Negative Impacts Of Child Wasting To Nigeria’s Economy

 By Carl Umegboro

The National Stadium, now Moshood Abiola Stadium in Abuja has a 60,000-sitting capacity. Whenever the facility is filled to full capacity by people, it is not only easily noticed but referred to or tagged ‘ocean of humanity’ which is just a one-off fill.

Now, imagine how it will look like where the filled stadium is reproduced to 50 in number to accommodate three million people. It means that a large expanse of land in Abuja will have to go, to adequately contain the number. This scenario, I believe will assist greatly to humanely feel the estimated three million children in Nigeria according to statistics facing acute wasting.

The Monster Of Child Marriage

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

In the appalling arrangement of child marriage across Nigeria and the world, those who marry children are as guilty as those who marry off children in what is a grand but grievous theft.

All those who get involved, including all those who consent either by their silence or compliance, are thieves of the worst kind. From girls barely off their mothers’ breast, they steal a childhood, a girlhood, and more damningly, a future.

In the place of innocence, they sow iniquity, and from bodies unblemished by the complications of adulthood, they force out anguished lives. In Nigeria, as in many other countries around the world that have failed to reconcile equity and equality, being a woman is a never-ending battle.

The Girl Child: Our Future And Hope

 By Ifeyinwa Chime

International Day of the Girl 2022 has come and gone. Should we simply tick done and move on? I say no. Let’s us continue celebrating and working for the good of our female children. 

This year the International day of the girl child was celebrated on Tuesday 11th October 2022. Its theme was “Our time is now- our rights, our future.” 2022 commemorates the 10th anniversary of the International Day of the Girl (IDG).

The Girl-child is a biological human female offspring from birth to eighteen years of age. Recently, we have seen a surge of Girl-child education debates surrounding the primary, secondary, tertiary and health/safety education in particular for girls and young women.

Why Climate Change Must Define Our Elections

 By Nick Dazang

Following unprecedented rainfall this year, the vast length and breadth of this country has been flooded. Most adversely impacted are Kogi and Bayelsa states. Kogi State, which is located smack on the confluence of Rivers Niger and Benue, has been submerged by water. Bayelsa, which is down stream, has been cut off completely from civilisation, with nearly one million of its citizens displaced.

It is a tale of woe for nearly all the states of the federation, including the Mambilla and Jos plateaux, which experienced the most torrential rains in a generation. Not less than a conservative 700 Nigerians have lost their lives. Millions have lost their properties and live in camps. And millions more are prone to diseases and hunger as a consequence.

How Scary Is UNICEF’s 20 Million Nigerian Children Out-Of-School Statistic?

 By Cheta Nwanze

It has been well acknowledged that primary school education is the foundation of individual and national development. The skills learned at that level are the base on which the capacity for future economic productivity is built. Primary School Education takes up the first six years of Nigeria’s nine-year Basic Education Curriculum which seeks to give every child resident in Nigeria an adequate foundation for a successful and productive life.

The nine-year Basic Education Curriculum covers 10 subjects: Mathematics; Basic Science and Technology; English Studies; Religion and National Values; Cultural and Creative Arts; Business Studies; Nigerian Languages; Pre-vocational Studies; French and Arabic.

How Nigeria Became A Failed State

 By Dan Amor

Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx’s celebrated phrase, “the official resume’ of the antagonism in civil society”, but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated. It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its made-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions. 

Therefore, those who murdered Nigeria, and are still killing its residues include, but not limited to: a big and comprador bourgeoisie that has abdicated its political aspirations and allied itself to semi-feudal interests; a disoriented small and medium bourgeoisie made up of a certain class of professionals and intellectuals, potentially revolutionary, but which hesitates to renew the struggle for its national liberation. There is a sleeping working class which is supposed to be the prime revolutionary force but which cannot define clearly its trade union tasks and political aims. There is a large crowd of youths, the student body that constitute about 60 percent of the national population, which has abdicated its responsibility of serving as light to the national ideal due largely to intellectual dishonesty, ignorance or docility arising from poverty of ideas. 

Fathers As Sexual Predators

By Dan Agbese

Let’s quit feigning ignorance about this benumbingly shameful fact. A vicious form of paedophilia is rapidly creeping up on our country. Fathers have become the sexual predators of their daughters. So has the neighbour; so has the employer; and so has the admissions officer in our institutions. The cocktail of our national challenges is getting progressively more complicated. Sorry.

And so, the girl-child, the mother of our future presidents, governors, Senate presidents and 37 speakers of the federal and state legislatures and justices faces a bleak future from the sexual trauma suffered in childhood. She is condemned to carry the heavy burden of sexual shame for life. Some of the abused girl-children find it difficult to live normal lives after being so traumatised. It is horrible.

Maternal And Infant Mortality In West Africa…Beyond The Numbers

By Clem Ugorji
THE pain of childbirth has been described as equivalent to 20 bones getting fractured at a time, a level slightly greater than the 45 del (a subjective measure of pain) limit of pain a human can endure. With this unique experience comes inexplicable joy and the pain is momentarily forgotten. But not in all cases. The curtains may fall on the mother or baby or both, and the long 9-month wait ends in anguish with a psychological pain that can never be quantified, not in words or numbers.

Maternal and newborn mortality ratios, that is, the rates at which women or babies die from birth related complications, in West Africa are among the highest in the world. UNICEF reports that the maternal and newborn mortality rates in the West and Central Africa region are 679 women per 100,000 live births and 31 babies per 1000 births, respectively. 

Meeting A Man Who Fed Biafrans

By Okey Ndibe

One of the fortunes of my frequent travels is that I meet fascinating people at different locations, even when I have no inkling of the possibility of such encounters. In stops in such cities as Los Angeles, Abuja, San Francisco, Johannesburg, London, Washington, DC, Houston and Austin, Texas, I have met classmates from my elementary, secondary school and college days, childhood playmates, former students of mine, elders who knew my parents before they were married, those who knew me as a snotty nosed, impish child, and folks with whom I had communicated for years, by email or telephony.

Last week, I put out a notice on Facebook and Twitter that I was spending a month in Pittsburgh, PA, to give several workshops and lectures as well as present my memoir, Never Look an American in the Eye: Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts, and the Making of a Nigerian American. I received a note from Ndaeyo Uko, once one of Nigeria’s wittiest and most popular columnists, who is now an academic in Australia. Ndaeyo, who was a star writer at The Guardian and Daily Times, now holds a PhD. For his dissertation, he researched the daredevil motley of adventurers and philanthropists, who discounted unimaginable risks to ferry food and, in some cases, arms, into Biafra during Nigeria’s ruinous thirty-month civil war.

Ndaeyo’s message was simple: I was not to miss the opportunity, before leaving Pittsburgh, of meeting David Koren, an American, who was part of that team of expatriates – Americans, the British, and Europeans – who, at grave risks to life and limb, undertook the perilous missions to fly-smuggle relief into Biafra. He explained that he had flown from Australia to Pittsburgh to interview Mr. Koren – and had found his recollections memorable.

Via email, Ndaeyo introduced me to the rescue activist. Mr. Koren and I then spoke over the phone. I told him I was a child of the Biafran War, and directed him to a link to my piece titled “My Biafran Eyes,” a series of vignettes based on my childhood recollections. On reading my essay, he responded, “I read ‘My Biafran Eyes.’ It was a touching story.”

Last Saturday, Mr. Koren (accompanied by his wife, Kay) and I met at a bookstore run by the City of Asylum, the organisation that arranged for my monthlong fellowship in Pittsburgh. It was an emotional experience, for both of us.

The Central African Republic's Hidden Conflict

International Crisis Group
- NEW BRIEFING

Away from the international spotlight, the Central African Republic’s rural areas are turning into fields of violence as war over territory and livestock hits a highly vulnerable population, with effects increasingly felt in neighbouring Cameroon and Chad.

“The country’s crisis has exacerbated old conflicts and produced new ones. Rural Central African Republic is now the stage for a violent competition over livestock, the wealth of the poor”.

Thibaud Lesueur, Crisis Group’s Central Africa Analyst

In its latest briefing, The Central African Republic’s Hidden Conflict, the International Crisis Group examines a dangerous conflict-within-a-conflict requiring urgent action by the transitional government and its international partners. Targeted by anti-balaka militias and ex-Seleka fighters, many pastoralist communities are left in extreme poverty and forced to flee. Tens of thousands cross the border to Cameroon and Chad where, in turn, land pressure intensifies. Many of the victims seek retribution or join armed groups to survive, becoming actors in a conflict that divides communities and damages a pillar of the traditional economy.