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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 New
York Times News Service

The iron horse
features significantly in Igbo narratives, connecting with notions of
wealth, poverty, power, modernity, security, and interpersonal
relationships in a changing society. Transliterated from the Igbo
“anyinya igwe” (for the English word “bicycle”), iron horse represents
a people’s perception of the convergence of the familiar and the
unfamiliar, the natural and the invented Indeed, as a signifier, its
meanings keep shifting. For instance, while owning an iron horse was an
indication of great wealth and being in tune with modernity (or
culturally being with the oyibo), having it instead of a car in the
modern Igbo society is viewed as a sign of abject poverty. Little
wonder that the Mobylette, with its combination of the features of the
iron horse and the conventional motorcycle, was nicknamed “M zuru m ike
igwe” (May I take a rest from bicycle riding). Is it not astonishing
that one who also wants to take a rest from car driving in contemporary
Nigerian society and decides to ride an iron horse to church or work
becomes an object of ridicule? How so soon we forget!

The iron horse once
mattered. It was class, especially if it was the brand called “White
Horse”. Ride a White horse and the whole village would bow. In those
days, a suitor wishing to impress would look for someone in his village
who had a White Horse and beg him with some drinks to accompany him to
see his in-laws. That was a strategic impression management. As the
Igbo would say: “O gbajuo n’elu, o rute ndi no n’ala” (when the wine
keg fills to the brim up there, the wine will surely trickle down to
those below).

The owner of an
iron horse might not know how to ride it. The most important thing was
that he possessed an iron horse. Sometimes he would dress up for a
ceremony and since the iron horse must accompany him to boost his
image, he would roll it all the way to where he was going; or,
alternatively, someone would have to roll it behind him. And when he
eventually learned how to ride it, someone would always have to hold
the metal animal while he mounted.

It was part of the
homage to both the beast and its powerful rider. If wishes were iron
horses, those that held them for others to mount might ride! Well, it
seemed that when poor villagers were eventually able to buy their own
iron horse, its integrity suffered. Perhaps, this entry of the poor
into the circle of iron horse riders led to the introduction of a
bicycle license. If the poor must join in riding, they must regularly
pay for doing so.

The local council
had special license officials deployed like today’s police on the
roads. As would be expected, the local people needed to be wary if
their iron horse licenses had expired. An iron horse license official
could spoil someone’s journey by mounting a roadblock where it was not
expected.

Trust people in my
village for being their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers: those who
successfully passed iron horse license checkpoints always tried to
alert others that “onye akika agba” (literally, a person that carved up
someone’s jowl) was somewhere around the bend.

It was considered a
calamity to lose one’s iron horse to thieves. Even as the poor and the
nonliterate wanted to progress to by climbing out of poverty onto the
saddle of wealth, they also had to wrestle with the prevailing
structures of power, criminality, injustice, and a Eurocentric justice
system.

Seven Seven,
popularly known among his Igbo fans as “Okonkwo Asaa,” will always be
remembered for his musical narrative about Long John and his iron
horse. Long John in Okonkwo Asaa’s story is a stark illiterate who,
desiring to enjoy the things of modern technology and also to reduce
the suffering occasioned by trekking, decides to purchase an iron
horse. In his innocence, he fails to ask the seller for a receipt,
little knowing that the seller, like many dubious business people, is
determined to show him, a mumu, that “Na guy wack.” The seller raises
an alarm after Long John has paid and departed with the iron horse,
claiming that someone has stolen an iron horse from his shop. Long John
is arrested by the police and being unable to produce either the
receipt of the purchase or a witness, is detained. But he would not
give up: as a firm believer in tradition and poetic justice, he invites
the road, the mango tree on the road, as well as his ancestors, to be
his witnesses, with the police mocking and scolding him for being out
of tune with modern ways of justice.

The seller begins
the trip back to his shop with the recovered iron horse, rejoicing that
he has demonstrated astute business intelligence. But, either out of
recklessness occasioned by the excitement over his cleverness or the
quick intervention of the witnesses summoned by Long John, the iron
horse dealer is knocked down by a car and he dies instantly. The
bicycle falls beside the mango tree mentioned by Long John as one of
his witnesses. The police officers are so shocked and terrified at the
turn of events that they quickly release Long John and hand over the
iron horse to him.

Like Long John, I am back on my iron horse, riding to work in a
postcolonial Nigerian society where one has to construct one’s
importance and travel to power using a “special” vehicle.

Our unpreparedness
for disasters we know to be inevitable is the bane of our problems in
this country. The government, it seems, is never in a hurry to learn.
To ban, maybe, but not learn. Our leaders would rather throw money at
problems instead of thinking about why they happen and what should be
done to prevent them. Recent events have caught our government and its
various agencies pants down, a scenario always followed by a scramble
to pass the buck. We refuse to learn any lessons from past mistakes.
The isgraceful performance of our national team, the Super Eagles,
during the just concluded World Cup in South Africa was as result of
unpreparedness and lack of commitment to duty. One would have expected
that a tournament as important as the World Cup, especially an edition
holding in Africa for the first time would inspire a determination to
excel, instead of the last minute preparation that inevitably led to
the worst performance in our World Cup history. Millions of naira went
into the hole called the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF), yet the
expected miracles did not happen. And President Jonathan did not waste
time in producing the usual knee-jerk reaction by banning the entire
football federation and the national team, before a FIFA ultimatum
caused him to have a rethink.

The
episode further opened the world’s eyes to our perpetually ineffectual
method of handling situations. An even more serious malaise than our
football failings is the kidnapping epidemic. After more than three
years, our government and its security agencies are yet to show us that
they have what it takes to stay ahead of the criminals.

We probably would
not have known the extent to which the Nigerian Police has contributed
to the problem if not for the recent kidnapping of four journalists and
their driver. The ugly incident has thrown light on just how out of
touch the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, is
regarding crime in Nigeria. After the journalists were freed – freed by
the kidnappers, not rescued by the police – the number 1 cop declared,
“the crime is a new phenomenon…” Has he been on sabbatical these past
three or four years? Can someone please send

Mr. Onovo a list
of the high-profile victims of kidnapping – cutting across the entire
country from the North to the South East to the South-South? Can all
those people who have shunned the

customary
end-of-year visits to their villages please let the IG know the reason
for their drastic decision? Can a crime that has grown in leaps and
bounds over several years qualify to be termed “a new phenomenon?” On
top of this startling misjudgment the police were ill equipped and
unprepared to rescue these journalists. The fact that the IG himself
had to run to Abia State reveals a lot about what is wrong with our
police force. Will the IG have to relocate to the site of every
kidnapping crime to personally oversee rescue

efforts that we
all suspect are bound to end in futility? Now that the ordeal is over
the journalists are safely back with their families and the kidnappers
back in their lair to regroup and prepare for the next strike.

The government and police have also returned to their clowning
around. Mr. Onovo is taking credit for a job he clearly bungled, while
the Abia State government – under whose watch the state has descended
into anarchy – has dethroned three traditional rulers for allegedly
sponsoring kidnappings and robberies in the state. Did they just find
out that these traditional rulers sponsored the kidnappers and armed
robbers? How long have the police and other security agencies in the
state been investigating these individuals? Or are they merely the
latest in a series of scapegoats with which the police and state
governor can save face before Nigerians? (It is this same Abia State
governor who has been busy in the last few weeks changing political
parties and attempting to sack his deputy).

Now is the time to
find a lasting and sensible solution to this kidnapping problem. We
suspect that the police force will need a major shake-up. A police
force that cannot ensure that kidnappers find it difficult to operate
deserves nothing less than decommissioning. If Onovo and his men cannot
solve this kidnapping problem now, how do they intend to cope in the
thick of the coming election season?

The case of Nigeria
is like the proverbial table of thieves, where there is no honour. The
new threat facing every Nigerian lies in the Eastern parts where one
stands the risk of being kidnapped once one is ‘perceived’ to be doing
well.

The government’s
response has been, to put it mildly, worrisome. Government officials
have inadvertently ‘settled’ these hostage takers in what might seem
like an attempt to appease those that are angered by their pilferage of
our resources and their high level of corruption.

The four
journalists that were kidnapped recently have enraged the public. The
President has read a riot act to the Inspector General to get to the
root of the matter but that for me is simply grandstanding. The issue
of kidnappings in Nigeria is actually a morality issue and nothing more.

From the first time
it came to public knowledge in the Niger-Delta, where expatriates and
foreigners were being kidnapped, government’s reaction to the mishaps
was pathetic. While in well-developed Nations, you hear government
officials saying things like, “We do not negotiate with hostage takers
or kidnappers,” in Nigeria the case is different.

And the reason is simple: Among thieves, there is no honour.

How can a man (the
principal thief), who has looted and stolen billions of money by any
means necessary, ask another (the subordinate thief) who has done what
he can within his power, not to steal by any other means? In this case
all the principal thief will be able to do is tell the subordinate not
to get caught.

So when the first
incident about the kidnapped expatriates was widely reported in the
media both locally and internationally, government officials felt
obliged to give the kidnappers what they demanded under the flimsy
excuse that they wanted to preserve Nigeria’s already bashed image.

So now the
Niger-Delta goons have set the pace and opened the warped eye of the
youngsters and desperate fast-lane money seekers to the gains of
kidnapping, only that this time around they no longer kidnap
foreigners, who now move amidst heavy security, but have turned their
gaze to their fellow brothers and sisters in the absence of the
white-skinned walking gold mines.

And what will the government officials do about this? Settle every single one of them!

And as time goes
on, more and more youths will resolve to the fast paced, money making
trade of taking hostages and kidnapping, after all they too are staking
a claim to their portion of the National cake

Little wonder why
so many people are trooping out of the country, even though many are
leaving for the façade they call ‘greener pastures’, there are also
some leaving because they perceive genuinely the danger ahead – but
they have the means. And that leaves the helpless innocents that don’t
have anywhere else to call home except here. The entire Nigerian
society is in grave danger.

Some might say I am
being unnecessarily paranoid but let me give those people a little
illustration of what I am talking about. Let’s go back to 1999 after
the triumphant death of the late dictator Sani Abacha and the
successful transition to civil rule. Where the AD held sway in the West
and through such factors as a track record and simplicity, a certain
former school principal was elected governor in one of the southwest
states.

Prior to that time,
this man used to drive a rickety old Peugeot 504 Salon car and was
often assisted by his neighbours every morning to jump-start his car.
But after about six months of being governor, this man had moved from
grass to grace. He bought a fleet of new luxury cars, built houses in
prime areas in the state and as well as in neighbouring states and sent
all his children abroad, forgetting the school he once headed as
principal.

I am sure this
story is not new to many Nigerians as this has been the case with many
top government officials. But here, a picture is being painted; a way
of life is been carved. Where are our values?

Though the
ex-governor in question is an old man now, what do you think he has
taught his children? What do you think he has taught his children’s
friends? It’s all a ripple effect.

Let’s all be honest
with each other. The armed robber or kidnapper is a man with a dual
personality. Firstly, he is your neighbour you see on your street as
you drive out to work. He is the man you see pushing his broken down
vehicle along the road. He could be the school principal going to
school early in the morning. He could be anyone. We must all be
responsible for each other. We must be responsible for our dear country.

I am sure so many
people that will read this piece also know a similar story of a man
that became a politician. They are the ones that set the precedent;
they are the ones that first kidnapped public funds, taxpayers’ money.
Every other event is a ripple effect that we caused when we kept quiet
and watched, waiting for a time we too would be in government.

I for one am not
disillusioned about government doing a thing, after all they are the
same: the man who steals with a pen, the man who steals with a gun is
what we call a thief and there is no honour amongst thieves.

I believe Nigeria will survive and the truth will prevail above all
things but I enjoin Nigerians to take responsibility and start to look
inwards – that’s the only way. If everyone changes, Nigeria will change
as a whole.

The latest hot
political topic is the “Obama paradox” – the supposedly mysterious
disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The
line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories
in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Barack
Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about
what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right
nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want
more passion. And so on.

But the only real
puzzle here is the persistence of the pundit delusion, the belief that
the stuff of daily political reporting – who won the news cycle, who
had the snappiest comeback – actually matters.

This delusion is,
of course, most prevalent among pundits themselves, but it’s also
widespread among political operatives. And I’d argue that
susceptibility to the pundit delusion is part of the Obama
administration’s problem.

What political
scientists, as opposed to pundits, tell us is that it really is the
economy, stupid. Today, Ronald Reagan is often credited with godlike
political skills – but in the summer of 1982, when the U.S. economy was
performing badly, his approval rating was only 42 percent.

My Princeton
colleague Larry Bartels sums it up as follows: “Objective economic
conditions – not clever television ads, debate performances, or the
other ephemera of day-to-day campaigning – are the single most
important influence upon an incumbent president’s prospects for
re-election.” If the economy is improving strongly in the months before
an election, incumbents do well; if it’s stagnating or retrogressing,
they do badly.

Now, the fact that “ephemera” don’t matter seems reassuring, suggesting that voters aren’t swayed by cheap tricks.

Unfortunately,
however, the evidence suggests that issues don’t matter either, in part
because voters are often deeply ill informed.

Suppose, for
example, that you believed claims that voters are more concerned about
the budget deficit than they are about jobs. (That’s not actually true,
but never mind.) Even so, how much credit would you expect Democrats to
get for reducing the deficit?

None. In 1996
voters were asked whether the deficit had gone up or down under Bill
Clinton. It had, in fact, plunged – but a plurality of voters, and a
majority of Republicans said it had risen.

There’s no point
berating voters for their ignorance: people have bills to pay and
children to raise, and most don’t spend their free time studying fact
sheets. Instead, they react to what they see in their own lives and the
lives of people they know. Given the realities of a bleak employment
picture, Americans are unhappy – and they’re set to punish those in
office.

What should Obama
have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say he made a
mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the
economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking
about pursuing different policies – they’re saying that he should have
talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic
results.

The best way for
Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been
enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis.
Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an
adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True,
senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really
big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that
political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more
friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it
won its first big congressional test.

In short, it looks
as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion,
focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on
their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the
way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Obama took office,
they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about
how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by
blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the GOP is
helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Obama do
anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is
crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is
all. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap”
by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote.
But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect,
instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects
will say that it was because Obama was too liberal – when his real
mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

Imagine Facebook existed during the reign of Sani Abacha.
Instead of inviting traditional rulers to the screening of the ‘Diya Coup’
videos he’d simply have tagged them on Facebook; if, that is, he refrained –
against the advice of persons like Al-Mustapha – from totally banning the
social networking site in Nigeria.

Sadly we will never know. Abacha did not wait to see the
Internet boom. Obasanjo and Yar’Adua who on the other hand saw it did not care
much for it; they were our own George W. Bush.

Goodluck Jonathan is therefore a breath of fresh air.

Not only is he the first Nigerian president from a minority
ethnic group, he will also go down in history as the first Nigerian leader to
embrace social networking as a tool of governance. If Obasanjo was our
Television President (recall the Presidential media chats, and the nationwide
broadcast announcing that the Senate President and Education Minister were
thieves), Jonathan is our Facebook President.

As I write this he is the most popular Nigerian on Facebook.
Only two weeks after joining he has amassed more than 120,000 followers. Apart
from a glitch early on, that saw the defacement by some e-miscreants of the
president’s photo pages (images of an unknown nude man suddenly appeared in the
hallowed presidential arena); Mr.

Jonathan has been having a blast. Thursday morning he had about
116,000 “likers”. Twenty-four hours later the number had risen to more than
121,000.

A cartoon by our own Zapiro, the inimitable Asukwo E.B., has Mr.
Jonathan in bed, eyes glued to his laptop, while he tells a sleepy dame that
he’ll remain awake for a bit longer; he has to check his Facebook page. If I
had any drawing talent I’d instantly create my own cartoon: Aunty Dame wagging
her finger furiously at the President, muttering: “Today you are going to tell
me who the First Lady is; me or that Lap-top…”

Mr. Jonathan’s Facebook page sure is the place to be these days.
Next time you wonder why no one is commenting on your update or note, or poking
you; why the alleys of Facebook seem deserted, wonder not far: all are smitten
and have succumbed to the allure of e-AsoRock. Every presidential update is
commented upon and “liked” by not less than 2,000 people. Compare that with the
half dozen comments that most of us would be grateful for.

If half as many people liked Obasanjo we’d be talking about a
fourth term for the old man today. (It’s a good thing Obasanjo wasn’t on
Facebook as president; imagine this appearing in newsfeeds all over Facebook,
while both men were still in office: “Obasanjo is no longer listed as being in
a (political) relationship with Atiku.”

The multitude of fawning comments on the page say a lot about
the Nigerian psyche. In a land under the siege of Big Men, we are suckers for
accessibility and a semblance of humility. Murtala Muhammed stands out in the
annals of Nigerian history for many reasons, one of which is that he shunned
the trappings of power expected of his position – long, sirened convoys with
animals-in-uniform hanging from every corner.

Recall also how Governor Ayodele Fayose became a folk hero of
sorts in Ekiti for his penchant for eating in roadside bukas and stopping to
buy suya and roasted corn in public. Governor Fashola stands out in Lagos for
the unobtrusiveness of his convoy – flashing siren lights without the sound.

And recently I saw former Cross River State governor Donald Duke
walk into the Genesis Deluxe Cinemas in Lekki, with his wife and daughters – if
you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have guessed this was an ex-governor and a
current presidential candidate. As they joined the queue to buy popcorn, I
almost simultaneously joined the Donald Duke fan queue (were it not for the
cynicism I have learned to wear as a protective mask).

Moral of the stories above: Nigerians, citizens of a land
perpetually starved of heroes and (true) humility, are drawn in a mysterious
way to Big Men who strive to not act like Big Men.

The president must have discovered that Facebook is one cheap
and easy means to be a Big Man who does not appear to be a Big Man.

But watch out Mr. President. Your current monopoly of Facebook
might not last very long. One Very-Important-Personality has also recently
discovered Facebook. Max Gbanite, a diehard IBB supporter (the man never tires
of writing long rambling pro-Babangida essays on the Internet) told a Nigerian
newspaper last week: “Babangida enjoys reading Facebook and sends messages
under a different name; Babangida is a gigabyte thinking man, he is not
operating on the outdated DOS (Disk Operating System) level.”

There it is: Maradona is now a fan of Facebook! Indeed the
battle ahead is a “Gigabyte” one, and Nigeria’s next president just might be
decided on Facebook! But jokes apart, two questions for you, dear reader: one,
what will you do when that inevitable friend request from IBB shows up?

Two, have you “liked” Goodluck Jonathan today?

I do not like sequels… or prequels or “triquels” or “quadruquels” for that matter! I view them as cheats and opportunistic attempts at taking advantage of the original and the audience. Even bonafide sequels like the ones in the Harry Potter series get my ire. Why repeat the same old story in a less than- original way? Of course, there really should be nothing original about a sequel or it would not be a sequel.

It would just be an entirely different movie, not worthy of being called a sequel. Then it might just lose at the box office because it has nothing in common with the original version that brought in big bucks for the originally innovative producers who unsatisfied with just one explosive story think that tweaking the storyline one way and another and messing with the characters would continue to inspire love in us and make tremendous money for them. That is the franchisee spirit! Franchise! Oh, how I hate that word! It is blatantly and unabashedly capitalistic! “Hey, we are glad you loved our first movie and since we are not inventive enough to come up with a better storyline based on different characters that would equally blow your mind away, we might as well just take these ones you love so much and turn them into something you will later come to view with a mix of exasperation, wistful nostalgia and lots of irritation.” What brought on this rant? Shrek the fourth chapter! I mean Shrek Forever After (and hopefully AMEN!)

I love Shrek. I loved him right from the first day I heard Mike Myers’ heavily accented voice and saw Donkey do the Eddie Murphy thing with his teeth. I loved Shrek the first. Then I tried to understand Shrek the second. By Shrek the third, the only thing that intrigued me was why the Justin Timberlake character ever existed.

Then now Shrek the fourth and I feel cheated, duped, used, outsmarted! I mean these guys rather than entertain us just want to play on our sentiments. It does not even matter to them that few sequels in history have ever been par with the original or made as much money. But then it is not the “as much money” they are concerned about; it is the money, period. Because they know that if you really enjoyed the first movie you would be willing and eager to part with your money to go watch a part two and even maybe, just maybe, put your hands in your pocket again and again for a part three and four. And why would you do that? Because you have become sentimentally attached to the original characters.

In fact some people become so attached to a story or characters in a movie that a whole bunch of straight to video movies is churned out especially for them. Check out the American Pie series. It is like junk food- you know it is bad for you but you keep eating it anyway probably because of the Ajino Moto or the trans-fat it is made with. Either way, something in junk food makes us keeping longing for it no matter how fat we become from eating it. It was rather unfortunate that I did not pay to watch the movie because I was seriously tempted after an hour twenty minutes of pure torture to go and ask for my money back. You ask me if it was that bad why stay through one hour 20 minutes? Because it’s like listening to your daughter make the same joke for the umpteenth time.

You don’t shut her up or get up and walk away. You wait patiently while she repeats the now familiar words all with a sickly painful smile on your face and then when she finally drops the punch line you politely chuckle and pray to the highest heavens that she never repeats the joke again. Thank God they said it is the last in the franchise. But with Hollywood, you never know. Give them twelve years just like with John McClane and the Die Hards that failed to just die or Rocky that eventually lived up to its name by the sixth and after-how-manyyears installment. They just might release Shrek the Grandpa.

Why can’t they just accept that we loved the original version of the movie and move on to other projects? Why keep flogging us over the head with washed-up stars, uninspiring storylines, overdone visual effects and now lousy characters? Yet we complain when Nollywood does part one to four. At least in Nollywood’s case all the parts are just an unnecessary elongation of a rather short predictable story but with credible cliffhangers that justify one coughing out money to buy the CDs. But imagine paying more than that at the cinemas for the oyibo version of a desperado attempt to make money without being original! Yes, say it with me- I have just been had!

No one pretended
that it was democratic. Its sole purpose was to ensure that the South
produced a president at a time the country was reeling from the
excesses of Generals Babangida and Abacha’s dictatorships. It was a
compromise in national interest. And so it was that rotational
presidency produced Obasanjo (who as it turned out, was not the South’s
best specimen).

After Obasanjo’s 8
years power returned to the North, but Yar’Adua died shortly
afterwards, returning the presidency back to the South. Suddenly,
rotational presidency is now ‘unconstitutional’. In an ironic throwback
to the Abacha era, motley groups have emerged with the stated mission
of ‘convincing’ President Goodluck Jonathan to run for president in
2011. As if the man needs any convincing…

But the propriety
or morality of rotational presidency is not the crux of this piece; it
is the fact that 11 years of democracy has only ‘democratised’ poverty,
especially in the North. The concern of most people in the North is not
the presidency, but poverty. Did Babangida’s eight years improve the
North? Or conversely, did Obasanjo’s 8 years really improve the South?
So while the political elite fight about what the mother tongue of the
next president should be, the real issue must be how to challenge
poverty.

The focus should be
on multiplying the hundreds of trucks laden with fresh food produced
from irrigated schemes in the North that depart for markets all over
Nigeria daily. The irrigation infrastructures that produced the crops
were built in the 1970s, implying that Nigeria is capable of meeting
its food needs and even for export through the expansion of irrigation.
Today, less than 10 of the country’s irrigable land are irrigated.

Nigeria has the
potential to become a global food exporter by expanding irrigation. In
1999, 42 percent of arable land in Asia was irrigated, 31 percent in
the Near East and North Africa, 14 percent in Latin America and the
Caribbean, and only four percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Irrigation
increases yields of most crops by 100 to 400 percent.

Increased irrigated
agriculture is a key to reducing poverty. In many countries, irrigation
triggered high economic growth increased incomes and improved
nutrition. It raises yields and is essential to increasing
productivity. Farmers benefit from irrigation through increased and
more stable incomes and the higher value of irrigated land. Nigeria has
large untapped reserves of groundwater. In addition, there is great
potential for harvesting water runoff and for farming lowlands and
valley bottoms that catch it naturally.

The development of
small, cost-efficient earth dams is important in breaking the poverty
circle. A study of small-scale irrigation schemes across Africa found
that irrigation improved incomes, diets and health. For example, when
women no longer had to fetch water from far away, they had time to
start market gardens, thereby improving their incomes and diets. The
benefits extended beyond increased agricultural productivity. Women
earned income and helped families reduce debt. It increased school
attendance, reduced seasonal migration for work and earned cash to pay
for previously unaffordable essentials.

Underused water
resources in Nigeria offer great potential for irrigation using simple
and inexpensive technologies. Irrigation development is a goldmine as
long as it includes: (1) a sustainable strategy for irrigated
agriculture in Nigeria; (2) development of cost effective rain
harvesting techniques for domestic and agricultural uses; (3) steps to
position Nigeria as Africa’s leading organic crop production area; (4)
creation for millions of direct and indirect employment; (5)
encouraging the emergence of agro-allied industries in; (6) ensuring
better management of soil moisture in rain fed areas; (7) facilitation
of direct investment in water harvesting and storage.

Focus must be on
the development of small-scale community-based irrigation schemes;
improved water access and control for semi-urban agriculture; the
evolution of an environmentally sound system of improved water access
for livestock in arid and semi-arid areas; better alignment of
irrigation and drainage institutions, and transfer of responsibilities
for operation, maintenance and management of irrigation and drainage
systems to organised local user groups; cost-sharing for infrastructure
improvement; appropriate systems of water rights and volumetric
delivery for greater efficiency in water use; and re-dimensioning of
irrigation systems where they are not financially or environmentally
viable.

Implementing these
strategies will create millions of jobs. Food security would be
assured. Environmental challenges would be mitigated. Foreign exchange
earnings would be boosted and poverty eradicated. If we focus on the
things that are truly important like fighting poverty, who wants to
know if the next president is Goodluck Jonathan or Badluck Babangida?

The oil business
has not been the same since April 20th this year for BP, American
president, Barack Obama, the American people and the entire world,
reason being that BP’s equipment in the Gulf of Mexico where they drill
for oil malfunctioned and started spewing oil into the water, in very
large quantities. BP has not slept neither has Obama, the oil company’s
misdeed (accident or no accident) is synonymous with murder.

Environmentalists
are huffing and puffing, rightly so; lawyers are analysing and getting
ready to sue the living day lights out of BP, and the ordinary people
whose livelihoods have been disrupted are screaming blue murder. Water,
sand, birds, fauna, people are being tested and analysed by biologists
and scientists to ascertain damage. America is a country that does not
lie low when it comes to environmental issues like oil spillage. They
are holding their president accountable and Obama is holding BP
responsible and accountable.

Sadly and
interesting though, what is going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now is
a daily occurrence in our Niger Delta. There is a conservative estimate
of about 10 million gallons of oil spilling into our water annually for
the past fifty years. One cannot even begin to imagine the
environmental degradation and death this constant unchecked spillage
has brought on our waters and the surrounding creeks. Not once have we
seen the oil companies in this country held responsible or accountable
by our government. We have never seen our president or any government
official visit disaster sites in the Niger Delta.

Obama has made two
trips to Louisiana already. He knows what is at stake politically and
otherwise for his young administration. The American people will speak
loudly come next election, and hold him responsible for whatever is
happening now. This is why he is shaking BP and its executives. So far
he has made BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg apologise and own up to
the spillage. “I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to
the American people on behalf of all employees of BP, many of whom are
living on the Gulf Coast, and I thank you for your patience…we care
about the small people”.

Not only has
Svanberg apologised, he has also committed $23. 2 billion into a
compensation fund and the America government is not even done with BP
yet. That is what a functioning government does for its citizens; help
the “small” people. Our government has never forced the big careless
oil companies in this country to care about the “small” people of Niger
Delta.

Nigerian
governments have always colluded and collaborated to continue the
onslaught in Niger Delta. Whenever the ordinary fishermen whose
livelihoods have been taken away rise in unity to demand justice, the
Nigerian Army mows them down. Most villages have been completely wiped
out of existence for daring to raise their voices against oil spillage.
The oil companies who have operated on our shores for more than half a
century know how corrupt the system is and have wasted no time in
exploiting it. They know we have no government to hold them responsible
for their criminal activities, like Obama is doing right now with BP.
So, the spillage continues and the Niger Delta ebbs away.

Oil companies here know Nigeria is a no man’s land, if you have ‘big money’ you can get away with practically anything.

The question we should be asking now is, what is our new President
(who by the way has a firsthand experience on the devastating nature of
oil spillage in the Niger Delta) learning from his American
counterpart’s experience? Since we seem to imitate a lot, will he learn
to hold errant oil companies spilling oil in his homeland accountable?