In recent times, the good governor of Akwa Ibom state, His Excellency Obong Godswill Akpabio has been deluged with praise singers both at home and abroad. He has been inundated with sycophants who have praised him to high heavens, commended him for building roads and completing abandoned projects. What these praise singers have not told him is that it is expected of him to build roads. If he does not build roads then what would he spend the $2 Billion state budget on?
On completion of abandoned projects, we could first debate if such projects were abandoned in the first place. Just because a former governor could not complete the construction of a particular project within 4 years of his term does not mean the project was abandoned. If we retain this mental attitude, then we will not be able to deliver ambitious projects like London’s Heathrow terminal 5, which was conceptualized in 1989 but completed 17 years later in 2006! And became operational two years later in 2008!!!!
We will always have praise singers and jesters in the king’s court, but the danger lies where the king takes his jesters too seriously especially the one who keeps telling him that he will conquer all his enemies. The king should however keep close that jester who once in a while reminds the king that he has a large nose and his ears might be a bit too small!!!
For all the praise singers, I have only advice for His Excellency Godswill Akpabio - Remember Abacha's wife. I was a fresh university graduate when I went to Abuja to look for work. I was told that to get anything in Abuja you must belong to the Kanu led youth for Abacha club. Every young person in Abuja was talking about the first family, the first lady, Abacha the redeemer, the savior, the man with the cap that fits etc. And every single visible space was filled with his pictures and that of his wife. Just like AKS is filled with yours now. I left Abuja convinced that I could not do a civil service job. I was not created for such levels of ass licking.
Barely a month after my Abuja trip, Abacha died. Across the country young people went on the streets to celebrate. People closed down streets and partied till daybreak. The next morning Abuja was in confusion. But I will never forget the statement attributed to Mrs. Abacha (reported by the various youth leaders who rushed to Aso Rock to console the first family) ' So Nigerians Hated Us this Much'. That is what she said.
Your Excellency Sir you shall live a long and prosperous life to serve your people. Your story is one of a man who has overcome great adversity to achieve outstanding leadership. You have been given a unique opportunity in history. Your story is a consolation to every struggling mother in Ibibio land. People say 'That was the son the family rejected, if he can be governor, then my child will be something in this life'. When we hear your story how you struggled with lack but held on to your believe in education and kept going to school even when all odds were against you, we are encouraged to keep striving for literacy. We admire you Sir for promoting free education in our state and we are encouraged by your advocacy for relief for pregnant women, children and the elderly by providing free health care to this vulnerable group of people. Your audacity to stand against and win the mighty political machinery and the conventional wisdom in Nigeria that the incumbent leader (governor or president) is the only one that can anoint his successor, proved that indeed democracy has come to stay in our land and we will keep improving the process and continually reap the benefit of having a form of government that is of the people, by the people and for the people.
In this brief discuss, you can see Sir that history has already painted you in a good light and you shall be remembered fondly by many. Yet Sir, your falling under the spell of sycophants will undo all this good work. Cloak yourself with the humility of Fashola. Put your nose to the grindstone. Hire a few real critics especially those who live in Nigeria. People whose job it is to tell you on a daily basis the truth…… That you are not doing enough considering the billions that enters the covers of AKS on a daily basis. That creating a privileged class of people who are personal Assistants (PA) to a PA who is a PA to a PA of the PA who is the governor's PA is not empowerment. It is enriching people without allowing them create value and it is a sheer waste of human talent not to speak of the state money!!!
And you will do well Sir to hold a town hall meeting to address those young folks that pelted you with pure water sachets. They I believe have an answer to how you can win our hearts again. We AKS people want to love you, we connect with your story and we believe in you but we think that you are wasting time and resources campaigning for a second term while leaving the work of the first undone. Execute the Mandate that we gave you. Write your name in the sands of history of our state and our nation, as a minority in Nigeria, I understand the challenges you face as a minority in AKS. But dear Sir times have changed. The youths will deliver the votes and we don’t care about Ibibio or Annang, we don’t even understand what it means, we care about our future and a lasting legacy and dear Sir contrary to whatever your praise singers will tell you, in AKS the great governors of our state still remain: Dr. Clement Isong and Idongesit Nkanga.
You need to up your game to be included in this list and you will not achieve this feat by plastering your face across the landscape of our land and the praise songs of sycophants is a dirge in the ears of the citizenry.
God bless Akwa Abasi Ibom State and Long Live the Federal Republic Of Nigeria.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Monday, August 4, 2008
Of Prayer Houses & Assignments...
Persecution Delusions and Prayer Houses: At every point in time, we are always persecuted by someone or some force. Someone is always after us, someone is always working overtime to do us in and most times the prayer houses are ready to point out this ‘someone’ to be a family member, close friend or associate. These prayer houses never offer solutions beyond expensive ‘assignments’ and advise to steer clear of the persecuting ‘someone’.
Someone asked me what assignments are. Assignments in prayer houses could be compared to the recipes one gets from the traditional ‘juju’ doctor for his ‘spiritual’ concoctions. Depending on the whims or wishes of the prayer house ‘pastor’ these assignment condiments would range from food items to requests for even a motorcar. Below are some lists:
‘Victim’ needs to pass the national exams for university admission:
1 Lantern, 10 litres of kerosene, 1 bottle of olive oil, 6 80-leaves exercise books, N500 cash.
‘Victim’ needs a job or promotion
N5, 000 to prepare water for spiritual bath that will ‘clear’ the man’s destiny, 1 packet of biro pens, half dozen fresh coconuts, one dozen eggs and a feast of rice to celebrate the impending job offer.
From the foregone, you can easily deduce your own ‘lists’ for assignments and to make it sound spiritual, the victim will be told to fast for a full day or 12 hours a day for 3-7 days depending on the ‘severity’ of the spiritual attacks. The most abused victims are women especially those seeking for the ‘fruit of the womb’. In addition to numerous fasting and assignments, some ‘men of God’ recommend ‘spiritual cleansing’ of the reproductory canal and one of the tools for this cleansing – among others- is the penis of the ‘pastor’.
Why do we still fall for such abuse and falsehoods? Most of it is because we seek the ‘easy’ way out and these prayer houses exploit this laziness and leave us worse off than when we went there to seek for help! They ascribe everything physically wrong with us to ‘spiritual attack’. They separate our people from family and friends effectively cutting us away from the love of family and the counsel of friends. They fill our heads with phantoms and delusions that our people are unable to separate fantasy from reality. And the worst of their sins is that they take precious TIME away from us.
Our people spend too much time to confront their ‘perceived’ spiritual persecutors. Not face-to-face, you are expected to fight this phantom in the spiritual, thus our people spend countless hours at mid night (when witches fly) to fight these phantoms and wake up the next day without adequate rest. This of course impacts their performance at work for the rest of the day. They cannot focus to deliver their best, they therefore receive sub standard reward for their labour, then blame their failures on more phantoms, spend more time chasing them at night and the cycle continues.
Prayer is a good thing so why don’t we spend more time communing with God for solutions and breakthroughs and leave the fighting to Him? If the advice to steer clear of the persecutor is heeded, we have a situation where family relationships are strained, friendships lost and associations broken. We live in a lot of distrust of one another and in this atmosphere, it is impossible to collaborate, share knowledge, pool resources and ideas to create solutions to life’s challenges. These delusions have effectively put a wedge between us and the activities of the prayer houses have widened the gulf.
Someone asked me what assignments are. Assignments in prayer houses could be compared to the recipes one gets from the traditional ‘juju’ doctor for his ‘spiritual’ concoctions. Depending on the whims or wishes of the prayer house ‘pastor’ these assignment condiments would range from food items to requests for even a motorcar. Below are some lists:
‘Victim’ needs to pass the national exams for university admission:
1 Lantern, 10 litres of kerosene, 1 bottle of olive oil, 6 80-leaves exercise books, N500 cash.
‘Victim’ needs a job or promotion
N5, 000 to prepare water for spiritual bath that will ‘clear’ the man’s destiny, 1 packet of biro pens, half dozen fresh coconuts, one dozen eggs and a feast of rice to celebrate the impending job offer.
From the foregone, you can easily deduce your own ‘lists’ for assignments and to make it sound spiritual, the victim will be told to fast for a full day or 12 hours a day for 3-7 days depending on the ‘severity’ of the spiritual attacks. The most abused victims are women especially those seeking for the ‘fruit of the womb’. In addition to numerous fasting and assignments, some ‘men of God’ recommend ‘spiritual cleansing’ of the reproductory canal and one of the tools for this cleansing – among others- is the penis of the ‘pastor’.
Why do we still fall for such abuse and falsehoods? Most of it is because we seek the ‘easy’ way out and these prayer houses exploit this laziness and leave us worse off than when we went there to seek for help! They ascribe everything physically wrong with us to ‘spiritual attack’. They separate our people from family and friends effectively cutting us away from the love of family and the counsel of friends. They fill our heads with phantoms and delusions that our people are unable to separate fantasy from reality. And the worst of their sins is that they take precious TIME away from us.
Our people spend too much time to confront their ‘perceived’ spiritual persecutors. Not face-to-face, you are expected to fight this phantom in the spiritual, thus our people spend countless hours at mid night (when witches fly) to fight these phantoms and wake up the next day without adequate rest. This of course impacts their performance at work for the rest of the day. They cannot focus to deliver their best, they therefore receive sub standard reward for their labour, then blame their failures on more phantoms, spend more time chasing them at night and the cycle continues.
Prayer is a good thing so why don’t we spend more time communing with God for solutions and breakthroughs and leave the fighting to Him? If the advice to steer clear of the persecutor is heeded, we have a situation where family relationships are strained, friendships lost and associations broken. We live in a lot of distrust of one another and in this atmosphere, it is impossible to collaborate, share knowledge, pool resources and ideas to create solutions to life’s challenges. These delusions have effectively put a wedge between us and the activities of the prayer houses have widened the gulf.
Friday, July 11, 2008
The Economic & Political Emancipation... Part II
As part of my education, I read various books but found no information especially in books written by Nigerians about Nigeria. I then left the history books to see what the popular media said about us. In every TV show, the ‘Calabar’ man was depicted as the houseboy or the gateman. He was subservient, without imagination, ridiculed and dominated. This was the picture the media fed us in ‘The New Masquerade’ and ‘Village Headmaster’. Images form pictures in people’s minds and some people live out these pictures in their lives. I therefore stopped blaming my Calabar brothers for not standing up for our people in that January 1991 Sociology class.
It was now time to find out what we said about ourselves. It was worse than what the history books and popular media said about us. Here goes:
Our parents are suspected witches, our parents-in-laws are confirmed wizards: As a people we are mired down by superstitions. The fear of witchcraft – Ifot- is so strong that our sons and daughters do not even visit home. In a country where per capita income is below one thousand dollars, and unemployment rate is over 30%, it is known and accepted that ‘Ifot’ is the cause of job loss or the lack thereof and not the prevalent economic situation. Ifot is the reason why young men and women die young; no credence is given to the WHO statistics that has pegged the Nigerian’s life expectancy at less than 50 years.
A woman who does not give birth to a baby within the first year of marriage is a victim of her mother in law’s witchcraft practise. You see, our witches have perfected the art of eating our babies in the spiritual before they are even conceived. Never mind that most of us are sexually active in our late teens and there are a myriad of sexually transmitted diseases which many young people contract and these when not properly treated (as in most cases they are not), due to ignorance, poor health care facilities and sheer stigmatisation, these infections do lead to infertility in adult life. We do not confront these issues, neither do we study their effects, we feed our mental laziness by throwing up our hands in the air and blaming it all on the unknown and unseen ‘Ifot’.
Persecution Delusions and Prayer Houses: At every point in time, we are always persecuted by someone or some force. Someone is always after us, someone is always working overtime to do us in and most times the prayer houses are ready to point out this ‘someone’ to be a family member, close friend or associate. These prayer houses never offer solutions beyond expensive ‘assignments’ and advise to steer clear of the persecuting ‘someone’.
There is a story about a pastor that started a church in our state. During counselling sessions, his parishioners came with complaints of various uncles, aunties, parents, co-workers and even neighbours who were against them and were about to do them in. The poor pastor was overwhelmed with all the reports of hatred and fear as some of the people, whom the ‘victims’ were complaining about, were also his parishioners and some of these parishioners also felt themselves to be victims also.
He then held general prayer meeting to ‘exorcise’ the tormenting spirits, which planted these thoughts of persecution in his parishioners’ minds. The poor church folks were not satisfied. They demanded ‘Spiritual Assignments’. The pastor was confused and asked what assignments meant. Well the definition of assignment will be a subject in my next post.
It was now time to find out what we said about ourselves. It was worse than what the history books and popular media said about us. Here goes:
Our parents are suspected witches, our parents-in-laws are confirmed wizards: As a people we are mired down by superstitions. The fear of witchcraft – Ifot- is so strong that our sons and daughters do not even visit home. In a country where per capita income is below one thousand dollars, and unemployment rate is over 30%, it is known and accepted that ‘Ifot’ is the cause of job loss or the lack thereof and not the prevalent economic situation. Ifot is the reason why young men and women die young; no credence is given to the WHO statistics that has pegged the Nigerian’s life expectancy at less than 50 years.
A woman who does not give birth to a baby within the first year of marriage is a victim of her mother in law’s witchcraft practise. You see, our witches have perfected the art of eating our babies in the spiritual before they are even conceived. Never mind that most of us are sexually active in our late teens and there are a myriad of sexually transmitted diseases which many young people contract and these when not properly treated (as in most cases they are not), due to ignorance, poor health care facilities and sheer stigmatisation, these infections do lead to infertility in adult life. We do not confront these issues, neither do we study their effects, we feed our mental laziness by throwing up our hands in the air and blaming it all on the unknown and unseen ‘Ifot’.
Persecution Delusions and Prayer Houses: At every point in time, we are always persecuted by someone or some force. Someone is always after us, someone is always working overtime to do us in and most times the prayer houses are ready to point out this ‘someone’ to be a family member, close friend or associate. These prayer houses never offer solutions beyond expensive ‘assignments’ and advise to steer clear of the persecuting ‘someone’.
There is a story about a pastor that started a church in our state. During counselling sessions, his parishioners came with complaints of various uncles, aunties, parents, co-workers and even neighbours who were against them and were about to do them in. The poor pastor was overwhelmed with all the reports of hatred and fear as some of the people, whom the ‘victims’ were complaining about, were also his parishioners and some of these parishioners also felt themselves to be victims also.
He then held general prayer meeting to ‘exorcise’ the tormenting spirits, which planted these thoughts of persecution in his parishioners’ minds. The poor church folks were not satisfied. They demanded ‘Spiritual Assignments’. The pastor was confused and asked what assignments meant. Well the definition of assignment will be a subject in my next post.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Towards The Political and Economic Emancipation of The Peoples of the Old Calabar Province – Akwa Ibom State
Self Awareness
I believe the time for the economic and political emancipation of the peoples of Akwa Ibom state and the Niger Delta of Nigeria has come. The manifestation of this actualisation will only become evident when we spread the good news, talk about it always and live our lives as free and empowered people. I have therefore undertaken this journey and I commit to writing a series of essays on the topic: Towards the Political and Economic Emancipation of the Peoples of Akwa Ibom State. In this first essay, I invite you to share my thoughts on the impact of Self Awareness in our political and economic emancipation.
January 1991. School of Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Imo State. SOC 101 Class. On this day, I for the first time addressed in my consciousness ‘The Nigerian Question’. My teenage soul was pricked and I battled to comprehend the place of the ‘Calabar’ man in the Nigerian polity. It started off as a discussion on the Nigerian civil war and escalated to a name-calling duel. Our SOC 101 lecturer made a statement that Biafra would have won the Nigerian Civil War if the ‘Calabars’ and ‘Rivers’ people had supported the war effort. I was born a few years after the civil war, in fact my parents had not met each other until after the war but the war had been a great part of their experience and early life and my father told us some of his experiences. It was one of this experience that I shared in the Sociology class to prove to my fellow students that Biafra had been a South East struggle and not merely an Igbo war. At the outbreak of hostilities, my father was an engineering student at UNN and he remembered working at night with other students to clear the camouflage from the Biafran airstrip so that planes carrying arms and mercenaries could land and take off. If students could do such menial work as removing fake palm trees from runways, then lets leave to the imagination what they could have used their fertile brains to achieve in the science labs. In that class, based on what my father had told me, I argued that the minority tribes of the South Eastern Region had supported the war effort but in defeat, the Igbos took ownership of Biafra and viewed it as a personal loss instead of a collective defeat. I ventured to add that a ‘Calabar’ man Col. Effiong was the officer who signed the article of surrender that ended the civil war.
This last contribution was the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. My fellow students went berserk. They called me, my family, tribe and the peoples of the old ‘Calabar’ province names including but not limited to: cowards, emasculated men, lazy bones, idiots, houseboys etc. At this point, I am ashamed to say; I gave in to emotion at the sheer force of their hatred and wept. No one comforted me, the few ‘Calabar’ students, all of whom were male stayed rooted to their seats, not a word of comfort, no sound of protest, no shoulder to soak my tears, no mass walk out, nothing! Just a studied silence, maintaining the status quo in the face of the majority, hiding in the crowd, not seen, not heard, inconsequential, unimportant and not worthy of note. On that day, I made up my mind to commence a journey of self-discovery and know who I was, where I came from and what motivated my brothers to stay silent in the face of such humiliation and disgrace of their tribe and if we as a people had a place in the Nigerian nation.
I began my search in our history books. This is the summary of the history of Nigeria as taught to me in Primary and Secondary schools:
Independence: Awolowo, Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, Enahoro etc fought for our independence, it is in recent times that I got to hear of the works of a ‘Calabar’ Independence activist Eyo Uyo.
Economy: Groundnut form North, Cocoa from West, Timber from Sapele, Rubber from Benin. Even as late as the eighties no mention is made of Crude oil.
Politics boils down to a song taught to me in primary school in the early eighties:
Ojukwu wanted to separate Nigeria
Gowon said Nigeria must be one
We are fighting with General Gowon
To keep Nigeria one
The above song encapsulates the story of a three-year civil war. No mention of the casualties. There is no word on the human suffering. No one says anything about the bravery of a ‘Calabar’ Colonel- abandoned by a defeated Ojukwu who fled Biafra rather than surrender to the Nigerian forces- this officer faced with a demoralised, ill equipped army, the bloated stomachs of kwashiorkor children, a cruelly effective Nigerian food blockade, had the courage and human compassion to negotiate a dignified surrender to the Nigerian forces. No word is said about this man who perhaps single handedly, saved a generation of Igbos from possible death by starvation. It was reported that at Colonel Effiong’s funeral, an Igbo man proposed that a major airport in Igbo soil be named after the late Colonel, I am sure that this proposal is being seriously considered but more than two years later, there is no Colonel Effiong airport in Igboland or Nigeria for that matter.
I believe the time for the economic and political emancipation of the peoples of Akwa Ibom state and the Niger Delta of Nigeria has come. The manifestation of this actualisation will only become evident when we spread the good news, talk about it always and live our lives as free and empowered people. I have therefore undertaken this journey and I commit to writing a series of essays on the topic: Towards the Political and Economic Emancipation of the Peoples of Akwa Ibom State. In this first essay, I invite you to share my thoughts on the impact of Self Awareness in our political and economic emancipation.
January 1991. School of Engineering, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Imo State. SOC 101 Class. On this day, I for the first time addressed in my consciousness ‘The Nigerian Question’. My teenage soul was pricked and I battled to comprehend the place of the ‘Calabar’ man in the Nigerian polity. It started off as a discussion on the Nigerian civil war and escalated to a name-calling duel. Our SOC 101 lecturer made a statement that Biafra would have won the Nigerian Civil War if the ‘Calabars’ and ‘Rivers’ people had supported the war effort. I was born a few years after the civil war, in fact my parents had not met each other until after the war but the war had been a great part of their experience and early life and my father told us some of his experiences. It was one of this experience that I shared in the Sociology class to prove to my fellow students that Biafra had been a South East struggle and not merely an Igbo war. At the outbreak of hostilities, my father was an engineering student at UNN and he remembered working at night with other students to clear the camouflage from the Biafran airstrip so that planes carrying arms and mercenaries could land and take off. If students could do such menial work as removing fake palm trees from runways, then lets leave to the imagination what they could have used their fertile brains to achieve in the science labs. In that class, based on what my father had told me, I argued that the minority tribes of the South Eastern Region had supported the war effort but in defeat, the Igbos took ownership of Biafra and viewed it as a personal loss instead of a collective defeat. I ventured to add that a ‘Calabar’ man Col. Effiong was the officer who signed the article of surrender that ended the civil war.
This last contribution was the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. My fellow students went berserk. They called me, my family, tribe and the peoples of the old ‘Calabar’ province names including but not limited to: cowards, emasculated men, lazy bones, idiots, houseboys etc. At this point, I am ashamed to say; I gave in to emotion at the sheer force of their hatred and wept. No one comforted me, the few ‘Calabar’ students, all of whom were male stayed rooted to their seats, not a word of comfort, no sound of protest, no shoulder to soak my tears, no mass walk out, nothing! Just a studied silence, maintaining the status quo in the face of the majority, hiding in the crowd, not seen, not heard, inconsequential, unimportant and not worthy of note. On that day, I made up my mind to commence a journey of self-discovery and know who I was, where I came from and what motivated my brothers to stay silent in the face of such humiliation and disgrace of their tribe and if we as a people had a place in the Nigerian nation.
I began my search in our history books. This is the summary of the history of Nigeria as taught to me in Primary and Secondary schools:
Independence: Awolowo, Azikiwe, Tafawa Balewa, Enahoro etc fought for our independence, it is in recent times that I got to hear of the works of a ‘Calabar’ Independence activist Eyo Uyo.
Economy: Groundnut form North, Cocoa from West, Timber from Sapele, Rubber from Benin. Even as late as the eighties no mention is made of Crude oil.
Politics boils down to a song taught to me in primary school in the early eighties:
Ojukwu wanted to separate Nigeria
Gowon said Nigeria must be one
We are fighting with General Gowon
To keep Nigeria one
The above song encapsulates the story of a three-year civil war. No mention of the casualties. There is no word on the human suffering. No one says anything about the bravery of a ‘Calabar’ Colonel- abandoned by a defeated Ojukwu who fled Biafra rather than surrender to the Nigerian forces- this officer faced with a demoralised, ill equipped army, the bloated stomachs of kwashiorkor children, a cruelly effective Nigerian food blockade, had the courage and human compassion to negotiate a dignified surrender to the Nigerian forces. No word is said about this man who perhaps single handedly, saved a generation of Igbos from possible death by starvation. It was reported that at Colonel Effiong’s funeral, an Igbo man proposed that a major airport in Igbo soil be named after the late Colonel, I am sure that this proposal is being seriously considered but more than two years later, there is no Colonel Effiong airport in Igboland or Nigeria for that matter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)