RiverNaija

This ancient story, I once heard. Some faraway twin brothers named Truth and Lie. They both stood by a river just outside of their small village bantering off. Then, Lie challenged his twin brother Truth to a race. “There is no faster or better swimmer than me in the history of this village. Truth, I can swim faster across this river than you”, Lie said. “What are the rules?”, Truth asked? Lie laid out the rules. Both of them must strip naked, and at the count of 1, 2, 3.. dive into the freezing cold water splashing and stroking to the other side and back. They both got ready and steadied their gaits. Lie, always boisterous and forward, counted to three. Trusting Truth jumped in the river, Lie laughed and lingered at the banks. He did not jump. Truth kept stroking on across the river. Lie grabbed Truth’s garments laying on the ground and strapped them on, strolling back to town. Lie stole the identity of Truth, and proudly paraded himself around town as his brother. Having won the ...

ARGUABLY, Col Paul Osakpamwan Ogbebor (rtd), 70, is the first Nigerian to be enrolled into the Nigerian Defence Academy, NDA. Among the 61 cadets of Course 1, he was one of the 34 that graduated. He is also one of the 18 who are still alive.He fought the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of 1967-1970 and opines that the war has cemented the country’s unity. Although at the NDA, he was one of the best in academics, sports and soldiering where he won many laurels, Ogbebor was one of those whose military career was short-circuited by high-wire intrigues and witch-hunt that characterize Nigeria’s military and public service.Ogbebor’s love for the military had no bounds as he envisioned and worked hard to be enlisted. He bore no one ill-feelings over how he was detained, tortured and finally eased out of the army because of his efforts to save General Samuel Ogbemudia (rtd), a former military governor of Bendel State, who was roped in, in the coup that killed former Head of State, General Murtal...

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...

This includes indicators such as how quickly a Nigerian can receive medical attention as well as access to cooking fuel and pre-primary education. It goes beyond the monetary measurement of poverty to the multidimensional aspects — which will not only tell us that people are poor but also list factors that predispose them to poverty. It highlights child poverty and picks up the physical and cognitive aspects of early childhood development — undernutrition, immunisation and intellectually stimulating activities. There are 15 indicators under four broad areas: health (nutrition, food security, time to healthcare); education (school attendance, years of schooling, school lag); living standards (water, water reliability, sanitation, housing materials, cooking fuel, assets); work and shocks (unemployment, underemployment, security-shock).

Oil is a curse. Natural gas, copper, and diamonds are also bad for a country’s health. Hence, an insight that is as powerful as it is counterintuitive: Poor but resource-rich countries tend to be underdeveloped not despite their hydrocarbon and mineral riches but because of their resource wealth. One way or another, oil — or gold or zinc — makes you poor. This fact is hard to believe, and exceptions such as Norway and the United States are often used to argue that oil and prosperity can indeed go together. The rarity of such exceptions, however, not only confirms the rule, but also serves to clarify what it takes to avoid the misery-inducing consequences of wealth based on natural resources: democracy, transparency, and effective public institutions that are responsive to citizens. These are important preconditions for the more technical aspects of the recipe, including the need to maintain macroeconomic stability, prudently manage public finances, invest part of the windfall abroad, ...

This world is like a big football stadium. A throng of people come either as spectators, players, or referees. At the stadium, contests are conducted and games are played. Some players play fair; some play foul. Some play wicked, some play well. Some play wise; some play foolish. All players came because of a game that had a time-limit. Whichever way we play, and how long we tarry, the game will end. This is the truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes, humans need to sit back and think about this. Is life worth all the hassles and hustles? The answer should spell true, or deny it. This is nothing but the truth. Truth is immortal. Truth lives forever. You can suppress it but not eternally; you can deny but can’t avoid it.You can cage the truth if you want to; but you cannot break it even if you tried. Don’t think you are super-dominant when you suppress the truth; don’t sleep with both eyes closed when you repress it. Truth does not cry for justice; and it does not beg for help. Wh...

Struggle is a strenuous or determined effort to break through a brick wall of bruising situations in the face of difficult opposition. Nations struggle; so do businesses. Every human being gets a taste of life’s struggles. Some survive it, many are strangled by it. The life we live is a rollercoaster of happiness and sadness; pain and pleasure, and good and bad times. It is true that some struggles are necessary. They may be the best thing that can ever happen to us. But struggles aren’t prayed for; who wants them? They’re like living in a steaming hot pressure cooker, who salivates after them? I believe that liberation from God is often entombed in the womb of tribulation. I believe in much gain after much pain. I believe that a bundle of joy come from a bundle of hydra-headed struggles of life that men go through. I believe that joy comes in the morning after an enduring weeping that sweeps through the night. I believe in rising after falling, breaking through after a breakdown, lau...

" I caught up with my brother over the weekend. It was a disturbed man that I was talking to all through our time together. According to him,he's been having issues with his wife. He attributes the sudden change in her attitude to her brother( in Malaysia) who has made so much money and "spoiling" his siblings silly. According to him,the word of this his in-law is LAW in his household. He said that nothing he brings home is enough again. I told him that it could be just the regular husband and wife squabbles but his next words caught me off guard. He said "What about the children that she influences to become HOSTILE towards me each time we have issues?" According to him,the body language of their young son is like that of who just can't wait to grow up and FIGHT the father. This broke my heart because these are children that this man NEVER jokes with. We used to joke that he takes care of children more than a female! They have been married for close ...

One of the challenges of moving into a new country as a couple is learning how to navigate the different changes and the obstacles that may stand in your way as you gradually begin to adapt to your new lives in an unfamiliar environment. There is common knowledge that women are more likely to adapt to changes faster than men especially when children engage in the change because of their maternal instincts which stimulate their sense of curiosity to find diverse ways to help their children cope with changing situations. Change can be a huge benefit for your marriage and a fantastic opportunity for your family to form the needed connection but may be missing due to the hustle and bustle of your lives in the past.Even though a new environment may bring a less chaotic and better life but that can also bring its own challenges too. Therefore, you must all learn new ways of doing things and adapt to changing situations too. Ask for help One of the challenges facing many couples in their ...

Captain Ben Gbulie played a key role in Nigeria’s first military coup of January 1966. He is one of the few surviving officers who plotted that coup. He put in prison when the coup failed, went to war on the side of Biafra, survived a gun wound and ended up in prison again at the end of the war. He wrote a book on the war but today tells us more about the war and speaks from his Trans Ekulu residennce in inEnugu on Gowon, Ojukwu, Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, his position on the new agitation for Biafra and more. It’s a weekend delight. Enjoy it. MY TRAINING My name is Ben Gbulie, I am from Nimo in Njikoka local government area of Amanbra state. I joined the Nigeria army in March 1960; I was one of the pioneer trainees at Nigeria Military Training College, NMTC, in Kaduna in 1960. By July 1960 we completed the course and by September 1960, just before independence, those of us who were selected to go abroad were already in England. I was there at Mons Officers cadet school at Aldershot preparin...