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The
latest buzzword in the business world is CSR, CSR, and still more CSR.
This acronym stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. It’s the way
the titanic conglomerates, not so gigantic medium and small companies
try and ‘give back’ to the various communities that host them. They
want to improve the conditions of the location, or the people that
reside there. We could also say, that they want to make an impact or
impression on the environs, so that they will be known for doing good
and hopefully, will not be found wanting.

The projects for
giving back to these locales are as varied as the companies are
diverse. Companies in the manufacturing, food and beverage,
telecommunications, banking and financial services, pharmaceutical, the
health service, oil and gas (both upstream and downstream are not left
out!) and we also have faith-based organisations casting in their lot
as well. It must be noted that these players take their commitment
seriously and will go to varying lengths to announce the projects they
have endorsed, committed to implementing, commissioned and completed.

A full page
advertisement in the newspapers, notable mention and video clips of the
event on prominent television stations, are just a few of the ways that
they ensure that their corporate responsibility is heralded to the
world. This is not a bad thing and like all systems that work, it
should be a symbiotic relationship between the host community and
corporations that operate there.

When the business
entity made it’s advent into the community, it was announced one way or
the other, and as such when it decides to invest where it previously
had only a commercial interest it should also be trumpeted, because
this means that the relationship has evolved to the advantage of both
parties.

Education, health,
poverty alleviation, HIV/AIDS, youth empowerment, are just some of the
projects that are making their mark in various societies. Sometimes, a
combination of a few of the aforementioned is incorporated into a
project at different stages of its implementation. The youth, very
young children, women, men, and even the elderly are not left out of
the drive to improve the quality of life they presently enjoy.

A productive way is
found for the youth to utilise their time, immunisation and other
health care may be devised for the children and their mothers;
health-care management and provision of attendant services for the
elderly, destitute and widows. As stated earlier making a mark takes
different routes. In all the betterment of the society and the people
from which they benefit is the driving force of these corporate
citizens.

Self-enlightenment
or interest is the driving force behind these projects, after all, how
can you benefit from your operational environs when there’s
deterioration in these conditions. Ultimately, one or both of the
entities in the situation suffers and most likely may cease to exist in
their original form in that location. Thus, investing in communities
and people ensures the longevity of the companies and their structures,
whilst serving the community that accommodates them.

Although companies
have demonstrated their willingness to be accountable and
correspondingly dependable, they have also made themselves vulnerable
at the selfsame time. This is because with their investment in these
local communities, they have taken identified and acknowledged that
they will no longer be passive and content to watch things happen, but
will be involved in making them happen. It thus, behoves them to ensure
that the CSR projects that they commission and implement in different
locations, be sustainable.

Merely donating
expensive equipment, or building different infrastructures that cannot
be locally maintained by the materials sourced from that community or
its immediate environs should not be initiated at all. This means that
adequate research into what benefits can be derived from a particular
scheme and also how these benefits can be optimised should be of utmost
consideration when our able corporate citizens seek to demonstrate
their largesse once more, after all that is part of being a responsible
corporate entity in the society.

Before
Nigeria’s opening World Cup game against Argentina on Saturday, the
belief among many Nigerian football fans was that the Super Eagles
would be thoroughly shamed by their South American opponents.

A number of factors lent weight to this belief. In
the first place, the Argentines are blessed with some of the deadliest
strikers on the planet with the world’s best player, Lionel Messi, in
their fold.

Our fear of a bashing by the Argentines was
heightened by the shambolic preparations of the Eagles going into the
tournament. A new coach was appointed only late February, just three
months to the World Cup, and the Nigeria Football Federation organised
only three friendly matches in the last two weeks before the tournament
commenced.

So, Nigerians figured that with Messi, Carlos
Tevez, Gonzalo Higuain and Diego Milito, who between them tallied over
130 goals for their clubs in the just ended football season, our Eagles
didn’t have a prayer.

As it turned out on Saturday afternoon at the
Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg, Argentina only managed a slim
victory with defender Gabriel Heinze’s sixth minute goal making the
difference. It must be conceded however, that the 1-0 does not
accurately reflect the effort and determination of the Argentines.

Indeed, Messi was at his creative best, threading
passes and making dangerous runs into Nigeria’s goal area but was
thwarted again and again by the brilliance of Eagles goalkeeper,
Vincent Enyeama whose valiant efforts deservedly won him the ‘Man of
the match award’.

Our loss to Argentina has continued to generate
debate even as Nigeria’s next group match looms. In situating the loss,
some football pundits have queried Coach Lars Lagerback’s decision to
opt for a 4-4-2 formation, which they claim robbed the players of the
needed latitude to check Messi who repeatedly latched on to the ball
just in front of Nigeria’s last four. They argue that rather than
defend in two lines, which the 4-4-2 formation forced them to do,
Lagerback should have opted for a 4-3-3 formation, which would have
allowed the Eagles to threaten the Argentines whose right back appeared
flustered.

Added to the faulty formation was poor marking by
the Eagles, which provided Messi and his colleagues with acres of space
to explore time and again.

The perceived flaws notwithstanding, it must be
said that the Eagles did well given the circumstances. Under Lagerback
there has been greater discipline among the players as we have seen
from the last three friendly matches and the one against Argentina. The
Eagles are playing with a greater sense of urgency and commitment than
was the case in the past. There is also now a higher level of adherence
to tactics. One clear example is in the area of marking. It is to the
credit of our defenders that despite the intense pressure Messi and the
other Argentine forwards unleashed, they did not overreach themselves
and give away penalties.

All this is not to suggest however that there is
no room for improvement. Nigeria plays Greece on Thursday in an
encounter that is crucial to the quest of both teams to remain in the
tournament. The Greeks are certainly going to have a serious go at the
Eagles knowing that defeat at our hands means the end of the World Cup
for them. The Eagles need to be focused for this match. The
backslapping and chest thumping that followed their ‘survival’ of
Argentina should give way to maximum concentration and determination to
pick the three points on offer in this match. Nigerians expect nothing
less.

As
many cheeseburger-loving Americans long feared, soccer has finally
driven the world stark raving mad. Wanting to create an international
buzz in the worst way, the World Cup unleashed something called the
vuvuzela on an unsuspecting planet. Ears bleed from Amsterdam to
Alabama.

And the world screams back: Hey, put a sock in it!
The vuvuzela looks like a harmless plastic trumpet. A mere toy, at
first glance. But more than 500,000 vuvuzelas have descended upon South
Africa, and faster than you can say “Didier Drogba,” tournament
organisers have a plague of white noise that disrupts every game and
disturbs every telecast.

“It’s almost as if South Africa has been invaded
by a million bees,” TV play-by-play announcer Ian Darke bellowed
Sunday. The audio feed sounded as if ESPN was broadcasting from the
dark side of Mars, with the action on the pitch drowned out by the
unrelenting din of vuvuzelas, which can generate a mind-splitting 125
decibels.

For folks who don’t speak the language of soccer,
the buzz is pronounced: voo-voo-ZAY-la. It is sold as a musical
instrument of mass destruction. The vuvuzela poses the greatest threat
to permanent hearing loss at a stadium since Roseanne Barr received a
lifetime ban from singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” These garishly
hued plastic horns cost 3 bucks, are as long as an elephant’s trunk and
threaten to swallow the biggest sporting event in the world.

“We have asked for no vuvuzelas during national
anthems or during stadium announcements,” Danny Jordaan told reporters
in South Africa, admitting his World Cup organising committee has
considered banning the trumpets. “I know it’s a difficult question.
We’re trying to manage it the best we can.” Where on earth did this
fascination for soccer fans blowing their horn begin?

While the exact origin of the word is clouded in
mystery, some intrepid etymologists have traced it to Zulu and believe
when loosely translated, vuvuzela means: Bored to deaf.

At risk of revocation of my natural-born right as
a U.S. citizen to supersize my meals at Mickey D’s, let me confess to
be one American who truly, deeply and passionately loves soccer.

The 1-nil scores don’t upset me. I even kind of
dig the wacko tradition of hooligans trying to burn down bleachers with
flare guns in celebration of a goal. The vuvuzela, however, is turning
a beautiful game into nails on the chalkboard.

This is not to say American ingenuity is without
guilt when devising mindless ways to make a racket inside an athletic
venue. So we will take the rap for the cowbell, the thunderstick and
the immortal wave, where everybody, including your Aunt Nancy, waits to
stand up and be identified as over served.

But as we watched Team USA tie grumpy old England
1-1 on TV, how many millions of Americans had the same immediate
reaction as cyclist Lance Armstrong?

“What is that horn going off in the stadium?”
Armstrong tweeted. After determining the source of the noise pollution,
he chirped, “No offense to the vuvuzela posse but, man, it’s a bit
much.” Aren’t soccer crowds supposed to sing? As rock stars from Paul
Simon to Bono can attest, no continent can lift up its voice in song
the way Africa can.

How hard could it be to set up collection bins
outside every World Cup venue? If Americans will dump bottles of cold
beer before entering an NFL game, then soccer fans can surely be
trained to surrender a vuvuzela at the gate.

Kill the buzz. Please.

For the love of Pele and everything soccer holds sacred, put an end to this endless torture of white noise.

Are we just being ugly Americans to complain? Hey,
don’t make us send Will Ferrell, the “Saturday Night Live” alum who
also played a soccer dad from Hades in the classic soccer movie
“Kicking & Screaming,” to Johannesburg to clean up this mess.

Because do you know the only stadium sound that could be possibly be more annoying than a vuvuzela?

More cowbell.

© The New York Times 2010

Something
happened to the discourse on bread in Nigeria when Auntie Dora, whom
you know as the “NAFDAC Woman,” tried to teach some bakers that what is
used in preserving a dead body should not be used in preserving a loaf
of bread meant for human consumption. Nigerian consumers of these
loaves were praying, “Give us this day our daily bread” but ironically
the bakers were answering their prayers with “well preserved” loaves of
“dread.” For them, the transformation of bread to dread was a special
work of scientific genius, with the consumer easily crossing the
threshold of life just as in the phonemic space of the word; a “b” that
looks backwards becomes a “d.” If “b” is for “birth” and “d” for death,
then a “b” that has looked back like Lot’s wife to become a “d” has
exhibited the highly appealing condition of life-after-life. Auntie
Dora did not like this tragic discourse and so quickly banned the
production and sale of bromated bread. But that was not the end of “our
daily dread.” It is one thing to deliver bread from bromate and other
poisons and another to protect it as it makes its journey from the
bakery to the dining table. One who observes the handling of loaves of
bread in our markets and streets would in fact wonder whether it would
not have been better for us to ask God to give us our daily “akpu” or
“eba” instead of the kind of loaves that would mean greater wahala for
the consumer.

OK, here is a
playback: a bread vendor is faithfully going round, with naked loaves
on her tray, thinking, perhaps, that a naked loaf is more tempting than
a dressed one. One loaf of bread in search of adventure would roll off
the tray and fall into the gutter. The bread vendor would not tolerate
that impudence: she would pick the disobedient loaf up and then flog it
with a piece of cloth, most probably the one she had made into a pad
and had been using in balancing the tray on her head. Then, when she
has executed the punishment, she would put back the loaf on the tray.
Much later, you could see her trying to impress her customers by using
a duster that wears a serious frown on its face to “clean” the loaves.
A clean loaf needs a massage, always. That, too, is an advertisement
strategy, for someone would see the “retouching” and develop an
appetite.

As I contemplate
turning a bread experience into a S(h)ibboleth essay, a taxi pulls up,
and I can see naked loaves of bread packed in the greasy luggage
carrier and even inside the passenger area of the vehicle. The local
vendors – mostly women – rush in to be the first to buy the naked
loaves. As they say in Igbo, “Anu bu uzo na-anu mmiri oma” (The animal
that reaches the water first takes a clean draught). The women struggle
for the naked loaves and the naked loaves struggle for space on the
trays, cartons, and sacks. Some loaves fall on the ground and are
picked up again and placed on the trays or in the cartons. And each
loaf picks the smell and stain of each space it occupies on its journey
to someone’s mouth.

Minutes later, Mama
Bread-and-Butter begins to make her round, with the loaves not dressed
in transparent cellophane. She stops as a customer beckons her. She has
an itching nostril, and so digs into each nostril with her finger in a
kind of practiced scrub. With the same hand she grabs a loaf and slices
it, then butters it and hands it over to a man waiting. The man takes a
bite and then pays. I am horrified and have to pray to God not to puke.
But within my heart, a heretic prayer is already forming: give us this
day our daily dread! Auntie Dora should hear this, I swear under my
breath. When next she comes, she should inspect the nostrils of Mama
Bread-and-Butter. Auntie Dora should also interview the loaves of bread
so that they could tell her how they make their journey from the bakery
to a man’s mouth, where and how they were dressed and undressed.

As I get ready to
go to church, I have to rehearse Our Lord’s Prayer properly, for if
care is not taken, I could start uttering, “Give us this day our daily
dread” when others are saying “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Someone would think I am devilishly trying to add some bromate into the
bread the Lord is baking for His people.