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Together with our
NATO allies and coalition partners, the United States, France and
Britain have been united from the start in responding to the crisis in
Libya, and we are united on what needs to happen in order to end it.

Even as we
continue our military operations today to protect civilians in Libya, we
are determined to look to the future. We are convinced that better
times lie ahead for the people of Libya, and a pathway can be forged to
achieve just that.

We must never
forget the reasons why the international community was obliged to act in
the first place. As Libya descended into chaos with Col. Muammar
Gaddafi attacking his own people, the Arab League called for action. The
Libyan opposition called for help. And the people of Libya looked to
the world in their hour of need. In an historic resolution, the United
Nations Security Council authorized all necessary measures to protect
the people of Libya from the attacks upon them. By responding
immediately, our countries, together with an international coalition,
halted the advance of Gaddafi’s forces and prevented the bloodbath that
he had promised to inflict upon the citizens of the besieged city of
Benghazi.

Tens of thousands
of lives have been protected. But the people of Libya are still
suffering terrible horrors at Gaddafi’s hands each and every day. His
rockets and shells rained down on defenceless civilians in Ajdabiya. The
city of Misurata is enduring a medieval siege, as Gaddafi tries to
strangle its population into submission. The evidence of disappearances
and abuses grows daily.

Our duty and our
mandate under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect
civilians, and we are doing that. It is not to remove Gaddafi by force.
But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi in
power. The International Criminal Court is rightly investigating the
crimes committed against civilians and the grievous violations of
international law. It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to
massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. The
brave citizens of those towns that have held out against forces that
have been mercilessly targeting them would face a fearful vengeance if
the world accepted such an arrangement. It would be an unconscionable
betrayal.

Furthermore, it
would condemn Libya to being not only a pariah state, but a failed state
too. Gaddafi has promised to carry out terrorist attacks against
civilian ships and airliners. And because he has lost the consent of his
people any deal that leaves him in power would lead to further chaos
and lawlessness. We know from bitter experience what that would mean.
Neither Europe, the region, or the world can afford a new safe haven for
extremists.

There is a pathway
to peace that promises new hope for the people of Libya – a future
without Gaddafi that preserves Libya’s integrity and sovereignty, and
restores her economy and the prosperity and security of her people. This
needs to begin with a genuine end to violence, marked by deeds not
words. The regime has to pull back from the cities it is besieging,
including Ajdabiya, Misurata and Zintan, and return to their barracks.
However, so long as Gaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its
operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the
regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an
inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new
generation of leaders. In order for that transition to succeed, Gaddafi
must go and go for good. At that point, the United Nations and its
members should help the Libyan people as they rebuild where Gaddafi has
destroyed – to repair homes and hospitals, to restore basic utilities,
and to assist Libyans as they develop the institutions to underpin a
prosperous and open society.

This vision for
the future of Libya has the support of a broad coalition of countries,
including many from the Arab world. These countries came together in
London on March 29 and founded a Contact Group which met this week in
Doha to support a solution to the crisis that respects the will of the
Libyan people.

Today, NATO and
our partners are acting in the name of the United Nations with an
unprecedented international legal mandate. But it will be the people of
Libya, not the U.N., who choose their new constitution, elect their new
leaders, and write the next chapter in their history.

Britain, France
and the United States will not rest until the United Nations Security
Council resolutions have been implemented and the Libyan people can
choose their own future.

(Barack Obama is
the 44th president of the United States. David Cameron is prime minister
of Britain and Nicolas Sarkozy is president of France.)

New York Times

It is very
disappointing that we still have not found a way to organise elections
without too much drama. The South Africans do it year after year, like
changing tires. The Senegalese do it. And so do the Ghanaians and the
Beninois. And the Costa Ricans and Indians, for that matter. It is worse
than disappointing that aggrieved citizens took the law into their own
hands in several parts of the north of our country on Monday. It is
positively alarming.

As daylight struck
Kano, Kaduna, Gombe, Adamawa, Sokoto and other parts, so did gangs of
disaffected citizens, who decided to vent their frustration at the
defeat of their preferred presidential candidate in last weekend’s
election, Muhammadu Buhari, by targeting the homes and palaces of
suspected “collaborators” for razing. A few people were killed. The
streets were thick with smoke from burning tires, and curfews have now
been imposed on large swaths of the country.

Final results
released by INEC showed that Goodluck Jonathan, who was seeking to
escape the shadows of his predecessor and be elected to high office on
his own steam, avoided a runoff by winning 25 percent of the votes in 31
states. Quite clearly, many citizens have concluded that the margin of
victory – if not the victory itself – is suspiciously overwhelming. As a
result, they started lashing out at many symbols of authority, be it
the homes of prominent businessmen, police stations or, most alarmingly,
even the palaces of emirs and other traditional rulers. If not handled
with care and despatch, this violent rampage may threaten the political
system and the social cohesion of the nation as a whole.

The northern part
of the country has been seething for a while. The region has felt
abandoned for much of the 12 years of PDP rule, even when a northerner,
Umaru Yar’Adua, paralysed by illness, was at the helm for about 30
months. The brief economic boom of the mid-2000s almost completely
passed the north by. The region has the worst unemployment, the most
grinding poverty, the poorest education, and the shortest life
expectancy of any region of Nigeria. So stark and repulsive is the
poverty, and so thoroughly alienated have the people become, that even
this contested election can be seen as little more than an outlet for
the expression of deep-seated grievances.

As the south
experienced the bounce from the telecoms boom, privatisation, and the
explosion of capital accumulation from the banking sector reform, much
of the north watched from the sidelines. Local elites were, of course,
well taken care of by the gushers of cash from Abuja. But the tide
receded for ordinary citizens, who lost faith in their conventional
leadership and sought solace with extremist groups such as Boko Haram,
and priests with an apocalyptic view of the world gained footing amidst
the misery.

The collapse of
traditional and other formal authority in the north was fully manifested
in Monday’s violent convulsion. Gangs of youth were targeting emirs’
palaces for destruction. They were torching the homes of prominent
politicians and businessmen. Even the Sultan of Sokoto was reportedly
pelted with sachets of “pure water”. The old order crumbles and there’s
nothing, yet, to replace it.

So where do we go
from here? The first step, it seems to us, is that President Jonathan
and his court must avoid any hint of triumphalism, plus the president
should immediately address the nation to call for calm. He should tell
the people that he will use all the powers of government to ensure that
legitimate grievances are addressed speedily and comprehensively.

It would also be
useful for the president to signal to our northern citizens that he
understands their profound sense of alienation, and that it will be his
continuing duty as the president, now and in the future, to take urgent
steps to assuage those feelings.

Second, we call on
Mr. Buhari to continue to demonstrate his love of country by publicly
remonstrating with his inflamed supporters to stop the violence and
allow a peaceful resolution of this political conflict. Mr. Buhari had
earlier stated that he would have nothing to say until INEC has formally
declared the final results. In that case, silence was not golden, and
was clearly taken by his supporters as acquiescence. We cannot blame
Mr. Buhari for the violent outbreak. But we can ask him to continue to
demonstrate leadership by taking urgent steps to calm the roiling waters
and prevent his country from tipping over the edge. We note that he, as
well as his party, the CPC, have issued statements calling for calm.
This is necessary but insufficient.

Finally, we ask
the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, to make clear to the public that the
commission is taking every due care, as normal, to assure the integrity
of the election, including internal audits, where deemed necessary.

Our country labours under the dead weight of a self-destructive
political class. It is our common duty to ensure that they don’t bring
the house down on all of our heads.

Nuhu Ribadu, the
presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), was
reported last week by NEXT to have said: “They have damaged my
candidacy”. He was, among other things, speaking from the pit of his
despair as he imagined that, given his handling of the coalition talks,
some of his followers could have started feeling that he was not the
messiah they had been expecting. Mr Ribadu’s candidacy and indeed his
political career have been dented. But does Mr Ribadu’s expression of
despair suggest that he is looking for repair through a helpful
discourse strategy?

In his rhetoric of
blame, Mr Ribadu does things with pronouns, holding others responsible
for the perceived damage, probably hoping that he could, in the process,
begin to repair the perceived damage. His use of the third person
pronoun “they” in his statement quoted by NEXT suggests avoiding being
specific on those responsible for this damage. Does that translate to
being very clever and cautious? At first consideration, yes, but that
manner of blaming could also backfire.

The pronoun “they”
is exophoric and vague in Ribadu’s assertion cited above: it points
outside the text of his proclamation, unlike its endophoric use which
points to a specific antecedent in the same or preceding statement.
Grammarians tell us that pronouns are deictic elements (and deixis are
those linguistic elements that point to aspects of situation – entities,
time setting, and space – in a discourse). Discourse analysts also take
the significance of pronouns further and draw our attention to the fact
that people use these elements in their encoding of power, negotiations
of solidarity, as well as practices of exclusion and assimilation. The
bad news is that segments of the public that are addressed may not be
aware of the politics that political public speakers sometimes play with
pronouns. Who says that the linguistic side of political education is
not what a politician could be uncomfortable with, given the fact that
it exposes rather than conceals?

The plural third
person pronoun ‘they’ not only suggests that the destroyers of Ribadu’s
candidacy are legion, but also implies a Them-versus-Us imagination
associated with Homo hostilis, the enemy-making mammal. The Homo
hostilis does not take blame or responsibility for the consequences of
its actions. No; it is the bad guys (who are on the other side) that are
responsible for the misfortune. The Homo hostilis is a saint and, in
Ribadu’s travails, has no hand in the damaging of his own political
ambition. So, we are invited to sympathise with this victim who is a
good guy. If we don’t, we become bad guys automatically, and join in the
damaging job.

Of course, in some
cultural contexts in Nigeria, individuals could sometimes reinvent the
pronoun ‘they’ as a device for suggesting politeness in discourse when
the referent is a singular individual that possesses a higher social
status, something similar to the French use of “vous” in encoding
respect for a singular addressee. The pronoun thus might be used as a
way of avoiding being specific in making reference. In other words, one
simply attributes the action or experience to a vague ‘they’ when one is
afraid or cannot defend an attribution to a specific agency.

I am inclined to
look beyond Ribadu’s rhetoric of blame, which the proclamation “They
have damaged my candidacy” entails, to identify him as the one to be
blamed for allowing himself to be outsmarted by lobbyists of the
coalition arrangement. Someone like him who wishes to rule Nigeria
should know that he is entering into an arena where motives do not have
to be placed like cards on the negotiation table. It would be an
exhibition of naivety for Ribadu to be in the midst of political wolves
and be talking of “selflessness” and “truth”. Those words, even if they
are still in the dictionary of modern politics, are only used in this
“new” context in which Ribadu is featuring in totally different senses.
Our presidential candidate needs to know that when his fellow Nigerian
politicians say “come”, he should prepare to take to his heels! If he is
telling us that “they” have damaged his political ambition, then he is
confessing that he is simply immature and needs to take some lessons
from veterans. Ribadu needs to put idealism aside and become a better
fox if he wants to rule Nigeria.

Indeed, by putting the blame on others, he continues the damage to
both his ethos (character) and to his ability to manage how he cognises
and speaks about relationships in political transactions. Nigeria’s
journey to genuine democracy is implicitly a school where Nigerian
politicians can learn how to speak and act in the presence of others,
and about others. It invites them to grow in and with the process.

One of the biggest
pet peeves that I have with responses to requests or questions in the
Nigerian context, as is the case in many developing countries, are the
phrases – “By God’s grace,” or “If God wills.” For example: “By God’s
grace, good leaders will be elected during our elections,” or “If God
wills, the dress will be ready on Wednesday,” or “By God’s grace, the
university will reopen in June,” or “If God wills, the flight will
depart on schedule.” I could go on and on.

I am a big believer
in the grace and power of God and I have seen it manifest in my life
time and time again. I also recognise the myriad challenges and risks of
operating in our country, where every day is an adventure and there are
no guarantees about what one can experience when they step out of their
house on a daily basis. However, I also recognise that God has given us
the grace to achieve results, and that His will for us is that we
deliver on the commitments that we have made to people. Too often, we
hide behind these phrases to excuse us from taking responsibility for
our own actions or from getting angry enough when others use them to
make excuses for their inability to deliver.

Somehow, by using
these phrases, we basically shift the responsibilities and
accountability of our actions or inactions to God, who has given us more
than enough to work with. For example, as humans, we have the ability
to plan events, manage our time effectively, and to understand how to
prioritise tasks. We also have the ability to plan for uncertainties and
to develop ‘Plan B’ strategies or hedge our risks, in order to minimise
the cost of uncertainties. Clearly, because of our ability to transfer
most of the responsibility to God, we get a little lazy about fulfilling
our end of the bargain.

In an effort to
institute systems and structures within AACE Foods, our start-up
agribusiness, I introduced penalties for late deliveries on projects.
For example, we hired a carpenter to build lockers for the staff. During
the negotiations process, we asked him to indicate when he would be
able to deliver the lockers. He picked a date two weeks after the
start-date, and used the same phrase – “By God’s grace, I will deliver
the lockers by January 8.” We explained the penalty system to him – that
he would be charged 5 per cent of the balance on the payment for every
late day. We asked him, once again, if January 8 was still reasonable or
whether he would like to change the date to the 10th or even the 14th.
He repeatedly stated that the 8th was more than enough time and
proceeded to sign the contract stating that he understood the terms and
would deliver.

You can guess the
outcome of the story. On January 5, we called the carpenter and he said
that the wood for the lockers was still drying, but that “if God wills”,
he would still deliver the lockers on the 8th. On the 8th, we called
again, and he told us that he was on his way. We waited, and waited. He
eventually delivered the lockers on the 15th and was extremely upset
that we chose to penalise him for the late delivery.

While one might
argue that we were unfair to the carpenter who could have faced some
uncertainties which compelled him to miss the deadline, the reality is
that he needed to take full responsibility for his actions, and deliver
on his commitments or face the consequences.

Too often, we make
excuses for ourselves and others – “there must have been some serious
traffic, the downpour was unexpected, an okada hit the car, they took
the light and there is no diesel”, etc, etc. In our context, sometimes
these excuses sound as silly as “the dog ate my homework”. The reality
is that as unpredictable as many of these occurrences appear to be, they
are more of our everyday realities and we have to plan for them. Even
more important is the fact that one missed deadline or an inability to
deliver in one area affects a range of other activities, which will
invariably escalate the challenges that we all face.

And if for some
‘real’ reason, we cannot deliver, at least call to explain, instead of
waiting for the customer, client or friend to be the one to call to find
out why the lapse occurred.

God has truly
blessed Nigeria, and Nigerians. It is time we stop passing or sharing
the responsibilities of our actions or inactions with Him – and start
doing our part.

It is hardly a new
thing to hear of men who assault their wives. After years of advocacy
and encouraging women who have been domestically abused to speak out,
their plight is hardly unknown to the world. But an interesting
phenomenon is emerging. The tables appear to be getting turned. We are
now hearing more about women who beat up their husbands.

We seem to be
oblivious to this fact because the shame and ego-bashing attached to
the idea of a wife (woman) beating her husband (man) will not allow or
encourage some men to report such abuse. The notion that men are
victims of domestic violence can be unimaginable to the extent that
some men would rather not report.

The impact of
domestic abuse is less apparent when it is men who are at the receiving
end than women. For instance, when a married man is seen with bruises
or burns or any sort of injury, it is always assumed that he got it in
a bar fight or domestic accident. No one ever thinks his wife might
have given him that black eye as is the case of women with bruises.

There was a report
on 234next.com website about a 75-year-old man, Fatai Bakare, who
appealed to an Ikeja High Court to save his life from his wife. He
wanted his 18-year-old marriage dissolved on grounds of domestic
violence and “wickedness”.

Mr. Bakare alleged
that his 55-year-old wife was very violent and would beat him up at the
slightest excuse. He said he was scared for his life since he was an
old man.

When one reads or
listens to stories like that, the image of a giant woman pounding a
small man comes to mind. “Just how huge must this woman be to
successfully beat up her husband?” many of us would wonder.

On March 1, 1999,
The Oprah Winfrey Show aired a show on wives who beat their husbands.
On that episode, it was ascertained that while men beat their wives to
shut them up, women beat their husbands to make them listen. Some
abused men who spoke at the show said the reason they did not speak up
was because they felt they were supposed to take it like a man. So like
women who have been physically abused by their husbands, they usually
cover up for their wives when people ask them about a bruise or injury.

Gone are the days
when women were referred to as the weaker sex. Most women now want to
take up the mantle of leadership in every sphere of their lives,
including their homes. Some do that in the most derogatory ways as they
abuse their husbands both physically and verbally. In a way, what women
do not consider domestic abuse almost always comes across to their
husbands as abuse.

Domestic violence
to both men and women involves physical acts like beating, shoving,
hitting, kicking but domestic violence can also be emotional or mental.
Unkind and cruel words hurt and linger longer in different ways for
different people. According to an expert, men hurt more from emotional
abuse than physical abuse.

Many women no
longer find sitting at home to bear children and tending the home
comfortable. Most have taken charge to the sad point of flexing muscles
with their husbands. They have forcefully pulled the pants from their
husband’s waists, replaced them with wrappers and amended the pants to
their own size.

Where women lack
physical strength, they make up with verbal power. Sometimes, you are
left aghast at the words some women use on their husbands.

How much more
abused do you expect a man whose wife calls a coward, impotent or lazy,
to be? Domestic violence in any form is bad and even more cringe-worthy
is the fact that more women seem to resolve to the act.

It is an evil that
needs to be flushed out because it ends up having an adverse effect on
the seeds of a marriage. The children grow up believing that a normal
home is one defined by a feisty and fire-spitting mother.

There is a dire need for domestic violence to be discouraged,
regardless of who is giving or receiving it, in order to breed saner
generations of men and women.