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It didn’t take
long, sitting with an enthralled audience and watching the saga of the
cloistered jerk who betrayed those around him and ended up unfathomably
rich and influential, to understand why it has been hailed as a
masterpiece.

They had me at the
mesmerizing first scene, when the repulsive nerd is mocked by a comely,
slender young lady he’s trying to woo. Bitter about women, he returns
to his dark lair in a crimson fury of revenge.

It unfolds with
mythic sweep, telling the most compelling story of all, the one I cover
every day in politics: What happens when the powerless become powerful
and the powerful become powerless?

This is a drama
about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy, theft and the
consequence of deceit – a world upended where the vassals suddenly
become lords and the lords suddenly lose their magic.

The beauty who
rejects the gnome at the start is furious when he turns around and
betrays her, humiliating her before the world. And the giant brothers
looming over the action justifiably feel they’ve provided the keys to
the castle and want their reward. One is more trusting than the other,
but both go berserk, feeling they’ve been swindled after entering into
a legitimate business compact.

The anti-social
nerd, surrounded by his army of slaving minions, has been holed up
making something so revolutionary and magical that it turns him into a
force that could conquer the world.

The towering
brothers battle to get what they claim is their fair share of the
glittering wealth that flows from the obsessive gnome’s genius designs.

The gnome, remarkably, invents a way to hurl yourself through space and meet up with somebody at the other end.

All of these mythic
twists and turns in “Das Rheingold” at the Metropolitan Opera in New
York were a revelation to me. I’d never seen the Ring cycle. I didn’t
even know what it was about. I loved everything about Peter Gelb’s $16
million production: the shape-shifting, high-tech stage, the mermaid
sopranos dangling from wires, the magnetic Welsh bass-baritone Bryn
Terfel, who plays Wotan, the weak ruler of the gods who tries to renege
after bartering his gorgeous sister-in-law for construction of a
gorgeous castle. (The moral of the story:

Never mess with your contractor, the contractor always wins.)

But as I watched
the opera, my mind kept flashing to the “The Social Network,” another
dazzling drama about quarrels over riches, social hierarchy, envy,
theft and the consequences of deceit. A Sony executive called “The
Social Network,” the David Fincher-Aaron Sorkin movie about Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg and his circle of ex-friends and partners, “the first
really modern movie.” Yet the strikingly similar themes in Wagner’s
feudal “Das Rheingold” – the Ring cycle is based on the medieval German
epic poem “Das Nibelungenlied,” which some experts say helped inspire
J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” – underscore how little human
drama changes through the ages.

We are always
fighting about social status, identity, money, power, turf, control,
lust and love. We are always trying to get even, get more and climb
higher. And we are always trying to cross the bridge to Valhalla.

W.P. Ker defined
the heroic epic as “the defense of a narrow place, against odds.” And
that can just as well sum up the modern epic of the anti-hero Mark
Zuckerberg.

In “Das Rheingold,”
the dwarf Alberich is mocked and rejected by the Rhinemaidens. “Fury
and longing/ fierce and forceful/ surge through my spirit,” Alberich
sings.

Thwarted in lust,
stewing in rage, the gnome turns to greed and vengeance. He steals the
Rhinemaidens’ gold, returns to his sulfurous, subterranean cavern and
forges a gold ring that “would give unbounded power and wealth.”

He uses the ring to
enslave the other dwarves, “the Nibelungs’ nocturnal race,” and forge
and weld more gold trinkets, as well as a magic helmet that can make
him invisible and teleport him through space.

“No one can see me/
though he search for me/ yet I am everywhere/ hidden from sight,”
Alberich says, in a perfect description of the elusive Zuckerberg and
Internet users in general.

Then, in a mantra
that could belong to Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg, Alberich warns the
gods: “Beware! / For when once you men/ serve my might/ the dwarf will
take his pleasure/ with your pretty women/ who scorn his wooing, /
though love does not smile upon him.”

The 1854 Wagner
libretto has ornate language like “the soft zephyrs’ breeze.” The 2010
Sorkin screenplay has snappy, syncopated language about Python Web
servers and Pix firewall emulators.

But the passions
that drive humans stay remarkably constant, whether it’s a magic ring
being forged or a magic code being written.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

While they have all tried in their own ways to be worthy ambassadors of Nigeria, particular mention must be made of our special athletes, who despite the constraints placed in their way by the lapses within the Nigerian sports establishment, have risen to the occasion to command the respect of the international audience.

While we applaud our athletes, we cannot fail to mention the pall cast over our performance at the Games by the drugs scandal where two of our athletes, Damola Osayomi and Samuel Okon tested positive for the same banned stimulant, Methylhexamine. One of the consequences of those incidents apart from the obvious blight on our integrity was Nigeria’s loss of the gold medal won by Osayomi in the women’s 100 metres event.

Had that medal not been withdrawn our total haul of gold medals would have stood at 12, a situation that would have made our participation this year our best ever performance at the Commonwealth Games.

As it is, we are left to rue what might have been. Still, there’s much to be said for the fact that given the efforts of the NSC to educate our athletes on the dangers of doping, we find ourselves falling short at the international arena. While the athletes may not have deliberately set out to use performance enhancing drugs, the point must be made that had there been better co-ordination of activities within the Nigerian camp in Delhi, the affected athletes would not have turned to the drug without the knowledge of team officials.

That said, we must salute the performance of Team Nigeria and advise that as we revel in our success, we must not lose sight of the fact that the next games in Glasgow, Scotland is only four years away. Like Ibrahim Bio, our Minister of Sports has said, the time to start preparing is now.

Beyond that, we must seize the moment and recognise that the London 2012 Olympic Games is less than two years away. With careful planning we can sustain the Delhi momentum and ensure that unlike our participation at the last two editions, we strike gold in London.

The Commonwealth Games ended yesterday in Delhi after two weeks of intense competition. For the Nigerian contingent, it has been a wonderful outing.

With 11 gold medals already in the kitty, the last of them coming yesterday courtesy of Kate Oputa’s victory over Australia’s Catherine Morrow in the finals of the Women’s Single Wheelchair Table Tennis event, Nigeria has surpassed its gold haul at the 2002 Manchester Games and 2006 Melbourne Games combined.

For many Nigerians, the performance in India has come as a surprise given the general lack of preparedness of our athletes in the months leading up to the games. Before the Nigerian contingent departed for India, there had been reports in the media of how lack of funds had made it difficult for the National Sports Commission (NSC), to send athletes abroad on tours to complement whatever training had been given to them by their coaches.

The biggest casualty in this regard was our boxing team, which was completely outclassed in Delhi. The team, which had been scheduled to tour Germany to perfect strategies for the games, had to settle for a camp somewhere in Benin City.

Expectedly, officials of the NSC are engaged in chest thumping and backslapping. They are gleefully claiming responsibility for our good fortune in India. The truth of the matter however, is that what has happened in Delhi is the result of our athletes’ determination to succeed. That the athletes excelled despite the obvious drawbacks is testimony to their will to excel.

They have proved by their accomplishments in Delhi that with the right mixture of self-belief and patriotic spirit success can be achieved even in the face of the most difficult of odds.

Oluwadamilola
Olusola has lived up to the calling of the national youth service. The
25-year-old corps member in Ogun State on her own steam renovated the
children’s ward at the State Hospital, Abeokuta, as part of her
community development contribution.

Olusola is not a
doctor or an architect but a lawyer who graduated from the University
of Lagos. On a visit to the State Hospital the sad conditions prompted
her to do something about it.

“I just wanted to
do something to influence the community, so I embarked on this project
to renovate the children’s ward at least to make the ward conducive for
the sick children.”

Olusola spent her
service year that ran from November 2009 giving the children’s ward in
a makeover. New paint, mattresses, bedding, mosquito nets ceiling fans
and electrical fixtures and notice board were some of the standard
features she brought in as well as other touches to make the ambiance
more pleasant for the young patients.

Ms Olusola’s
story of how she raised the money for this project is a lesson in
enterprise and resourcefulness, no contract padding no obstacles to
“settle”. She made her appeals on the basis of charity but also
displayed a most democratic approach to raising the necessary funds
went to those who should have had more than passing interest in the
subject she had set her heart on. Both church and state were happy to
contribute to this laudable cause.

“I generated the
funds from corporate bodies and individuals like the state Commissioner
for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Permanent Secretary,
Ministry of Justice, Permanent Secretary of Local Government and
Chieftaincy Affairs, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Environment,
Permanent Secretary Bureau of Cabinet and the Redeemed Christian Church
of God, Soul Winners Chapel, Lagos state and the Attorney General of
Ogun State also donated generously.”

The project took
ten weeks from idea to completion, which also included getting approval
for the National Youth Service Commission. The launching was a happy
occasion featuring Oyin Sodipo permanent secretary, in the Ministry of
health, representing the state commissioner who expressed her pleasure
with what she called an example of individuals complementing the
efforts of government and indicated that more of such activity would be
greatly welcomed.

When Olusola who
works at the Ogun State ministry of Justice was asked if she would like
to build a children’s home on day she gave this answer:

“I am a lawyer,
it is not likely that I will build a children’s home but what I hope to
do, is to continue with this ward renovation yearly and if possible
moving from here to other state hospitals. I believe that by doing
things like this, other people might see it, and do something of such
in the future to help others in need.”

What a complete
package in this example of young Nigerian enterprise: initiate,
independently finance complete and maintain with a plan for progressive
future expansion. What a contrast to the government: “Government cannot
do everything on its own,” the permanent secretary, Oyin Sodipo. Truth
is that the government can certainly do far more than it does to
provide the basics of a health care delivery system.

But with people like Oluwadamilola Olusola there is hope for Nigeria.

When he died last
Monday, aged 87, a former minister of education and one of Nigeria’s
key players in that sector in the last 50 years, Babatunde Aliyu
Fafunwa left behind his life-long companion, his wife, Doris and
children and grandchildren who have done him proud as a father.

However, the man
who devoted his entire career to educating generations of Nigerians
also left behind a nation still grappling with defining its destiny and
an even more troubled education sector. It is perhaps not surprising
that one of the last public actions of this driven and doughty man was
to rise in defence of one of his signal contributions to Nigerian
education: the 6-3-3-4 system introduced by the federal government in
1983 when he was the minister of education.

Fafunwa and other
scholars had for long argued that the former British 6-5-4 system was
inadequate for the nation’s needs. They contended that the British
based system was parochial, elitist, regurgitate and unresponsive to
the need and aspirations of the Nigerian society and fought for what
they said was a more suitable one, which was later adopted by the
federal military government.

Yet, participants
at a recent education workshop, including President Goodluck Jonathan,
blamed the rot in the nation’s education system on the change from the
British system to the more American one, which was supposed to provide
room for individual development. As it happens, the federal government
has itself changed the 6-3-3-4 system to the 9-3-4 system.

It is a trite
argument that education, along with most other sectors of the Nigerian
society, is in very parlous state. Employers of labour routinely bemoan
what they tag the ‘unemployability’ of Nigerian graduates while fresh
graduates themselves deal with diminished and vanishing employment
opportunities – and don’t even get them started on the conditions under
which they receive their training!

Surely the blame
goes beyond an operating system taking into consideration the now age
old Nigerian propensity to rush things through and hope for the best?

Take the 6-3-3-4
system: one of the recommendations of its promoters was that an
adequate number of teachers and the requisite infrastructure be
provided before the system was launched.

This never happened and it ensured that the expected outcomes were not achieved.

The new system,
anchored on a well-promoted university basic education programme, has
itself not fared any better. It has been struggling with under funding
and lack of teachers to bring the project to reality. It would not be a
surprise if this is also jettisoned by another administration a couple
of years down the road. This business of chopping and changing while
ignoring the basics is as unsustainable as it is pathetic.

No nation can
truly achieve its potential with an uneducated – or poorly educated
citizenry and Nigeria cannot be an exception. If any government
official – or parent – needs any reminder of the low quality education
that children are receiving across the nation’s schools, they only need
to check the result of graduating secondary school students over the
past couple of years.

The failure rate
has been consistent in its abysmal level. Our education system is
failing our children – and you cannot hang this on one man.

The death of Mr.
Fafunwa also poses another dilemma for national planners. He was a
member of a generation that was well trained in local and international
institutions and was still devoted to working in their country to build
a better future. It is a moot point whether they truly were able to
achieve this.

Many of the
fresher graduates expected to lead in future are badly prepared – and
probably see little to recommend them to a life of public service, and
that is they have not already fastened their hopes on making a living
abroad.

Our present leaders need to realise, to use a much-abused phrase,
the urgency of now. There is a need to ensure that the labour of our
heroes past – thinkers, doers and leaders – is not in vain. Hard work
and dedication to duty must therefore replace fickle chicanery.

The first time I
heard of Alkaki was from one of the owners of Abule Café. The café is
part of The Life House on Sinari Daranijo Street in Victoria Island,
Lagos. Abule simply means village, and the owners have a strong
suggestion of an organic approach to their sparse but interesting menu.

I have to admit to
liking the way their minds work. It is refreshing to have a place where
you can go for a snack of a bowl of gari, iced water and groundnuts in
the afternoon comfortably sipped in air conditioning while surfing the
Internet…or their own charming version of Buck’s Fizz, a combination
of champagne and zobo; or their delicious Chapman’s made from freshly
squeezed watermelon and other fruit juices, Angostura bitters and
additional well guarded secret ingredients. Theirs is the very first
Chapman’s that I have drunk with an unsuspecting and tranquil mind.

One of my favourite
Abule Café stories is that of fresh palmwine available there from the
beginning of the week. A nursing mother who wants to bring on the
breast milk can go in at the start of the week and drink this palmwine
and at the weekend when it is fully and irredeemably fermented, those
wishing to mainline alcohol can go in and get unrepentantly drunk.

Abule Café’s Alkaki
comes from a friend of the house who makes them somewhere in the North
and sends them down to Lagos. It is apparent that they are carefully
and lovingly made. They are made up of twists of fried wheat dough
soaked in honey. In texture and taste they remind me of what I consider
the best honey wheat bread available in Nigeria sold by High Quality
Bakery in Calabar. The Alkaki, like the honey wheat is grainy, dense,
sweet (sweeter) crumbly and honey infused. A piece of the pastry broken
off reveals hidden silken tracks of honey. It is best served fresh, or
warmed in the oven, with a cup of coffee or Lipton tea.

Also Alkaki has
pedigree. It was originally the preserve of Northern aristocrats who
had it for tea or as a desert. I like to imagine Fulani ladies draped
in limited edition Hollandaise Ankara sitting under alcoves ordering
one such as myself about with trays of Alkaki, cold Lassis,

Fura and hot
fragrant teas, talking about the year’s yield of tea on plantations in
Taraba State in soft cultured voices. Alkaki has strong strains of
Arabic cuisine where desserts and puddings are prepared with wheat
flour, yoghurt and always always always, drenched in honey.

I asked Ugoma
Ebilah, who owns Abule with her husband, to request the summary of the
recipe for Alkaki from their Northern friend and was by and by snubbed.
I didn’t take it to heart. In a country of over 150 million people, no
Nigerian recipe can be successfully enshrouded. I finally stumbled on a
version in my old tattered Maggi family menu cookbook made from 2 cups
of crushed wheat, 2 teaspoons of yoghurt, 1 bottle of groundnut oil, 2
cups of honey and 2 tablespoons of lime juice. The methodology is also
simple enough.

Instead of crushed
wheat, I bought a N50 peak-milk-tin measurement of whole wheat sold out
of a huge Dangote bag. I ground a few handfuls of the wheat to coarse
flour in my blender’s dry mill, sieved it and added to the sieved
flour, yoghurt and about three spoons of groundnut oil, enough to
loosely hold the dough together. I must admit to substituting the lime
juice for water and also that something about the ground wheat
suggested and even demanded the addition of a handful of coriander
seeds. The dough must be left for a few hours or overnight to ferment.
The remaining oil is heated, the dough fried in it till the Alkaki is
the colour of golden honey. The Alkaki is removed from the heat and
submerged in a jar of honey. From experimenting, I found that they must
be submerged for a period of time to get an impressive infusion.

My Alkaki certainly does not have the well-dressed look of Café
Abule’s. Their friend has so perfected the art of making them, of
twisting the dough together to look like small pretty twisted brioches,
and has probably done this for years that I certainly cannot begin to
compete. But the taste of mine was commensurate if not better for being
freshly made, with a grainier bite from the coarseness of the flour and
coriander seeds, also fragrant from the coriander, honey sweet and
certainly worth the roundabout research and snobbery.

The recession has taken a toll on the institution of marriage, we keep hearing.

Last month, for
instance, when it was reported that the proportion of Americans aged 25
to 34 who are married fell below the proportion who have never married,
it was quickly attributed to the economic downturn. Young adults,
according to this narrative, have less money to spend on a wedding and
are less eager to enter into a lifetime commitment during times of
uncertainty.

Again last week,
when a report from the Pew Research Centre noted that, for the first
time, college-educated 30-year-olds were more likely to have been
married than were people the same age without a college degree, the
news was interpreted as another side effect of the recent recession.
After all, the downturn has been especially hard on young men with no
college degree.

But if you look at
marriage in the United States over the past century, this
interpretation doesn’t stand up. Marriage and divorce rates have
remained remarkably immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle.
Unfortunately, the marriage statistics are easy to misread.

It’s misleading to
count the wedding rings among people in their 20s and early 30s,
because the median age at first marriage in the United States has risen
to 28 for men (from 23 in 1970) and 26 for women (from 21 in 1970). The
fact that these folks aren’t married now doesn’t mean they won’t marry
– many of them just aren’t there yet.

Look instead at
40-year-olds, and you see that 81 percent have married at least once.
Yes, this number used to be higher – it peaked at 93 percent in 1980 –
but, clearly, marriage remains a part of most people’s lives. These
statistics are not a perfect barometer either, however, because they
reflect weddings that were celebrated years earlier.

To most accurately
track marriage rates, you need to focus on the number of wedding
certificates issued. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data,
there were about 2.1 million marriages in the United States. That does
represent a slight decline since the recession began. But it’s the same
rate of decline that existed during the preceding economic boom, the
previous bust and both the boom and the bust before that.

Indeed, the recent
modest decline in marriage continues a 30-year trend. And even as the
number of marriages falls, divorce is also becoming less prevalent. So
a greater proportion of today’s marriages will likely persist 30 years
into the future.

This is not to say
that marriage looks the same today as it always did – over the past
several decades, there has been a tremendous shift in married life.

It used to be that
a typical marriage involved specialised roles for the husband and wife.
Usually he was in the marketplace, and she was in the home, and this
arrangement led to maximum productivity.

But today, when
families have easy access to prepared foods, inexpensive off-the-rack
clothing and labor-saving technology from the washing machine to the
robot vacuum cleaner, there’s much less benefit from either spouse
specialising in homemaking. Women, now better educated and with greater
control over their fertility, are in the marketplace, too, and married
couples have more money, more leisure time and longer lives to spend
together. Modern marriages are based not on the economic benefits of
playing specialised roles but on shared passions.

This new model of
“hedonic marriage” has had an effect on who marries, and when – as
research I have conducted with my better half, the economist Betsey
Stevenson, has documented. In the old days, opposites attracted; an
aspiring executive groom would pair up with a less-educated bride. And
they would wed before the stork visited and before the couple made the
costly investment of putting the husband through business school.

But today, that
same young executive would more likely be half of a power couple,
married to a college-educated woman who shares his taste in books,
hobbies, travel and so on. Indeed, marriage rates for college-educated
women rose sharply through the 1950s and ‘60s, and have remained
remarkably stable since. These women tend to marry after they have
finished college and started their careers.

The decline in
marriage, it turns out, is concentrated entirely among women with less
education – those who likely have the least to gain from modern hedonic
marriage.

This is not to say
that the economic downturn has had no effect at all on domestic life.
Census data show that the number of unwed couples living together rose
sharply last year. With rents high and jobs hard to come by, it’s no
surprise that people are doubling up.

Still, given that
the marriage rate remains on trend, the rise in cohabitation isn’t
coming at the expense of marriage. Instead, many young couples who
might otherwise merely be dating are moving in together. Some of them,
no doubt, will eventually marry. Truly, the recession has not torn
young couples apart; it has pushed them closer together.

© 2010 The New York Times

“Let me put it this
way, that the environment at the moment is getting better for business
and the issues of corruption are being addressed on a daily basis. We
have the EFCC there, we have NDLEA and they are all addressing the
issue. And I believe that there is a clean up exercise going on right
now and it should be given a chance so that we will be able to say in
another 2, 3 years what the position really is.”

Well, it took a
little longer than three years to get to the EFCC’s conviction of Mrs.
Cecilia Ibru former managing director and chief executive officer of
Oceanic Bank for three counts of fraud and money laundering. And though
it was a different clean up exercise than the one she was referring to
in that December 2007 interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk the former
doyenne of the banking industry did get swept up in the famous tsunami
that got its impetus not from the EFCC but from the current governor of
the Central Bank, Lamido Sanusi. He it was who set off the earthquake
when he landed on his new seat last year and the banking shake up that
followed will be forever associated with him Mrs. Ibru is to spend five
months in jail with time taken off for the period already spent in EFCC
custody.

She is to forfeit
assets and cash to the value of N190 billion, an astronomical amount
for most people to fathom. But it does seem from the list of her assets
that the EFCC disclosed that it will be doable. And that, indeed, is
the position.

Cecilia Ibru
handled herself well in that interview fending off the rather goading
questions with calm. She was asked about her bank’s support of public
private partnerships and about where she would draw the line in going
into business with corrupt state governments who channeled revenue into
cars and private planes in a country where 70 percent of the populace
lived inpoverty. “ What you have just described there, of course you
know it is something that we should be ashamed of. It is the structure
that was wrong because if you give money to governors and you don’t ask
for accountability you are asking for trouble. And that is what
happened.”

Ibru explained that
those types of governors had been retired or were on their way out
under the new dispensation of President Yar ‘Adua. “The ones that are
there now they have different approach to how money should be
expended,’’ she said. And continued: “We have the seven point agenda by
our president which everyone is working on and I believe…” Well she
believed that with all arms of government working towards the same goal
it would make for a better Nigeria in years to come.

It is all quite
neat really. Mrs. Ibru saved the country the cost of a long messy
trial, and unexplained disappearances, dropped her initial
protestations against the charges and admitted guilt in a plea bargain
that includes the forfeiture of extensive assets with some miniscule
jail time from a cumulative sentence of 18 months.

Take the case of
Olusoji Abiodun Ilori, 48, who has bagged himself a cumulative sentence
of 120 years for 419 fraud. He is to spend three years in prison. He
was arraigned by the EFCC on a 40-count charge after an arrest at Dugbe
Post Office Ibadan in March 2009 where he was trying to mail more than
200 scam letters containing forged documents.

In sentencing
Ilori, Justice M. Abimbola, according to the statement issued by the
EFCC’s media unit on its website “condemned the attitude of Nigerians
who are desperate to make money at all costs and by any means possible,
thereby bastardising the image of Nigeria. He said the misadventure of
Ilori and other scammers was capable of scaring away foreign investors
and businessmen from the country.”

Well Mr. Ilori will
have to pay his debt to the state in time spent in incarceration since
it seems he was apprehended in midscam so to say. admittedly long after
Mrs. Ibru will have returned home, but the EFCC can pencil him off
their register.

Nigerians though will have to keep a keen count on that long list of
assets from Mrs. Ibru that spans a motley list of capitals Alausa,
Abuja, Dubai and London. Property markets are iffy right across the
globe and the devil knows that keeping track of the paperwork is labour
intensive. So the EFCC’s role is far from over, and while this has been
a successful investigation and something to crow about, 70 percent of
Nigerians must still watch and wait.