuel industry is “deregulated” this would be the end of the matter and we would not have to deal with the issue again as the price of fuel would be dictated by the forces of demand and supply. There are several fallacies in this claim. The first one is that we have heard the same canard many times over the years only for the government to speak glibly a few years down the road about the crippling fiscal effects of subsidy and the need to once again “remove” it.

Here is why “fuel subsidy” keeps reemerging. Once the government transfers the dubious, unconscionably inflated costs of importing fuel into the country (aka subsidy) to Nigerians, there is no reason why the importers would not inflate their costs and expenses five years from now, especially since they know that, in the absence of a robust domestic refining capacity, the government has no choice but to pay up. In fact, with successive governments being so quick to agree to their fraudulent financial claims, there is a lot of incentive for the importers to keep increasing their profit margins through claims inflation. The importers and their friends in government have been perpetrating this “fuel subsidy” scam on us for many years. This is the secret of our five-yearly debate on “fuel subsidy.”

Deregulation is several myths rolled into one. Government spokespeople claim that deregulation would actually reduce the price of fuel. First, despite multiple “deregulations” in the past, the price of fuel in Nigeria has never fluctuated downwards as it sometimes does in the United States. What this says is that deregulation without domestic refining, deregulation in the context of an oligopoly of fuel importers, will not drive competition and downward price fluctuation. This is elementary economic logic.

Second, deregulation by itself has never determined the price of fuel. In the United States where I live, the fuel market is “deregulated.” Yet, as many experts agree, speculative activity in the oil futures market, much of it bordering on illegality, contributes as much to pricing as the mythical forces of demand and supply.

All of this brings us back to the underlying issue: the lack of domestic refining capacity, which is the reason fuel importers and their champions in government have constituted themselves into a class of permanent economic blackmailers who thrive on the myth of subsidy.

The stubborn question is: why should we spend trillions of naira paying the fraudulent and non-existent claims of fuel importers when we can solve the problem at its root by investing that money in the building and refurbishing of refineries? That’s the only way we can eliminate the many costs associated with fuel importation and banish the fiction of fuel subsidy forever.

Dr. Ochonu is an Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, USA, and can be contacted at meochonu@gmail.com

Related Articles:

Fuel Subsidy Removal: Time to "Occupy" Nigeria!

Biggest Scandal in Oil Subsidy Removal Fraud

Biggest Scandal in Oil “Subsidy Removal” Fraud

2011-11-05T01:28:00.005-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

To begin with, the idea that the Nigerian government is subsidizing fuel for the masses is a willfully double-tongued twaddle. Only four kinds of people believe that: the hopelessly ignorant, the mentally subnormal, masochists with a perverse thirst for self-abasement, and beneficiaries of real government subsidies such as our indolent, unproductive, and ruthlessly acquisitive government officials and their equally debauched cronies in the private sector. Many informed commentators have conclusively proved that.

But there is an even more treacherous scandal in this “oil subsidy” scam that the Nigerian national media is either not aware of or has chosen to ignore.

Two weeks ago, when I compared fuel prices among oil-producing nations of the world and showed that Nigerians pay the highest price for petrol even though they receive the lowest minimum wage among their peers, I actually did a gross disservice to my argument. The situation is a lot worse than that. I will come back to this point shortly.

I pointed out that the petrol I use for my car in America burns A LOT SLOWER than the one I use when I visit Nigeria, meaning that, at the current rate, Nigerians (with a miserable minimum wage of N7,000 per month or about $45 per month— against America’s over N180,000 minimum wage per month) actually pay more than or about equal to Americans for petrol. It takes a remarkably heartless person to ignore this heartrending fact. But that’s an issue for another day.

A Nigerian online citizen investigator who goes by the handle “Viscount” revealed on a Nigerian Internet discussion forum recently that Nigerians not only pay the highest price for fuel in OPEC; they also consume the worst imaginable grade of petrol among oil-producing countries. That means comparing fuel prices between Nigeria and other oil-producing countries—or even countries in Europe and North America— is actually like comparing apples and oranges.

These countries not only pay considerably lower prices than us for high-quality petrol, Nigerians have been paying unconscionably high prices for toxic fuel for the past 12 years, as you will see shortly. And they will pay even more for it next year. If this is not sufficient reason to give up everything and “occupy” Nigeria until the oppressors are brought to a standstill, I don’t know what is.

At the center of the tragic importation of toxic petroleum products into Nigeria—and other West African nations— is an Amsterdam-based multinational company called Trafigura. Keep that name in mind as you read this.

Many Nigerians know that the fuel they consume domestically isn’t derived from the crude oil their country exports. They also know that they have one of the world’s best and finest quality of crude oil. What many of them don’t know is that the cabal of rapacious oil importers that the Jonathan administration—and the administrations that preceded him—mollycoddle with “subsidies” actually import toxic, low-quality oil that is not fit for consumption in Europe or North America—or in any society that cares for the welfare of its citizens.

In 2010, a group of journalists from the UK, Norway, and the Netherlands won a prestigious international journalism award for a series of investigative reports they did on Trafigura’s barbarous dumping of toxic petroleum waste on Cote d’Ivoire. The waste killed scores of people and sickened thousands more. In July 2010, an Amsterdam court found the company guilty and fined it 1 million euros. (The caustic petroleum residues were dumped on Cote d’Ivoire on July 2, 2006).

On June 24 this year, Afrol News, an Africa-centered news agency, reported that it had been “given documentation” that shows that the same Trafigura that was fined for dumping deleterious waste on Ivoirians had offloaded “dangerous and poor gasoline [i.e., petrol]” in the “Nigerian port of Lagos.” This toxic petrol, which Nigerians have been consuming for years and which our governments “subsidize,” according to the Afrol News report, “is highly unstable, not enduring sunlight exposure, and will cause damage to vehicles. It will also cause environmental damages due to high sulphur values, and can therefore cause human health damages. The product is strictly illegal in Europe and the US, but may in some cases be within legal quality and environment standards in some West African countries.”

But this wasn't a one-off occurrence. It's been happening for over a decade. So, ordinary Nigerians are being forced to use their hard-earned money to buy inordinately overpriced and demonstrably harmful petroleum products. Yet the Nigerian government says this isn’t bad enough; it wants to increase fuel prices again next year. And the government has no plans to repair our refineries so that we can refine our own crude domestically and bring down the cost of petrol.

But the bigger scandal is that in January this year, the Jonathan administration signed a multi-billion-dollar annual contract with the same Trafigura of toxic fuel dumping infamy. And there was no due process in the award of the contract. According to Business Day of January 4, 2011, “Under the agreement with the Nigerian government, Trafigura is expected to pick up Nigerian crude oil and in return, supply her with refined products; but it is unclear why the firm, which has supplied refined products to Nigeria in the last 12 years, was favoured for the deal.

“Trafigura agreed to an annual contract with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on the basis of taking 60,000 barrels of crude oil per day in exchange for refined products such as gasoline and gas oil of equivalent value estimated at around $3 billion a year.”

An oil industry expert who spoke to Business Day said just “$1 billion of the amount would have put the four refineries in proper shape.” When I wrote two weeks ago that Nigerians were faced with a choice between death and life, I didn’t even know about all these.

I am going to leave the reader with “Viscount”’s parting thoughts:

“Nigeria will give Trafigura (confirmed supplier of bad petrol), 60, 000 barrels of oil per day in exchange for their mega tonnes of DEADLY-sulphurous petrol! Yep, Jonathan's government is paying a foreign company to systematically KILL Nigerians. And poor Nigerians are being asked to be happy jare!

“So, Nigerians, when your brand new Tokunbo engine knocks - just like that, thank Trafigura! When your I-better-pass-my-neighbour generator's fume smells funny and leaves a film like Casper the Ghost - just like that, thank Trafigura! When you are walking in Lagos, or any other Nigerian [city], and you are experiencing a choking sensation from the mundane act of breathing in - just like that, thank Trafigura! Nigeria!”

Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests

Re: Fuel Subsidy Removal: Time to “Occupy” Nigeria!

2011-10-31T12:51:00.003-04:00

I received an exceedingly high volume of responses to the above article by email and on my Facebook page. Although my readers differ on whether or not a pan-Nigerian protest is possible, they are united in condemning the planned hike in fuel prices and in desiring some kind of civil disobedience to save the government from itself. Enjoy their varied and insightful thoughts.

This must go down as your hottest article! I hope Nigerians will rise up and resist this fuel price increase. I'd wrongly focused on the camouflage: the "removal of subsidy". We now know the facts and figures.

Abdurrahman Muhammad, Maiduguri

Sir, I am a regular reader of your column. I found your current article interesting and thought-provoking. Personally I’ll love a revolution to start in Nigeria. People believe revolution won’t be possible here, but i tell you I just graduated from a university where the authority trembles at the uproar of her students. I wonder if such energy could be displayed on government.

Implication: young people here will support change, only if the instrumentality is put in place. Instrumentality? Supports from sincere well to do citizens home and abroad, arms proliferation geared towards government and not to slaughter her innocent inhabitants which are suffering from same obnoxious policy of government. I wish Boko Haram could turn their face on government alone.

Personally, I read political science and public administration. I know the capitalist states being led by USA (Uncle Som), will not support such movement because of black gold she derives from the Nigerian soil. But the fact is that, we need change. It can start now. I have friends i can talk to to follow suit. No country ever moves forward without civil disobedience. I read and understand this from history of some countries of the world. I support civil disobedience, I support Nigerian Revolution, and I support Occupy Nigeria.

Seyi Babatunde, Lagos.

Farooq has summed up the reality of the country's desperate and pitiful situation. If we do not act now, it will be too late. The tiny parasitic elite is banking on the legendary docility and ethno-religious divide which they can readily exploit. Organised labour and civil society are yet to be infested by this malady, and so they have some credibility to lead this "Occupation". Already the average Nigerian sees the political class in their open thieving at the same level as common criminals. It is only the spark that is required for this long awaited ignition. The whole system is for sure rotten, but lasting change will elude us if we do not collectively act now. Nigerians must rise up now. God bless Nigeria and its good people.

Prof. Jacob Kwaga, Zaria

I think a country whose citizens vote on religious and ethnic considerations who went on a killing spree after the elections, killing people that do not share the same faith or ethnicity with them cannot rise up against tyranny.

Once Nigerians start demonstrating against subsidy removal, the demonstrations will be turned into a Muslim-Christian conflict and innocent people will just lose their lives sparing the real enemies.

Dr. Abdullahi Dahiru, Kano

The most effective tool in the hands of ruling elite is existing ethnic and religious cleavages among Nigerians at all level. Having known the elixir of education as a panacea to this problem, they have raised its rung above the feet of certain Nigerians through exorbitant school's fees and destruction of education for those who are managing to pay that fees thereby make them an 'educated illiterate' after graduation

Omotosho N. Olalekan, Lagos

Just finished reading your piece. I must confess that this is a master piece. We must, however, rise above religious sentiment if we must "occupy". We must also go beyond writing on Twitter, Facebook and act in the real sense of it. We have prayed enough. God isn't going to come down and change our situation. God helps people who help themselves. We must act!

Yusuf Sambo, Bauchi

Brilliant! My fear is that if eventually Nigerians do decide to unite and fight back against this injustice and oppression, the very smart, manipulative and ruthless political elite will equally fight back using the age-old weapon of religion and ethnicity. They will hire hoodlums, vandals and thugs who will destabilize the peaceful, justified protests and turn it into an ethno-religious crisis, just as they did during the post-elections protests and crisis. It started out peacefully, then it was hijacked by hoodlums.

Zainab Usman, Birmingham, UK

You just hit the nail on the head. This is the enlightenment that is required to propel Nigerians into action. All that we need do is to step up the sensitization so the average Nigerian would be informed about our situation. I bet you, Nigerians would choose life ! That’s the one option that is left.

Zubair Abdulkarim, Lokoja

Like football, we shall fight a common cause this time around forgetting all our differences. Thanks. That was a masterpiece!

Godwin Isenyo, Kaduna

When i saw the heading, I knew I had to settle down to read it .I did, and it was comprehensive. I, however, fear for your safety. My prayer is that you will not have a Government delegation waiting for you at the airport next time you are home. The piece was bold. The whole scheme stinks. It is insensitive and a further proof of how far the Nigerian Government is from the people. As long as Government and their business partners (fronts) in the organised private sector or corporate Nigeria(however they call themselves) continue to engage in these brazen acts of "raping" the people and claiming it is consensual, someday soon the victim will become the villain.

As for “Occupy" Nigeria, that is another story. I do not see it happening due to the manner the country is polarized. People who cannot currently afford kerosene to cook or light their lanterns will be the ones saying “leave so and so alone, it is ‘our’ turn.”

This psyche (of the raped, another version of the Stockholm syndrome) is what the rapists are banking on.

Tina Hanis, Abuja

I think we can do it. If Egyptian could go past their religious and ethnic differences, why can't we? After all, it is a matter of survival now.

Tijjani Abdussalam, Maiduguri

Related Article:
Fuel Subsidy Removal: Time to "Occupy" Nigeria!

Fuel Subsidy Removal: Time to “Occupy” Nigeria!

2011-10-22T08:53:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

A seismic social convulsion is sweeping across the advanced capitalist nations of the world right now. It’s called the “Occupy” movement, which started with the “Occupy Wall Street” protest in New York. As I write this column, the protest continues to gather momentum and spread to not only other American cities (there was a hugely successful “Occupy Atlanta” protest here) but also to other major Western capitals and cities.

At the last count, nearly 100 countries in the world have caught the “occupy” bug. It’s a spontaneous grassroots rebellion against asphyxiating elite tyranny, greed, and other capitalist excesses.

But there is nowhere in the world that this protest is needed more urgently than in Nigeria where a clueless, thieving, conscienceless, parasitic, and indolent elite class is about to commit suicide through its wrongheaded plan to “remove fuel subsidies,” which is nothing more than an unimaginative, well-worn code for increasing fuel prices and deepening the misery of an already traumatized citizenry.

Hope it never gets to this point!

One of the slogans of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters is, “We are the 99 percent”— in reference to the obscene income disparity in America where more than 40 percent of the wealth generated by the economy goes to the top 1 percent of the country’s population. But the income inequality in America pales miserably in comparison with the outrageously unconscionable pauperization of large swaths of the Nigerian population by a cruelly insensitive and rapacious ruling class. Nigeria’s problem isn’t merely one of income inequality; it’s more the sobering reality of the perpetually savage rape of the masses of the people by a criminally privileged elite few in order to subsidize their vain, epicurean indulgences.

Nowhere is this insensitivity more evident than in the perennial blackmail of the masses by successive governments through removal of so-called fuel subsidies. For as long as I can remember, every Nigerian government has “deregulated” and “removed fuel subsidy” to generate income for “national infrastructural development.” When the late General Sani Abacha hiked fuel prices in the mid-1990s, for instance, we were told that the last subsidy had been removed. To “cushion the effect” of this drastic action, the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) was established and entrusted with the responsibility of renewing Nigeria’s decaying infrastructure and health care.

After that “subsidy removal,” a lot of Nigerians were relieved not because they were anesthetized by the PTF palliative but by what they thought was their freedom from the permanent government blackmail that told them they were undeserving beneficiaries of government’s expensive benevolence through fuel subsidies. But the freedom lasted for only a short while. Olusegun Obasanjo came and rehabilitated the old blackmail strategy: he said government was collapsing under the ponderous weight of its magnanimity toward the masses through fuel subsidies. He therefore increased fuel prices more times than any president or head of state in Nigeria’s entire history.

The last time he increased fuel prices, he assured Nigerians that the last abiding subsidy had been removed once and for all. The oil industry was now truly and totally "deregulated." Government would no longer intervene in determining fuel prices. In the new “deregulated” milieu, the wise, invisible but self-regulating dynamic of demand and supply would determine fuel prices. Even though Nigerians were being fooled for the umpteenth time, they, in their legendary docility, put up with the government’s lies and came to peace with the unjustified increases in fuel prices.

Now, the Goodluck Jonathan administration is deploying the same old, hackneyed, duplicitous, and mind-numbingly familiar arguments to increase fuel prices. But I think this time around the government is pushing its luck a little too far—never mind that the name of the president is “good luck.” As the English say, even a worm will turn, meaning even the meekest and most docile person will fight back if you push him so hard that he has nowhere else to escape to.

Goodluck Jonathan--may not be lucky this time

The government is about to push the masses of Nigerians to a cul-de-sac. When that happens, the masses would be faced with only two options: fight back fiercely and doggedly or submit to incremental but sure death. If it is true that self-preservation is the first law of nature, I expect a sustained, single-minded, and uncompromising battle in the coming months. The time may have finally come when the fault-lines of ethnicity and religion that have historically divided Nigerians will no longer matter.

But the Nigerian people should never wait until next year when the government increases fuel prices before they strike. The “Occupy Nigeria” movement should start right away! And here is why.

While over 80 percent of Nigerians live below the breadline, our legislators at both houses of the National Assembly earn more money than any elected official in the whole world, including Barack Obama, president of the world’s most prosperous nation. Our president and his numberless coterie of useless minions pillage the national treasury daily in the name of maintaining government. Our ministers are the most expensive appointed public officials in the world.

Now, because a numerically insignificant portion of the population that are “privileged” to work for government asked for a miserly 18,000 naira ($114) a month minimum wage, the government wants to push every Nigerian who falls outside the orbit of institutionalized stealing otherwise known as government to the brink, to the very edge of existence. The same government that is complaining of the unbearable burden of “subsidizing” fuel prizes for the masses of Nigerians has depleted our foreign reserve by $3.5 billion in 2011 alone to subsidize the unconscionably lavish opulence of its members.

In all of this, perhaps the biggest scandal is that among oil-producing countries in the world, Nigerians pay about the most for petrol. While Nigerians currently pay about $1.64 for fuel per gallon, Venezuelans pay only 18 cents per gallon (meaning a bottle of water is cheaper than a gallon of petrol in the country!), Iranians pay just 37 cents per gallon, war-ravaged Libyans 54 cents, Saudi Arabians 48 cents, Qataris 72 cents, Bahrainis 78 cents, Turkmens (citizens of Turkmenistan) 72 cents, Kuwaitis 87 cents, Omanis $1.17, Yemenis $1.32, etc. Only citizens of the United Arab Emirates pay slightly higher than us for petrol at $1.78 per gallon.

The standard of living in all of these countries is, of course, light-years higher than Nigeria’s. They have better social safety nets for their poor.

I read that that government wants to raise the fuel price to 141 naira per litter at the very minimum, which adds up $3.6 per gallon! That would mean that petrol would be cheaper in America and some European countries that don’t export oil than in Nigeria! I currently pay a little over $3 per gallon in Atlanta for quality fuel that actually burns a LOT slower than the fuel I use when I’m in Nigeria. (Nigerian importers always import the lowest possible quality of fuel to the country).

Remember, too, that the federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour. That adds up to $1,160 per month, which is equivalent to 184,000 naira per month. In the state of Washington, the minimum wage per hour is $8.67.

So by next year, a low-grade clerk with an 18,000 naira monthly salary in Nigeria will be paying more for fuel than an American laborer who receives the equivalent of 184,000 per month. And the low-grade clerk is a citizen of the world’s 8^th largest exporter of oil. Where is the justice in that? Why the heck should we have cream on our hands and our faces are dry?

If Nigerians don’t wake up now and occupy Aso Rock, the National Assembly, the Federal Secretariat, the Central Bank, governor’s offices all over the federation, etc they will be “occupied.” And this “occupation” will be more suffocating than it has ever been. The choice before Nigerians is one between death and life. I hope Nigerians choose life!

Related Article:
Biggest Scandal in Oil Subsidy Removal Fraud

Where is the Fuel Subsidy?

Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests

What do you think? Share your thoughts with me below or on my Facebook page.

Re: Italy’s Curious Love with Nigerian Criminals

2011-10-15T01:59:00.000-04:00

I have been receiving what seems like an endless stream of responses to my seriesof articles on Nigerian asylum seekers in Italy who cook up all manner ofwildly comical lies against their homeland and compatriots in order to win the sympathy of Italian immigration authorities. Given the number of visits I’ve been getting on my website from Italy and the number of times my articles have been quoted in the Italian media, it’s obvious that my interventions have had some appreciable traction in Italian national conversation about this issue. That alone makes me feel that my efforts have been worth the trouble.

I am also glad that President Goodluck Jonathan’s spokesman, Reuben Abati, has spoken to the Italian media and basically confirmed all that I’ve been writing here for the past couple of weeks. Of course, I can’t reverse Kate Omoregbe’s asylum, nor do I want to do that; I want people to live wherever they find comfort and inner peace. I only resent people telling blatant, malicious lies against their country and other people’s culture just because of their narcissistic calculations.

Read below a sample of the thoughtful responses I've received from readers.

We Italian Muslims and Muslims in Italy are disgusted by this umpteenth attempt to portray Islam negatively by the Italian media: every occasion is good for them to jump on Muslims and accuse them of whatever is the new "news".

I really wish that the Islamic and national organisations in Nigeria could make pressure as far as in their capacity to shed light over the ocean of lies under which we're daily submerged.

Jazakum Allah khayran.

Umar Andrea Lazzaro, Italy

I am from Kano state and I live in Italy. I enjoyed your series on the attitude of Nigerians in Italy. Permit me to stay that I am personally not surprised at all by these developments. I discovered some few issues with the whole saga, however. Regarding what you said at the conclusive aspect of today’s article, these people, in my opinion, are not doing these unfathomable acts because they are even passionate about Catholicism. In fact, I have spoken to many Italians who feel their religion is life--party, girlfriends, and wine. Their everyday life shows no iota of religion.

Additionally, the obvious fact that most of these faceless Nigerians come from a particular region of our country calls for an investigation into the whole matter in a deeper sense. It may be a warning signal to our leaders back home of an uneven distribution of social as well as economic rot, albeit among the "poor". It also baffles me how an average Italian easily falls prey to such flawed and poorly conceived tricks. In summary, we still may be far from having a true understanding why this human aberration continues to persist in the 21st century. It’s important to emphasize that most of the Italians I have met had never had any contact whatsoever with people from northern Nigeria.

Dr. Shamsuddeen Sani,

Novartis Vaccines Academy/Universita degli Studi di Siena,

Il Refugio, Via del Refugio, Siena-53100,

Italy.

I read with interest the stories of some criminals from Nigeria that exploit either the sincere innocence or the naïve nature of Italian lawmakers or both. So-called "human rights" activists like Franco Corbelli who lead such crusades have absolutely little or no idea of the "local customs" and traditions of Nigerians, neither have they even traveled to verify the authenticity of such claims. Besides, these Italians brush aside every available information that informs them of contrary views. But my curiosity is directed at WHAT benefits people like Mr. Corbelli get from championing such rib-cracking lies? Is he in collaboration with those that claim they are persecuted to gain some financial rewards? Does he render these services to pays his bills? Is that why she comes across as so gullible, stupid, and illogical?

Can't the Italian Embassy in Nigeria be secretly contacted to verify the tissues of lies those bad eggs churn to them ridiculously? Why can't you and I start making efforts to write the Italian Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, to save the Italian Great Parliament from the embarrassment of those very despicable Nigerians?

Mr. Corbelli must travel down to Nigeria so he can be well informed. If he refuses to come, a very popular corps of the Italian press and members of Parliament should be made to come and be well educated. They need to discover the other side of this so-called "savage and Dark Continent".

Methinks we have a moral obligation to rise to the occasion and help the Corbellis of Italy and other parts of Europe. We must make available all sides and angles of the issue objectively.

Dr Usman Muhammad

University of Abuja

This is disgusting! Her action has brought disgrace to us! That's why whites and others laugh at us. She's a disgrace to the black race!

Sola Aiyetan,

Russia

Kate Omoregbe and Franco Corbelli

No excuse for this kind of self-deprecation, but there are explanations: when someone in Denmark painted a cartoon of Muhammad, innocent people were killed in Nigeria; when a Nigerian won the Miss World contest and the country automatically got the ticket to host the next edition of the competition, innocent souls were lost; immediately after 9/11 some idiots in Nigeria started naming their newborn after Bin Laden; someone’s hand was hacked off in Zamfara for stealing a goat; Boko Haram is out there killing and maiming in the name of ‘death to Western civilization.’ Farooq it is not only Saffiyya Hussien and co., the examples are plenty, they all got worldwide coverage and the situation is only getting worse. This is the reason why the most outlandish stories can sound plausible. The North Country has to take another look at itself.

Anonymous commenter from the UK

I read your update and letter from Italy about Kate Omoregbe. I couldn’t help laughing. As you rightly said, now I understand why 419 scammers get them so easily. Methinks they love to believe we are savages/barbaric/Stone Age people (makes better sense to them). Hope to read more on Saturday.

Tina Hannis

One of the silly-silly lies told by desperate Nigerians that are curiously believed by people who only need to go on the Internet to deflate such lies. And, yes, I know of someone claiming he's being victimized for his sexuality. I don’t who's more stupid: those making up the stories or those willingly believing them. An Edo woman taking advantage of shariah/Islam. Mtcheeeewwwwwwwwwww!

Aliyu O. Musa,

This lady is a drug trafficker and an ex-convict and Italians believe her stupid stories! Dr. Kperogi was right in saying that Italy can start negotiating with Nigeria for the transfer of our criminals to their country. Thanks, Dr. Kperogi, for exposing this. Forget what the stupid Italian Corbelli said about you.

Dr. Aminu Mohammed

Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto

I really appreciate the way you expose those Nigerian criminals in the habit of putting black paint on Nigerian Muslims. May the Almighty protect you from undesirable elements, especially the so-called Western activists. Thank you, sir.

Salisu Kawuwa Suleiman

So oyinbo can be so daft, too? What does it take for them to uncover the lies? Just a click! Don’t we have an embassy in Italy? Or is it the usual Nigerian [official incompetence]? I am highly disappointed and disgusted! This is childish, for real. Allah ya isa.

Mohammed Sani,

Maiduguri

This is terrible! Somebody needs to do something about this. The Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, the Jama'atu Nasril Islam, the MSS, etc should, on behalf of Nigerian Muslims, write a strong petition to the Italian Embassy in Nigeria and to the Nigerian President about these ingrates who malign and blackmail Islam and Muslims in Nigeria for their selfish motives. We should not just fold our arms and only hiss, please.

Yusuf Ameen

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Italy’s Curious Love with Nigerian Criminals

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By Farooq A. Kperogi

My write-up pointing out the outright mendacity in the claims of Kate Omeregbe,the Nigerian asylum seeker in Italy who lied that she had been condemned to death by stoning by a Nigerian Sharia court for refusing to convert to Islam, somehow made it to the Italian national media. Several local and national newspapers and TV stations in Italy liberally quoted the article, which inspired a renewed scrutiny on Omoregbe and her sponsors.

Among the Italian news media that quoted my article extensively are CN 24TV, a local TV station in the region where Omoregbe served her four-year prison term for drug trafficking; Calabria Ora, a local newspaper in the same area; Lamezia Oggi, another regional newspaper; Metro News, one of Italy’s most widely circulated newspapers; and Il Domani, an equally notable newspaper.

My Italian Internet acquaintance whose email message I published here last week told me that my article has “had tremendous impact” and has caused Franco Corbelli, leader of Italy’s Civil Rights Movement that championed Omoregbe’s cause, to be subjected to intense questioning by the Italian news media.

Franco Corbelli

He shared with me the link to a story on the website of an Italian TV station where Corbelli launched laughably petty personal attacks on me when he was asked to respond to the issues I raised in my article. He called my article “shameful,” “scandalous,” “lies,” a "low blow," and described me as “an unknown self-styled intellectual.”

When he was pushed harder by journalists to respond to the substance of my article, he changed Omoregbe’s story. It is no longer that a Sharia court in Benin City sentenced her to death by stoning for refusing to convert to Islam; it is now that although Omoregbe was born in Benin City, she moved to Sokoto in northwest Nigeria where she was forced to convert to Islam and marry an old man.

In response to my observation that Islam does not have any kind of punishment for people who refuse to convert to the religion, he retorted that the death sentence on Omoregbe was based not on Islamic jurisprudence but on “local customs” in Sokoto—another blatant lie.

Northern Nigerian local customs, which are codified in the Penal Code, have no punishment for refusal to convert to Islam—or to any other religion. What’s more, as my Italian acquaintance aptly observed, the governor of Kate Omoregbe’s native Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, was born a Muslim but converted to Catholicism and he is still alive. Interestingly, for most of his adult life,Oshiomhole lived in Kaduna, a “Sharia state” like Sokoto. If Omoregbe’s story had any credibility, Oshiomhole should have been stoned to death, too, according to "local customs."

The astonishingly unnerving stupidity and gullibility of “activists” like Corbelli is contributing to making Italy an irresistible magnet for all manner Nigerian economic refugees and criminals who fabricate all kinds of wacky, infantile lies to play on the heartstrings of people in authority in Italy. I briefly wrote about a Tina Richard last week who is appealing against the denial of her petition for an asylum in Italy.

To make her case as compelling as Kate Omoregbe’s, she is now telling Italian authorities that her entire Catholic family was wiped out by a powerful Muslim man in Kano (which she misspelled as “Kanu”) because she refused to marry the man. Had she not mysteriously escaped to Italy, she says, she would have been dead, too. Of course, she doesn’t look anything like a Kano woman and, in fact, couldn’t even spell Kano correctly.

Tina Richard

But Richard’s story has already won a high-profile Italian sucker. On September 22, President of the (Italian) Province of Florence, Andrea Barducci, threw his full weight behind her petition for asylum, saying deporting her to Nigeria "would amount to a death sentence."

Another Nigerian from Edo State identified as Joshua John Paul (obviously a made-up name to appeal to the Catholic sensibilities of Italians) has won a three-year temporary Permit of Stay in Italy after claiming that he is a Catholic homosexual who has been declared wanted by Nigerian sharia courts because he had homosexual relations with a Muslim man in Edo State! He presented a forged, error-ridden police announcement, which purportedly appeared in the Observer, Edo State’s government newspaper, that reads as follows:

"Joshua John Paul comes from the state of Edo in Nigeria, from the Bini tribe, and is coloured. He is involved in cases of sexual molestation (homosexual) with Almed Suleman, whose family belongs to a Muslim tribe. John Paul has perpetrated this behaviour (homosexual) for a long time, causing disorders between the Christian and the Muslim in Nigeria. The police is looking for him. Anyone who has urgent information about him is asked to get in touch with the nearest police station in exchange for a rich reward.

Signed.

Bashiru Mohammed Soleman.”

"Joshua John Paul" also presented this obviously fake newspaper story to Italian authorities

Doesn’t this take the cake in rib-tickling hilarity? Who would have thought that any thinking, intelligent person would believe this juvenile, unintelligent fabrication? To start with, Muslims are not a tribe; they are, like Christians, a community of believers who cut across the primordial fault-lines of race and ethnicity.

Second, how can the private homosexual relations between two people (supposing this is true) in just one of Nigeria’s 36 states (which is, in fact, predominantly Christian) have the capacity to “cause disorder between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria”? And which Nigerian Muslim spells Suleiman as “Soleman” and Ahmed as “Almed”? Too many red flags.

Well, “Joshua John Paul” knew only too well that his information didn’t have to be factual or accurate or even sensible. In Italy, it would seem, all you need to do to get an asylum is to claim victimhood of a non-existent Islamic scourge, then assert the irrevocability of your Catholic faith and, viola, you have an Italian asylum! Joshua John Paul, in fact, went beyond that: he also claimed to be gay. So he was able to galvanize the support both of religious organizations and gay rights groups. Some smart criminal!

Since Italians seem love our criminals so much, the Nigerian government should probably make an arrangement to transfer many of the criminals overflowing in our prisons to Italy. Since even President Jonathan was sufficiently frightenedby the threat of Boko Haram to cancel Nigeria’s 51st IndependenceDay celebration, Boko Haram can be invoked as the reason for transferring our criminals to Italy!

Related Articles:

Lies Nigerians Tell in Italy in the Name of Sharia

Update and Letter from Italy About Kate Omoregbe