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It was one of those days when life unexpectedly slaps you in the face.

Two mothers with
four young schoolgirls walked into a museum in an east coast USA town
on Martin Luther King Day in 2003 and I immediately recognised the
guide in his uniform jacket. He was paunchier, and balder and his face
had aged considerably. When I first knew him he was a reporter at a
news organisation full of vim, hard working and articulate, rearing to
go.

We met on
assignment in the late seventies covering the Ecowas conference holding
that year in the Ghanaian capital, Accra. I was then working at the
Daily Times, the only female reporter in a group of 15 or so
journalists on a trip that took us to Cape Verde, Ghana and Senegal and
was bookmarked in my mind by the overthrow of General Fred Akuffo that
followed soon after our departure and led to the rescheduling of our
return route to Lagos. Bros Sege was running things then.

This was my first
foreign reporting assignment, when I came to understand the “man body
no be wood” category of travelling expenses that all male reporters and
the male editors to whom they had to account, were so familiar with.

I have to say the majority of my male colleagues, this gentleman especially, were respectful and as helpful as they could be.

By the time I left
Nigeria in 1989, this man had risen to the top position at the
organisation he worked for and moved on. I think he had even done some
stints as press secretary to some governor or other.

But evidently, from
meeting him again that day at the museum he had come down on different
times living in the States. He told me he was working two jobs,
guide/guard at the museum and cashier at a big retail chain in a
neighbouring town. He had got the current job courtesy of a former
colleague, his superior at the news organisation in Nigeria, a former
university professor who also worked at the museum. They had kept in
touch through good times and bad and had maintained a network, helping
each other out.

It was one of those
encounters where everything is left unsaid and the only question just
stands there like a giant elephant in the room everyone is trying to
ignore.

Yes he was keeping body and soul together and his grown children were probably working their way through college or high school,

helping their
parents with the bills, as mother held down a similar job to Dad’s. It
would be a life lived from paycheck to paycheck, no extras. Money for
air tickets home would have to come from carefully hoarded overtime
pay, as would any other treats, and remittances to help family back in
Naija.

One wonders
sometimes whether people at home understand how hard life can be in
those greener pastures across the seas. Yes there are rewards but they
do not come easily. In the absence of kinsmen and women close to the
seats of power, or extended family members who have made it
financially, in the lands of opportunity abroad one has to make one’s
luck with hard work and the requisite qualifications. What you thank
your stars for is having reached a place where you have the opportunity
to go as far as you want.

That aside, there
is no one to call on when that message from home asking you to pay your
levy for Uncle D’s funeral comes. If you take the time off to make the
trip, you lose the pay. Finding the extra to make up your donation has
to be calculated in overtime, or the extra job on the side that you
hustled to find.

This then is the
source of the anger that sometimes follows the discovery that all the
hard work that could have offset your study loan went on some bundles
of aso ebi.

Today things
promise to get even tougher as poverty becomes the great leveler and
financial strength replaces those other arbiters of rank and status
such as age, learning, experience, even love. If a younger brother or
sister has more means they become the elders everyone turns to. Uncles
and aunts whose voices used to be strident sometimes don’t ring out so
loud when the family is gathered and decisions are to be made,
especially those that involve putting down money. The favorite son or
daughter, niece or nephew is not always the one who loves most but the
one who gives most compared to others and not in proportion to how much
they have either.

But the deep end of this is even worse. Some day, when hopefully we
will have climbed out of the quagmire into which we are sinking,
someone will offer up for symposium discussion their proposed
dissertation subject on the slippery slope that links the descent from
419 to technology-free kidnapping.

I
was driving from Washington to New York one afternoon on Interstate 95
when a car came zooming up behind me, really flying. I could see in the
rearview mirror that the driver was talking on her cell phone.

I was about to move to the centre lane to get out
of her way when she suddenly swerved into that lane herself to pass me
on the right – still chatting away. She continued moving dangerously
from one lane to another as she sped up the highway.

A few days later, I was talking to a guy who
commutes every day between New York and New Jersey. He props up his
laptop on the front seat so he can watch DVDs while he’s driving.

“I only do it in traffic,” he said. “It’s no big
deal.” Beyond the obvious safety issues, why does anyone want, or need,
to be talking constantly on the phone or watching movies (or texting)
while driving? I hate to sound so 20th century, but what’s wrong with
just listening to the radio? The blessed wonders of technology are
overwhelming us.

We don’t control them; they control us.

We’ve got cell phones and BlackBerrys and Kindles
and iPads, and we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and
Tweeting – I used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high
school kids who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village
idiot, that the correct term is Tweeting. Twittering, Tweeting –
whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder.

This is all part of what I think is one of the
weirder aspects of our culture: a heightened freneticism that seems to
demand that we be doing, at a minimum, two or three things every single
moment of every hour that we’re awake. Why is multitasking considered
an admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic
inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.

Why do we have to check our e-mail so many times a
day, or keep our ears constantly attached, as if with Krazy Glue, to
our cell phones?

When you watch the news on cable television, there
are often additional stories being scrolled across the bottom of the
screen, stock market results blinking on the right of the screen, and
promos for upcoming features on the left. These extras often block
significant parts of the main item we’re supposed to be watching.

A friend of mine told me about an engagement party
that she had attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and
plenty of champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cell phones on
the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire
event.

Enough already with this hyperactive behavior,
this techno-tyranny and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and
take a deep breath.

I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological
advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to
typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper
morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other
tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes.

Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and
spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems
of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that
surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and
that includes our own individual needs – those very special, mostly
nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives,
enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe
Turner’s Come and Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or
her, and that you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out
of touch with your song,

forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied.

As this character says, recalling a time when he
was out of touch with his own song, “Something wasn’t making my heart
smooth and easy.” I don’t think we can stay in touch with our song by
constantly Twittering or Tweeting, or thumbing out messages on our
BlackBerrys, or piling up virtual friends on Facebook.

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives.
We need to savor the trip. Leave the cell phone at home every once in
awhile. Try kissing more and Tweeting less. And stop talking so much. Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when
they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say
to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your
song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really
you.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

As the Holy Books direct we rejoice with those rejoicing. We
rejoice with the rank and file of Nigerian journalists on the July 18th release
of their four colleagues and their driver kidnapped a week earlier in Abia
State. We rejoice with the victims’ nuclear families that were spared the agony
of becoming widows and orphans.

We rejoice with President Goodluck Jonathan for seeing his
directive heeded that the journalists’ freedom be secured. We rejoice with
Police Inspector General Ogbonna Onovo that his ‘people’ have heeded his pleas
and allowed him to keep his job. We also rejoice with the five kidnapped men
for living to narrate their disorienting experience of being blindfolded daily
and moved constantly around, feeding on a monotonous diet of bread, insults and
threats.

As time begins the healing process their one week loss of
freedom in Abia’s rain forest leaves some telling lessons. These include the
awareness that freedom is sweet, journalism comes with privileges, governance
must connect with the people, and crime must be punished.

Since Monday, the media have been awash with images of relief
and joy on the faces of the victims and their families. These images contrast
the morose looks of the previous week when the media in a case of concerted interest
advertised the grief and sorrow of the victims’ families with compelling
visuals and reports that defined the coverage of the kidnap. The coverage was
so effective a visitor to Nigeria may be forgiven for thinking journalists were
the first set of people to be kidnapped in Nigeria. Some commentators have even
branded the coverage, abuse of access while others feared it could even
endanger the victims’ lives.

Thankfully, subsequent developments have not justified the
fears. On the charge of abused access, I think the journalists simply lived up
to their calling. Accounts of kidnaps have often been lacking in detail
principally because the victims and their families shy away from public
pronouncements beyond thanking heavenly forces for their release. Even when the
media suspect that ransom payments accounted for the rising cases of kidnap,
they could not say so categorically.

The kidnap this time thus afforded the media opportunity to
deepen kidnap reporting. Rather than chase scared, reluctant, and usually
anonymous victim-sources for the necessary leads to write informed articles,
the media found in the plight of their colleagues the occasion to humanise the
reports by conveying the enormity of the grief suffered by the victims’
families. By so doing, the media put faces and voices to the menace that
kidnapping causes.

They showed weeping wives, dishevelled relations, and troubled
citizens. For every report and image published on the plight of the journalists
the media spoke for those who have passed through similar situations, and those
who may well face such challenges. The media reports provoked active state
interest and intervention. The President challenged the police; the Police high
command relocated its operational headquarters to Abia, threatening fire and
brimstone. Abia State Governor Theodore Orji suddenly woke up to communal
relations, challenging the communities to give up the merchants of terror.

Rather than abused access, what the media demonstrated was
privileged access.

Traditionally, the media serve society as purveyors of
information, discussing the human condition, identifying heroes and villains,
the knowledgeable and the ignorant, the bold and the timid, the beautiful and
the ugly, the important and the trivial. Often, these accounts are about other
members of society as journalism training expects its disciples to report and
not make news. Occasionally, where its members’ direct experience will amplify
meaning, journalism permits the reporter to play the newsmaker.

In this instance, the kidnapped men were reluctant newsmakers,
their families, accidental headline grabbers. From their one-week detention, we
have learnt that the kidnappers are young men in their prime, who attribute
their new vocation to lack of jobs or business opportunities and an eagerness
to avoid the dimming of their future by visionless governance.

Since the kidnap of the journalists is just a chapter in the
larger story of insecurity of life and property, focus must return to what
still needs to be done to ensure security in our cities, towns and villages.
Good governance is not an option. It is the reason for being in office.
Governor Orji’s engagement with the communities must be sustained; people of
questionable characters must be probed, indicted citizens prosecuted fairly.

The virtues of consultation, cooperation and communication in
governance all over the country must be promoted; consultation on communal
needs and policy formulation, cooperation on executing public policies and
programmes and regular communication of prospects and problems must be
followed. Conditions for gainful employment must be created, diligence,
rewarded and indolence, punished.

Corruption must be curtailed. The police must be restructured
and better equipped for organisational efficiency.

Lastly, in this age of electronic money transfer, it is strange that our
journalists were moving around with millions in cash, reportedly snatched by
their abductors. It does little credit to our intelligence or to our
reputation.

Days ago, the president of the Air Transport
Services Senior Staff Association of Nigeria revealed an open secret:
Nigeria has been unable to achieve Category One status, which is a
higher level of air travel capacity that certifies our ability to fly
directly from Nigeria to the United States of America, hence saving
travellers the stress of flying from Nigeria to another country in
order to get a flight to America.

According to the union leader, this is as a result of “the high level of deficiencies” in the country’s aviation sector.

The Nigerian airline industry is severely
strained. Operators and regulators continue to dance around this
reality, but it is the fact. The woes of Virgin
Nigeria-turned-Nigerian-Eagle-turned-Air-Nigeria still got wide
attention, but they were only a tip of the iceberg. All our domestic
airlines are labouring -from Aero Contractors, to Bellview to
Chanchangi, they continue to complain about debts that choke operations.

For at least half a decade and three aviation
ministers in between the industry has been awaiting a N10billion
government bailout package.

On top of their indebtedness, and concerns about
safety airlines with IATA certification operate under the constant fear
of de-certification, and the uncertain business environment full of
other players champing at the bit to take over the industry.

“They are positioning Arik as a national carrier
but the truth of the matter is that Arik is not a national carrier,”
Benjamin Okewu, the union leader, said to the press for instance. “It
is a flag carrier and there is no way you can attain Category one
without having a national carrier and we have made it known to the
government. This is actually painful no matter how they look at it.”
Arik Air indeed has severally been referred to as the nation’s most
successful domestic airline, but further inspection reveals a different
story. A joint action of the NCAA and the Nigerian Airspace Management
Agency (NAMA), in June 2010, temporarily halted the operations of Arik
Air and IRS airlines over issues of non-remittance of charges.

The grounding of the two airlines by a task force
came as a result of monies owed over a long period. According to this
newspaper’s source, Arik Air was said to be indebted by almost N1.8
billion on the domestic routes, and about $126,000 on the international
route. Airlines are supposed to statutorily deduct five percent of
ticket fees for remittance to agencies.

Apart from Arik, 17 other carriers were said to be
owing up to N5 billion, being accumulated ticket sales charges
collected from passengers but not remitted to the agencies Aero was
said to owe almost a billion naira and Bellview, almost N300 million.

The bottom-line is that we are fiddling while Rome
burns. Our government and corporate players are playing games with the
aviation sector. Instead of taking the time to do things right we keep
looking for shortcuts.

The problems are plenty. There are the
longstanding allegations of corruption in the Federal Airports
Authority of Nigeria, unlawful interference by the current minister of
aviation on behalf of erring airlines, proper and thorough
certification by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority amongst others.
The lack of professionalism in our system showed itself in the fact
that the NCAA obviously failed to carry out a thorough certification of
airlines in the country before it invited officials from the
International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and the United State
Federal Aviation Authority (US FAA) to Nigeria last week to examine the
issue of Category One Status.

Then there are smaller issues. Why has the airport
authority refused to install airfield lighting at the 18L (18left)
runway of MMA for over three years? Why is its payroll bloated with
consultants? Why are airlines still unable to break even, barely
struggling to survive despite persistent increase in charges?

Some solutions have been proffered.

The ‘Presidential sub-committee on solutions to
challenges facing the airline industry in Nigeria’ examined 10 critical
areas of the sector – high operating cost, aviation fuel,
infrastructure at the airports and air space, multiple tariffs and
charges, training and Central Bank of Nigeria Forex policy – and warned
of consequences should the government ignore its report.

The report included advice that the government
should provide “scheduled domestic airlines special airline financing
assistance in form of long term soft loans from under the Nigeria
Airline Industry Review Action-Fund recommended to be established by
the Federal Government with Nigerian banks.” The imperative of this is
clear. A viable airline industry will boost economic activities in
Nigeria but when the ‘Giant of Africa’ is unable to provide effective
and safe airline services, and continues to have severe structural
challenge within its financial service industry this is not likely to
happen.

Let’s stop deceiving ourselves. The nation cannot afford another series of air crashes. 2005 was only five years ago.

A calamitous
national occurence was casually under-reported as a human interest or
crime story by some newspapers last week. It should have been the stuff
of screaming headlines and angry, editorials Fifty year-old Shuaibu
Atanda is a father of six hired by the Lagos University Teaching
Hospital to evacuate the bodies of dead babies on a contractual basis.
He was arrested on July 3 in the outskirts of Lagos with five
Ghana-must-go bags containing the corpses of 76 dead babies he was
contracted to bury at Atan Cemetery. Here are the gruesome details from
the proverbial horse’s mouth:

“I am a private
contractor with LUTH and I have been helping the department of Morbid
Anatomy to clear unclaimed babies corpses for the past two years. The
corpses the police found with me are corpses for the months of March
and April – 40 corpses for March and 36 corpses for April. I was
supposed to bury the corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba but I was
financially down because I have used almost all the money I requested
from the hospital to bribe the people working at the Morbid and Anatomy
Department.

“I also bribed
people at the account department. I gave one Mr Abraham Ekohmi, the
unit head of the Morbid Department, N50,000; I gave one Mr Everest,
40,000 and two staff of the accounts department 10,000 each, so that I
can continue with my job. The money I charged the hospital for my
service is N185,000 and it was Mr. Ekhomi that inflated it to that
amount. After settling all of them, I was left with nothing to bury the
corpses at the Atan Cemetery at Yaba, because they were demanding
N90,000 for each month from me before they will collect the corpses.
Since I did not have the N90,000, I decided to help myself by taking
the corpses to a bush at Agbowa to bury them. It was because I have to
bribe my way that was why I could not afford the cemetery fees.” It is
tragic that this story had zero shelf life in our newspapers.

Subscribers to the
various – and increasingly visible Nigerian Internet listservs such as
Naijapolitics, Talknigeria, NIDOA, and Nigerianworldforum – even tried,
as we say in Naija-speak. Because most of them are based in
Euro-America and are part of the social regimes of national shock and
outrage that would have greeted the idea of seventy-six dead babies
discovered in bags in Britain, Canada, or the USA, they screamed for
about two or three days before that thread was forgotten. However, some
of the commentators went the predictable way of a knee-jerk
condemnation of Mr. Shuaibu Atanda. As far as I know, only Mr.
Ibukunolu Alao Babajide, an Arusha-based lawyer and a prominent member
of the Nigerian Internet community, offered reassuring perspectives on
the broader national and systemic implications of the tragedy.

Mr. Shuaibu Atanda
is one of those honest and hard working Nigerians who should be on the
national honours list as opposed to the extant culture of crowding the
worthless list with scurrilous members of the political status quo
whose only qualification for national honours is the fact that they
have been able to steal a couple of billions from the Nigerian people.
Mr. Atanda belongs in the class of those little dispossessed people who
not only bear the brunt of the visionlessness of the morons in the
rulership in Abuja but who also have to clean up after them.

When you turn your
University teaching hospitals to baby death factories (LUTH even has to
hire private contractors to evacuate the tons of dead babies they
manufacture!); when whatever is left of structure has, in turn, been so
corroded by corruption that even the roadside contractor hired to do
the job is unable to afford regular cemetery fees, why arrest and
criminalise him for taking the initiative to bury the bodies somewhere
else in the oustskirts of Lagos? None of the reports – including police
accounts – has indicated so far that he was doing anything untoward
with the bodies at the time of arrest.

The dead babies,
LUTH, and Mr. Shuaibu Atanda are all victims of the criminals in our
rulership. They should be held squarely responsible for the bigger
picture. It is infuriating to note that the same criminals who cannot
provide health care of Burkina Faso standards to Nigerians are the ones
now planning to steal N6.5 billion in the name of their yeye
independence anniversary later this year.

Shock is dead in
Nigeria. If Nigerians at home have lost the capacity to be shocked, as
the fact that the idea of seventy-six dead babies in Ghana-must-go bags
only registered as an imperceptible blip in national discourse,
shouldn’t our obtuse rulers at least pretend that they still care?

What, in the name of God, are Ken Wiwa, Oronto Douglas, and Ima
Niboro doing in Aso Rock? These are gentlemen who ought to know how
these things are done. These are gentlemen who ought to be able to tell
Oga Jonathan that when 76 Nigerian babies are found in Ghana-must-go
bags, there must be a comforting statement from the presidency. As for
Dimeji Bankole and David Mark, well, they were partying in Lucky
Igbinedion’s mansion in South Africa. Seventy-six dead Nigerian babies
aren’t enough to make them interrupt their faaji and rush to Abuja to
call for special hearings! Na so we see am.

In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at
Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience
hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as
good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and
racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard – and by extension, the entire
American elite – of discriminating against white Christians.

A decade later, the note of white grievance that
Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody.

You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack
Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in
“reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia
Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a
white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice
Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party
accused of voter intimidation.

To liberals, these grievances seem at once
noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they
often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s
present polarisation, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas
Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of
admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities.
Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black
and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT
scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last
week on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most
disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the
private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s
socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For
whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was
three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar
qualifications.

This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote,
Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their
mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for
students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,”
leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well.
Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular
activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a
leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school ROTC, 4-H
clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline
against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right wing or “Red
America.”

This provides statistical confirmation for what
alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented
groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class
whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and
regions.

Inevitably, the same under representation
persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and
philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites
alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican
constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially
tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited – that Barack
Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a
Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants,
and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile,
the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of
wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals
fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties,
they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

This cultural divide has been widening for years,
and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem
admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when
they’re assembling their freshman classes.

If such universities are trying to create an
elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s
more to diversity than skin color – and that both their school and their
country might be better off if they admitted a few more ROTC (Reserve Officer
Training Corps) cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.

© 2010 New
York Times News Service