Finding use for the National Anthem’s second stanza

Finally, someone found use for the second stanza of the National Anthem. Somebody shout halleluiah! I was quite impressed last week when, while attending the award presentation ceremony for winners of the National Youth Essay Contest organised by the National Orientation Agency, I found that the agency had adopted the second stanza of the National Anthem as some kind of official uniform national prayer for Nigeria.

I have always wondered what the second stanza was about, what purpose it served. Indeed, I questioned the need for one, especially since it was rarely sung by anyone. In a country where national identities enjoy little relevance in the minds of the citizens and where not too many educated citizens can recite the otherwise popular first stanza without errors, it seemed a waste of time to have a second stanza that is almost of no significance to the people.

Ironically, however, I have always thought that that the lyrics of the second stanza are very rich. It reads more like a pledge, a solemn declaration under the guidance of the Supreme Being to serve – a prayer. I have always wished Nigerians would pay more attention to those lines and use them as a guide for their conduct or at least derive some meaning from them and enrich their sense of patriotism. I am glad the National Orientation Agency, under the new DG, Mike Omeri, shared these thoughts and did something about it.

The Nigerian is a very religious being. He advertises it at the slightest opportunity. It is either his hands hold prayer beads or his car is covered in stickers screaming the glory of God. His sentences are not complete without “God” in them and, make no mistake about it, he believes in some way that God is a Nigerian. You hear him espouse such beliefs when the national soccer team is playing a match. Even the team observes prayers as though it is a football skill. They will pray before the game and at half time, in a very public display of submission to the Almighty.

At public functions, prayer has found its way into becoming a fixture on the programmes. There are opening and closing prayers. Consciously, we do our best to ensure a balance (as we have learnt to do in every other aspect of our national life). If a Christian takes the opening prayer, we make sure a Muslim closes it.

While we pretend by these actions to be very religious people, on the other hand, we have also succeeded in officially emboldening our differences as a people. It is such actions that continue to harp on our sensibilities that we are different people because we call God by different names, thus ensuring that religion continues to be a dividing factor, one that currently threatens everything we know and hold as a nation.

It is interesting to observe what happens at these official prayer sessions; the hypocrisy, the competition, the shame. If a Christian is called to say the opening prayer, he makes sure to be as elaborate as he can be and might spend as much as five minutes. When the Muslim counterpart is later called, he ensures he outdoes the Christian and spends more time. This happens vice versa.  And if we will be sincere to our selves, no one is really paying serious solemn attention to the words of prayer being said at such events.

It is therefore a welcome development to have the National Orientation Agency championing a move away from this era of official religious irresponsibility. It is interesting to note that while the agency was not scrapping prayers as a whole (which many would have raised arguments against), they were replacing the Christian vs. Muslim prayer roll call with a National prayer drawn from the second stanza of our National anthem which is owned by all, both Christians and Muslims.

Besides finding some use for the long ignored, presumed irrelevant and unappreciated second stanza of the anthem, the agency, through this initiative, is finally doing something symbolic to blot out differences from our national consciousness. I think this is commendable and we all should support this.

The national prayer should be adopted in all schools and should become the default prayer at all public functions at all levels of government. For many who do not remember the words – and I know there are many – I have taken the liberty of reproducing them here so that, perhaps, the orientation can begin right here:

Oh God of creation, direct our noble cause

Guide our leaders right

Help our youth the truth to know

In love and honesty to grow

And living just and true

Great lofty heights attain

To build a nation where peace and justice shall reign.

First published in Daily Times 13/5/2012

Maslow’s theory and the Nigerian reality

One of the main problems with Nigeria is that we have too many social climbers without ladders. You heard it here first. Well, maybe you have heard it before but I am repeating it here for emphasis. There are too many abracadabra, out of the blues success stories. So much fluff with no material, plus no keen sense of reality. Like everything artificial, everything that does not rest on a solid foundation, everything without a strong essence, the things they do keep collapsing like Humpty Dumpty.

You see, Abraham Maslow was not on cheap crack when he proposed his Hierarchy of Needs theory. Let’s assume he was, he couldn’t have got the entire world drugged such that his theory continues to enjoy rave analysis in business and management classes world over. You see, that is one of the problems I have with us, too many MBA holders who are neither masters of their own thoughts nor that of management practices. We keep studying and writing thesis on what people in similar classes years ago propounded. Immediately after, we go shopping for suits and become briefcase CEOs, employ staff and owe them for months.

But I digress. We were talking about Maslow. This theory remains valid today for understanding human motivation, management training, and personal development. Indeed, Maslow’s ideas surrounding the Hierarchy of Needs concerning the responsibility of employers to provide a workplace environment that encourages and enables employees to fulfil their own unique potential (self-actualisation) are today more relevant than ever.

Now, replace employer with “government” and employee with “Nigerian citizen” in the above statement and you get a glimpse of what I am on about.

You see, I was reviewing some notes recently and it hit me. Each of us is motivated by needs, true. Our most basic needs are inborn, having evolved over tens of thousands of years. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs helps to explain how these needs motivate us all. The theory states that we must satisfy each need in turn, starting with the first, which deals with the most basic need for survival itself. Only when the lower order needs of physical and emotional well-being are satisfied are we concerned with the higher order needs of influence and personal development.

What do we have in Nigeria today? We see people from nowhere, all sorts of characters, riffraffs, simpletons, people without a clear understanding of where they are headed themselves, suddenly doing double somersaults and unfortunately finding themselves in places and offices at the very top of Maslow’s chart, effectively skipping the preceding steps.

What happens is that when they get there, they still retain the mindset of people in the lower levels. For example, when a fellow with little or no education and no reasonable means of livelihood (an occupant of the lowest tier of the chart) who is most bothered about physiological needs of food and shelter suddenly, by associating with the right political party, finds himself in the State Assembly, he is not concerned about the esteem his new status accords him. In his mind, he is still at the ‘physiological needs’ level and so he busies himself stealing and embezzling funds just to meets those needs to such extent that he accumulates enough for two generations.

Those are the social climbers with no ladders I am talking about.  The gate crashers to power and fame. Pretenders. Empty vessels. If you think they only exist in government or that this phenomenon is restricted to those in places of authority, you are, as D’Banj will say, sitting on a long thing. Perhaps you should take another look around you. Start from your blackberry messenger or whatsapp list. Navigate your way to facebook and twitter. By the time you have successfully done the blog rounds and read all the empty talk and disturbing perspectives of young people, some of whom, in fairness to them, are (by our standards) ‘successful’ people, you will appreciate what I mean when I say that the quantity of ‘matter’ without ‘mass’ we have around has entered worrying proportions.

You see, when someone suddenly begins to enjoy celebrity status by doing next to nothing or by riding on the shoulders of some forces to certain levels of influence, without putting in the requisite hard work or learning the rudiments required for such ascension, it is not hard to tell. And when a generation is no longer motivated to put in their best as dictated by their immediate needs to move to the next stage of life, but is in a hurry to fly up to the top, then you know that there is a problem.

You know, we didn’t need Maslow to even speak all the big grammar for us to appreciate this fact. From time immemorial, we know that a child will sit and crawl before standing and attempting to walk. Must we wait for oyibos to tell us about ourselves? Sad thing is, even that which they’ve told us, we have refused to learn from. Didn’t we have to rely on them to help us jail one of our worst criminals recently?

 Published in Daily Times on Sunday 6th May 2012.

Pictures from the National Orientation Agency Prize Presentation ceremony.

Yes, so i posted here a couple of weeks ago that i was named one of the grand prize winners in the National Orientation Agency National Youth Essay Contest on “Strategies for getting the fuel subsidy savings to the highest number of Nigeria.” Well the award ceremony held last Thursday 3rd May, 2012 at the Conference Hall of the Agency National Secretariat In Abuja. Here are pictures.  

 

 

PROJECT NIGERIA: Ending the Blame Games and Taking Charge

CELEBRATED writer JK Rowling while delivering the 2008 commencement speech at Harvard University titled “The fringe benefit of failure” in which she talked about how failure was a catalyst for her success in life made a statement that I find very apt for the times and which captures the crux of this piece. She said “There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in a wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

It is common knowledge that one of the favorite past times of young Nigerians is blaming the government for everything. It has become so bad we now sound as though we were an abandoned truck on the road side, incapable of overcoming its own inertia. We spend our days whining and complaining, exploiting every avenue to express our anger and frustration at the leadership of our country and those who have passed through those offices all of whom we accuse of stealing and plundering the nation to the extent that what we have today, that which is set to be our inheritance is a badly battered nation in which we (the so called future leaders) are already disillusioned and disenchanted.

As sincere as these expressions of anger are, I wish to state that the blame game has lasted long enough. I am not by this suggesting that we should forget the past, no. Indeed, we must appreciate where we are coming from to be able to define where we are headed. We cannot afford to be like the man in the Igbo proverb who does not know where the rain began to beat him and so cannot say where he dried his body. We must always keep in mind the point where we derailed, the issues that derailed us and those who have through their actions or inactions ensured we remained off track. But then we must begin to convert the energy of blaming and anger into positive resolves to take back our country, battered as it is, and make her a truly great nation.

Two words summarize the simple strategy for accomplishing this; participation and engagement. These words are a compendium of many actions we can take individually and in groups. Participation starts from the otherwise mundane virtue of being the best at what we do daily, of going the extra mile in ensuring we deliver on our jobs, of imbibing the virtues of handwork and honesty. It includes doing something where we can to make our society better, identifying problems and doing something about them right in our vicinities. It includes exploiting the few opportunities the government provides and making the best of it for our own good and uplifting others in the process.

The case of the YouWin project comes to mind and the silent regrets many have come to express for not quite taking it seriously and promoting ideas that could be revolutionary. Participation extends to our seeking positions of leadership. Before the 2011 general elections, the challenge was to get young people to take some interest in the electoral process due to the then near zero interest. Through the efforts of various youth bodies including Rise Networks, EIE Nigeria and their likes which yours sincerely is proud to have been part of, we have seen greater interest from youths in the polity.

We participated actively in the polls as voters. Today however the call has changed or ought to have changed. It is not enough to own voters cards anymore. It is time to also appear on the ballot. As I have stated elsewhere, we treat political parties like abominations to our own peril. Waiting for the time when they become clean and honourable to join will mean postponing further the change we seek. Engagement on the other hand is one thing we have never done enough of. By now it should have become clear to us that the “we against them” mindset which has guided our relationship with our leadership over the years is not only unproductive but also retrogressive.

Sadly, a lot of us are still at that stage mistaking our abuses and use of obscene language especially on social media, against our leaders, for activism. Those words do not do more than massage our egos following the endorsements and retweets they get from friends. It is this attitude that has continued to keep us alienated from them and thus unable to actively advance our own opinions to them. If we are truly interested in change, we must engage the government more constructively and frequently as partners in the Nigeria project not as enemies.

We must establish a two-way symmetrical communication channel with power, exploring all the rights and privileges democracy and the rule of law affords us. But given the years of distrust and mutual suspicion between the leaders and the people, there is a necessary process of ‘comfort building’ that has to happen which has not. A few of the ministers in the present government who ventured into twitter for example and who gave early signs of wanting to engage more have disappeared due to the lack of constructive engagement. It might not seem apparent but our voices count and we must explore these avenues to air them to their hearing not shouting back at ourselves online.

Borrowing JK Rowling’s words I wish to conclude by stating emphatically that there is an expiry date for blaming our past leaders, the government and our parents for the state of our country. Indeed that expiry date is now. It is time we began to take charge of our lives and the destiny of our country. It is time we began to go beyond blowing hot air in anger and blames and begin to do something in the lines of participation and engagement. The earlier we, this generation of Nigerians, come to this realisation, the faster we will wrestle our country from the hands of those who do not mean well and trace our way out of the woods.

This piece was published on the back page of The Guardian as part of Rise Networks ‘YouthSpeak’ blog initiative on Friday 4th May 2012.

These insanity-inducing zeroes

This may sound embarrassing, but I must publicly admit that whenever I am writing a figure that goes beyond hundreds of thousands, I have some challenge with the number of zeroes involved. You see, I was never really on talking terms with all the Mathematics teachers I had. But with the way I was made to learn the multiplication table at my dad’s feet – close enough for his hands to disagree when I muddled it up – I passed every Mathematics exam I ever took. I said so. If you want proof, write a letter to WAEC and stop allowing bile ruin your stomach.

So yes, I have paid my dues. But even after paying my dues, Mathematics has refused to stop tormenting me, what with the kind of figures I read of in the papers these days. They simply scatter my head and make me feel dizzy. You see, English has spoilt the power of Mathematics because it has seriously watered down our appreciation of the size of numbers. It is easy to write one billion and it sounds so lowly, so miniature, like something you can count on the tips of your fingers. But if you attempt the mathematical exercise and begin to write down the zeroes involved, then you will understand that there is a difference between the ‘b’ and ‘m’ that appear in front of the word “illion”.

What am I talking about? In the last few weeks, no day passed without media houses, in connivance with our thieving public officials, offending my sensibility with figures that I cannot write down in numbers. This is no joke. I am now feeling very harassed. Billions, trillions all over the place. And they even make it worse by providing these figures in Dollars and Pounds. So I have to find out exchange rates and do multiplications to get the right number of zeroes to meet the exact (or near exact) figure of what one person decided to appropriate to him (her) self in broad daylight.

You see, it all began with the pension funds scam. No, the word scam is disrespectful, very belittling. Let’s call it “magic”. That’s the only thing that can explain it. I read the news over and again, did the zero adding several times and when I finally saw the people who put me through all that stress on TV struggling to cover their faces from shame, I was disappointed. Maybe I expected them to appear like ruminants on four limbs, with four stomach chambers, hence the desperation to stash away extra helpings of our commonwealth for cord chewing later. Alas, they were standing on two legs like me. Kai.

Then came the Ibori case. I am convinced Jeffrey Archer had this dude in mind when he wrote “Honour Among thieves”. You see, there are thieves and there are thieves. For a long time, I had been hearing “Ibori is a thief, Ibori is a thief”, but I didn’t know what they meant was that he was a treasury cleaner. We really need to differentiate between somebody who snatches a purse at a bus stop and someone who vacuum cleans a state treasury, emptying the “dirt” into his personal dustbin. Initially, I promised myself to ignore the figures and focus on the plenty English the Judge was speaking, but all these my extra smart friends on twitter would not stop going on and on about it so I took out a calculator and began punching. Sigh. Is it not a miracle that we still have a state called Delta at all?

My eyes were already spinning out of control when the main course was finally served. You see, when a figure enters trillions, then it is the same thing as saying infinity. That’s my postulation really. I mean can there be anything more than trillion? The zeroes are just endless. Some calculators, a while ago, would have given an “error” verdict if you punched such figures into them. But hey, believe it or not, that’s what grew legs and flew away like a bird in the name of subsidy payment, according to the House committee that undertook to sniff around a little. And then I also read of the miracle of money transfer; how the former accountant general performed a Guinness Book of Record worthy feat that should go into accounting text books worldwide. As I read, my head spun. All I saw was zeroes, like motif on an amateur painter’s canvas, like irregular tracks on ant-infested wood.

But for a miracle, I might have ended up in “Yaba left”, so I have renewed my undertaking to avoid figures henceforth and stick with the words. If you attempt to wrap your head around the sleaze this country has endured and is enduring, insanity is sure to come for you. Who wan mad? 

First published in Daily Times

NECO results, a call for National awakening

I tried to stay away from commenting on this issue because I think I am beginning to sound like a broken record on topics concerning education. Hard as I try though, I can’t seem to keep myself from coming back to this very sensitive issue which determines the destiny of this country. Without mincing words, I wish to reiterate ab initio that if we are truly interested in this country’s future, if all our feigned concern is not mere sloganeering, then we must, as a  matter of urgency, take another look at the standard of education.

If the last NECO result, which recorded 90% failure (as reported in some mainstream media), does not worry you, nothing else would. It gave me sleepless nights. Perhaps, because this has become a recurring decimal, the news no longer shocks. We sigh and make exclamations of disgust and dish out a few lines of insult to the government, and then go on with our concerns. Each year, we watch the free fall of the grades, a fall only comparable with the collapse of stock values under the weight of the worldwide economic meltdown.

Undoubtedly, these shameful results are a direct reflection of the quality of learning that goes on in our schools. It cannot get worse than this. If we cannot pass exams set by ourselves, by our own standards which are generally accepted to be low, then there is a problem. How can we then pass exams set using global standards? How do our children and future leaders compete in a globalised world when we cannot successfully scale our own lowered bar?

That the state of education today leaves much to be desired is a well known fact. What is needed now is not even the proffering of solutions –countless opinion articles over the years, in addition to the many policy documents and blue prints of series of committees and even PhD thesis in our universities, have exhaustively explored the solution to this sad situation more than I can ever articulate in an 800 word op-ed piece. What has been lacking (and which is needed urgently) is that commitment to make it happen, to apply the pill in order to arrest the situation and save ourselves further embarrassment.

What has to be done is already documented somewhere, begging to be implemented. It is not rocket science. You cannot continue doing things in a particular way and expect a different outcome. If anything, the law of diminishing returns will set in. What the annual deterioration in general exam results points to is that whatever we are doing, we are failing at it and it is time to change tactics. Until that day when we have leaders who are ready to pursue disruptive but innovative strategies in every field of our national life and not just reproduce the annual budget template year after year, we shall simply continue to remain overwhelmed by our challenges.

The call today is for decisive action from all, the government and the people alike. We have to disrupt the order to arrest the trend. At this level, no idea is useless. There is fire on the mountain. We cannot overemphasise the relationship between illiteracy and/or unemployment and national security. We cannot prove enough how an educated populace equals national development. The facts are clear. For me, nothing is more important than this at the moment. There is enough room for everyone (the government, NGOs, civil society and individuals) to play a part in the large jigsaw puzzle that is education in Nigeria; from access, to conditions of learning, to teacher training and welfare, curricula development, learning materials, guidance counselling and proper evaluation.

Let me point out that government is not solely culpable in this situation of mass examination failures. The parents and the students themselves have a huge share of the blame. Can the parents proudly state that they provided everything needed for their children to succeed in the exams? Can the students themselves claim that their failure was not their fault, that they prepared well enough, within the resources available to them, to pass? That they did not, for the most part, resort to the belief that they would cheat their way through? I say this bearing in mind the many technological distractions confronting children of school age today, and the near collapse of parental interest and guidance of children in many homes as parents run the rat race of career advancement. So, the call rings out to all. We either stop in our tracks now to arrest this trend or in twenty years, we will be sighing for the same reasons.

First published in Daily Times.

The decay of journalism

The Internet has done well in increasing access to information; but it has also led to a significant drop in the quality of news reporting and is rapidly devaluing journalism as a profession.

I receive daily news summaries from about three sources and it’s always interesting and quite disturbing to note the similarity of the news headlines and even the content; and these are not press releases. One doesn’t need to be too smart to know that the name on the byline did not report that story.

Indeed none of the said reporters can say anything about the story. It is simply a copy and paste activity or ‘churnalism’ if you like, but that is a matter for another day.

I am worried today however about the dearth of follow up reporting by journalists in Nigeria. In standard practice, while breaking a story or making the cover page is a pretty remarkable achievement for a reporter, the achievement is not complete until such a reporter or at least that media house continues to pursue that story to a logical end.

News stories are not simply one-time events, but rather ongoing topics that can last for weeks or even months. One example would be a crime story that unfolds over time – the crime is committed, then police search for and finally arrest a suspect. Then the suspect goes to court, and there is a trial.

However with our love for sensationalism and a very short attention span, we break stories and it ends there. The reporters don’t follow up; and in this era of copy and paste journalism, no one really even knows who really broke the story. The readers too make no demands for a follow up. We hear the story, we discuss it like vultures devouring meat at the newspaper stand or in our various online forums and then we move on.

In real journalism, when a reporter has aroused the reader’s or listener’s curiosity with a news story, there is a duty to satisfy that curiosity. Many news reports raise questions, particularly: “So what happens next?” Having given your audience an appetite for the story, you have a duty to provide answers to those kinds of questions.

A man murdered his wife and is arrested, so happened next? A minister stole money and has been invited by the EFCC, was he charged? A notorious terrorist was arraigned in court, when is the next hearing? Debate on a controversial bill was suspended in the House, what are the various issues?

Besides the need to satisfy the curiosity of the reading public is the need to contribute to society. Journalists contribute to the development of societies by demanding proper conduct from the leaders, and on the other hand, ensuring that the citizens live by the laws of the land.  For example, beyond reporting that a man killed his wife, the reporter, through a follow up, must show that murder is a crime punishable by law by detailing the arrest and trial up to the conviction (or acquittal) of the said suspect

Painfully, most of this is lacking in our society today. We move on to the next thing as soon as the euphoria surrounding one issue dims. And like a people plagued by collective amnesia, we forget easily. This is the reason why for example, the National Health Bill, a bill that defines, streamlines and provides a framework for standard and regulation of health services in the country is currently gathering dust somewhere between the Ministry of Health and Aso Rock. The Bill which was passed in May 2011, was also expected to spell out the rights and duties of healthcare providers and health workers in the nation’s health system but was not signed into the law because of a disagreement between the doctors and the other professional unions in the health sector.

No sooner had the controversy that followed the passage simmered that the story lost relevance in the scale of preference of news editors as a hot issue worth bringing to the front burner. And this is just one example.

There are many celebrated corruption cases that make headlines and then we don’t know what happens next. After the January demonstrations, what is the follow up on all the demands and promises? Of late the news has been awash with numerous stories of domestic misdemeanor, we never know how they end.

These are issues I strongly believe our journalists should pursue for the sustenance of democracy and for the emergence of an egalitarian society that we all yearn for. The time tested principles that makes the profession relevant must not be eroded; and the rise in junk journalism due to new media must be regulated. Happy Easter! 

First published on my column in Daily Times

Photo credit http://contentblogger.shore.com/2009/05/brill-crovitz-hindery-launch-journalism.html