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I don’t know if irony is the right word, but it
does give me pause when I reflect on the fact that the male equivalent
of the pill that freed women from the fear of conception is a little
blue diamond shaped pill that prolongs men’s ability to seek
satisfaction in the act of conception. But just the other day, one half
of the duo that made it possible for couples to meet in the middle and
achieve that ultimate joy of union for most- the birth of a child – was
awarded the Nobel prize in medicine.

Robert G. Edwards, an Englishman with his compatriot, the late Patrick Steptoe, developed the procedure for helping infertile couples to
fulfill their hopes. Edwards is a physiologist now aged 85, who spent
years working on getting eggs and sperm to grow and unite outside the
body. The late Steptoe, who died in 1988, ten years after the first
successful test tube baby, was a gynaecologist who pioneered the
concept of laparoscopic surgery, the method by which eggs are extracted
from a womb.

The duo were a dogged and determined pair who
withstood ostracism, hostility, and denial of funds from the medical,
scientific, and religious establishment.

According to the UK Guardian, they were spurred
on, Edwards said in 2008, by their patients. “Nothing is more special
than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation
felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of
critics, but we fought like hell for our patients.”

Louise Brown, the daughter of Lesley and John
Brown, that lucky first couple was understandably excited and happy at
the news of the prize, but many of Edwards and Steptoe’s supporters
felt the Nobel Committee had been very tardy indeed in recognising this
achievement.

Steptoe is no more, and Edwards is too old to
grasp what has just happened to him. To date, 4 million people around
the world have been born through IVF and the procedure has led to the
development of new ways to treat forms of male infertility, a condition
that, to some Nigerians, does not exist.

Which brings us to the strongly held beliefs that
can make the pursuit of happiness so hard for some. The idea that a
person is incomplete without this or that can create a real blight on a
life that could, left alone, find other paths to fulfillment. You must
marry, you must have children, then you must have sons, because
daughters don’t mean as much…It is unending and sometimes it is
nonsensical.

Happily, even in Nigeria, some of that is giving
way to the recognition that there are alternatives, one of which is
providing a loving home to children in need through adoption, an act
that is a two fold gift of giving and receiving that keeps on growing.

Looking back though, there were days when almost every aspect of the act of conception was fraught with fear. Lack of the kind of medical
knowledge and the tools we have today meant that giving birth was a
risky process that could take you to the brink and beyond. If something
went wrong, there was little to choose from between the act of trying
to extract the child with the crude and rudimentary tools available and
saving the mother. Both usually died so that when child was
successfully delivered and the mother lived to share the joy, it was a
triumph of grace and providence.

“I have been and back’ is the chorus of one of the traditional songs announcing the birth of a child.

There was surviving childbirth and there was the
fear of conception, the strain of a child each year, the pressure of
more mouths to feed, the drudgery of a life of constant physical work
farming, childbirth, housework or in between some petty trading, just
to keep something coming.

For schoolgirls, it was a rocky terrain. Teenage
pregnancy meant the end of a chance at education and a career. And
then, with a working life, babies meant no career or one where
advancement was limited, especially if the babies kept coming. Those
were dark days of back street abortions of lives wasted in hidden fear
and misery.

The advent of the contraceptive pill changed all
that. One tiny little tablet freed women up to make choices and plan
their lives, to pursue pleasure without fear, to plan for the
responsibilities young men did not spare a thought about as they went
about sowing the wild oats society entitled them to.

Two inventions have made the pursuit of happiness possible in such fundamental ways

and yet, we still continue to perpetuate the same
problems. Teenage pregnancy is till an issue in many countries, despite
the availability of sex education, and free contraception. Ordinarily
it should be an anathema that HIV AIDS should still continue to spread
when the message of how it can be prevented is so basic and simple:
protect yourself always or abstain and you can live free of the virus.

It is a big puzzle how the human condition simply refuses to change.
Or maybe it is just that freedom without education, and that in its
truest sense, is as bad as no freedom at all.

The huge Nigerian,
and indeed African community in the United States engages in intense
and constant debate on a list serve run by Professor Toyin Falola –
SAAFRICADIALOGUE. In the run up to the 50th anniversary celebration of
Nigeria’s independence, the key issue of concern to the community was
fraud and the Emeagwali narratives. Anyone that has googled

Nigerian achievers
on the Internet would have come across the “great achievements” of one
Philip Emeagwali. The question posed was whether he is the greatest
Nigerian achiever in the contemporary world or a monumental fraudster?

In the numerous
citations about his so-called achievements, we read that he has a PhD
in scientific computing from the University of Michigan, that he is the
father of the Internet and the inventor of super computers.

He claims to have
invented 41 patented devices including a timing device, non-capsizable
container, sweepstake programmer, random unit generator amusement
device, and bidirectional monitoring and control system and so on. In
an interview by Susan Henderson for the book African-American
Inventors, Philip Emeagwali presented his achievements in the following
manner: “…Invented methods and procedures for making computers faster
and more powerful. These methods enabled me to perform the world’s
fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989 and
solve the largest weather forecasting equations with 128 million points
in 1990. Programmed a computer with 65,000 processors to outperform the
fastest supercomputer and thereby proving that it is best to use many
processors in designing supercomputers. Successfully implemented the
first petroleum reservoir model on a massively parallel computer in
1989. As a result, one in 10 parallel supercomputers is used to find
and recover additional oil and gas. Solved one of America’s 20 Grand
Challenges – accurately computing how oil flows underground and thereby
alerting the petroleum industry that massively parallel computers can
be used to recover more oil. Only 30 percent of the oil in a reservoir
can be recovered and this discovery will enable oil companies to
recover more oil. Invented a new approach of designing supercomputers
by observing and emulating patterns in nature. Formulated new
mathematical (partial differential) equations for slowly moving liquids
and gases such as the flow within the Earth’s interior.”

Under Olusegun
Obasanjo, the Nigerian Government invited and celebrated Philip
Emeagwali as one of our shining stars in the Diaspora. This was at a
time in which there were claims that the best Nigerian brains are
abroad and we should bring them back to develop our country. Those of
us in the country were considered failures that could not get positions
abroad.

The problem with
Philip is that the university has now revealed that he never completed
his doctorate degree and checks at the United States Patent and
Trademark office did not show up patents with the name Philip
Emeagwali. He has not published in any reputable peer reviewed journal.
The conclusion is that narratives about his achievements are a fraud.

The claims about
his achievements have however been cleverly spread in numerous web
sites, and today many curricula on African and Black achievements have
him as a star example. Black youth in Europe go around with his
photographs in their school bags determined to be as “great” as
Emeagwali when they grow up.

One of the most
poignant aspects of the saga is the manner in which Gloria Thomas
Emeagwali was dragged into the debate. Gloria is a top ranked professor
of history in the United States. She is a good friend of mine from our
days as junior lecturers in Ahmadu Bello University in the early 1980s.
At that time, she was recovering from a bitter divorce with a different
Emeagwali who had studied with her in Trinidad and Tobago, married her
and brought her to Nigeria where she suffered a lot of abuse. To her
shock, she found her photograph cut and pasted on Philip Emeagwali’s
web site with the fraudulent claim that she is his wife. She put a
disclaimer on her own web page and has sued him in court.

When she drew
attention to this in the on-going debate, many questioned her
sincerity. As one commentator put it “”Emeagwali” is not a common name,
like Okeke, Okafor or Ojo. We know not whether Gloria bears ANY past or
present relationship with Philip beyond a common last name.” The
suspicion was that she might be his estranged wife trying to get at
him, which is extremely unfair allegation for the Gloria I know. At
that point, the debate got dirty between so called Igbo bashers and
Igbo defenders derailing the core issue about fraudulent claims of this
man. The most painful issue of the debate is that Nigeria bashers in
the United States are now singing narratives about how most Nigerian
academics in the country are 419 scholars.

We have great Nigerian scholars at home and abroad. We also have
great fraudsters at home and abroad. Not all that is abroad is good.

It’s not surprising
that Chilean President Sebastían Piñera made sure that he was on hand
to welcome the first of the 33 miners who had been trapped at the San
Jose mine since the 5th of August, back to the world, or that he stayed
at the mine in the remote town of Copiapo which is over 700 km from his
working base in the capital, Santiago, throughout the entire day and a
half that the rescue operation took. The entire episode has been
tremendously positive for the image of Chile and the Chilean people.

Comparisons, though
perhaps odious, are inevitable, nor is it only in Nigeria that the
results are unflattering to the home team.

In Mexico they are
cracking sour jokes along the ‘if-the-miners-had-been-Mexicans’ line
(the tunnel would have come out in the United States of America).

In the United
States of America Barack Obama, with his frequent visits to Louisiana
and tough talk during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill never played a
fraction as well as his Chilean counterpart. Obama’s government was
content to leave the matter for BP to sort out until public opinion
forced a more proactive response. By contrast, even though it sought
and received advice and assistance from all over the world, Piñera’s
government was clearly in charge of the rescue effort from the outset.

Disasters, whether
natural or man-made, are an inevitable fact of our human lives on
mother earth, but government reactions vary. In Hungary for example,
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is fully alive to the toxic effect of
environmental disaster on political careers, is threatening “the
toughest possible consequences” for those responsible for the tide of
toxic red sludge that burst out of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant on the
7th of this month.

Here at home, the
disaster of the day has been floods from Sokoto in the north to Ogun
and Lagos in the south. President Goodluck Jonathan has made a point of
turning up in Sokoto along with relief materials for flood victims.
There has been none of that “I don’t need to be here” arrogance with
which former President Olusegun Obasanjo rebuffed displaced Lagosians
during his visit to the site of the Ikeja Cantonment explosions in
January 2002: Jonathan is running for election as President and needs
not only to counter the ‘Ijaw mafia’ tone that keeps leaking out from
those around him, but also to highlight the contrast between himself as
the father of the entire nation and the parochial and sectional
presentation of the ‘Gang of Four’ northern Peoples Democratic Party
candidates: Atiku Abubakar, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and Bukola
Saraki.

But although it’s
not only in Chile that mining activity carries risks, or in Hungary
that industrial processes have deadly side effects, apparently it’s not
all disasters that a presidential candidate wants to be associated
with. That might explain why it has been left to the United Nations to
raise the alarm about the lead poisoning deaths of over 400 children in
Zamfara State, where alluvial gold mining is taking place in lead
contaminated areas. In that tragedy there is nothing to ‘fly in to’ –
just another mark of the failure of the Nigerian state at the basic,
boring, regulation of potentially dangerous industries.

When ‘rich alhajis’
are reaping while ‘poor mallams’ risk their health to mine the gold,
perhaps making too much noise would risk stepping on political toes in
an area where those running for office need local friends and
supporters. The thread of lax government oversight runs through many of
the recent man-made disasters: the oil industry in the US was obviously
getting away with the sort of grossly negligent attitude towards
compliance with safety standards for which it is famous (and
unsanctioned) in Nigeria, and the same might be said of Chilean mine
owners and Hungarian aluminium producers. But in those countries
governments have been loud in their promises of future stringent
regulation. Here, it may not be clear to informal miners in Zamfara
State that their governments even care that there is a problem!

Like the people of
Nigeria, Chileans have had their time under the military jackboot,
ushered in on their own “9/11” when the democratically elected
government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in by Augusto Pinochet in
a 1973 coup supported by the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency. But
while for us, military dictatorship only set the country back and
hindered our progress in every way, Chile has at least emerged with
something to show for the years of human rights abuse and harsh
measures advocated by Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys”. Despite the resulting
slump in wages and high unemployment, Chile achieved such sustained
economic growth that today it is considered a ‘middle income’ country.
The miners and people of Chile deserve their accolades. It used to be a
standard joke in media circles that the dullest newspaper headline ever
written was: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Times change. The 2010 version is: “Mine roof collapse in Chile.
None dead.” It’s a headline that brought the whole world to a halt with
tears of joy.

American officials
used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell
them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial
crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied
moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the U.S. Treasury
secretary, declared that the keys to voiding financial crisis were
“well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective orporate governance
and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of ontract enforcement.” By
implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn’t. The
accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of
effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks
were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now
the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective
contract enforcement – in fact, the question is whether our economy is
governed by any kind of rule of law.

The story so far:
An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an
epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on
mortgage payments. So servicers – the companies that collect payments
on behalf of mortgage owners – have been foreclosing on many mortgages,
seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes?

Horror stories
have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home
was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain
players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving
foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce
appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits
asserting that the papers are in order.

And these
affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level
employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth
is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist.
In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by
fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible.
These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced
and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally
required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the
borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were
frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now
taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very
bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of
borrowers are being defrauded – charged fees they don’t actually owe,
declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they
aren’t.

Beyond that, if
trusts can’t produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against
which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will
face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims – claims that are
now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these
sponsors? Major financial institutions – the same institutions
supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage
mess threatens to produce another financial crisis.

What can be done?
True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose
any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on
foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is
asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act.
That’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from
the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying
low, but conservative commentators like those at the Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper
documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank
says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this
evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted,
knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I
suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be
happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal
morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has
proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s
the government’s job to create them. That won’t be easy, but there are
good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has
proposed giving mortgage counsellors and other public entities the
power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing
unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to
clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we’re doing now isn’t working. And pretending that things are OK won’t convince anyone.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

I had breakfast
with President Goodluck Jonathan on the 1st of October: No, not my
contrived one hour with the president a couple of months ago, and no;
it was not a private breakfast. It was in the company of many other
Nigerians invited to the occasion by the President and Commander in
Chief to mark Nigeria’s 50th Independence Anniversary.

Afterwards, we
moved to the venue of the president’s Independence Day speech,
broadcast live to the nation. After the speech, he interacted with us
before leaving for the Eagle Square. President Jonathan came across as
essentially decent, but I am dismayed by his cooks. Not Aso Villa’s
chefs but the political cooks stoking up the bonfire of his
presidential ambition.

President Jonathan,
like other people in power has many friends. And that, precisely is my
concern. It is not the number of friends, but their ulterior motives
and pedigrees that worry me. The president I sat with spoke to the
whole nation, but in the aftermath of the bomb blasts was saying “I am
from the Niger Delta…I know my people….” Is that to say that the
rest of us are not his people?

Nigeria is a
complex country. Managing the country requires composure, maturity and
tremendous self-restraint. My apprehension is that the many cooks in
the president’s kitchen (cabal once again?) have little appreciation of
the nuances needed to knead Nigeria. While it may be said that the late
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua assembled a highly provincial team from
Katsina State lacking a national outlook, President Jonathan on the
other hand has an outwardly national team without a nationalist
mind-set.

A look at some of the president’s major supporters may be worthwhile.

Vice President
Namadi Sambo was hardly a brilliant choice. That the Jonathan campaign
team had to deny reports insinuating that Sambo would not be the
president’s running mate speaks volumes. It is debatable if Sambo can
deliver Kaduna State to the ticket because he was forcefully imposed as
governor in 2007. Not much has changed.

Just when you think
things cannot get any worse…. This column gave Turai Yar’Adua
scorching criticism for what was perceived as undue influence in
matters of state. We now have a new benchmark. Mrs. Patience Jonathan
is not the wife of a local government chairman. So what business does
she have engaging in populist and ill-advised activity like sharing out
bags of rice to people? It is an indication of how bad things are in
Nigeria that three people reportedly lost their lives at the
scene…for a bag of rice.

Jonathan’s option
of director general of his presidential campaign team is another
curious decision. Senator Dalhatu Sarki Tafida, the septuagenarian High
Commissioner to the United Kingdom played a very prominent role in
former president Obasanjo’s life presidency bid. He was so unpopular at
the time that he dared not visit Zaria, his hometown without an escort
of mobile policemen.

Tafida was forced
out of the Senate and compensated with an ambassadorial posting. In
free and fair elections, it is inconceivable that he will win his ward.
Deep down in his heart, Tafida probably does not believe that President
Jonathan would win. It is difficult to see how this man will energise
and engage the critical base for the campaign team.

The speed with
which Mohammed Abba Aji transferred support from the Yar’Adua to the
Jonathan camp should have made the president suspicious. As Yar’Adua’s
link with the National Assembly, Aji botched communication between the
Presidency and the National Assembly. We still do not know if there
ever was a letter from Yar’Adua to the Senate. Unfortunately, this man
not only kept his job, but also has become an integral part of
Jonathan’s team. What is his strategic and political value? With his
fortunes tied to Jonathan remaining in office, can this man be trusted
to give logical, selfless counsel?

In the final
analysis, it is clear that the many cooks in the president’s kitchen
are folks who can only concoct political poison. Olusegun Obasanjo;
Jerry Gana; Ibrahim Mantu; Jonathan Zwingina; Samaila Sambawa; Edwin
Clark; Hassan Adamu; Shehu Malami; Solomon Lar; Barnabas Gemade;
Bamanga Tukur; Tony Anenih – from a progressive viewpoint, the list is
odious.

Most of these cooks are bitter old men who have nothing to
contribute to the Nigeria of our dreams. Others are failed politicians
and businessmen seeking to feather their nests. They have nothing to
lose. Their only hope for relevance is continuing to muddle the
political environment in Nigeria and thriving in the resulting chaos.
Too many cooks….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 New York Times News Service

If you are a
business owner in Nigeria and wondering why your profits are worse than
Nigerian stocks, do not go to any jazzman as they do in Nollywood
movies. You must also look beyond Facebook and Twitter, which are
gradually becoming the biggest anti-productivity drugs in the business
environment. Among the latest company to ban its workers from the use
of social networking sites, especially Facebook, is the luxury
automaker, Porsche because it poses a security threat to the company.
Whereas Facebook as a company has minted the freshest and youngest
among Forbes’ list of billionaires in the history of the United States,
the social network site has also cost countries like the United Kingdom
an estimated £14 billion in lost work time, because in that country
where things can be monitored and measured, 6% of its workforce spends
roughly one hour a day facebooking.

Well in my
wonderful country, we cannot really ascertain, even if we tried, the
amount of money employers of labour or Nigeria as a country are losing
because of Facebook in the workplace, reason being that we are trying
to count the number of hours we lose to our lawmakers who are
constantly arguing about how to loot the national coffers by
arbitrarily inflating their salaries and perks.

We have no problem
with social networking when compared to political networking especially
at this time when elections are around the corner. Britain would not
dare to publish its figures if they realised that what they lose to
social networking in the work place is moi-moi money compared to what
we Nigerians lose everyday to one bank MD networking with politicians.

This is not to say
we have no serious issues with Facebooking in Nigeria, just that ours
come in different colours. Facebook has allowed some of our leaders to
make us feel as if we are having a conversation with each other,
whereas you are probably instant messaging your cousin who is sitting
in a well furnished cyber café in Kubua or Yayan Karimu.

So when next you go
to your favourite politicians Facebook page and give him the thumbs up,
just remember you are hailing someone else, because I doubt if any of
the current presidential aspirants with Facebook pages who are busy
networking politically have time for virtual social networking.

Do not get me wrong
because there is much to be gained from Facebook for those that know
how to use it wisely and commercially, but for those that just want to
hang out there like Mami Market, it can be the most disastrous
adventure. Facebook is the biggest tatafo that was ever created. It’s
intended and unintended features can inflict untold pain and hardship
on users, so when next you see your friend’s profile message that reads
“Goodluck is Married to Patience”, just know that he is Facebooking
from the dog house and kindly give him the thumbs up, he will
appreciate you and laugh at your silly jokes when next you post them.

But this is not
where I am going this week; Facebook just sidetracked me, which is one
of its side effects. What I wanted to say earlier is that I think
Africa Magic, the DSTV channels that show Nollywood movies might be the
biggest bleeder of Nigeria businesses. Most homes and small businesses
in Nigeria have their TVs permanently on one version of Africa Magic or
the other.

Haven’t you been to
a hospital, while malaria is racking your bones, the nurse will be busy
chewing gum and waiting for Ramsey Noah to take off his shirt? Or have
you not had one of those experiences where you order rice, but the
waitress brings you an omelette because he or she was engrossed with
the pranksters, Aki and Pawpaw?

My latest
experience on the adverse effect of Africa Magic could be having on
Nigerian businesses was in my barber’s shop. There is a small notice by
his mirror that says a haircut with NEPA costs N200 but with his
I-better-Pass-My-Neighbour generator the price goes up to N300. On this
particular day, there was NEPA but he had his TV on Africa Magic.
Between running the clipper on my hair for two seconds and watching
Genevieve “romance” RMD for three minutes, NEPA took light, leaving me
with a temporary Mohawk, like one of those Benin chiefs during Igue
Festival. I sat livid while he was trying to start his small generator
that was leaking oil all over the environment.

All said and done I gave him N200 and told him I would not pay N300
because he had enough time to cut my hair before NEPA did what they do
best. We stood there looking at each other; he couldn’t believe his
eyes because I usually pay him more than N300 whenever I cut my hair,
but that day I just realised he did not know the difference between
production time and Africa Magic time. And Nigeria has more Africa
Magic addicts than Facebook addicts. When we compute what business lose
to AfricanMagic one day, the moment wont be magical..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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