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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We
live in an age of unprecedented opportunities as well as challenges.
East Asia has experienced spectacular growth, with China recording
quantum leaps by way of an annualised average of 15 percent growth over
the last two decades. India and Brazil have joined the club of newly
prosperous nations as have Malaysia and Indonesia. The digital
revolution has made the world ‘flat’, as Thomas Friedman tells us,
while discoveries in genetics and biotechnology are opening new
prospects in medicine and food production. The search for renewable
energy sources is gathering new momentum.

The particle
accelerator Large Hadron Collider (LHC) developed by European
scientists at CERN in Geneva holds immense promise for cheap, renewable
energy.

The prospects of supersonic flight based on green energy seem closer than ever before.

But we also face
new dangers and vulnerabilities. Climate change is no longer the stuff
of science fiction. The warming-up of our biosphere is altering
rainfall patterns, speeding up desertification and engendering
devastating natural catastrophes. ‘Failed states’ such as Somalia and
DRC remain a challenge to global governance even as the scourge of
poverty continues to afflict a billion people on our planet; nor could
we ignore the challenge of new pandemics and viral diseases that
recognise no national borders.

We also live in a
cruel and divided world. What Harvard professor Joseph Nye terms the
‘clash of civilisations’ has become one of the defining elements of our
age. Formerly harmonious societies are reaching breaking point.

There is widespread alienation and crises of identity. We in Nigeria can no longer take our nationhood for granted.

We also face a
global financial crisis that is worse than anything that has been
witnessed since the Great Depression. Financial markets lost an
astonishing US$14 trillion – equivalent to the annual GDP of the United
States – from their book balances. The major currencies have been in
turmoil, with many fearing that the Euro may be in its death throes
even as the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency comes
increasingly into question.

We in Africa have
not been immune to the crisis. The Nigerian capital markets, once
considered the most attractive in the world, have been badly hit.
Foreign investors have recalled more than US$15 billion of their
portfolio investments. The collapse of oil prices has led to a growing
fiscal crisis, even as our parliamentarians and the state/local
governments continue on a spending spree that borders on profligacy.
Our manufacturing sector has all but disappeared while the few
remaining industries are relocating to our neighbouring countries in
droves. Our policy choices have wiped off the life-chances of millions
of teeming youths, many of whom have taken refuge in hustling, armed
robbery and prostitution. All the symptoms of social decay are there –
kidnapping, criminality, cultism,

ethno-religious
killings and the retreat into primordial cocoons. Amid all this chaos,
our leaders are engaged in a vacuous debate on ‘zoning’. None of the
pretenders to the presidency has put forward one single idea on how to
make our country go forward, which is what truly matters to most
Nigerians.

Four priorities, in my opinion, would be crucial in the coming year.

First, we must
speedily conclude the arrangements for the conduct of free and fair
elections, on which depends the future of our democracy. Updating the
electoral register is crucial. I would strongly recommend that we
borrow the Indian model where IT has been used to ensure successful
voting by over 670 million voters.

New laws need to be put in place to prosecute vote-rigging and any form of bribery aimed at changing electoral outcomes.

Second, we must
take bold steps to exorcise the demons of crime which have made ours a
byword among the nations. Crime is not in our genes. Some of us are old
enough to remember when our country was not like this.

Third, we need
extraordinary measures to revamp our parlous infrastructures,
particularly power. While there have been some modest improvements, we
are still a long haul from the minimum international standards for
civilized nations. Massive investment in the sector should be linked to
wide-ranging reforms and more severe laws against vandalisation.

Fourth, we must
speedily ensure structural diversification of the economy. We have to
think the unthinkable. We would be fools to stake all our future on
oil. Structural diversification entails looking at sectors such as
solid minerals, agro-allied industries and biofuels. Improving the
business climate is imperative, in addition to enhancing private
sector-led growth, strengthening public institutions, tackling
corruption and ensuring financial deepening.

Industrialisation linked to agriculture is key to rebuilding our economy and creating jobs for millions of our people.

The mass of
evidence from economic literature shows that an open, competitive
economy is the best way to ensure accelerated transformation while
hooking on to the digital world economy. Promoting inward investments,
particularly to the non-oil sector, is vital. We must reposition our
country to grab a large chunk of the estimated US$1.7 trillion of
global capital flows. Many are saying that Africa and its 900 million
market is the next global frontier. No country, in my opinion, is
better placed than ours to lead this renaissance and rejuvenation of
our continent.

(Summary of a Presentation at the Breakfast Talk Series at Abuja Investments Ltd, Abuja, Thursday 22 July, 2010).

The World Cup has
taught us many lessons but these lessons have to be transmuted into
improving the game and providing a platform for growth. At this moment-
Now Focus Fully (NFF) on the NFF should be the motto. The NFF have been
at it for ages, we all know that; but this latest act of overseeing
Nigeria perform woefully in South Africa was the final straw that broke
enough important people’s backs to catalyse a change, albeit only in
leadership of the inept NFF board. Like many other like-minded
Nigerians desirous of true change in the NFF, I howled at the
President’s proclamation and initially proclaimed to whoever I
discussed with that the effects would damage and retard our football by
many years and result in more harm than good. After discussing with a
few well-placed Nigerians, I am certainly better informed about the
politics that went on behind the scenes to actualise the removal of the
autocratic trio that represent only a tip of the iceberg.

Background

Recent events have
only reemphasized what we have been demanding for decades. Mumini
Alao’s ‘Soccer Talk’ articles of July 7 and 14 as well as his 2008
publication compiling “Soccer Talk” between 1996-2008 is a veritable
reference for confirmation that history is simply repeating itself. A
succinct look at the touted greatest democracy in the world can shed
more light. America’s status originated from the transparent collective
yearning and efforts of the legendary Founding Fathers to first call a
Constitutional Convention in 1787 that resulted in a constitution that
served as the backbone for United States of America we know today.
Though Nigeria as a collective is still in the throes of developing a
Constitution that is generally acceptable to all, it is the
constitution of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) we are focusing
on.

The stark reality
is that all we are going through now; i.e. condemning football
administration, rejoicing over the removal of an NFA board, as well as
listening to countless repeated recommendations to overhaul the system
is just a multiple repetition of the past thirteen years or so. This
was harshly brought home to me in detail again. In truth, from
journalists to the average Nigerian, to our leadership, we all bear
collective responsibility for the malaise depriving us from enjoying
the benefits in terms of development and ‘real’ success, not
questionable underage victories, of a properly run Football Federation.
The Eagles’ (whom I haven’t referred to as ‘Super’ for about two years)
recent fiasco and removal of ‘the trio’ has provided a platform for
genuine reform by the remaining NFF executive members, minister of
sports, and the president if they legitimately desire to move our
football forward.

Way forward

Current statutes
are filled with loopholes and have mostly been subjected to an
inexhaustible range of interpretations by various individuals pursuing
ulterior motives except the establishment and development of the game
in Nigeria. That should have been the focal point of the just concluded
NFF Congress. Unfortunately the congress only focused on ratifying the
removal of the infamous trio that headed the NFF until recently. Whilst
their removal is most welcome, it was only the very tip of a monstrous
iceberg that was a smokescreen to cover up the structural rot the NFF
has become. However, the soon-to-be-elected NFF executive has been
presented with a unique opportunity to make history; as the board which
in collaboration with selected but acceptable Nigerians, the sports
minister, and President Goodluck Jonathan, selflessly took the
necessary bold steps to bring about genuine change. This can be
achieved by jointly producing an amended draft of the NFF Constitution
within two months of election into office (i.e. by October 2010). That
would provide the foundation for proper debate and public contribution
for a month (or two) before being finally adopted as the “New NFF
Constitution” immediately after. I dare say if they achieve this (and
they can) and it leads to the kind of NFF board Nigerians have been
looking forward to, and should, Nigerians will never forget them and it
will tell when votes are needed.

My suggestions

No Constitution is
perfect for each individual it covers whether it is for a family,
organisation or country and is usually considered a permanent
work-in-view. However, the fundamentals would be structurally sound and
generally acceptable, that is what the current NFF Constitution must
urgently address. Permit me to pick a few I consider acutely essential.

1.Remove the
clauses that presently place near absolute powers in the personae of
the NNF President/NFA Chairman. To ourselves be true. The current
statutes are dictatorial and autonomous favour any incumbent Chairman
to interpret selfishly. The acting chairman just resumed office and
should not (yet) be tempted enough to look away from leading the charge
for change under ‘supervision’ by the minister.

2.Introduce the
submission of detailed plans (or manifestoes) prior to campaigning for
office by which elected officers will be held accountable by Nigerians
and those responsible for voting them into office. This must not
include “qualifying Nigeria for every FIFA/CAF competition because that
should be a given.

3.Introduce proper
checks and balances which include an appraisal system for periodic
reviews of performance on submitted plans; say every 2 years with the
proviso of calling elections if boards are classified as non-performing.

4.Limit the number
of times incumbents can contest for office to a maximum of two 3-year
terms. That is enough time to serve the country and leave a mark if
there is focus.

5.Create a platform that (increasingly) gets people with genuine
intentions into the NFF. The current system segregates and discourages
non-politicians, suitable enthusiastic and dedicated technocrats, and
relevantly experienced people, but most importantly does not allow the
country enjoy the crème of the skills we have on offer. I am sure my
suggestions are only a few of many Nigerians would like to make. I am
sure if they achieve these five, and they can, Nigerian football will
be better placed for the future.

If
I were asked to describe the typical Nigerian palate in one word, I
would say reserved. And if I were asked to elaborate, I would say our
palates in general enjoy foods that generate feelings of comfort and
stomach fullness and familiarity, especially the safe stodgy goodwill
of starches and lubricating grease.

Very much unlike
the exploratory constantly searching out new, quirky, exciting
sensations palate, it is a lot like that hypothesis on married men and
their wives, where men are men and their wives are bowls of Kellogg’s
Cornflakes. It proposes that some men like to eat Kellogg’s every
morning, rain or sunshine, all the days of their lives, while most men
choose to eat Kellogg’s Cornflakes only about once or twice or so every
six months and sometimes do so reluctantly or because they have no
option.

This theory
fundamentally offends me since I am a married woman. Accordingly, a
bowl of cornflakes, may be useful for pointing out the contrast between
the ability or willingness to enjoy sameness, familiarity and further,
refine and extol it as does the typical Nigerian palate; and the need
for variety and constant experimentation as a premise for enjoying ones
food as is commonplace in other food cultures.

I once hired a man
called Muri Fini to take care of my garden. He had lived his whole life
on Lagos Island and every day eaten his soft white bread accompanied
with milky tea in the morning, bowl of rice and peppery stew in the
afternoon and eba and efo riro or amala and ewedu at night.

The highlights of
his meals were as much meat as he could afford, and if there was
variety, it was present in the anatomy of the cow. If one had the
ability to eat generous portions of tripe, knotted intestines, cowhide,
cow leg, oxtail, lungs and liver then one was eating like a king.

Needless to say, he
was very set in his eating habits even though he was only in his early
twenties. He was not worried about vague distant ideas like the
requirement that one should eat balanced meals. Experimentation was of
course completely out of his radar.

My mother-in-law
had come to stay and she is of the staunch unwavering belief that one
must offer everyone who enters ones house a proper meal. She offered
Muri some food. Muri agreed with visible excitement. What was he
expecting? Probably a bowl of rice and stew.

She handed him some gari and Afia Efere; White soup.

He took the food
from her, thanked her, and my mother in law and I went upstairs only to
come down a few minutes later and discover that Muri had left the food
on the table and literally absconded.

My poor
mother-in-law was offended and taken aback and confused at this sort of
peculiar behavior. Why had he not just declined the offer of food?

Because he did want
to eat, I said, but not what he was given. And what he was given was so
completely removed from anything he had eaten in his life that instead
of inspiring hunger or curiosity, it inspired fear and probably
revulsion.

If the reader looks
through the eyes of Muri’s classic superstitious “Isale Eko” Yoruba,
upbringing and twenty odd years of eating red stews; into the alien
yam-thickened off-white countenance of Afia Efere, he just might be
able to empathise.

Muri knew he would
be coming in to work in a couple of days, so, leaving the food and
running away was not really the most rational way of dealing with a
bowl of unwanted food.

When I demanded an
explanation for his behavior a few days later, he just shuffled his
feet and mumbled something about never having seen that sort of
something or the other before. He was so embarrassed, that it would
have been cruel to continue to probe.

Though Muri’s case
is comical, I have also heard of the tragic fifty year old Nigerian
woman with crippling arthritis, eating stew every day even though she
has been given medical advice that tomatoes and peppers which are in
the nightshade family sometimes cause or aggravate inflammation. She
might get substantial relief from pain, if she does not eat her daily
stews.

Any Nigerian,
whatever their age might have that same initial suspension of belief;
how is it possible to be a Nigerian and not eat stew? Not eat hot
steaming peppery red jollof rice? Or ofada? Or goat meat stew? Then
what is the use of living! Stew after all is our established safety net
for hunger. Stew with everything.

I have had people
write to tell me how unimaginably alien they find the idea of cooking a
stew with coconut milk, or fish sauce. It makes sense because a
Nigerian stew needs to accompany everything from gari, semovita to
beans, and coconut milk stew for example, is a mighty leap for the
Nigerian imagination or palate, but I wonder about Yorubas running from
Efik soups and the unfamiliarity that we smugly hold up as a defense
when confronted with food from different parts of our very own country.

I wonder that we
are not dying of curiosity about Tiv cuisine and uncommon hot peppers
that grow in remote areas of Yenogoa. Or why our “national cuisine” is
in reality so restricted. I wonder if the typical Nigerian had to
choose between not eating stew and death, if he would really choose the
latter.

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.

Last
week, the Ondo State governor and arguably one of the more dynamic
state executives in the country, Olusegun Mimiko fired a number of
broadsides against the enduring yearning of Nigerians for foreign
education. Basically, the state governor was scandalised by the huge
transfer of naira to mostly western countries by Nigerian parents,
government and private organisations seeking to educate Nigerian
youngsters in foreign climes. More specifically, Mr. Mimiko said this
huge sum of money is enough to turn around the parlous state of
tertiary education in the country. He may well be right. It is not for
nothing that one of the booming areas of foreign interest in Nigeria
these days is in education: possibly at least three foreign -sponsored
education fairs probably take place in the country every other month to
expose

Nigerian students to admission processes for western universities and
others on different continents. It is also a particular bogey of
education activists that government officials remain wedded to the
ambition of training their children abroad. Every little official in
the local, state or federal establishment wants his or her children
educated in fancy – and not so fancy schools abroad. It is often
muttered about that this fondness for foreign education is one reason
why government officials do not really care about providing public
schools with the required resources to make them attain their past
standards, not to mention meeting up with modern demands. An extension
of this is the suspicion that a large part of the funds that should
have been invested in the schools is actually stolen.

There are no statistics on the number of Nigerians enjoying the benefit
of foreign education. But the figures should be in the hundreds of
thousands. A large number of them are in the west, but there are
substantial numbers in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and,
increasingly west and south Africa. The reason why Nigerians travel
abroad to get educated can be found in the wide variety of courses they
pursue. The genuine pain of Nigerian education activists and now Mr.
Mimiko notwithstanding, it is hardly possible or desirable to seek to
stop Nigerians from educating their children anyway they can – and to
the best of their ability.

There is one
reason why many parents also increasingly prefer to send their children
to private elementary and secondary schools namely the quality of
education on offer in Nigeria right now leaves much to be desired.
Under funded and mismanaged, public schools in Nigeria are overwhelmed
by the large number of students they have to train. As for tertiary
institutions, the problem is capacity.

According to
Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), over
300,000 students who passed in the recent Universities Matriculation
Examination (UME) will not be able to gain admission to a university
due to lack of space for them in any of the nation’s private and public
universities.

This is a yearly
ritual and is not likely change until more universities are built to
accommodate this growing number of youngsters. Then there is the
uncertainty over the school calendar. A recent NEXT report stated that
the business of foreign education recruiters boomed during the last
strike action by university lecturers. Students only know when they are
admitted. Frequent strikes make it almost impossible for them to
calculate when they will leave the university as a five-year course may
well take six or more years.

Then there is the
very real fear that Nigerian companies have a soft spot for applicants
bearing foreign-awarded degrees. There has been a lot of talk about the
fact that Nigerian graduates are virtually unemployable – and there may
well be reasons to back this up. But the likelihood of getting better
reception from prospective employers is a mighty spur to a young
person’s desire to study abroad.

The upshot of all this is that the rush for foreign degrees is a
symptom of a much larger social malaise and cannot be treated in
isolation. Putting more money in public schools and retraining our
educators would be a good way to start the process of rebuilding trust
in our education system.

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

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

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.

Last
week, the Ondo State governor and arguably one of the more dynamic
state executives in the country, Olusegun Mimiko fired a number of
broadsides against the enduring yearning of Nigerians for foreign
education. Basically, the state governor was scandalised by the huge
transfer of naira to mostly western countries by Nigerian parents,
government and private organisations seeking to educate Nigerian
youngsters in foreign climes. More specifically, Mr. Mimiko said this
huge sum of money is enough to turn around the parlous state of
tertiary education in the country. He may well be right. It is not for
nothing that one of the booming areas of foreign interest in Nigeria
these days is in education: possibly at least three foreign -sponsored
education fairs probably take place in the country every other month to
expose

Nigerian students to admission processes for western universities and
others on different continents. It is also a particular bogey of
education activists that government officials remain wedded to the
ambition of training their children abroad. Every little official in
the local, state or federal establishment wants his or her children
educated in fancy – and not so fancy schools abroad. It is often
muttered about that this fondness for foreign education is one reason
why government officials do not really care about providing public
schools with the required resources to make them attain their past
standards, not to mention meeting up with modern demands. An extension
of this is the suspicion that a large part of the funds that should
have been invested in the schools is actually stolen.

There are no statistics on the number of Nigerians enjoying the benefit
of foreign education. But the figures should be in the hundreds of
thousands. A large number of them are in the west, but there are
substantial numbers in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and,
increasingly west and south Africa. The reason why Nigerians travel
abroad to get educated can be found in the wide variety of courses they
pursue. The genuine pain of Nigerian education activists and now Mr.
Mimiko notwithstanding, it is hardly possible or desirable to seek to
stop Nigerians from educating their children anyway they can – and to
the best of their ability.

There is one
reason why many parents also increasingly prefer to send their children
to private elementary and secondary schools namely the quality of
education on offer in Nigeria right now leaves much to be desired.
Under funded and mismanaged, public schools in Nigeria are overwhelmed
by the large number of students they have to train. As for tertiary
institutions, the problem is capacity.

According to
Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), over
300,000 students who passed in the recent Universities Matriculation
Examination (UME) will not be able to gain admission to a university
due to lack of space for them in any of the nation’s private and public
universities.

This is a yearly
ritual and is not likely change until more universities are built to
accommodate this growing number of youngsters. Then there is the
uncertainty over the school calendar. A recent NEXT report stated that
the business of foreign education recruiters boomed during the last
strike action by university lecturers. Students only know when they are
admitted. Frequent strikes make it almost impossible for them to
calculate when they will leave the university as a five-year course may
well take six or more years.

Then there is the
very real fear that Nigerian companies have a soft spot for applicants
bearing foreign-awarded degrees. There has been a lot of talk about the
fact that Nigerian graduates are virtually unemployable – and there may
well be reasons to back this up. But the likelihood of getting better
reception from prospective employers is a mighty spur to a young
person’s desire to study abroad.

The upshot of all this is that the rush for foreign degrees is a
symptom of a much larger social malaise and cannot be treated in
isolation. Putting more money in public schools and retraining our
educators would be a good way to start the process of rebuilding trust
in our education system.