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Survivors

Susan L Daniels's avatarSusan Daniels Poetry

There is choice.  We can die
from the shame of what is done
to us.  We can wear the names
like letters branded into our skin
and quietly disappear,
become the nothings
they say we are, banished and vanished,
or we can wear our own words.

We can show them
women are not sheep.
Girls are not fruit.
There is no shearing of hair
or reaping a harvest from us.

We learn through breath
the difference between being a victim
and becoming a survivor
is subtle, delicate
before it grows strength:

That shift across the line
of being versus agency
is a thing danced, not learned;
sidestepping guilt and spinning it
back where it belongs
with something simple as a lifted head,
a turn around to shout back
at what is muttered under breath,
or the woman who did not stand in shame, wordless,
but blocked a door 
shouting for police,

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ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? SMH

Ikhide takes a hide…

Ikhide R. Ikheloa's avatarPa Ikhide

The Academic Staff Union of Universities of Nigeria. ASUU. ASUU is on strike again. Who cares? They are thugs, they are always on strike, nobody seems to know why, except that it involves being paid a boatload of money by their counterparts, those thieves euphemistically called the Nigerian government. ASUU. My contempt for that body of narcissistic thugs knows no bounds. There is really not much one needs to say about how these rogues in academic robes have colluded with any government in power (AGIP) to defraud and rob generations of beautiful children what is their right – a good education. To say ASUU is on strike is to state the obvious, they are nearly always on strike, even when they are at work, they are on strike. Their members want to have sex with every child that walks into their pretend classrooms, when they have satisfied themselves, they pimp their…

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Posted in Prose

The 26th September March

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

Our legislators are among the best paid in the world. If you look at their salaries and emoluments relative to either the mean, median and modal wages in Nigeria, then you are forced to take back that statement and to correctly say that they are among the “worst” paid in the world since their salaries are totally out of sync with the socio-economic realities of their environment. The Economist report has it that the basic salary of a legislator is about 116 times Nigeria’s GDP per person. Now if this claim is accurate, such a salary is not just bad, it is sinful. Our legislators ought to, in every responsibility, advocate for an immediate downward review of their salaries and allowances. I will be among the first to support a petition by the electorate for the immediate downward review of the salaries and allowances of these people.

Our history on demonstrations is not the best in the world. We appear to be totally unable to come up with demonstrations with peaceful endings. The fault is at two levels. The first is with the demonstrators.   Some of the demonstrators act with immaturity and are prone to demonstrating the worst forms of self- restraint during demonstrations. The second is with the agents of law and order who are not always “lawful nor orderly” in their conduct and who are not very skilled in handling demonstrations/marches and in crowd control. The combination of an immature group of persons and law enforcement agents who are not too skilled in the management of crowds during demonstrations usually spells disaster. Disaster arrives even faster when mischievous element, anxious to make either political capital or quick financial gains from demonstrations,  join this mix. The descent from a peaceful assembly and parade to confusion, mayhem, anarchy, tire burning, road blocks, extortion and other forms of disorderly conduct is rapid and the consequences can be very  painful, wasteful and socially divisive.

I hear a march to protest NASS salaries is planned for 26th September, 2013. Details are still sketchy as to the locations, route, how and the form of this march. But it is important for the march organisers to recognise upfront the realities of demonstrations in Nigeria and to take steps to ensure that the planned march is peaceful and that their ranks are not infiltrated by elements with other intentions. They must also ensure that the march is not hijacked by persons or groups with party political motives and ambitions. It is important that clearance(s) for the march or marches (if they are planned for several locations) are obtained from the relevant authorities and that designated venues and routes are kept to. The organisers must therefore organise a responsible march and ensure that marchers march with responsibility and keep within the limits of the law. The law enforcement agencies, on their part, also must keep away from provoking the demonstrators. Their roles must focus on ensuring public order and peace and on protecting the lives and safety of Nigerians, including the marchers who they must see as simply exercising their democratic rights. The crowds must be handled with great sensitivity and tough tactics should only be deployed when breaches of the peace are clear and obvious. When this happens, response should swift, targeted and commensurate with the perceived risk and nothing more. We saw such swift and targeted responses in the police handling of the last riots in the UK.

I do not want to be alarmist but I am just calling attention to a planned event that could provoke clashes which then have the potential of snowballing out of control.  Clashes can be avoided if clear commitments are made before the march and adhered to by the marchers and law enforcement agents also agree to abide and actually abide by agreed principles of crowd control during the march. Incidentally, the planned march can still be headed off now (and valuable man hours and agro saved and possible disasters/hard feeling averted) if significant persons representing all the political parties from both houses of the National Assembly were to step forward now and assure the electorate that the NASS would be engaging in discussions with the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) in the very near future with a view to a downward and realistic review of the salaries and allowances of their members.

Noel

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Spotlight on Nigeria’s education crisis

A slow onset but protracted emergency and social time bomb! Cry, the beloved country!

Pauline Rose's avatarWorld Education Blog

Education in Nigeria is in crisis: 10.5 million children are out of school, more than in any other country, and over half of adults in the country are illiterate, a legacy of decades of poor education. In response, the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, attended an education summit yesterday in Abuja, Nigeria, together with President Goodluck Jonathan, state governors and the education commissioners of all 36 states.

The UN Special Envoy and the policy makers were joined by major education partners such as USAID, Qatar’s Educate a Child, the Global Partnership for Education, and the Global Business Coalition for Education. They were expected to announce significant new financial support for education and discuss how it could be used to build more schools, recruit and train more teachers, and implement new technology.

A similar trip by the UN Special Envoy in July helped put the education emergency in…

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The library lives still

The Library is no longer a Building!

Ikhide R. Ikheloa's avatarPa Ikhide

For my friend, Uzo Onyemaechi, the Millenium librarian. Biri kwe!

The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a lovely piece in Guernica magazine, Why Are You here?. It is a sobering commentary on what passes for education in Nigeria.  Hear Adichie:

“It is not surprising that parents do not want their children to attend university in Nigeria. Many students themselves would leave if they had the opportunity. About ten years ago, I left after almost three years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, not so much because of the conditions, which were not good, but because I no longer wanted to study medicine. Now, the student complaints are sadly the same—the classes are overcrowded, no books in the library, no computers, no chemicals in the lab, lecturers force students to buy handouts which are just recycled outdated textbooks, incessant lecturer strikes elongate programs, exam schedules are often haphazard. Private universities…

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Remembering Ekwensi’s spirit: Ode to the Sokugo

Ikhide R. Ikheloa's avatarPa Ikhide

For Cyprian Odiatu Duaka  Ekwensi (1921-2007)

Deep in America’s grinding labor mines, my memories hear my childhood chiming the Angelus. I pause to luxuriate in the coming pleasure of tugging at the camphor smell of mama’s wrapper. The bugler stands, starched khaki clean, on the hill of many wars, horns hollering Taps for a warrior struck one last time by the sokugo. Our dispatch-rider, high on joy, and apeteshie, stands tall on giant Fanta bottles of ogogoro balanced on his Triumph motorcycle. Uniformed myrmidon of the coming darkness, dispatch rider of generations of Africa’s worst despots takes a break from ushering yet another coming of yet another dictator and performing somersaults on the motorcycle of many memories, and confirms the final journey of the warrior, Cyprian Ekwensi. Here in America, we shiver at attention in our blue suits – alien regalia offspring of our ancestors apologizing in alien regalia.

cyprian_ekwensi

I…

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Francis: War is Always a Defeat for Humanity!

feathersproject's avatarFEATHERS PROJECT

“Look upon your brother’s sorrow – I think of the children, look upon these – look upon your brother’s sorrow, and do not add to it, stay your hand, rebuild the harmony that has been shattered; and all this not by conflict but by encounter! May the noise of weapons cease!”           

Full Text of Pope Francis Address in the Prayer Vigil for For Peace[Vatican, September 07, 2013]

“‘And God saw that it was good’. The biblical account of the beginning of the history of the world and of humanity speaks to us of a God who looks at creation, in a sense contemplating it, and declares: ‘it is good’. This, dear brothers and sisters, allows us to enter into God’s heart and, precisely from within him, to receive his message. We can ask ourselves: what does this message mean? What does it say to…

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The ‘Deintellectualisation’ of the Academia in Africa

Steps to recover, reclaim and redeem our Ivory Towers. A worthy read.

feathersproject's avatarFEATHERS PROJECT

I just read this paper (see pdf below): “REINTELLECTUALIZATION OF THE DEINTELLECTUALIZED ACADEMIA IN AFRICA: PROCESS, PRODUCT AND PATHWAY” by Professor Joel Babatunde Babalola. It was graciously shared by Dr Noel A. Ihebuzor.

REINTELLECTUALIZATION OF THE DEINTELLECTUALIZED ACADEMIA IN AFRICA by Prof Joel Babalola pdf

Professor Babalola argues that:

[…] the academia in Sub-Saharan Africa has become deintellectualized over the years owing to hostile environmental conditions, depraved resource situation and compromised intellectual processes as well as poverty in the feedback mechanisms. As a way out, a system-approach intellectual revival is proposed to reintellectualize the deintellectualized academia in the continent. To this end, this paper is arguing for a process involving reinvigoration and retooling of non-organic and immature intellectuals who are based in various interacting parts of the knowledge systems in Africa to imbibe and be immersed in the global spirit of intellectualism, thereby catching the intellectual…

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Guest Blog Post – Missive to Ikhide Ikheloa: A Diasporan Fulbright’s experience of Higher Education in Nigeria

Bashing with a capital B!

Ikhide R. Ikheloa's avatarPa Ikhide

Professor Okey C. Iheduru teaches at Arizona State University, in the School of Politics and Global Studies.

Preface: This essay is a compilation of two postings I made beginning 28 August 2013, in which I responded to a discussion on the listserve USA-Africa Dialogue Forum occasioned by a Call for Papers by the editor of the Unilag Journal of Politics. The subject of the heated debate was the propriety of demanding upfront payment from prospective authors by a supposedly peer-reviewed journal. In that intervention, I also promised to do a proper write-up of some of my two-year sabbatical/Fulbright and LEADS Scholar experiences, particularly as it concerns higher education in Nigeria.

I am a full professor of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University, Tempe. Given the time constraints I face (especially readjusting to life in America after two years plus the…

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New Chefs

By

Noel A. Ihebuzor

 

The big pot on the fire

slowly cooks a rot of a plot,

rotters, revellers and rioters,

sing and rejoice, copiously salivating

the glimmering prize in sight, tantalizing

We must not talk or sulk or balk

 

 

The dropping romps of the cooks and crooks

too obvious to even non-looking eyes,

the fevered stirring of this sticky broth

a mish-mash pot-pourri cobbled by a medley

of assorted chefs of drooping and dangling mores,

tired and tiring broth

to be served for our famished jaws

We must not talk or sulk or balk

 

 

Doom beckons coyly in this season of declining bloom

nimble fingers play with our minds chords,

clever tongues sing swans to dull us

the ever hungry lion

spins his wealth on our common loom

glows and swims in an ocean of wealth

whilst all around us

lame lambs drown in pool of poverty

in a season of plenty

We must not talk or sulk or balk

 

 

And all this dance of drunken lizards and

dead beat rats racing almost dazed,

looking for who to bait and bite.

We must not talk or sulk or balk

We must like Isaiah go the slaughter

with laughter, “shuffering & Shmiling”

but with no salvation in sight