RiverNaija

Since well before Nigeria’s return to elective governance in 1999, the country has been overtaken by a progressive escalation of what Hannah Arendt in her classic On Violence called “a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics”. In contemporary Nigerianism, the word for this is “banditry”. “Bandits” is a conveniently capacious bogeyman for insecurity in Nigeria that precludes necessary questions as to the provenance of the descent into lawlessness. It captures diverse elements that may include terrorists, cultists, herdsmen, kidnappers,criminal gangs, and militants. Originally applied to the motorcycle gangs who perpetrate carnage in different parts of Nigeria’s North-West, bandits have now become the trope for an intolerable toll of destruction by mostly non-state entities as well as the inexplicable haplessness of Nigeria’s Federal Government that has never been known to cringe at the thought of exterminating significant numbers of its citizens. This lamentable situatio...

I’ve always been fairly unambitious and selectively lazy. My mother wanted me to go to one of the two most elite universities (Oxford and Cambridge) in the United Kingdom, where I grew up. And, if I say so myself, I certainly possessed the brains to make her happy and make it to either of these globally revered groves of academe. But while I was willing to stay up all night voraciously reading books that interested me (quality fiction, tomes about history, anthropology and classical civilizations); I couldn’t be bothered to study for the intellectually challenging Oxbridge entrance exam. And I wound up cheerfully going to a respected but less prestigious university that had considerably less stringent entry requirements. My mother pleaded with me to do law because she reckoned that a legal career would provide me with prestige and a decent income. But I wasn’t having it. Perish the thought! Too much like hard work. I did a considerably less arduous combined arts course instead and d...

WHAT CAUSES CREATIVITY 1. CONFIDENCE : ABILITY TO QUESTION WITHOUT FEAR 2. OBSERVATION : SEEING PROBLEMS/IDEAS 3. HUMILITY : KNOWING YOU DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING 4. MINDFULNESS : THINKING ON HOW TO THINK 5. CURIOSITY : EXPLORING AND EXPERIMENTING 6. RESOURCEFULNESS : SOMETHING TO TINKER WITH 7. ENERGY : TO EXPLORE AND TINKER 8. ACTION : NOT JUST THINKING, BUT DOING

In 1996, following a peacekeeping stint with the United Nations mission in Somalia (UNOSOM II), I undertook a series of fixed-term appointments in the Department of Information (DoI) in New York. Two years later, I joined the Security Council Affairs Division (SCAD) of the Department of Political Affairs. That was a dream come true as I had always wanted to learn how the council functioned. The department was headed by a United Kingdom diplomat. Naturally, I wanted to join the secretariat staff, but I would apply to agencies and bodies of the organisation as well. As anyone knows, who has tangled with the UN, in practice, merit is rarely the most important quality required of job applicants. For instance, in 1998 at SCAD, I trained an intern from the UK. Within weeks of completing his degree programme in the UK, he was curiously on the UN payroll in New York. Within a few more years, he had vaulted into the P5 cadre.But corruption in the UN is a different file. This one is abou...

It has become clear that our ancestors were deceived with goodies from Europe (Hot drinks, Mirrors, Combs and Ornamental cloths and Shoes). Our ancestors had never seen these items before Europeans arrived. Our ancestors were high on this excitement and was fighting over themselves to acquire them, so that they can distinguish themselves as superior to other members of their villages and settlements. The Europeans then introduced cowries (a form of money) which they used to exchange for these products whenever the Europeans berthed on African shores. Subsequently in the 17th century after the invention of muzzle-loading guns, they started equipping some of the tribes with guns to go and sack perceived enemy villages in other to capture them as slaves, so that they can exchange them with Cowries and Ornaments from Europe. Some of our ancestors who were privileged to be in close proximity with the shores of the Atlantic ocean took advantage of this new found opportunity to raid hinterla...

Lagos is too sophisticated for any group of individuals to divide along ethnic lines. Politicians are also tricksters, so the drums of war will not achieve anything at the end. The uninformed should learn from the experience of Dr.Nnamdi Azikiwe. Zik was the first President of Nigeria. Born in Zungeru in the North and moulded in Lagos, he was determined to make it anywhere he stepped his feet. After studies abroad, Azikiwe returned to Africa and gained prominence in Ghana ( Gold Coast) as a newspaper editor. Azikiwe left Accra for Lagos where he felt journalism could be combined with politics in those heightened years of nationalism. And it paid him. His tabloid, West African Pilot, appealed to everyone who wanted power to change hands from white to black.Lagos was where everything happened. The young man climbed from the Nigerian Youth Movement ( NYM) to the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). Zik was ambitious and did not want to be a peripheral politician. Th...

If something doesn’t add up for me, I won’t scuff off to the corner, accepting any explanation, however illogical. No, I raise as many questions as possible to arrive at a grounded understanding of the issue. If a proffered answer strikes me as absurd, I won’t rest until the truth emerges – or the liar is unmasked. My robust prospecting for the truth often puts me at odds with many people. In a community saturated with sentimentalism and duplicity, crossfires with people of such demeanour are usually observed as flashpoints. As stated by Enyinna Efuribe on 210223

Social interactions in a society is normally based on individuals adhering to acceptable moral codes. Normally behaved societies are those societies where the moral code deployment of individuals equates society’s social interaction expectations. When the society’s social expectation is fuelled by reckless acquisition of foreign lifestyle, it will lead to lifestyle hyper-inflation. Reckless lifestyle inflation topples a society’s existing moral code and triggers behaviour expectations confusion within the society. Behaviour expectations confusion then leads to moral anarchy/decadence. Normally behaved societies have a set standard of expected behaviours agreeable to majority of the population. Behaviour malfunction is created when a society decides to recklessly get excited by foreign lifestyles and in turn applies these acquired lifestyles to the social expectation capital of their society. Apparently this will lead to moral decay in the society. A nation should have a national moral...

The hustle and bustle of life. The rush and rustle in human existence. But why do human beings get immersed in the hustle, bustle, rustle, and rush of life? I know why. It’s a strife to survive today and secure tomorrow. No one abhors a breakthrough. None detests success.Show me that man or woman who wants to make life’s back-of-the-bus their abode. None that I know. Everybody wants to make it in life. No one wants to be left behind and left out of what makes life a beauty. That is why we struggle and hustle. But must you kill yourself? In the process of striving to hit the goldmine, men work hard. In the onerous odyssey into the land of milk-and-honey, men sweat. Men toil. Men lose sleep. Men burn the midnight candle. And then, men burn out and burn up. They break their bones and mash their marrows. They get sick and ill. They get afflicted bodily and infirmed spiritually all because they have compromised on rest and restfulness. They believe they are invincible. They believe they ar...

"I am not cursing you; I am wishing you what I wish myself every year. I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year, may there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not so sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’? I ask for no more. Our successes are conditioned by the amount of risk we are ready to take. Earlier on today I visited a local farmer about three miles from where I live. He could not have been more than fifty-five, but he said he was already too old to farm vigorously. He still suffered, he said, from the physical energy he displayed as a farmer in his younger days. Around his hut were two pepper bushes. There were kokoyams growing round him. There were snail shells which had given him meat. There must have been more around the banana trees I saw. He hardly ever went to town to buy things. He was self-sufficient. The car or the bus, the television or the telephone, the newspaper, Vietnam or Red China were nothing to him. He...