Would You Like To Be A Teacher?

 By Daniel Ighakpe

“Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” – Japanese Proverb.

In many parts of the world, October 5, of every year is observed as World Teachers’ Day. Also known as International Teachers’ Day, it is a day that celebrates the incredible role that teachers all over the world play and their important contribution to society. This year marks the 29th anniversary of World Teachers’ Day, and the theme for this year is: “The teachers we need for the education we want: The global imperative to reverse the teacher shortage.”

On October 5, 1966, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) signed a recommendation concerning the “Status of Teachers.” This guidance hoped to target and investigate the status and situation of teachers across the world. From their working conditions, recruitment, rights, and responsibilities, this historic recommendation set a high standard of practice in the workplace.

Crocodile Tears For Victims Of Preventable Accidents

By Andrew Erakhrumen

What used to be unexpected tragedies in the past gradually became clearly regularly expected, unpreventable, acceptable and accepted “disaster-in-waiting” because of past and present governments’ non-responsiveness and irresponsibility coupled with the followers’ complacency, unseriousness, inability, and/or refusal, to confront collective challenges; and when these ‘expected’ disasters occur, all that is done is the predictable, regular, short-lived, mostly valueless, unproductive, mechanical public uproar that dies almost immediately as it starts!

This has always been the pattern and those in government are perfectly aware of it! After all, they are supposed to be from amongst Nigerians! Then, are we – as Nigerians – a serious people? This informed our opinion, concerning the 12-year-old Sylvester Oromoni Jnr., whose death occurred on November 30, 2021, that “...it was as if the ‘unusual’ happened. 

Let Me Breathe, I Don’t Want To Die!

 By Owei Lakemfa

Two different but related cries ring in my head. “Let the Poor breathe” and “I don’t want to die.” The first is the cry across the country as the masses are being suffocated by inflation and over 90 million poor get hungrier.

*Dr. Vwaere Diaso

The second is the plaintive cry of young medical doctor, Vwaere Diaso, whose calling is to save lives. However, when her life was in danger with her limbs broken by an heartless system, her blood flowing from various parts and she knew her life was ebbing and she desperately needed help, her dying cry to her colleagues was: “I don’t want to die.”

Alaba Market Demolition: Matters Arising

 By Emeka Alex Duru 

I confess that I initially bought into the explanation by officials of Lagos state on the reasons for the demolition of some structures in the popular Alaba International Market. The government had on Sunday, June 18, commenced pulling down 17 buildings it tagged distressed at the market. 

The General Manager of Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA), Gbolahan Oki, who spoke on the exercise two days earlier, claimed that the affected buildings had been marked for demolition since 2016. “The marked inscriptions from LASBCA seen on different parts of the buildings that were looking physically distressed had vacation notices as far back as 2016, 2020, 2022, and several others issued to this year, 2023,” the state added in a post on its website. 

Nigeria: Appeal To Housing Developers

 By Sulaimon Yusuf

When the 7-storey building collapsed at Banana Island, Ikoyi, Lagos on April 12, 2023, the holy month of Lent /Easter and Ramadan/Eid-El-Fitri seemed desecrated. However, for this incident to have occurred around this sacred period, an auspicious time to intensify the evangelism against building collapse and stir the conscience of those who are currently the domineering factor in the Nigerian Housing Sector is now! 

Real estate and housing development have become an alternative booming business for investors following the collapse of the stock exchange and manufacturing in Nigeria. So many business-oriented people, who possess nil training in building construction, have flooded the nation’s construction sphere with little respect for professionalism and due process.

Think, Before You Rwanda Lagos!

 By Jide Johnson

Long before the ethno-political madness for power started in 1998, which has taken an untoward dimension in recent years, Chief Ebenezer Obey Fabiyi sang a song, ‘Lagos State is the place for all…’ I am sure a lot of revisionists and ethno-bigots will disagree with me now because of the high stake politics of a selfish few, with disregard for the good of the majority. 

Taming The Monster Of Poverty

 By Adeze Ojukwu

The gory details of pain, anguish and hopelessness have become the calamitous lot of many Nigerians today. The cry of the masses is reverberating everywhere. From Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto and Zamfara to Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Lagos, Plateau and Edo states, the stories of suffering and sorrow are the same. Poverty is the new norm for the masses. 

Latest reports published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) are frightening and disconcerting. Here is the verdict: “About 133 million Nigerians, representing about 63 percent are poor.” This has again confirmed Nigeria’s status as the world’s poverty capital of the world, surpassing India, with a massive population of over 1.4 billion. 

Nigeria: Tackling The Menace Of ‘The Great Flood’

 By Harrison Eromosele

The annual ritual flooding which every  so often besieged and submerged communities, suburbs, towns, and certain metropolises across several states and countrywide has degenerated from being a recurring decimal problem to a recurring death crisis. The havoc wreaked by this year’s deadly flooding is overwhelmingly unprecedented.

Indeed, it has earned for itself, a catastrophic history. This is the great flood of 2022. There are frightening grapevine hypotheses, suggesting that the devastating scale of this year’s (2022) flood condition in relation to 2012 would possibly imply a repeat, once every decade.

Lagos Is Far From Excellence, Not Yet Working!

 By Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour

Lagos is not working. Once promising, the state now wallows in a sickening state of mediocrity, captured by a fraudulent and mercantilist political class that has held sway for 21 years. Indeed, Roosevelt helps us understand the danger of the mercantile class when he opined thus:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism ownership of government by an individual, or a group.” Roosevelt’s wisdom sums up most appropriately the present tragedy that is the lot of Lagosians.

To start with, the wealth of Lagos is directly tied to the productivity and sweat equity of its citizens. More than 80% of Lagos’s revenue comes from income tax, consumption tax and several other forms of taxation. Hence, while successive administrations brag about increasing internally generated revenue, they have spectacularly failed to hold up their part of the social contract. Close to N10 trillion has been spent during the period but Lagos still ranks as one of the most unliveable cities in the world. Of what use are the trillions generated in tax revenue if it doesn’t improve the life or livelihood of the average citizen?

Bullying In Hostels: The Sylvester Oromoni Tragedy

 By Hope O’Rukevbe Eghagha

Anyone who went through secondary school hostel/boarding house life knows that often, some seniors or some of the bigger boys or girls often bully the juniors. Yes, girls bully the junior girls too. Bullying comes in different forms – in form of depriving the junior ones of their own ‘provision’, extortion, psychological torture, and/or physical beating. There used to be the formal bullying, where all Form One students in the hostel went through what was dubiously called ‘fagging.

On that day, often at night, all the kids in Form One would be assembled in a hall and subjected to all forms of indignities, from bathing them with cold water in a cold weather, pouring food remnants on them, and beating them. After that ritual, they would now say ‘Your tail has been cut off.’ Sometimes, the young and the vulnerable ones continue to be bullied till they get to a senior class or till their tormentors leave the school. I don’t remember now whether that was how the notion of school father started, a senior student who would be one’s protector.

Kidnappers And Ritual Killers In Lagos

By Hope Eghagha 

Kidnapping and ritual killing seem to be on the increase in Lagos and around the country. Another way to express this is that there are more reports of abductions for ritual killings these days than we used to have them. Red Cross says that it has received reports of 10,480 missing persons in Nigeria. Every other week or even day, we read reports about ‘ritualists den’ in Nigeria. Two channels, social media and personal testimonies do a better job reporting the incidents than mainstream media. 

While mainstream outlets can be controlled not to report the incidents (to give a good albeit false image of security) no one can really control reports in social media. The latter presents gory pictures of dismembered bodies. The most recent was that of a 200 level undergraduate at the University of Port Harcourt who butchered a neighbour’s seven year old daughter for ritual, removed parts of her body and attempted to dispose of the body in a garbage heap. Shocking! Horrifying!

The Worst Cities In The World To Work In

If you think your job is tough, and the location you live in doesn’t quite meet your expectations, then take a look at the top 10 worst cities in the world to work in and you might just think differently about your own situation! These cities are so dangerous that employees who agree to take up employment there often qualify for ‘hardship’ pay ; this is extra pay awarded to employees, just for working in a particular location!

The below list was reported by Bruce Einhorn for US online forum, Excelle and is the results of data obtained by OCR Worldwide for BusinessWeek.

Please note that the list does not include any location in the US, Canada or Western Europe, nor does it include any location that is considered a ‘war zone’ [IMAGINE THAT!!].

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THE CITIES 

Nigeria: This House Is Not For Sale!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye  

“Why do I ever think of things falling apart? Were they ever whole” – Arthur Miller, Late American playwright and essayist    

-----------------------------------

I am forced by some very discomforting thoughts to remember today Bessie Head, the late South African writer and her 1989 collection of short stories entitled, Tales Of Tenderness And Power. I remember particularly one of the stories in that collection captioned,  “Village People,” especially, its opening lines which reads: “Poverty has a home in Africa – like a quiet second skin. It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with an unconscious dignity.” 

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Now, this is one assertion that immediately compels one to start visualizing images of scenes and objects that readily constitute benumbing evidences of “dignified poverty” spread all over Africa, where people try to give some form of shine and panache to a very horrible situation they have somehow convinced themselves would always be with them. In those two brief lines, Ms. Head states a truth about Africa which we may find very demoralizing and objectionable, but which would remain extremely difficult to contradict. 

But is poverty the only thing we appear to have accepted as inevitable component of life in this part of the world? What about crime? How come crime appears to have gradually become too natural with us in Nigeria here, that we even go ahead to put up notices to moderate its operation? We appear to relish more the very unpleasant job of merely alerting people to it than doing anything to stamp it out. Now, if I may ask: what usually occurs to your mind each time you enter a hotel room in Nigeria and on the wash-basin, dressing mirror, bed-sheet or towel you see the following inscription: “Hotel Property, Do Not Remove!”   

If you ask me, this warning simply takes it for granted that guests would naturally wish to remove those items, and so to forestall that, care is taken to advise them not to remove those particular items as the hotel is still in need of them. In other words, the absence of such a warning on any other item should be construed as an automatic authorization any guest requires to move those things together with his personal effects, if he so wishes, at the expiration of his stay.  That’s just the implication.  Or have we not also thought about that? What are we then, by this practice, telling numerous foreign visitors that use those hotel rooms daily about ourselves?  

Yet such warnings abound everywhere, but I doubt that it in any way bothers anyone, even those public officers spending billions of naira on their so-called efforts to manage the nation’s image. Indeed, it no longer shocks us to see daily on virtually every building, even rickety, dilapidated ones, this inscription, usually written in very bold letters, even at the risk of seriously defacing the structures: “This House Is Not For Sale!!” And in most cases, they usually add, for maximum effect: “Beware of 419! Beware of  Fraudsters!” For goodness sake, is Nigeria the only country that fraudsters can be found?

 Is this the only country with records of incidents of people selling properties that do not belong to them? Are there no better, more decent, less socially destructive ways of protecting people from fraudsters than screaming on virtually every house out there: “This House Is Not For Sale, Beware of 419!!” Are these houses not properly registered at the appropriate offices where prospective buyers can go and verify their real owners? Today, almost every undeveloped, refuse-ridden land on every street hosts at a prominent spot an imposing signpost informing people the land is not for sale, plus the usual warning screaming to prospective buyers to beware of fraudsters and 419.


The impression the continued proliferation of these warning signs can only convey is that most Nigerians do nothing else than wander all day looking for each other’s properties to sell to unsuspecting buyers; that our society is filled with so many rich, dumb buyers without the slightest awareness that checks ought to be run on properties before paying for them; that the system here is so chaotic and unreliable that people prefer to rely only on this very crude, people-diminishing method of discouraging potential property buyers with mostly badly written notices.    

Out there, my beloved sister, Dr. Dora Akunyili, is shouting herself hoarse in a determined effort to convince us that she is re-branding Nigeria or its image; she claims that she is striving to give Nigeria a positive image, but I doubt if it has ever occurred to her that this unwholesome phenomenon alone can easily destroy the best cultivated image. What for instance would a foreign visitor think of us, after observing this inscription on virtually every building he saw on a particular street he visited?

There are some crooks in Nigeria, like in every other nation, but, for goodness sake, this is NOT a nation inhabited by only fraudsters! Decent people like me also exist here, okay! And it is somebody’s job to ensure that this point is cleared underlined to every ear that can hear.  


And because we appear to demonstrate through our indifference to the whole thing that these vulgar displays are in order, foreigners living among us have gone ahead to add some really ruinous sophistication to the ugly    phenomenon. In front of even some hardly known, struggling foreign companies today, you must find notices screaming: “No Waiting; No Loitering.” The next time you visit an embassy, try and look at the kind of notices placed in front of the buildings.  Indeed, United States Embassy in Lagos here appears to be the most enthusiastic offender in this regard.

 Only recently, while visiting the US embassy, I was suddenly moved to look at the number of large, gleaming notices in front of the compound warning people against patronizing touts, submission of fake information and documents etc.

I can’t really recall now how many notices I saw in front of the same embassy gate saying the same the thing in the same words, and standing gallantly near each other, in silent competition.

Robin Sanders: Former US Ambassador
To Nigeria

I have not tried to investigate whether this is what obtains at the US embassies in other countries, but I am willing to guess that this proliferation of demeaning notices may not be the case in other lands.  Inside the US embassy building itself, the rooms are generously splashed with well illustrated notices warning people that fake visas or passports or false information or documents can open many doors and but close one permanently. Even warning notices meant for the blind and deaf could not have been so generously pasted! 
Indeed, the thing is so gratuitously done that I am forced to wonder if the aim is really to discourage fraudsters or to advertise a well-cultivated opinion about Nigeria to visiting Americans and other foreign nationals who also visit the embassy as often as Nigerians. 

 I am tempted to suspect that the latter is the prime motivation, and as I look at Ms. Robin Sanders, US Ambassador to Nigeria, and observe the facial features she shares with me, I am forced to wonder how she is able to allow this clearly unhealthy profiling and stereotyping to continue flourishing during her tenure against the land of her ancestors.    

Yes, we can say that after all we asked for it by failing to contain the vile activities of some Nigerians that clearly portray here as a country of crooks. Indeed, there are fraudsters in this nation, as in any other country, but this is by no means, a nation peopled by ONLY fraudsters. It ought to be clear that fraudsters constitute only a negligible minority in this country, but their evil deeds seem to speak louder than the good works of the decent, hardworking majority.


And although the fellows ruling us are mostly very low characters who care very little about reputation and self esteem, and whose understanding of being in public office is to loot the treasury pale, I refuse to accept that any nation’s politicians should form the basis for judging the people’s character.

Else, why do Americans still speak contemptuously about the “Washington crowd,” and yet hallow their country at any given opportunity?

Yes, we have the Dimeji Bankoles out there, the Iboris, the Bode Georges, Governor-General Alams, Big Tafas, Obasanjos, IBBs, Dariyes and the rest of them, who know only how to rubbish the country and give it a monstrous image, but for goodness case, this does not automatically consign all of us to the refuse dump reserved for low, dishonourable characters. The time to do a rethink and act accordingly is now.

Enough of this debilitating profiling, please.       
  —————————————————

scruples2006@yahoo.com

NIGERIA: This House Is Not For Sale!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye  


“Why do I ever think of things falling apart? Were they ever whole” – Arthur Miller, Late American playwright and essayist    
————————————————————–

I am forced by some very discomforting thoughts to remember today Bessie Head, the late South African writer and her 1989 collection of short stories entitled, Tales Of Tenderness And Power. I remember particularly one of the stories in that collection captioned,  “Village People,” especially, its opening lines which reads: “Poverty has a home in Africa – like a quiet second skin. It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with an unconscious dignity.” 

Now, this is one assertion that immediately compels one to start visualizing images of scenes and objects that readily constitute benumbing evidences of “dignified poverty” spread all over Africa, where people try to give some form of shine and panache to a very horrible situation they have somehow convinced themselves would always be with them. In those two brief lines, Ms. Head states a truth about Africa which we may find very demoralizing and objectionable, but which would remain extremely difficult to contradict. 

But is poverty the only thing we appear to have accepted as inevitable component of life in this part of the world? What about crime? How come crime appears to have gradually become too natural with us in Nigeria here, that we even go ahead to put up notices to moderate its operation? We appear to relish more the very unpleasant job of merely alerting people to it than doing anything to stamp it out. Now, if I may ask: what usually occurs to your mind each time you enter a hotel room in Nigeria and on the wash-basin, dressing mirror, bed-sheet or towel you see the following inscription: “Hotel Property, Do Not Remove!”   

         (pix:zouzouwizman)


If you ask me, this warning simply takes it for granted that guests would naturally wish to remove those items, and so to forestall that, care is taken to advise them not to remove those particular items as the hotel is still in need of them. In other words, the absence of such a warning on any other item should be construed as an automatic authorization any guest requires to move those things together with his personal effects, if he so wishes, at the expiration of his stay.  That’s just the implication.  Or have we not also thought about that? What are we then, by this practice, telling numerous foreign visitors that use those hotel rooms daily about ourselves?  

Yet such warnings abound everywhere, but I doubt that it in any way bothers anyone, even those public officers spending billions of naira on their so-called efforts to manage the nation’s image. Indeed, it no longer shocks us to see daily on virtually every building, even rickety, dilapidated ones, this inscription, usually written in very bold letters, even at the risk of seriously defacing the structures: “This House Is Not For Sale!!” And in most cases, they usually add, for maximum effect: “Beware of 419! Beware of  Fraudsters!” For goodness sake, is Nigeria the only country that fraudsters can be found?

 Is this the only country with records of incidents of people selling properties that do not belong to them? Are there no better, more decent, less socially destructive ways of protecting people from fraudsters than screaming on virtually every house out there: “This House Is Not For Sale, Beware of 419!!” Are these houses not properly registered at the appropriate offices where prospective buyers can go and verify their real owners? Today, almost every undeveloped, refuse-ridden land on every street hosts at a prominent spot an imposing signpost informing people the land is not for sale, plus the usual warning screaming to prospective buyers to beware of fraudsters and 419.


President Goodluck Jonathan

  The impression the continued proliferation of these warning signs can only convey is that most Nigerians do nothing else than wander all day looking for each other’s properties to sell to unsuspecting buyers; that our society is filled with so many rich, dumb buyers without the slightest awareness that checks ought to be run on properties before paying for them; that the system here is so chaotic and unreliable that people prefer to rely only on this very crude, people-diminishing method of discouraging potential property buyers with mostly badly written notices.    

Out there, my beloved sister, Dr. Dora Akunyili, is shouting herself hoarse in a determined effort to convince us that she is re-branding Nigeria or its image; she claims that she is striving to give Nigeria a positive image, but I doubt if it has ever occurred to her that this unwholesome phenomenon alone can easily destroy the best cultivated image. What for instance would a foreign visitor think of us, after observing this inscription on virtually every building he saw on a particular street he visited? There are some crooks in Nigeria, like in every other nation, but, for goodness sake, this is NOT a nation inhabited by only fraudsters! Decent people like me also exist here, okay! And it is somebody’s job to ensure that this point is cleared underlined to every ear that can hear.  


And because we appear to demonstrate through our indifference to the whole thing that these vulgar displays are in order, foreigners living among us have gone ahead to add some really ruinous sophistication to the ugly    phenomenon. In front of even some hardly known, struggling foreign companies today, you must find notices screaming: “No Waiting; No Loitering.” The next time you visit an embassy, try and look at the kind of notices placed in front of the buildings.  Indeed, United States Embassy in Lagos here appears to be the most enthusiastic offender in this regard. Only recently, while visiting the US embassy, I was suddenly moved to look at the number of large, gleaming notices in front of the compound warning people against patronizing touts, submission of fake information and documents etc. I can’t really recall now how many notices I saw in front of the same embassy gate saying the same the thing in the same words, and standing gallantly near each other, in silent competition.

Robin Sanders: Former US Ambassador To Nigeria


I have not tried to investigate whether this is what obtains at the US embassies in other countries, but I am willing to guess that this proliferation of demeaning notices may not be the case in other lands.  Inside the US embassy building itself, the rooms are generously splashed with well illustrated notices warning people that fake visas or passports or false information or documents can open many doors and but close one permanently. Even warning notices meant for the blind and deaf could not have been so generously pasted! 
Indeed, the thing is so gratuitously done that I am forced to wonder if the aim is really to discourage fraudsters or to advertise a well-cultivated opinion about Nigeria to visiting Americans and other foreign nationals who also visit the embassy as often as Nigerians. 

 I am tempted to suspect that the latter is the prime motivation, and as I look at Ms. Robin Sanders, US Ambassador to Nigeria, and observe the facial features she shares with me, I am forced to wonder how she is able to allow this clearly unhealthy profiling and stereotyping to continue flourishing during her tenure against the land of her ancestors.    


Yes, we can say that after all we asked for it by failing to contain the vile activities of some Nigerians that clearly portray here as a country of crooks. Indeed, there are fraudsters in this nation, as in any other country, but this is by no means, a nation peopled by ONLY fraudsters. It ought to be clear that fraudsters constitute only a negligible minority in this country, but their evil deeds seem to speak louder than the good works of the decent, hardworking majority.

 And although the fellows ruling us are mostly very low characters who care very little about reputation and self esteem, and whose understanding of being in public office is to loot the treasury pale, I refuse to accept that any nation’s politicians should form the basis for judging the people’s character.

Else, why do Americans still speak contemptuously about the “Washington crowd,” and yet hallow their country at any given opportunity?

Yes, we have the Dimeji Bankoles out there, the Iboris, the Bode Georges, Governor-General Alams, Big Tafas, Obasanjos, IBBs, Dariyes and the rest of them, who know only how to rubbish the country and give it a monstrous image, but for goodness case, this does not automatically consign all of us to the refuse dump reserved for low, dishonourable characters. The time to do a rethink and act accordingly is now.

Enough of this debilitating profiling, please.       
  —————————————————

scruples2006@yahoo.com
www.ugochukwu.wordpress.com
August 2010.