Nigeria Content Online

It is evident that
African women are the backbone of national economies. From the
grassroots to national level, the womenfolk are involved in all spheres
of development. Apart from performing all domestic chores, many of them
also farm and trade. They are also responsible for taking care of the
children, the sick and the elderly, in addition to performing essential
social functions within their communities. About half of our
economically active female labour force is employed in agriculture and
their responsibilities and labour inputs sometimes exceed those of the
men. All these efforts are mainly geared towards the survival of the
children.

In fact, many
people who today are benefiting from the fruits of education have their
mothers to thank for it. The women are also increasingly getting
recognised due to their energetic efforts to organise, articulate their
concerns and make their voices heard. At both grassroots and national
levels, more women associations have been formed. They have taken
advantage of the political openings to assert their leadership and
developmental roles. They are also pressing for an expansion of women’s
economic and social opportunities, and the advancement of women’s
rights. By improving their own positions, they are simultaneously
strengthening society as a whole, as well as enhancing the nation’s
broader development prospects.

The deputy
minister of Agriculture was indeed right in observing that African
women produce 80 percent of the continent’s basic food.

His observation
shows that state technocrats are increasingly recognising the roles of
women at the grassroots level for eventual full integration in national
development programmes.

However, despite
the huge contributions of women in the development of Africa, in some
parts of the continent their contributions have not translated into
significantly improved access to resources or increased decision-making
powers. Neither has the dynamism that women display in the economic,
cultural and social lives of their communities through their
associations and informal networks been channelled into creating new
models of participation and leadership.

A comprehensive
approach must be taken by governments in conjunction with development
agencies and women themselves to remove the social, economic and legal
constraints on women. Regional actions are also needed for implementing
the African Common Position for the Advancement of Women and the
Platform of Action adopted in Beijing. And national action plans must
be designed in broad consultation with women’s groups to complement
regional initiatives.

The advancement of
the welfare of African women should be the primary objective of all
countries.

Courtesy Daily Observer, The Gambia

Jimmy Carter is putting the out in outspokenness.

In an interview with bigthink.com, the former president was asked, “Is the country ready for a gay president?”

Even as John McCain
and other ossified Republicans were staging last-minute manoeuvres to
torpedo the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, the 86-year-old Carter was
envisioning a grander civil rights victory.

“I would say that the answer is yes,” he said. “I don’t know about the next election, but I think in the near future.”

The news that
Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer will smooch in an upcoming movie
about J. Edgar Hoover and his aide Clyde Tolson – buried near each
other in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill – is a reminder of
an “Advise and Consent” Washington where being a closeted gay official
made you vulnerable to blackmail.

Others feel we’re
not ready for a gay president, citing the fear and loathing unleashed
by the election of the first black president. “Can you imagine how much
a gay president would have to overcompensate to please the macho
ninnies who control our national debate?” Bill Maher told me. “Women
like Hillary have to do it, Obama had to do it because he’s black and
liberal, but a gay president? He’d have to nuke something the first
week.”

I called Barney
Frank, assuming the gay pioneer would be optimistic. He wasn’t. “It’s
one thing to have a gay person in the abstract,” he said. “It’s another
to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a
gay presidential candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner
after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing
has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two men kissing.”
Because of the Defence of Marriage Act, he added, “it’s not clear that
a gay president could use federal funds to buy his husband dinner.

Would his partner have to pay rent in the White House? There would be no Secret Service protection for the paramour.”

Frank noted that
we’ve “clearly had one gay president already, James Buchanan. If I had
to pick one, it wouldn’t be him.” (The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan
aims higher, citing Abe Lincoln, who sometimes bundled with his
military bodyguard in bed when his wife was away.)

Frank said that
although most Republicans now acknowledge that sexual orientation is
not a choice, they still can’t handle their pols’ coming out. “There
are Republicans here who are gay,” he said of Congress, “but as long as
they don’t acknowledge it, it’s O.K. Republicans only tolerate you
being gay as long as you don’t seem proud of it. You’ve got to be
apologetic.”

Sam Adams, the
mayor of Portland, Ore., hopes that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t
tell” will help persuade “the collective conscience of the United
States that gay people are just the same as anybody else. We shouldn’t
have to die in the closet. The irony is, as mayor, I marry people, but
I can’t marry Peter, my long time partner.”

There are no openly
gay senators, governors, cabinet members or Supreme Court justices.
There are four openly gay Democratic House members, once David
Cicilline of Rhode Island gets sworn in.

Representative
Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin recalled that during a race for State
Assembly, a voter she thought was “trouble” swaggered up to her. But
she need not have braced herself. “If you can be honest about that,” he
told her, “you’ll be honest about everything.”

She said she took
her former girlfriend, Lauren, to White House parties to meet three
presidents, interactions that she thinks “really helps change minds and
advance the cause.”

Representative
Jared Polis of Colorado said he took his boyfriend, Marlon Reis, to a
White House Christmas party this year. He said Marlon is “very popular
– some of his best friends are Republican spouses.”

Fred Sainz of the Human Rights Campaign fretted to his husband that a gay president would be anticlimactic.

“People expect this
bizarre and outlandish behaviour,” he told me. “We’re always the funny
neighbour wearing colourful, avant-garde clothing. We would let down
people with our boringness and banality when they learn that we go to
grocery stores Saturday afternoon, take our kids to school plays and go
see movies.”

After studying
polling data for a decade, Sainz thinks a lesbian would have a better
shot at the presidency than a gay man. “People are more comfortable
with women than they are with men because of stereotypes with gay men
about hyper sexuality,” he said.

André Leon Talley,
the Vogue visionary, pictures a lesbian president who looks like Julie
Andrews and dresses to meet heads of state in “ankle-length skirts,
grazing the Manolo Blahnik kitten heels.” She would save her “butch
trouser suit for weekends at Camp David and vacation hikes in
Yellowstone. No plaid lumberjack shirts at any time.”

2010 New York Times News Service

The Austrian-Jewish
novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig once famously described Brazil,
his adopted home, as “the land of the future” — a country of eternal
potential. Today, Brazil is an increasingly self-confident emergent
world economic power, a technological-industrial state of the first
rank, thanks to visionary leaders such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso and
Luis Iñacio Lula da Sliva, who have turned around the fortunes of the
country.

Nigeria,
unfortunately, seems to have inherited the questionable mantle of being
Stefan Zweig’s land of the future – a country forever in suspended
animation.

Last week, during
Monday the 13th and Tuesday the 14th, a conference was held under the
Abuja Distinguished Speaker Series (ADSS) on the theme of “Unlocking
Nigeria’s Wealth Potentials”. The ADSS is a joint initiative of the
Abuja Investment Company Ltd (AICL), the commercial and investment
agency of the Federal Capital Territory and the Centre for Policy and
Economic Research (CEPER), an Abuja-based macroeconomics and public
policy think tank founded by yours sincerely. The aim of the series is
to bring to our Federal Capital world leaders in business, government
and academia to speak on issues of national and international
importance. It is part of efforts to place Africa’s most beautiful
capital on the map in terms of cutting-edge ideas that would help
transform our country.

Last week saw the
launching of the maiden lecture by Professor Peter Lewis, Director of
the African Studies Programme at the elite Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. The welcome address
was given by the Minister for the Federal Capital Territory, the gentle
and soft-spoken Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed. The event was declared open
by the President of the Senate, David Mark. A brief introduction was
made by the Managing Director of AICL, Abdu Mukhtar, a Harvard Medical
School graduate who has become a successful finance and investment
executive. Participants were drawn from industry, finance, government
and the international agencies. Among the speakers were: Bart Nnaji,
Special Adviser to the President on Power; Andrew Alli, CEO of the
African Finance Corporation; Mustapha Bello, Director-General of the
Nigerian Investment Corporation (NIPC); Ernest Ndukwe, former Executive
Vice-Chairman of the National Communications Commission; Ikenna Nwosu,
CEO of Mooregate Ltd; Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien, Founder and CEO of the
Growing Business Foundation of Nigeria; Isa Odidi, founder/CEO of
IntelliPharmaceutics Ltd, a billion dollar publicly quoted firm based
in Toronto, Canada; Hassan Usman, CEO of Aso Savings Ltd; and my humble
self.

Peter Lewis provided the main lecture around which three round tables were organised.

His paper, titled
“Can Nigeria transform its Economy? Lessons from Asia” drew from his
famous book, Growing Apart: Oil, Politics and Economic Change in
Indonesia and Nigeria (Michigan University Press, 2007). It is one of
the most important books to be written on comparative Nigerian
development over the last two decades and I recommend it to all those
who feel a calling to leadership in this country.

Lewis makes the
point that Nigeria and Indonesia started in the 1960s with similar
initial conditions but ended up with development trajectories. Both are
large, populous oil producers; both are ethnically divided societies;
both underwent bloody civil conflicts as well as corrupt military
tyrannies. But that is where the similarities end. Unlike Nigeria, the
Indonesian power elites managed to broker a national development
consensus that oversaw massive investments in infrastructures and human
capital. Indonesia pursued an agriculture-led, export-oriented
industrialisation strategy that has seen the country reduce its
dependence on oil as principal source of government revenues. Most
importantly, Indonesian elites kept their ill-gotten wealth within the
country. They invested at home, providing jobs and opportunities for
their own people.

We did the complete
opposite. Out of the US$850 billion we have made from petroleum over
the last four decades, between US$200 and US$400 billion have been
squirreled abroad. Our physical infrastructures, including power, are
in shambolic conditions and our education system is fourth-world. The
tragedy of our situation is that most of us do not believe in our
country. This encourages the haemorrhaging of the economy through
capital flight which in turn deepens the vicious cycle of poverty. If
people decide to take everything abroad the country will remain poor
and our people will continue to wallow in destitution.

What is the ultimate solution?

For my part, I
believe part of it lies in the declaration of an amnesty on all
expatriated funds for two years, after which the government should be
free to prosecute those who have pillaged our national treasure.

That could rake in
an estimated 25 trillion naira, which is more than what we need to
realise our much-vaunted ambition of being among the top 20 economies
by the coming decade. We must also create conditions that make it
attractive to invest at home. I regard Indonesia as one of the ‘softer’
Asian countries. We have to benchmark ourselves against China, Japan and South Korea.

History teaches that nations can never rise above the vision and
endowment of their leaders and the heights of their ambitions. I have
never wavered in my faith about our country’s high and noble destiny.
If we do not believe in ourselves nobody will believe in us.

Last Wednesday, a former Vice President of Nigeria and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar made what might well be the defining speech of the campaign by an ill-tempered calls to arms, apparently if he did not win the PDP primaries ticket. In a statement said to have lasted no more than five minutes, Atiku managed to lay bare a lot of what is wrong with the politics of the country and some of those practising it. In an address to his supporters from across the country at an event in Abuja, with the alluring title of: ‘Building a national consensus for national unity,’ Atiku Abubakar warned that a violent change might be inevitable in the country if the present crops of leaders fail to encourage peaceful change.

‘‘Let me again send another message to the leadership of our country, especially our political leadership – those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable.,” Mr. Abubakar said, add-ing, almost as an after-thought, that ‘‘But this is not what we want for our country.”

This is a speech that would do a university student trying to impress his teen colleagues proud. But it is hardly appropriate for a national figure of Mr Abubakar’s calibre. It is also particularly damaging when this statement is coming at a crucial stage when political parties are gearing up for their national primaries, one in which Mr. Abubakar is participating.

Cut it any which way, and it is not hard to surmise that the statement is directed at the man who is Mr. Abubakar’s main opponent for the presidential ticket of the PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan. Mr Abubakar and his supporters have long sought to deny legitimacy to the goal of Mr. Jonathan to contest the presidential ticket on the dubious premise that the part of the country he came from cannot produce a presidential candidate for next year’s election. In fact, the fulcrum of Mr. Abubakar’s candidacy has been based on the notion of his being a candidate of a section of the country which he says should be the one to produce the next president of the country.

But that is fair; after all what is politics if not a game where people try to maximize their perceived strengths to win political office. What should not be acceptable are people making petulant calls for a breakdown of the system on their perception that it might not be favourable to them. Which raises the pertinent question regarding Mr. Abubakar’s call to arms: who particularly is making change impossible and what particular change does Mr Abubakar want? And how in the name of all that is good can this life-long politician believe that violence would bring about the kind of change that is good for himself or the country?

To all intents and purpose, the race for next year’s election is on. It is even safe to assume that the electoral programme has not been this good for some time in the past. INEC has a respectable leadership that appears determined to curb the excesses of the past; the political parties are working on their programmes and candidates have taken to the air to sell their virtue to the electorate. The system has been able to check excesses by some political players, including a power grabbing attempt by lawmakers. No one has proclaimed any law stopping anyone from contesting – except if you count the attempt to stop Jonathan – and the race appears open in several instances. It is possible that Mr. Abubakar was clumsily trying to head off attempts to rig the primaries and or the general election. But even that would appear rash.

Until the result of the primaries and the general election is out, no one could really plead that the system did not work. In any case, it is debatable if a resort to violence would be the best response even if there was fraud in the process. As Mr. Abubakar should have learnt from his former associates in the Action Congress of Nigeria, the legal system is actually quite capable of correcting electoral theft.

Although Mr. Abubakar left the party for the PDP before the court ruled on electoral cases in Edo, Ekiti and Osun states, the Action Congress (and Labour Party in Ondo and APGA in Anambra State) has shown that politicians need not waste the lives of others before they get restitution for wrong declaration of results. It will be good if he and other politicians would take the moral of this court judgment to heart. Like in any other race, only one person can win a political contest and the default by politicians to claim they were robbed of victory is a bane of the growth of democracy in weak democracies. It would help all of us if politicians real-ised that it is possible to come short in a race and that does not necessarily mean the end of the world.