Experts on Effective Communication advise us to do the following when engaging in verbal communication:
Use variety, vary the stimulus and avoid monotony,
Be credible – if your audience senses or suspects that what you are saying is at variance with your every day practises and conduct, you have lost them,
Use a hook to attract attention, hold and retain attention,
Always find ways to gauge the attention, interest and response of your audience and adapt your delivery to align with these. Remember to constantly tap into that interest:
Spice your presentation with interesting tit- bits that relate to the life and experiences of your audience;
Start your presentation with something catchy -.the hook and keep on using different hooks to sustain interest and.retain attention.
Christ our saviour and leader was an expert in communication, often using a blend of strategies ranging from the amazingly simple yet subversive (the strategy he deploys in the Beatitudes) or plain dramatisation (eg setting a child amongst his listeners) or challenging his audience to engage in self examination (eg when he saves Mary Magdalene from stoning by a not too upright crowd) to drive home his key messages.
But by far, the most effective tools of communication are deployed in the parables. A close look at them shows that they contain all the aspects of effective communication – getting, retaining and sustaining the interest of the audience until the key message has been delivered and the audience has been guided to see what are the right choices This is because every good piece of communication ends with a call to action, a CTA, which may be explicit or implicit, subtle or direct – and the CTA is an invitation to choose and act wisely in the light of the message that has just been delivered.
The same experts on effective communication also point out to us the barriers to communication. These include
a) Language – speech and accent, dialect, non-specific meaning of words, double meaning jargon, technical language, woolly use of language, rambling, insufficient information given
b) psychological – emotive words, personality clashes, lack of interest; audience hostility
c) bias, prejudice and faulty assumptions
d) content not suited to education, status and intelligence levels of your listeners
e) physical environment – noise and distraction from the environment
Again you will notice that the parables anticipate and avoid most if not all these barriers and succeed in delivering winning presentations
Our age is obsessed by the power point presentations, where illustrations and fly-in effects and the jazzing up the presentation often mask inadequacies in content, logic and flow, We would do well to read the parables and learn from them.
In an age where verbose usage is often used to mask cognitive deficiencies, platitudes, social irrelevance of the message or the lack of preparation of the speaker, we would do well to go to the parables and learn how to communicate. And to communicate with interest, focus and effect…and with economy, things which I know I will need to learn myself.
The 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) paints a sobering picture of global governance. Transparency International measured perceived public-sector corruption in 182 countries, and the global average fell to 42/100, the lowest in more than a decade. Most countries are struggling: 122 out of 180 scored below 50, showing widespread corruption challenges. Only five countries scored above 80, compared to 12 a decade ago. Denmark leads again with 89, while Somalia and South Sudan sit at the bottom with 9 each.
Key Highlights
Top performers: Denmark (89), Finland (88), Singapore (84), New Zealand (81), Norway (81).
Major democracies slipping: United States (64), Canada (75), United Kingdom (70), France (66), Sweden (80), New Zealand (81).
Lowest scorers: Venezuela (10), Somalia (9), South Sudan (9).
Global Trends
Democracy matters: Full democracies average 71, flawed democracies 47, authoritarian regimes 32.
Civic space is critical: Countries with open civic space average 68, while those with closed civic space average just 30.
Declines since 2012: 50 countries worsened, including Venezuela, Syria, Hungary, and South Sudan, where corruption has become systemic.
Consequences
The report links corruption to weakened institutions, poor public services, and rising inequality. It notes that restrictions on civic freedoms often coincide with declining CPI scores. For example, Georgia (50), Indonesia (34), Peru (30), and Tunisia (39) have seen governments limit NGO activity and intimidate journalists, worsening corruption risks.
Recommendations
Transparency International urges governments to:
Protect independent justice systems.
Ensure transparency in political finance and lobbying.
Safeguard civic space and media freedom.
Strengthen oversight of public spending.
Cooperate internationally to combat illicit financial flows.
One striking line from the report captures the urgency: “At a time of climate crisis, instability and polarisation, the world needs accountable leaders and independent institutions to protect the public interest more than ever – yet, too often, they are falling short.”
Would you like me to create a regional comparison table (e.g., Americas vs. Europe vs. Africa) so you can see how different parts of the world stack up against each other?
One of the most fascinating lessons I’ve learnt about women in this my short life, and this is based on the women I’ve met, is that a man can never truly claim to know a woman, except perhaps his mum. Because essentially, women are basically unknowable.
Women are mysteries, and the moment they lose their mystery, they lose an essential trait, a trait that makes them women. I am inclined to concluding on the basis of my limited experience (error of limited sample size) that this state of things just has to do with what I believe is at the core of what being a woman, that quality of their “unknowability” to a man. Let us suppose that this applies to the relationships between most women and men and is invariant in time and place. In that case, a man approaching trying to “know” a woman in fiction, and this woman herself being a creation by another woman (would “understand” be a better verb to use in this context?), faces a serious uphill task. Such a man could be said to be embarking on a task which even the bravest of souls would approach with a lot of caution and timorousness.
Yes, it is thus with a spirit of “quaking and trembling” that I embark on this assignment, or this self-imposed task that will not let me rest, of sharing a few thoughts about what I believe I’ve learnt or known or suspect to have known about one of the many female characters that populate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s many books. I’ve picked on one of her female characters that is perhaps the most complex, the most unknowable, and indeed, the most difficult to trap. And this you must agree, is a difficult task for a specie (sincere apologies for any crude biologism here – it is totally unintended) that, at the outset, I’ve said is basically unknowable to most men.
The character in question here is Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin in Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie’s newest and most engaging novel – Dream Count. Omelogor is the person I’m trying to wrap my head around to try to see if I can present a description of her that makes sense to me before it can make sense to other people. Omelogor is very complex, but then, trying to decipher a complex character is a project that appeals to us as humans, even when we intuitively feel that failure could be the fate of such an exercise in the long run. But I’ll try. As the French say, “The difficulty of succeeding only makes it more imperative for us to try.” By the way, that’s a very bad translation indeed, because the original expression in Beaumarchais’ play = Le Barbier de Seville goes thus, “La difficulté de réussir ne fait qu’ajouter à la nécessité d’entreprendre.”.
Yes, the subject of my reflection is Omelogor, her actions and her thoughts as reflected in the story in the section of the book that bears her name. I am asking whether Omelogor is the world’s modern female Robin Hood, (And it should not surprise anyone that the name of the NGO she established and devoted to supporting female empowerment is known as Robyn Hood – how cheeky!). I am also wondering aloud whether Omelogor is a social iconoclast, a deliberate disruptor of social norms and conventions, a social avenger, a woman who is willing to stand up to the rich and powerful, a career banker who does not think twice about using a mop to poke at comfortable glass ceilings of society, a very composed male-eater or a bit of all of these. Who thus, is this engaging and unusual character, this bold character, who sets out to speak with frankness on several issues that most women would approach with a lot of caution, you may ask? Omelogor is someone who can throw caution to the wind and who speaks her mind on very difficult issues, can make up her mind on very complex social issues, and who can go ahead to do things that run counter to the dominant trends and the dominant models of sex roles in society. Once her mind is made up, she just goes ahead and does these things, without as much as batting an eyelid about what the consequences could be.
Omelogor is a banker who returns to Nigeria from the USA, after a successful degree, and joins a bank, rises to the very top of the career and becomes a very close associate and confidant of a character in the book simply described as CEO. The appellation CEO is the only one we have of him. Could this be a technique that Chimamanda Adichie uses to suggest that the CEO could refer to anyone, to any of the many individuals who crowd and corrupt the numerous commercial establishments in Nigeria’s financial sector? Through the CEO and his antics, the reader gains an insight into the carryings-on and the putrefaction that has become a distinguishing feature of the dealings in our banking sector. These include money laundering, aiding and abetting financial heists, stealing from clients’ funds, armed with the knowledge that persons who operate accounts made up of stolen funds cannot speak up when those very same funds are expropriated from them by the persons they entrust them to. CEO is just as criminal as those who steal government funds, as he steals from his very customers in the Bank. Omelogor soon finds out that the CEO is stealing from his own bank but shows no moral outrage. This is a reflection of how badly her values have altered that rather than upbraid the CEO for larceny, she actually tells him that she can teach him better ways to cover his tracks and criminal acts, CEO takes the bait, and once he does this, he becomes Omelogor’s accomplice and partner in crime. By thus choosing to cover up the CEO, Omelogor has effectively pocketed him and silenced him forever. To keep him under her thumb, she says – “I never failed to perform respect” because she has come to realize that men like CEO “had shockingly thin skins”. Notice that the expression “to perform respect” serves to convey the superficiality and fakeness of her actions since she actually feels nothing but contempt for these big men in society – “these same men who paraded wealth that they knew to be mere hull and all hollowness beneath.” Omelogor continues to thus “play” this society for her own gains and ends. Is it hypocrisy that she can still decry the collapse of morality in Nigeria or is it the silenced voice of her morality still struggling to speak out amidst all the financial rot and decadence? Her observation that “It is not that Nigeria is poor, it is that it is virulently materialistic…….Money is at the of center of everything, absolutely everything. We don’t admire principle or purpose” is most apt but what gives the moral high ground to speak thus when we know that her behavior in managing funds entrusted to her financial house betrays this same trait?
She makes a number of statements that condemn corruption in society and its consequences. And I find myself agreeing with her when she talks of the “fragile security of stolen wealth”. When she comments thus of a politician – “He was surrounded by many people but he trusted so few because his power had robbed him of the ability to trust”, I find myself feeling very sorry for the politician because he is experiencing the effects of what I describe as a bad tradeoff. The story contains other instances of the damaging results of a life of criminality –aptly expressed in the reflection “who do you go to complain when someone steals the money you stole from you”? This situation is well illustrated in the case of the politician whose money is stolen and who did nothing “because what can you do when a person has stolen what you stole”?
Omelogor crosses the stealing and cheating line and her excursion into philanthropy with stolen funds could be dismissed as the efforts of someone looking for ways to buy back her soul by using of some of the stolen money to financially empower needy women! But I could be wrong as some other reader could simply see Omelogor as our brand new 21st century Robin Hood. She takes the money she shas stolen and sets up a foundation that embarks on an empowerment programme for women in rural communities. Redemption through restitution to non-expropriated? Does this clean up the act of stealing? Her model is that of a thief who steals money with the intention is using it to empower the poor. But do intentions wipe out criminality? Because stealing is criminal. Taking what is not yours is criminal, even if what you’re taking is stolen. And it is important to say this and draw clear boundaries around these issues, for if not we could get trapped in a quagmire of philosophical ramblings, emotional tainted disputations and theological disagreements. A man/woman who steals from the rich to give to the poor, is he/she doing the right thing? And if the intention is to do the right thing, do intentions redeem an act from what it was in the first instance? Now, those are the type of questions that Omelogor’s acts in the story throw our way. The case of stealing from a stealer raises important ethical and moral issues! Whilst Robin Hood is an appealing model for this type of moral conduct, one wonders what the world would become if we all became modern Robin Hoods, acting like EQUALIZERS in the Denzel Washington and Queen Latifa molds.
What would Immanuel Kant say about such a world in the light of his categorical imperatives? Ethics and Morality can often be slippery where acts are judged by the intentions of the perpetrator and not by its outcomes and consequences; The moral and ethical question of “stealing from a thief”—sometimes phrased as “Can it be right to take back what was stolen?” – is a nuanced issue in philosophy. It has attracted and continues to attract volumes and tomes in ethics and theology and Miss Adichie, in her presentation of Omelogor, walks dangerous and slippery grounds here as the actions of her character raise the important question, is it right to steal from someone who has stolen? When Omelogor says “Look, you have to understand that lying and deceiving are not moral issues in everyday life here – they are just survival tools.”
Should we extend the same claim to stealing and “pen robbery”? And she goes on to seal her position and indicate the protective seal one must apply on one’s mind to carry on the way she does – “Compunction is not even an option because you would need to think of these issues first as moral”. Our heroine has provided us with the moral code by which she wants to be judged. Is she rationalizing her dishonesty by thus creating a code by which her acts should be judged? Honestly, I do not know. How did her mind which condemned the sleaze and corruption in the banking sector, her mind which had so much contempt for the corrupt characters in the sector suddenly get twisted? How and why did she allow her soul to be seduced to cross over the line that separates the innocent from the damned?
Maybe the seeds for the conversion could be traced to her unusual sexual ethos. Here is a female character who picks men to sleep with and dispenses with them after the event without any trace of emotional connection. Is she real? Is she acting? Doesn’t she feel anything? Is she well? Is her characterization simply to convey, by role reversal, the frustration that women, like Zikora and Kadiatou, feel on being used and dumped by men. In one episode, she walks over and invites a man who she has spotted ogling her at a party to her flat. In another, she picks a young man in act devoid of emotional connection. She picks the men. She is not picked.
Listen to Omelogor speak about one of such pickups. – “I sensed his fascination with and mild repulsion for women older than him”. Yet she goes on and ends up “bedding” him and this decision is the rational one of a female tigress. About this younger lover, Omelogor observes – “He was to me simply a younger man, an experiment because he was sweet”. Who else but a man-eater could speak thus – Men run for your lives! There is a man eater on the prowl! And she can be so detached during the act of coitus that she is able to provide a neutral and clinical description of the engagement taking place, taking time to talk of the practiced movement of fingers and tongue and accusing the young man trying to please her of simply going through a well-rehearsed performance whilst being completely enraptured with himself over his performance. Reads more like a description of male masturbation with a female accomplice.
There’s a role reversal here in terms of our stereotypes. In standard narratives, men use women and dump them and move on. In the cases of the encounters between Omelogor and men, the tables are turned. Here is a bold female character, an enterprising and upwardly mobile one at that too, a new manifestation of Jagua Nana if you want, who picks up men, chews them and spits them out without any emotional connection. Picking men and sleeping with them without due attention due to considerations such as shared values, social class and adequate background checks of one’s intended sleep mate carries certain risks as Omelogor discovers when one of her “captives” brutalizes her during coitus by pinching her breasts – and he confuses effective and pleasurable coitus with the act of riding her as if he were riding a horse. She is so turned off that she tells him to get off and get going.
I have a nagging feeling that the character Omelogor perhaps offers the author a good platform for speaking out against a number of male inadequacies in relationships with women, be they wives or mistresses. Take the case of Hauwa whose husband is described as a reason and not a person. Or take the case of Mmiliaku and her husband, Emmanuel. Mmiliaku complains that her husband “just climbs on top of her whilst she is sleeping! “I just want us to have enjoyable sex and connect as man and wife. It is terrible, always the same thing: he forces himself into my body when I am asleep”. When Mmiliaku complains to Emmanuel about his approach to sexual relationships in a marriage, he resorts to the strategy of shaming, instead of agreeing to identify his shortcomings – accusing her of talking like a prostitute and advising her to change her ways! My fellow men are we such insensitive and sexually incompetent clods?
The story “Omelogor” is replete with her and the way she treats men. In a few episodes, she makes comments on masculinity and the size of the male organ, which is something you don’t usually find women talking about – but I could be wrong here. Does Adichie use Omelogor to have a laugh at men, and the type of insecurities they feel because of size. One episode during a sexual encounter illustrates this well. When one of her “sex captives” asks whether he was hurting her during the sex act, she reflects and comments to herself – ”hurting me when the man had an object of insufficient size further encumbered by a significant belly, and yet he had the nerve, as he was huffing and puffing to keep asking “am I hurting you”. “Huffing and puffing”, like the ineffective Fox in the three pigs story! Huffing and puffing indeed – this is what a man’s action during coitus is now reduced to.
And the introduction of four of her lovers by the phrase – “There was a man” – is very unusual and subversive. “There was a man”, so we read, “there was a man with long elegant fingers”. “There was a man I could have loved, a man I wanted to love” – all of these read more like the disinterested entries in the social diary of a female qualitative researcher working on the relationship between the sexes, – conducting initial frequency counts, tallying numbers and then making bland entries. There was this man with elegant long fingers she describes as erudite, self-possessed, and not crushingly handsome but he is disqualified by one flaw – self-love because nothing bores Omelogor more than the self-love of men who have their whole lives been praised for their looks. In another relationship, she gets really upset when the fellow keeps repeating “I love you” to her during the act of lovemaking and ends the relationship. Her longest relationship lasts 11 months! Yet this tigress is not immune from emotions that come from the type of autopsies we usually carry out at the end of relationships – “How could I have opened my door to this man who I did not want at all and could not possibly have wanted” = So what happened ? Did Omelogor open her door to him in a moment of irrationality? Please do not ask me.
Like most men, I feel uncomfortable when females discuss male sizes. Why? It is simple – I’m tempted to believe that the saying size matters actually is a derivative, an offshoot from male obsessions with their inadequacies. And that indeed, if you look at the current obsession in pornography, which incidentally Omelogor wanted to do a master’s degree in, and its consistent interest in exaggerations, exaggerated phalluses, exaggerated busts, exaggerated moans and visual exaggerations enhanced by different styles and angles of photography and close ups, you will understand why men feel uncomfortable when size is mentioned. In pornography where one sees such mechanistic and demeaning images, one is right to start to wonder whether sex is really an expression of affection or is it more a physical expression of power and asymmetries? Is the sexual act an expression of power symbolized by size; of force and invasions symbolized by entry for the man; power symbolized by capture for the female; and power symbolized by subjugation for the female? I say subjugation very responsibly and I do so because at the end of most sexual encounters, the man leaves the battlefront a reduced form of himself, feeling very, very insecure at the end of it.
It is these taboos that Omelogor exercises little reluctance in giving expression to. And this is what makes her fascinating as a character in this book. Because she talks freely about these inadequacies, and funny enough, she’s also so aware of male inadequacies that she even sets up a blog to talk to men about issues about sex and relationships that men tend to fret about and are unwilling and afraid to discuss with third parties. Reading the contents of her blog, one cannot but get the feeling that Omelogor is mocking men and having a good laugh at their expense. It is also interesting to note, as I’ve said earlier, that Omelogor decides to abandon her banking career to go to the States to do a master’s degree in all things…in all things on an unholy subject like pornography. Anyway, in the end, she abandons the degree, but that does not mean she has abandoned her restless mind. Her mind is full of energy and brimming with rebellion.
So, what we have here now is a picture of a new female. I’m careful not to say new feminist. Is this a new female that’s assertive, that’s independent, that knows what she wants to do, and that doesn’t really appear to give a hoot about what social conventions say, Is this the model for the new female? Is she the model for the new feminist in Nigeria? I don’t think that’s the author’s intention. The author’s intention is rather to tell us that it is also possible for females to choose paths that do not conform to the conventional. Females can choose paths that set them apart and that are not necessarily tied to obeying the strictures of social conventions.
In the end, looking at Omelogor, you realize that we are dealing with a female who can say what she wants, and does what she wants, and doesn’t allow herself or her horizon to be limited by social norms and conventions. Is this the definition of a feminist? Perhaps so.
Now, if this is the definition of a feminist, then Omelogor is one, a social iconoclast smashing away at all the barriers of morality, whittling down on all expectations of females in normal society, attacking preciously held notions about motherhood. In her discussion with her auntie, she’s very clear about it – attacking and showing very strong moral outrage about attempts to make her conform to the norms of a society. In that case, social iconoclasm for her becomes a route to self-expression. But when you look at her closely, you discover a woman who’s also very anxious to be loved, anxious to be possessed, anxious to possess, but who is not that lucky, because the men she meets don’t meet her criteria. Could it be that she set her criteria too high? Could the source of the problem be in the way she conceives of love as sudden panic syndrome, an emotion described by another writer Mario PUZO in the Godfather as the bolt of lightening effect? Must all love be of this highly romanticized nature?
Omelogor is a woman who has triumphed over a number of socio-cultural obstacles that stand between women and upward social mobility, who has overcome social constraints and barriers that stand between women and success, broken through the glass window and is there in our faces asserting herself, being herself, even at the risk of being labeled a social iconoclast, a man-eater who picks up the men she wants, a lady who trivializes pornography, and who is able to even take risks of sleeping with men she poorly understands. So perhaps our female Robin Hood, our female social iconoclast, our social avenger, our male-eater, is a woman who wants to be what she wants to be and who demands to be understood for what she is and wants to be. But then I’m not sure that men would understand her and accept her in that position.
But there’s a point at which she actually goes beyond this searching for identification and definition and goes into what one could call a subversive role. The typical relationship in society, the typical male-female relationship in society is one that is governed by, in many ways, in many relationships, by power asymmetry where the man either physically or financially or socially enjoys a more privileged status than the woman. That is our standard, paradigm for the relationship between a man and the woman. The man is either richer, stronger, older, more experienced or taller or whatever you want to name it. But there’s always that asymmetry which is a critical part of male-female relationship. Now, in Omelogor’s case that asymmetry is changed, is reversed, is subverted because whereas the rich man uses his money and social position to hire women to come and please him, Omelogor uses her power, her privilege, her connections to hire men to come and please her. Now, that’s subversion because it subverts our normal expectations.
It is also worth noting that in our culturally defined norms, it is the man who makes the move, who chooses, who decides where the playground will be. But then suddenly a woman emerges and she’s the one doing the choosing, choosing when it will start, choosing when it will end, choosing who she will play with, choosing on which terrain she will play with the person. And for me, that’s been very deliberately subversive because like I’ve said earlier, the typical male-female relationship is one that’s characterized by intersection of power, privilege, culture and patriarchy, and all end up favoring men. Omelogor, in one fell swoop, subverts all that. And it is that deliberate attempt to subvert and successfully subverting that qualifies her well as social iconoclast.
There is also a play on the name Omelogor by the author. The name Omelogor in Igbo suggests social philanthropy, and most social philanthropists are men. There are a few women. It is also assumed that money used for such noble exercises was cleanly made. Was the money that Omelogor deploys to social philanthropy made through honest means? No because we know that in Omelogor’s case, the money was made by robbing the rich who had robbed society. Philanthropy made possible with stolen funds is flawed right at the outset! Why then would Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, her creator “bless” her with a name as Omelogor knowing that her social philanthropy which reflects her name is made possible by illegal-gotten wealth, even if this illegally gotten wealth is obtained by robbing the rich who have robbed society? I find to be another interesting dimension to this story.
Omelogor is socially aware and she has agency. But her behavior shows traces of what can be called a socially amoral strain with a very pronounced pragmatist bent. Her unfolding persona clearly illustrates the difference between the immoral and the amoral person. I hope that I am not being unfair to her if I say that she can be indifferent to conventional morality and may indeed have created her own moral laws. I’m not sure I’ve understood Omelogor, but like I said, I don’t think I understand women and I don’t pretend I do and perhaps I never will.
But the story is well written by a very skilled word and phrase smith and powerful storyteller and the verses and lines flow so beautifully – Just a few examples will suffice to demonstrate this –
“a part of Zikora decayed into a bitterness which she imagines is wisdom”
“if I needed further proof that this was no emotion happening, it was the painful hailstorm of cascading regret that hit me each time I remembered him”
“Friendship should have prefixes, suffixes, gradations”.
“….and leave my skin unmarked by the stigmata of eternal gratitude”
“Jide thinks of his hopes as thwarted even before he hopes”
There is beauty in these lines, even if some of these lines are hauntingly so . Read the book and you will discover more.
Truth is twisted, lies fall in to assorted lines, by hook and crook, mimicking straight lines, tangled lines tangle lives, tangled lives tangle minds, in vain we seek to untwist a tangled wreck,
the broom, overrun by yesteryear’s cobwebs has lost its power to sweep,
only witches and wild wizards, unable to find rest or sleep now hop around, crossing carpets to and fro, hopeless and hapless on its jagged ends!
Notes scatter, flung high above the heads of the celebrant, come falling down like boozed butterflies in disordered clusters to the unclean floor, gradually being overrun by notes in disarray. The more affluent hurl bundles at willing shoulders, some other bundles are thrust into welcoming arms by photo-savvy gifters
The long arm of the law looks on, powerless, the law has been long settled, sorted, and so now is broken, breakable
The space knows no balance, this place knows no balance, peopled by hollow souls with no restraint, who know no restraints, know and respect no limits, the leash on the impunity of the rich has no limits, so we ball on, big ballers kicking restraint, morality, conscience, common sense further down the slippery road of riot, ruin, and rot.
May the flour jars and jars of oil in our lives never run dry but may they be always replenished like fountains of eternal gift from God because we have given in support of the truly needy. The lady who gave two cents in the NT Reading represents someone who gives with deep faith, confident in the munificence of God. Her gift and its real value effectively teach us the economic concepts of marginal significance and opportunity cost. Christ’s remarks on her giving teach us that a gift is not measured by its absolute value but by the real effort and sacrifice that giving involves. So even before the principles enunciated in “The Wealth of Nations”, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, was already well versed in economics. If the giving to a worthy receiver does not cause some pain, then there is no gain in it. The gifts of the two women take on enhanced significance when we realize that the two women are widows. We must remind ourselves that these narratives are set in a social context where widows were the lowest of the low, the bottom of bottom of the social pyramid, victims of societal discrimination given the harmful widowhood practices that were so rampant at that time. It would thus appear that the Harmful Traditional Practices we notice in society today have a long history! Yet these victims of discrimination stepped out and made their marks in acts overflowing with faith and genuine care of others. May we have the faith to give like these two women, Amen.
A first sketch of a sociology of the Naija self-acclaimed “social activist” twitter community
Reactions to recent events in Nigeria, notably the very tragic loss of lives in the crash of a Dana aircraft and the changing of the name of the former University of Lagos to Moshood Abiola University, Lagos bring again to the fore some persisting peculiarities about social media usage in Nigeria. In the former, whilst families and almost the entire nation stood in shock and mourned in a spontaneous outburst of grief and outrage, a group of individuals jumped on the sad event and sought, after a brief interlude of demonstration of solidarity with families affected by the tragedy, to twist it to advance particular agendas. In the latter, rational discussion and review were marred by a combination ethnic undertones in the reactions and comments of a number of Nigerians and again by an “events hijack” by a group of individuals anxious to score political points. The ethnic undertones were indeed disturbing and of such a strength and intensity that some persons were even willing to venture as far as to question the significance and brand value of MKO in relation to the institution that was being re-named after him. This was surprising as it came from a section of the country that had all along clamoured for some fitting recognition for MKO for his contribution to the re-emergence of democracy in Nigeria. Politics does strange things to people’s memory and their judgments! But let us leave that aside for now with the hope to return to it on some other occasion.
My interest is this write up is the behaviour of a particular group of users of social media, specifically “Twitter”. This group is of interest to me because they were in the forefront of the attempts to politically hijack the two events I had mentioned earlier in this write up. This group dominates the Naija Twitter space by the sheer volume of their tweets and see themselves as social activists. It sees itself as the social conscience of our nation and has arrogated to itself the moral high ground of socio-political rectitude and probity. I write this piece as a first sketch of the sociology of this group. My intention is to see what, at a first level of examination, the patterns of conduct of this group on Twitter as a social media can reveal for the field of sociology of groups.
The easiest definition of sociology is that it is a study of society – how society is structured, the rules, the norms, codes and convention that govern it and the power relations which sustain it. Sociology looks closely at institutions, especially at its norms, rules, laws and codes. Central to sociology is the assumption that things do not just happen and that no structure in society, no event, no human action happens by chance. By implication, events in society are linked by a deep nexus of functions, causality, intentions and end seeking behaviour. Sociology assumes that human actions are purposive but are framed in time and space by rules, norms and functions. Events and actions are socially determined, rewarded and sanctioned by rules, norms and conventions which in the end betray power relations, social functions and status.
Sociology also sees every society as being made up of smaller units or communities, which are also mini societies in themselves. Each of these communities would have its norms, rules, conventions, power structure and reward system. In the larger society we can then find a community of writers, a religious community, an Agbero community, a medical community, a social media community and even within this community, a twitter “social activist” community! It is this last group that I will be looking at in this article that attempts, as I have indicated earlier on, a first sketch of its sociology. This first sketch is based on observations from the tweeting habits of this Nigerian “Twitter Social Activist community”, especially the content, pattern, language and style of its “tweeple”. These observations allow one to uncover a discernable power structure, clear pecking order, a set of unwritten rules of engagement, and a package of incentives and reward structures that ensure group cohesion and sustain loyalty. These observations were made from January to June 2012, It therefore covers from the “occupy” period right up to the recent June “sting”. I will be looking at the following – purpose and intention of this group – (stated or implicit), structure of the group, control and incentives, content of tweets, ground rules (stated or implicit), how the group deals with opposition and the spatial distribution of this group. This article is exploratory and I welcome comments and challenges.
Purpose and intention
The major ambition of this “social activist community” is to steer and dominate public opinion to the point of suffocating and drowning any dissenting voices. In the current dispensation, this ultimate end game is to unseat the PDP in 2015. Marketing this agenda and drawing supporters to it has been greatly facilitated by the seeming inability of the Jonathan administration to deal in a decisive way with critical problems of governance in this country, especially corruption, insecurity and decline in our social services provision sector. In the short and medium terms, the objectives are to magnify these failings of the GEJ administration, increase its unpopularity, undervalue and rubbish any achievements it may lay claims to. Regime change through the ballot is the ultimate goal. The means to this end include direct insults to the presidency and the person of the president, distortion of events to inculpate the president, deliberate falsehoods, exaggerations, ridicule, biased reporting and deliberately outrageous remarks meant to inflame and confuse. Members of this group are socialized into behaviours that produce all of these in the tweets. This socialization is achieved through a subtle blend of social pressure and incentives made possible by the structure of this “activist” community.
Structure
The structure of the community looks deceptively flat but it is not so in reality. There is an overall leader and below him/her, another level of leaders. These second level leaders are in charge of their specific “cells” and do their best to maintain a supportive and “mentoring” relationship with members with the aim of cleverly creating a dependence syndrome by these members. Below this second leadership level, and within these cells, there is the broad followership. In this broad followership, you will find an assorted array of persons – male and female, who function more or less as enforcers and hit men and women. Their job is to increase the anti-government tweet traffic and protect their members by hacking at anybody bold enough to challenge tweets from them. In many ways, this “social activist” community functions with a lot of the modus operandi and patterns of typical cults in our tertiary institutions – follow and obey the cult leader, loyalty to the cult and to its overall mission is more important than your individual likes and dislikes; your individual standing in society is actualized and enhanced the more the cult flourishes; your blind and unquestioning loyalty is critical for the cult to flourish. As with cults, so it is with this community where members willingly abandon reason and logic to follow the tweets of their leaders and defend these with passion and fury!
The overall leader of this community is not elected. Rather he/she emerges by self-selection, exploiting any surviving credibility from previous political incarnations to dazzle and befuddle members. This surviving credibility is carefully nurtured, packaged and repackaged and kept in the eyes of this “activist” community who relate with him or her with considerable adulation! He or she shapes and determines of the social activist agenda and direction for the week. This is usually achieved through the use of well-choreographed regular clinics on Twitter where this leader fields and answers questions and then makes broad swipes at persons and institutions. Such clinics then set the tone for the week and the abuse sound byte for that week is usually released during such clinics. The contents of the clinics are constantly shared to all members through the instrumentality of “Following”, retweets, member replies and new tweets by members – the purpose of these being to amplify the leader’s voice and reach. Let us suppose that the leader’s name on Twitter is @Yabiswacko, then the members, especially the second level leaders quickly start sending out tweets like “If you are not following @Yabiswacko now, you are missing a lot. Please retweet”. Because of the architecture of twitter, once you send out this message @Yabiswacko automatically knows it and you suddenly come to his attention as a strong ally! Any member who retweets or replies is also noticed. This explains the rather sudden burst in tweeting and retweets that accompany the leader’s clinic sessions, as tweeple, especially the new recruits and fresh converts, all start tweeting away and struggling to be noticed.
Control and incentives
How does this community manage to control its members? This is intriguing and the leaders of this community have developed and modified the use of a management pattern described in management literature as influence without authority. The modification comes in the form of the subtle blend of thought control tactics with reward and recognition. Leadership is always feeding its members with a specific spin on issues that ends up warping their minds and creating in them a sense of hysteria. It exploits a desire to belong by young people and uses subtle and psychological pressure to get these young people in their various locations to respond along lines that the leader desires. One group-belongingness strategy consists in creating a belief among members of this group that they, the self-certified social activists are the correct, morally upright few with vision and boldness. Further recognition also comes in the form of retweets and mentions by the leaders, something which members crave. Another form of recognition is promoting the member with the greatest volubility and distinction in insolence by the leader with a tweet such as “Follow @Fineshineshinebobo444 – he is a great Nigerian”! Members then retweet! Or this for a group of selected members – “Please follow @hair_ead999 @liteebrane001 @hemuty_kokohead0Y0 @FyneGal789 because they are Nigerian youths with vision”. This type of recognition is anxiously sought after and lapped up by young men and women thirsty for social recognition. The final recognition, the icing on the cake is made when the leaders and his lieutenants follow the tweeter in question. This type of recognition is celebrated the same way an adolescent boy celebrates the first sign of hair growth on his face!
Content of Tweets
Most of the tweets are one liner swipes and insults. Name calling is rampant – goons, thugs, thieves occur with deadening repetitiveness and frequency. Complex situations are reduced to simple statements and blame is shared very liberally, with finger pointing always pointing to the other person. Any event that embarrasses government is celebrated and orchestrated to the point that some tweeple were triumphant at the yellow card incident in South Africa, the failed rescue mission where two hostages died, killed by the captors. A screaming tweet – something like – “British Army invades Nigerian territory” suddenly jarred the twitter space as one tweeple gave expression to the sensationalism which is also a feature of the behaviour of this group. NOI failed bid for the World Bank presidency was celebrated in style and with rejoicing. There is a restructuring in a federal ministry and the first reaction is to gloat because of a feeling that the Personal Assistant to the Minister in the affected ministry is going to lose his job! The Bashorun MKO recognition effort was roundly rubbished as the “clueless” act of a “clueless” and “shoe-less” president, the Dana crash was caused by presidential incompetence, the president tears at the sight of the crash were fake, the cassava bread is a no brainer, GEJ is trying to undo UNILAG by renaming it MAUL because he failed to get admitted there…the list is endless – a sad commentary on how far the slide in mental processing has gone in certain sections of the populace of this country. No visible ideology, no alternative vision, no grand plan are discernable in the tweets of this group. Rather what seeps through is simple intense dislike for the president. A growing number of these tweeple are beginning to have their own blogs but apart from a minuscule of well-argued articles, content and style are one dimensional, single simple story in orientation, and usually marred by bias, deliberate deceptive spins and distortions. Whatever facts are in them are badly mangled by subjectivity and poorly concealed political motives.
Ground rules
Every community has its ground rules. The “social activist” is no exception. You can discern some of their unwritten ground rules from their tweeting behaviour.
1. Never criticise those higher than you on the pecking order
2. Never disagree with those higher than you in public. Use the DM facility, if you must disagree
3. Align behind the leadership and follow them, supporting and backing up their every utterance, no matter how outrageous and out of touch with reality they may be
4. Show unswerving loyalty to the leaders, overwhelm them with adulation and you will get your stripes and more recognition
5. Join the twitter battle to defend the leaders even before you understand what the issue is all about.
6. Defend group members – act with greater fury than the cavalry described in the Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
7. Give credit to the leader using the @Yabiswacko option even in a general tweet.
Such behaviour and the norms which underpin them show that this tweeter community is not about equals who share a commonly held ideology freely associating. They rather reveal an association marked by subservience and pernicious mind control. We are seeing social interaction strongly steeped in well internalize power relations and subservience to authority. Persons in this community subject themselves to the influence and control in a structure that has no directly visible formal authority To understand this, we will need to posit that this influence is exercised through an incentive structure which uses recognition in the present accompanied by the hope of social ascent/mobility in the future.
Overcoming opposition
Dealing with opposing voices involves a swarm and swamp attack strategy when the target is suddenly besieged by taunts and insults by “social activist” acting with fury and frenzy in a co-ordinated storm attack. Reason is buried. Senseless fury and noise are let loose on the Twitter space. And the storm attack is not fortuitous – it is triggered by an innocent tweet say by @CAPO_ogbaegbe to all who follow him “check out my TL for my rants” or by another capo to his brigade – “check out @CAPO_ogbaegbe as he takes on a goon”. Leading the attack are hackers – male and female – who act with energy of unchained sadists, unleashing an un-ending chain of verbal violence, directed not just at the victim but also to his/her family.
Geography and spatial distribution
One should never trust names on Twitter because people use fake names. However, if names are anything to go by, a lot of these angry people are from the southwest of Nigeria. They are very liberal and non-discriminating in their attacks. To qualify for their attacks and insults, you simply have to belong to the PDP, or be suspected to have sympathies for a PDP position. The voice of the South-South and the South East is more moderate in this community. It is not so loud, and their representation is weak. But the very few who do show up appear to want to out-do themselves and their soul mates from the South West – but they are not really convincing, their hearts are not really in it and theirs could be simple posturing. Voices from the North have two key features – they align predominantly behind one voluble and all-knowing gentleman. They are very usually very guarded in their attacks on persons from the North, even if that person belonged or still belongs to the reviled PDP. However, they become very bold in their tweets on persons from the South! We therefore are dealing with a group dominated by the South-West and the North who are using Twitter to attack and run down the president and his party but who are careful and controlled in their tweets on persons belonging to political parties that have the South-West and the North as their home bases. In addition, tweeple from the north are also very careful in what they say about persons from the north, whether or not that person belongs to the reviled PDP. Their take on the emerging revelations from the recent “sting” operation speaks volumes.
Conclusion
So this is the Nigeria “social activist” community. The social conduct and actions as described above are not reflective in the least of social activism as universally understood. Rather, they smirk of the antics of immature political opposition that conveniently tells itself that it is practising social activism. Or perhaps, the title is a convenient label being used by opposition party political activists to disguise their real intentions and its identities. This is not to mean that there are no genuine social activists out there but their voices are usually drowned in the howling noise of this new breed of political party mobilisers, recruitment agents and propagandists. One anxiously looks forwards to hearing more of their voices as they call attention to key social issues of governance guided by the principles of problem solving, objectivity, non-partisanship, impartiality, truth, relevance, justice and a concern for the common man and woman struggling to make ends meet in our struggling country.
Today’s readings touch on choices, decisions and wisdom. In the first reading, the apostle Paul does what he does best – drawing from his familiarity with greek philosophy to use opposites to contrast God’s wisdom with human wisdom. The whole exercise enables Paul to show the profound superficiality of much of what we humans see as indicators of our wisdom. Much of that pretended wisdom is indeed nothing else but vanity upon vanity, just plain shakara! In the Gospel reading, Jesus resorts to a parable to bring out the limited rationality of much of human decisions, especially in the example of the servant who buries his talent and therefore and thereby forecloses its possibility of growth and development. We are, most times, like this third servant in our decision making and in our choices. We arrive at decisions and choices by prioritising faulty and flawed parameters and assigning weights to these. We then reach a position based on the defective considerations that follow from our earlier prioritisation process. This position we have now taken must be the right one, must always be the right one we delude ourselves into believing. We tell ourselves that every other person’s views are inadequate, not well thought out and lacking in social depth, contextual sensitivity and intellectual rigour. We resist every effort to make us see otherwise and we resort to a broad range of strategies including doubling down, trivializing and ridiculing alternative views and voices. Hubris would already have kicked in at this time making us effectively victims and prisoners of our pride, our imperfect analysis and our unconscious biases. We become “Amarachalam ihe uwa jere je kuola nda Onyemachi nwa”. The readings today invite us to reflect and make real wise choices and take sound and rounded decisions which are based on a full consideration of the total circumstance involved – the actors and persons in the constellation of that decision making as well as the long, medium and short term consequences of our choices, decisions and actions. They also challenge us to examine the ethical and moral implications of our choices and what Kantian categorical imperatives would suggest as the best line of action in the situation we find ourselves in.
May divine wisdom invade us, possess us, flood us, overtake and overpower us and thus equip us with the necessary wisdom and balanced emotional intelligence that we need to engage with the world and those around us.
Ka Chineke mezie ukwu, isee!
Noel Ihebuzor
(written in the departure lounge of Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, whilst waiting for a rescheduled flight)
Reflections 