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The Power of Vulnerability

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

simple yet deep!

Miranda's avatarWord, Sentence, Story

This is an incredible TED video. The beginning is a little slow, but you need all of the information she tells you to start with in order to appreciate the end the way you will if you promise to watch the entire video. If you don’t have time for the entire video, I at least want you to take from it the main message which is exposed in the last couple minutes and I have written below.

Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

Starting at 14: 27 — “Why do we struggle with [vulnerability] so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No. So this is what I learned…We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability.

And I think there’s evidence — and it’s not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it’s a huge cause…

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Bias and its hazards

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

Most people will swear on their mother’s left breast, the breast closest to her heart, that they are objective, even when the evidence that they are not stares them starkly in the face. Some journalists are bolder and are even willing to swear on their mother’s two breasts that they are objective. And it is not that such journalists hate or disrespect their mums by swearing falsely and invoking the name of such a significant person in their lives who deserves undying respect and veneration – it is just they have become so blind to their biases that they have ended up losing every sense of balance and self awareness – the usual endpoint for persons who allow themselves to journey and mingle with bias and who then becomes its prisoners – their minds shackled, their visions dimmed and judgments vitiated. Persons who were supposed to be the voices and the eyes of the people are now locked up in dungeons with very opaque windows and where deformed self-made panes, the only windows to the world out there, deflect and refract light and create the worst forms of illusions of vision. How did these fellows get into these dungeons? They got pulled into them by the lure of money and incentives, by unreflecting loyalty to faction, section or class and by the seduction of hatred and envy which end up dulling the senses – visual acuity, discriminatory powers and judgment – of persons  whose hearts and hearths they have entered and found quick and easy welcome. Henceforth cocooned in islands of subjectivity and irrationality, so sadly and blissfully unaware of their present afflictions, these persons who should be the fourth estate of the realm become purveyors of inaccuracies and writers of commentaries and editorials which have neither breadth nor depth but are characterized by flatness, incompleteness and cant. And the belief of these persons in their objectivity persists, fuelled by comments and adulations from a captive readership.  These delusions of objectivity are so powerful that these prisoners of bias would willing take on any mortal bold enough to point out to them what are clear inadequacies, profound shallowness and shameful aberrations in their writings and in their campaigns of misinformation and disinformation of the masses they are supposed to inform, educate and defend. To get a sense of what I am talking about, just read the new Sam Nda Isaiah, the Punch Newspaper and Leadership Newspaper and then weep for the sorry state of journalism in our dear country.

Noel Ihebuzor

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A Nigerian Book Review by Sylva Nze Ifedigbo

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

They shed their Khakis for Agbadas. They still toy with our fortunes and our future!

Max Siollun's avatarMax Siollun’s Website

 

An author’s peep into Nigeria’s military years

A review of Max Siollun’s book, Soldiers of Fortune by Sylva Nze Ifedigbo.

HISTORY matters and history well told, in an engaging manner devoid of academic encumbrance, matters even more, especially when it is about Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, which is set to celebrate the centenary of its existence next year, 2014. At this point when the younger generation of her over 160 million large population is contemplating the future of their country, a proper knowledge of the past, where the rain began to beat, as a popular Igbo adage will say, is imperative to ensure that the future is a different story, for as George Santayana once noted, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Brilliant historian, Max Siollun, satisfies the yearning of many, Nigerians and non Nigerians alike, who have long sought an insight into…

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Posted in Prose

Dis Na Naija!

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

Every age deserves a show. For some the show could come packaged as comedy, full of boom, bloom and blossom. For others, it could come served as tragedy overflowing with gloom and doom. Since we are special in Naija, we often get treated to shows in quick successions – and each one, a blend of comedy and tragedy, leaving the watcher bemused but confused.  We have had some very good shows lately, all blending the comic and the tragic, and all portending the coming of more shows.

SLS’s letter and its confutation by the NNPC is a tragi-comedy. How can the governor of the CBN be ignorant of these details if the NNPC’s explanation is indeed true? If the explanation is true, we have a tragedy that arises because arms of government are not talking to one another and a comedy because they choose to come to the public gallery to display such a dysfunction. I simply hope that the NNPC explanation is wrong, since I hold SLS in very high esteem. When technocrats opt to play politics, they should be kind enough to serve the public notice in bold strokes that says “Buyer, beware”.

Tambuwal’s recent corruption song is as comic as it is tragic.. It is comic because he was playing to the gallery and knew he was doing precisely that. It is tragic because he too is a product of that same corruption he talks about and that the House he serves as speaker is not corruption free. What has he done to address that corruption in the House? What has he done to sweep his own stables? The sad truth of life is that the beam in the other fellow’s eye is always larger than the one protrudes from our own eyes. The bathos of Dambuwal’s situation is that he comes away from the speech feeling he has barbed the presidency and forgets to notice how much he has bloodied himself in the effort. The tragedy in pyrrhic victories replays ever so often with presumed victors often overlooking how much they may have sullied themselves in their vain efforts to score cheap victories.

OBJ’s letter is the tragi-comedy of squandered good will and eroded credibility. I have always argued that credibility becomes a depleting asset once its use has been abused three times – the magic number 3! OBJ could be saying correct things about GEJ but nobody takes him seriously any more. I am even distancing myself from “the kettle call pot black” type of reaction that dominated the media since his missive-missile became public. I prefer to focus on the content of some of his accusations and his seeming inability to understand that assertion is not the same thing as proof. Old folks do not waste soup – agadi adighi agwo ofe – the Igbos say.  Thus when respected old men succumb to the temptation of treating with flippancy and levity that which is serious, when respected elder statesmen start making wild accusations without bothering to substantiate them, then you start to wonder what these same old men expect of our 20 million youths. Snipers under training and 1000 persons under surveillance and this said in the most cavalier of manners. In some other climes, Baba would have been invited to explain but this is Naija, a country where it is sometimes difficult to separate the venerable from the venal! How could Baba, in every seriousness, write thus? Has Baba’s mind been influenced by the propensities of one of his famous “oti mpkus” whose reckless excesses are such as even to make the extremes of lunacy look somber and sober?   Even Baba’s attack on GEJ’s second term ambitions are built essentially on claims he is unable to prove convincingly and conclusively, some even bordering on hearsay and thus bringing his entire intentions and emotional state when he wrote the piece into question.  Some of the content were in particular bad taste, his take on the interanl PDP palaver being a good example! Nigerians needed to be spared the long narration on the internal squabbles in the PDP, and it needs a sense of statesmanship and fine sense of judgment to guide OBJ not to tread that path. Not everything that one sees and knows should be inflicted on the public. Not everything an elder sees and knows is discussed in the market place, the Igbos say! Nzu rules supreme!  Statesmen do not come to the public to wash dirty linen and underwear! Knowing what and when to share is an art. It demands an awareness of the nature and needs of the target audience; It demands good judgment of what is relevant.  It demands sensitivity, tact and Nzu, qualities that statesmen are also assumed to possess in abundance. In failing to apply the right level of selectivity in the choice of what he divulged, OBJ may have betrayed a drop in his level of tact and statesmanship. It is this sad drop that explains why he could have inflicted such a narration on us and why he could also do so with the clumsiness one normally associates with a young elephant. In the democracies we aspire to, it is considered to be in extreme bad faith and taste for an ex-president or ex-prime minister to make such disparaging and destructive remarks on the rule of a sitting president or prime minister. It is considered as bad manners and hardly ever happens. But not in our Naija –  Everything goes.

Abati’s response is tragic and comic at the same time. “I am not to reply but yet you reply” – haba, which kine one be dat?  And his reaction was as predictable as his line of attack. Trying to dismiss grave accusations of the type that Baba Iyabo made with emotive language is not always very convincing. When confronted with accusations against my person or against my principal, my attitude has always been to kill my emotions and do a blow by blow clinical response, accepting where I am wrong and using evidence to challenge and refute assertions that derive from either spite, ignorance, greed, ambition, misplaced ideology, immaturity, vacuous knowledge base or an over-inflated ego. I should commend this modus operandi to Reuben Abati, but Dr Abati is a guru and veteran of the media and I, alas, I am nothing but a lay reader.

The dress rehearsal for 2015 has commenced in earnest. Generals, who wrongly believe that this country is theirs to manipulate at will, are watching which way the political wind is blowing and are doing their best to adjust their tattered sails to benefit maximally from it. Self-interest is being packaged and sold as commitment to the nation.  The over-riding intention is power grab! Any and every method is allowed. Decency, truth and common sense will be early victims. Hot air will triumph and lunatics will have their field days – unrestrained, and their unrestraint will be our constraint. Loud mouthed Achilles will visit us with their empty and rumbustious swagger and little men will act out their smallness to its fullest. God save us!

Posted in Uncategorized

For Madiba – A clumsy tribute for one of our greats!

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

Noel A. Ihebuzor

madiba 2
some flames never die
some loves never end
some gifts never fade
some glows defy the coldest winters
some touches last seven lives and more,
like yours to a grateful world
that rejoices, weeps and
remembers, O Madiba, Great Nelson.
 
the flame you lit and then lent us
brightens dark souls,
illumines hearts filled with doubts and fears
burns and shines brightest today,
its tongue soared and sang sharpest
warmed our grateful hearts best in its last season,
Jee nke oma dimkpa asa!
This dying opens the doors
of a new life for you
and new hopes for a troubled world
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Of Drink Problems and Disorderly Writing

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

The caption of the article “If Jonathan has a drinking problem” is framed in such a manner as to convey some uncertainty. Reading it however, one is confronted by Mr Adelakun’s not too concealed confirmation that the Nigerian President has such a problem. Journalists have their sources and lay people like us are expected to lap up whatever they dish out. Who are you to doubt their sources when they present these sources thus “I have interacted with associates that have also interacted with Jonathan at close range and they say, indeed, he has a blooming relationship with a certain brand of wine.” It should not matter that the evidence for this very weighty accusation is of the type I describe as “I saw a man who says he saw a man who claims he met a minister who saw the queen.” Mr Adelakun has his sources and his sources must be accurate. To doubt is to be disrespectful and one must never disrespect journalists.  It is also risky to conclude that Mr Adelakun does not drink – after all, among the irate crowd gathering to stone the woman caught in adultery to death in the Christian Scriptures were certainly some of her regular clients. Those without blemish and vices can hurl stones at us lower mortals with our frailties and foibles. Journalists are the conscience of the nation and spot sins which only their fine senses can behold. I have nothing against this – every profession has a right to some self-deceit.

 

But my questions are these – must an op-ed whose clear intention is to nail a president and diminish him also trade in stereotyping? Could Mr Adelakun not have clinched his case against the president without resorting to conveying and reinforcing damaging, outdated, irrelevant, demeaning, inaccurate ethnic smears/slurs and generalizations? Are paragraphs 6-8 of his article really necessary? What is the import of these paragraphs? Beyond revealing Mr Adelakun’s own biases and ethnic affiliations, how relevant are these paragraphs to the poorly veiled and politically motivated expose on a man’s supposed drinking problem? I was hoping that Mr. Adelakun would stop and challenge the whole basis of stereotypes, show how dangerous, damaging, divisive and unhelpful they are but that hope was in vain because he needed stereotypes to caste his slur on the president and the president’s ethnic group. And, by the way, how accurate is this statement by Mr Adelakun – “Please note, stereotypes are not always devoid of reality but the problem is that they turn into self-fulfilling prophecies”. I am reluctant to challenge Mr Adelakun’s familiarity with stereotypes but if this comment reflects that knowledge, then that knowledge must be severely limited. Journalists should be familiar with the intimate links between stereotypes, prejudice, ethnophaulism and harmful actions, but not Mr. Adelakun.

 

And how more offensive can a journalist be in his comments on other ethnic groups? His insult on women from the SS is in very bad taste and deserves an instant retraction and apology.  And how more uncritical and biased can a writer be – the stereotype for the Yorubas is slick! Slick indeed! Notice the polysemy of the word “slick” and you will understand why he chose the word in this his sad role of purveyor of stereotypes. Slick! Mr. Adelakun’s effort itself is slick – could it be that this word which drips in deliberate polysemy is the best group descriptor for his people and the one he is most at peace with?

 

Having exercised his stereotyping wizardry in its fullness, Mr Adelakun then turns his attention to alerting his readers to the disastrous consequences of the president’s supposed drinking problem for the nation! But how convincing is Mr Adelakun’s effort to link this supposed problem to some governance gaps and goofs by the presidency? I find the effort unconvincing but overdone because of Mr. Adelakun’s quest for the over-kill. Over-kill has a trade-off in life.  That trade-off is balance. If Mr. Adelakun had adopted balance as one of his guiding principles, the arguments in his last two paragraphs might have been less puny. Assuming even that Mr. Adelakun’s accusations against the president and his people are evidence based, is mockery the mature and appropriate response to it?  It certainly is not. The abandonment of balance is clearly responsible for this grossly inadequate response. Balance would have encouraged him to remember that a mature and professional response to alcohol abuse, and to any substance abuse for that matter, is compassion and empathy, not the thinly veiled rejoicing and mockery one meets in his write up. Certainly to ask a journalist to recognize that substance abuse results from the interaction of public policy, biology, sociology and psychology and for him to reflect that recognition in his write up on such a sensitive issue is not asking too much. Indeed, it is to invite such a journalist to move beyond facile and simple narratives and to embrace depth. One does not need to remind Mr. Adelakun that the absence of depth in journalism leads to its death.

 

Journalists are the conscience of the nation. In this role, we lay people have certain expectations of them. Writing as if they were punch drunk is certainly not one of such expectations. Otherwise, we may also begin to suspect that journalists who display such traits either in their logic or choice of examples or lack of empathy could have even more damaging personal problems than those they “deign” to show up and castigate!

Posted in Prose

Tortoise, famine and the other animals

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel Ihebuzor

Once there was famine in the land of the animals. Animals starved. Every animal was emaciated. Hunger played music on their empty stomachs. Hungry played tricks on their minds. Things got more desperate with each passing day. The tortoise, the wisest and most cunning of all the animals, suggested that each animal kills his/her mother. If they did this, the gods would be struck by the enormity of the sacrifice that the animals were making and perhaps end the famine. Besides, by eliminating their mothers, the heroic animals would be reducing the number of mouths to feed during these hard times, tortoise persuasively argued. Some of the animals – the cock, the dove, the elephant and the bat initially objected but gradually tortoise wore down their objections.  In the end unanimity was reached. Difficult times required difficult decisions; special situations demanded special sacrifices, tortoise had argued and real heroes and nationalists never hold back from making tough decisions and carrying them out. Only cowards and the short-sighted hold back when destiny beckons, tortoise pontificated. The animals all agreed. Fiam, gbam, gbum, kagbum – each animal went home and fell on his/her mum and killed her. Matricide became the sign of courage and belongingness.

Unknown to the other animals, tortoise had hidden his own mum in the skies. He had designated a spot on a hill where his mum would send a rope from the skies to enable him climb up to visit her, chat with and enjoy all the joys of a mother’s love and care. And he would go up in most evenings to send her portions of choice meat from the slaughter below.

One day, the rest of the animals found out what the tortoise had done. A mixture of shame, regret and anger took hold of them and they set off to go and capture the tortoise. On sighting them, tortoise took off and started racing to the spot where his mother would normally let down the rope. As tortoise’s mum sent down the rope for her son to climb up to the skies, the other animals caught unto the rope and the agile ones – the cheetah, the leopard, the chimpanzee – all started climbing up and chasing after the tortoise. Soon they were catching up with him. When tortoise saw this, he shouted to his mum to cut the rope. The mum cut the rope and all of the animals came crashing down to earth, including tortoise. Tortoise broke his back in the fall. He also got a good beating from the rest of the other animals for his deceit. His back had to be patched and stitched together in hundred places as a result of the fall and the beating that he got. This is why the back of the tortoise looks so patched up always.

The morale of the story is that people should always be very suspicious of the person or group of persons who tell you to kill your mum whilst they secretly keep theirs safe, alive and very healthy. As with Tortoise and the animal kingdom, so with contemporary politics, and those politicians who invite you to commit matricide whilst their own mothers are safe and alive.

Posted in Uncategorized

No Principles but New Principals

Posted on by Noel Ihebuzor

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

I am sharing two documents we must all read. Both articles were signed by Nasir El-Rufai.  One was written to President Obasanjo and the other was written to President Yar Adua

These two articles are also published in the Village Square and the link lines to them are appended below –
In one paper, El-Rufai must have assumed that he was the front runner  of all OBJ successors and that OBJ would thus  so annoint him. He came up in this paper with such democracy destroying suggestions that would even make a Stalin shudder.
Read this

“The use of the unutilized power of federal electronic media in the propaganda war is unavoidable being a weapon that is readily available in the arsenals of the ruling party and therefore all obstacles to its deployment must be anticipated and removed immediately. 

A strategy should also be evolved to snatch away the international wire services from the opposition. Equally important is the need to cultivate FM radio stations for effective deployment against the enemy whose dirty deals and shameful conducts the print media has been largely paid to conceal. All stringers of the international wire services resident in Nigeria and their editors abroad should be identified for engagement, neutralization or deployment against the enemy that has used these effectively.

Condition survey needs to be conducted in a good time to ascertain the PDP’s popular support in all the senatorial districts before the national convention of the PDP. This exercise would pave way for the ranking of such constituencies on scale A, B, C, D and E.”

In another paragraph, he stops just short of actually saying how elections are best rigged! Read this –
“The function of the core-group is to systematically coordinate the use of Police, SSS, EFCC, ICPC and other state organs as per their respective roles before and during elections based on new approaches which subject matter will be detailed out subsequently”.
 In the second document, OBJ has by-passed him and selected UYA and the clever Nasir is now struggling to ingratiate himself with Umaru –

“Presidential Burdens and Qualities

We learnt that you were reluctant to run for President. It is quite understandable. No normal person who understands the burdens of the office will be eager to aspire to the Nigerian Presidency. But it is vital that decent people run for the office so that the nation is not destroyed by some of the vagabonds that ran around the country ‘aspiring’ and annoying the sensibilities of the people. Most of the eager and early aspirants saw only an expanded domestic treasury and foreign reserves ready for looting, rather than the heavy responsibilities of running a country containing one out of every 40 human beings on earth. And in a positive sense Nigeria needs the very best leadership if we are to become a great country; you have the opportunity to provide this leadership.

We were therefore relieved when you joined the race. You have emerged clearly as probably the most honest state governor in the country. John Steinberg (1966) in writing about the American Presidency said “The President must be great, but not better than all”. As Governor, you are probably better than all the governors, so what remains is for you to become a great President.

Early in this process, some of us – Tanimu Yakubu included got into real trouble because we made suggestions that you should be the sort of person to be drafted to run for President. We were essentially guided by lessons learnt at the Georgetown Leadership Seminar 2000, wherein Paul Begala, an aide to President Bill Clinton listed four qualities of a good President” 

How desperate can one get? How more obsequious can we get? The same character is now strutting around, fawning and trying to ingratiate himself with GMB and APC all in the hope of landing a post for himself should the GMB/APC ticket win the race! How low can one go? El-Rufai is nothing else but a chartered and certified political jobber. Hoha, no more needs be said about him. His principles do not change. His principals may change.

Noel