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The fate of our languages was brought into focus
recently during the second International Conference on the Extinction
of Igbo Language held in Owerri, Imo State. The Minister of Labour and
Productivity, Chukwuemeka Wogu, who represented President Goodluck
Jonathan, made a revelation that should not surprise anyone.

Quoting the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Mr. Wogu said that the Igbo
language might become extinct in the next fifty years.

The fact is that it is not only the Igbo language
that is under threat of extinction in the country. All our indigenous
languages are endangered species and there seem to be no visible
efforts to rescue them. A few years back Babatunde Fafunwa, a professor
of education and one-time minister of education conducted a controlled
research in Ife where some pupils were taught all subjects, including
the sciences, in Yoruba and the others in English. At the end of the
experiment both groups were examined and those taught in Yoruba
performed better than those who had their lessons in English. At the
end of the experiment Mr. Fafunwa campaigned for the adoption of
indigenous languages as medium of instruction in schools across the
country. His recommendation was implemented for a while, and then
abandoned.

The endangered status of our indigenous languages
has become more pronounced in the new world order, represented by
globalisation, and with the advent of the borderless Internet, which
has succeeded in giving English fresh dominance at the expense of our
local languages.

This is mistaken. In Japan children are taught all
subjects including the core sciences in Japanese and the country today
is a leader in the all facets of science and arts. Russia too has
demonstrated this in its arts and literature.

Its world renowned writers such as Leo Tolstoy,
Fyodor Dostoevsky and a host of others wrote in their native languages
and attained world fame based on the translations of their works.

In Africa, this debate has been ongoing and a
writer such as Ngugi wa’ Thiongo has since decided to write in his
native Gikuyu language and translate to English later.

In recent times some State Houses of Assembly have
resolved to conduct debates in local dialects as a way of encouraging
the revival of the local tongue. In Anambra State, Governor Peter Obi
has outlawed the treatment of Igbo as ‘vernacular’ in public schools,
while his Edo counterpart Adam Oshiomhole has advocated the teaching of
Edo language at both primary and secondary school levels.

We appreciate these gestures but the way to
achieve what they intend goes beyond tokenism. Structures must be put
in place to help achieve the aim. For example literature publishing in
local languages should receive government support.

The huge task ahead is however not for the
government alone; parents and teachers have important roles to play as
well. The idea of treating our local languages as inferior to English
or any other foreign language must be discouraged.

Language is bound up with our history and identity and our sense of
who we are as a people. Our local languages must not be allowed to
succumb to the ravaging flood of globalisation. We must not allow our
local languages to die and end up on the UNESCO’s listing of ‘dead’
languages. This can – and will – happen if we fail to speak our
languages, and to teach our children to speak and to write them.

Inhabiting
cyberspace is something that should suit wanderlust. Cyberspace
provides a relatively free environment for one to migrate from one
location to the other. Cybernomadism, the habit of constantly migrating
from one location in cyberspace to another, seems very attractive for
many reasons.

With the collapse
of community in real life, or at least the serious threat to community,
online migration is already a kind of coping strategy. Human beings
must look for communities to replace those they have abandoned or
forfeited. So, first of all, one escapes online to see if one could
meet those with whom one could commune. But, of course, even when human
beings mutually hallucinate about their alternative cyber communities,
they have not quite abandoned their humanity. Even as fictional
characters, they come to those online communities with the same
tendencies that endangered their actual communities. In fact, conflicts
in online communities are intensified by the very fact that members of
such communities interpret and pursue their freedoms in ways that
frequently endanger interpersonal relationship and create instability
in community life.

Cyberspace,
especially the Internet, frequently creates new attractions,
introducing new environments with exciting features such as free email
services, blogs, storage locations, and so on. Free services have
always been ways of baiting the crowds and using their presence to
sell. Reduce or remove the free services and you find that the
migratory tendency in online life would be reduced. The fact that
YahooMail, for instance, is free means that one can have an intra-mail
service migration, creating several Yahoo accounts, or maintain several
email accounts with Yahoo,

Gmail, Fastmail,
Hotmail, AOL, Excite, etc along with official institutional email
accounts. As they say in Nigerian pidgin, “Who talk say free ting no
sweet?” As an experimental and evolving world, cyberspace is home for
many in search of adventure into ideas, practices, and applications of
self. Already, this attraction has become an addiction for many,
heightening their Netizenship (being a subject of the Net) in ways that
affect their domestic and professional responsibilities and
relationships tremendously.

The addiction to
online life seems to be based on the principle that says, “keep
moving.” When one tries to stop, one experiences the fear of having
missed something wonderful in that other online location. Part of the
desire is to be everywhere and nowhere. To stop permanently somewhere
is to be crippled. The pleasures of wanderlust are not complete in one
journey; never.

The problems that
some Netizens encounter in locations they have migrated to online also
make them to want to keep moving, for example finding yourself in an
email service that is frequently under virus attack, or that has no
effective way of checking spam mails, would naturally be frustrating
and you would want to pack and leave. How does one stay with an email
service that cannot prevent spam mail about Viagra and that invites one
to increase the size of one’s penis? Definitely, one would tell
oneself, “no, this is not the place to be,” or “this is not yet the
destination.” But email homesteading appears always to be temporary,
not only because there could be an online Katrina that could demolish
the home and erase all of one’s important mail, but also because one is
not quite sure that home is actually a particular location. One is not
quite sure that the symbol “@” in emailing has not completely turned
one into a rock or a stone statue, trapping one in ways that entail
predictability and controllability.

The cybernomad redefines home as a location that also moves, and such a location could be an idea or a culture.

What we therefore
call “home” becomes a mere stopping point, mere “bus stop” where one
has the opportunity of disembarking for few moments to stretch one’s
legs, buy or share some communication, and then continue the journey.

One could make a
stop at a listserv where there are many touts or pundits, or touting
pundits, and hang around to enjoy all the “garagara”. It would be some
fun to join in the “garagara” about how people have made ideas their
home, at least to understand that it is part of the excitement of
homesteading and that one could use each homesteading to redefine and
authorize one’s voice within a fictional heteroglossia.

Perhaps one will return someday to that location from which one
escaped. One playful contemporary Igbo proverb advises: “Onye mee n’afa
nna n’ihu, ya mekwaa ya n’azu, maka o maghi ma o bu n’azu ka Jeso
ga-esi bia ozo” (One who makes the sign of the cross in the front
should also do it at the back, for one is not sure whether Jesus will
come from behind next time). Abandoned homes do not abandon themselves;
they too keep moving to some newness. It is left for the cybernomad to
learn to return to the newness of the old abandoned homes.

Nigerian
Writer, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani recently won the Commonwealth Book Prize
(Africa Region) for her book “I do Not Come To you By Chance” which is
a brilliant fictional account of the Nigeria cyber crime story. In the
book, Kingsley the main protagonist, a young man eager to help his
family, loses his idealism and joins his mothers infamous brother,
Boniface aka Cash Daddy in a successful and lucrative crime syndicate
that relieves unsuspecting but often greedy westerners of their hard
earned money from the safety of cyber cafes littered all over Nigerian
urban centers.

The story of cyber
crime in Nigeria is now so familiar to the point of cliché. The
perpetrators have been so aptly named “Yahoo Yahoo boys”, a term that
has now joined our lexicon along with such other words like “maga” and
“mugu” both of which describes victims of the activities of the yahoo
yahoo boys. However, in attempting a definition here so as to put this
discourse in proper context, I would refer to Cyber Crime as the use of
computers and or computer networks to commit crime. Computer assisted
crimes include but are not limited to e-mail scams, hacking, cyber
theft, credit card theft, impersonation, spread of hostile software and
cyber terrorism.

Worldwide, we enjoy
negative popularity as a criminally minded people with Robert Mallet,
former US deputy Secretary of Commerce for example complaining once
that the more aid the US was giving to Nigeria, the more they were
losing to Nigeria through cybercrime. He alleged that US citizens lose
approximately $2 billion a year to Nigerian fraud of all sorts.

Similarly,
according to the 2007 Internet Crime report of the Crime Complaint
Center (IC3), Nigeria ranks third among the cybercrime committing
countries in the world. In the US alone, Nigeria scam e-mails accounted
in 2007 for 1.1 percent of the top IC3 complaint categories received.

The enormity of
this problem has long been appraised. Several Nigerian administrations
have in the past taken steps towards checking the vice. In 2004 the
Federal Government established the Nigeria Cyber working Group (NCWG).
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has also been
working to monitor public cafes, stopping night browsing and tracking
suspected parcels procured fraudulently online.

As sincere as some
of these efforts have been, they have not been as successful as would
have been desired thus the need to develop more result oriented steps
to fight the crime. You cannot fight today’s crime with yesterday’s
technology. A successful fight against cybercrime requires not just
Information Technology Knowledge, but Information Technology
Intelligence on the part of the security agencies. They must be
equipped with the right skills, the know-how and the insight necessary
to rise to the challenge. In this regard, I advocate the development of
software that can monitor Internet usage in the country without
interfering with users’ right to privacy with the aim of tracking and
arresting fraudsters.

New and more
defined laws against cybercrime must be enacted to give bite to the
efforts of law enforcement agencies. These new laws must spell out
stiffer penalties and machinery for proper enforcement must be put in
place. One of such machinery is the dedication of a special court for
corruption cases in general. This will ensure speedy litigation and
punishment of fraudsters and would in a positive feedback mechanism act
as a deterrent to would be fraudsters.

Besides the laws
and their enforcement, there is the need for advocacy, public
enlightenment and national re-orientation. There has to be a conscious
effort both on the part of government and civil society to take the
fight against cybercrime into the consciousness of Nigerians, to
highlight its negativity and its consequences and to emphasise that
hard work remains the surest path to fame and fortune. There has to be
a return of civic education into our curriculum at the primary and post
primary levels with the aim of instilling in the young minds a sense of
responsibility towards their nation and the pride and dignity of honest
labour. On the other hand, private organisations should come up with
initiatives that exploit our rapidly expanding pop and music culture to
pass the same message.

An interesting
initiative in that regard comes to mind. In February 2010, we witnessed
the release of “Maga no need pay” a music video produced by a
collaboration of popular Nigerian artists amongst which were Cobhams,
Modele, Omawumi, MI, Rooftop MC’s, and Wordsmith. The video was to
support the Microsoft Internet Safety, Security and Privacy Initiative
for Nigeria (MISSPIN) aimed at fighting cybercrime among youths.

Finally, it is
important to note that cybercrime cannot be divorced from the
widespread corruption, harsh economic climate and ubiquitous poverty in
the land. To fight crime, you must attack the cause. Attacking the
cause in this context comes by the way of good governance, transparent
electoral processes and accountability in government all of which
translates into food on the table, more good jobs, better schools, a
fairer investment climate and ultimately a reduction in the tendency of
our citizens to want to go into cybercrime.

This piece is an excerpted version of the 1st runner up in the YGC/MISSPIN National Anti Cyber crime essay competition 2010.

“The people deserve the government that they have.” —Karl Marx

Last week we were told that Attahiru Jega, INEC
chairman, wanted N55billion to successfully rehash the voter’s
register. The sum of N55billion was what you would have been told if
you read NEXT. If you read The Punch, you would have been told it is
72. Between all of the papers, those were the limits. For the purpose
of this write-up, let us work with the smaller sum.

Prof. Jega drew on the example of Bangladesh in making his claims.

According to him, and he is quite correct, it took
the Bangladeshis eight months to complete their voters’ registration.
We have four months. He also said that the Bangladeshis completed their
registration with 30 000 units of the scanning machine. Then he pointed
out that the machines cost $2000 per unit.

30 000 units at a cost of $2000 each would come to $60,000,000.

Multiply that by 150 (converting to Naira), and we
get N9,000,000,000. Unless my maths is incredibly faulty, that is
N9billion! Even if we make room for a doubling of the number of
machines needed because we have half the time that Bangladesh had, we
would still arrive at N18billion. So where does this extra N37billion
that would make the lower limit of N55billion come from?

More questions, fewer answers…

When I first raised these questions, some people
tried to justify Jega’s maths. Some reminded me of what it would cost
to pay the staff who would complete the exercise. Others said that
because of Nigeria’s terrain that we should take into account the
diverse terrain (Nigeria has a more diverse climate and geography than
Bangladesh), so getting the equipment to the locations would be
costlier.

I think that is hogwash given the amounts involved.

For the record, Bangladesh is almost all swampy
rainforest like Nigeria’s south, so they probably would have more
difficulty in getting things around. But that is nit picking.

The important point here is this: why is it that
our leaders never give us a detailed breakdown of what the money is
for, and how they intend to use such monies?

Would Prof. Jega not have neatly avoided this
furore if he had told us, machines would cost N9 – 18billion, and this
is precisely how we intend to make use of the N37 – 46billion remaining
from the N55billion we are asking for?

On Monday morning we were informed that our House
of Representatives have approved the bumper sum of N17billion for the
two-day jamboree that is going to be our independence celebrations. You
can get the breakdown of the expenditures at NEXT’s website so I won’t
go into all that here. What is interesting however, is that this
breakdown is not detailed. The approved budget was done only in lump
sums for the subheads only!

To cap it all, Ayo Adeseun who is the head of the
Committee on Appropriation refused to offer explanations. He claimed
that he needed to consult the records before offering explanations?
Would any of you give money to someone who cannot tell you what for and
how he intends to use the money?

Even more interestingly, the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Appropriation refused to speak to the press.

At the end of the day, all of this is possible
because the Nigerian people never complain. Yes, we do moan in the
privacy of our homes, but we almost never take those complaints
outside, and when we do, we are too easily divided, settled and
dispersed.

Our leaders do not feel responsible to us for
their actions or inactions, and this is what the National Assembly is
clearly displaying.

Despite our rejection of the independence
jamboree, they are going ahead to approve large sums of money that
would no doubt find their way into private pockets. The average
Nigerian would remain oblivious to all of this…

In more serious countries with serious people, a
general strike would be in the offing. Come to think of it, N3.8billion
to replace carpets at the International Conference Centre?

Damn!

The
last time Imo State’s Governor Ikedi Ohakim caused a stir in Lagos it
was with the way his convoy brutalised a female driver: until last
Thursday, that is, when, on a courtesy visit to his Lagos State
counterpart, Babatunde Fashola, he declared that the menace of
kidnapping in the East should be blamed on the stock market collapse in
Lagos. He said:

“You may have
noticed the state of kidnapping in the southeast. One of the things I
need to tell you is that people came from Lagos to tell us in the east,
they called it Road Show, asking our people to buy shares in banks…
Our people sold their wares, some sold their warehouses and we were
captured by volcanic market …Unfortunately, the market crashed and
young boys got frustrated. We are trying to see how we can restore
them. Our people have lost too much money in most of these banks
stationed in Lagos.” Brilliant stuff, you’d agree. Misbehaving bankers
in the west leading to misbehaving youth in the east. I was still
relishing Mr. Ohakim’s Nobel-quality submission when something, or
rather somebody, caused me to lose my temper.

That person (going
by the name “Akika”), made a comment on the story, on the NEXT website.
Akika said: “Our problem as Igbo is due to the brainless worms that
lead us more than Federal Government’s marginalisation.” This got me
mad. Why would Akika be insinuating that the Igbo hold the monopoly on
questionable leadership in Nigeria, I wondered. I immediately realised
that Nigeria has subtly moved from a “my Mercedes is bigger than yours”
age to a “my governor is more inept / corrupt / greedy / stupid than
yours” age. We have found yet another intriguing avenue for our innate
competitiveness: which explains what Akika was trying to do.

Thankfully I was
not alone in my displeasure. As though to convince Akika that he didn’t
know what he was saying, Oyo State’s Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala called
a press conference in Ibadan the same day that Ohakim was revealing his
groundbreaking socioeconomic discovery in Lagos. Amongst other things,
Akala, in response to allegations by a former Oyo governor, Lam
Adesina, that Akala was seeking to assassinate him, said:

“What would I kill
Lam for? Of what use would killing him be for me? He can’t stand on my
way… The man is over 70 years. He smokes pipe and he is dying by
installment. Why would I accelerate his imminent death?” Now tell me,
is Akala an Igbo governor? The sameness of their actions and utterances
thus pushes me to imagine that when our governors gather for their
forum; beyond reminding themselves of how powerful they are, and beyond
plotting new ways of showing Nigerians how powerful they are, they also
find the time for special ‘self-development’/‘gubernatorial-conduct’
classes.

The next time you
hear of a Governors Forum meeting, maybe you shouldn’t make the mistake
of imagining that it is ALL about politics. Indeed it is mostly about
politics: self-preservation, self-interest. Take this as evidence: In
the dying days of the Yar’Adua administration, they spent all their
time preventing Vice President Jonathan from taking over power. In
these early days of the Jonathan administration they are spending all
their time telling President Jonathan that nobody is worthy of taking
power from him.

But these
governors are also smart enough to know that ‘self-development’ is as
important as self-preservation. Recall how they all made plans to be
Harvard alumni in 2009. Since that didn’t work out I imagine they found
ways of incorporating special tutorials into their intrigue-fuelled
forum sessions.

What this means is
that apart from plotting which one of them will take over from
President Jonathan in 2015 or 2019, they also spend time attending
special classes on topics ranging from “How to ‘DEAL WITH’ the media”
and “Foreign Banking for Beginners” to “British Virgin Islands or The
Isle of Man: How to Select a Tax Haven?”; “Talking before Thinking”;
and “How to Bargain with Award Peddlers”. And courtesy of former
governor Donald Duke, we now know that, “How to Rig Elections” is also
on the curriculum.

With the recent
statements of Ohakim and Akala you can clearly see the A-students in
the “Talking before Thinking” class. Ohakim also seems to be excelling
in the Personal Branding Class (see ‘Clean and Green’).

It is however the
“Social Networking for Governors” class I’m most interested in. Rumour
has it that no one in the class understood the difference between
Twitter and Facebook until the instructor explained it thus: “Twitter
is like the Ecological Fund; little room for ‘free styling’. Facebook
on the other hand is like a Security Vote. You can do a lot more with
it…”

PS. Governor Fashola of Lagos is a consistent F-student in the
“Talking before Thinking” class. If you know of any other governors
failing courses, please let me know.

In
the last few months headlines around the world have devoted
considerable attention to the issue of oil spills. The most significant
of course has been the BP oil spill, following the explosion in April
of a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Following that was a
noticeable attempt by the international media to divert some of the
world’s attention from the Gulf of Mexico to a much older tragedy: the
Niger delta.

On May 30, the UK Guardian published a piece by
John Vidal, its environment editor, titled “Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the
Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it.” Vidal’s piece was based
on a trip to the Delta. “We could smell the oil long before we saw it –
the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly
in the air,” he wrote. “The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it
became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the
best-quality oil in the world.” Two weeks later the New York Times took
the baton, publishing on June 16 an article by Adam Nossiter, “Far From
Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old.” The piece opens with the
heartrending words: “Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast,
tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of
all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the
equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some
estimates.” A few weeks later it is the turn of Reuters, in a story
with the headline,

“Gulf spill a familiar story in oil-soaked
Nigeria.” The gory details are the same: “While the world is transfixed
by the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, oil spills have become a part
of everyday life during the 50 years that foreign firms have been
pumping out Nigeria’s easily refined fuel. Environmentalists estimate
as much as 550 million gallons of oil have poured into the Niger River
Delta during that time – at a rate roughly comparable to one Exxon
Valdez disaster per year.” Only last week, Julie Baird, deputy editor
of Newsweek, was on America’s National Public Radio (NPR), to talk
about “the environmental and social impact” of the Niger Delta’s spills.

And then Omoyele Sowore, Nigerian
citizen-journalist and publisher of online news medium Sahara
Reporters, wrote an article for the Huffington Post, titled “The Oil
Spill No One’s Talking About.” In it he focused on one oil giant:

Exxon Mobil, accusing them of importing to Nigeria
an aged, leaking oil platform from Angola; “a platform even Angola’s
government regulators rejected.” Sowore says this platform is leaking
5,000 barrels of oil daily, and that Exxon Mobil has been making it
impossible for journalists to gain access to the site, as well as
bribing government officials.

The UK Guardian’s John Vidal also implicated
Exxon Mobil in a May 1 Akwa Ibom spill in which, over the course of a
week, more than a million gallons of oil leaked into the Delta.

In the face of such damning accusations, Exxon
Mobil’s grudging responses amount to no better than a loud, arrogant
silence. Nigerian history is littered with evidence of the nonchalance
of oil giants in a country where people – officials and even victims –
can easily be silenced with cash.

The Nigerian government has also been acting in its customary tardy manner.

“Exxon Mobil needs to show more caution in terms
of the management of oil spills,” Minister of the Environment, John
Odey, told journalists in June. No word from President Jonathan.
Compare that ministerial finger wagging with the American response to
the BP fiasco.

Nigeria’s news organisations also appear to be so
overwhelmed with news of kidnappings and constitutional amendments that
there is little time left for Niger delta spills.

The country’s biggest tragedy is that there are
too many tragedies competing for attention. With the election season
approaching fast, and politicians and government officials scheming for
the spoils of office, we wonder how long it’ll take before President
Jonathan realises that armed youth are not the only militants in the
Delta; that the most dangerous militants may very well be
blackberry-clutching corporate executives.