Croatian striker, Nikola Kalinicwho was sent back home after he refused to come on as a substitute againstNigeriaduring their first group stage clash, is yet to receive his World Cup silver medal after his country came second at the 2018 World Cup tournament inRussia.
In a country enamoured of dark humour, a common greeting among the middle class now is Happy recession!" Read OP-ED by acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie for the New York Times:
I was 7 years old the first time I recognized political fear. My parents and their friends were talking about the government, in our living room, in our relatively big house, set on relatively wide grounds at a southeastern Nigerian university, with doors shut and no strangers present. Yet they spoke in whispers. So ingrained was their apprehension that they whispered even when they did not need to. It was 1984 and Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari was the military head of state.
Governmental controls had mangled the economy. Many imported goods were banned, scarcity was rife, black markets thrived, businesses were failing and soldiers stalked markets to enforce government-determined prices. My mother came home with precious cartons of subsidized milk and soap, which were sold in rationed quantities. Soldiers flogged people on the streets for “indiscipline” — such as littering or not standing in queues at the bus stop. On television, the head of state, stick-straight and authoritative, seemed remote, impassive on his throne amid the fear and uncertainty.
And yet when, 30 years later, in 2015, Mr. Buhari was elected as a democratic president, I welcomed it. Because for the first time, Nigerians had voted out an incumbent in an election that was largely free and fair. Because Mr. Buhari had sold himself as a near-ascetic reformer, as a man so personally aboveboard that he would wipe out Nigeria’s decades-long corruption. He represented a form of hope.
Nigeria is difficult to govern. It is Africa’s most populous country, with regional complexities, a scarred history and a patronage-based political culture. Still, Mr. Buhari ascended to the presidency with a rare advantage — not only did he have the good will of a majority of Nigerians, he elicited a peculiar mix of fear and respect. For the first weeks of his presidency, it was said that civil servants who were often absent from work suddenly appeared every day, on time, and that police officers and customs officials stopped demanding bribes.
He had an opportunity to make real reforms early on, to boldly reshape Nigeria’s path. He wasted it.
Perhaps the first clue was the unusually long time it took him to appoint his ministers. After an ostensible search for the very best, he presented many recycled figures with whom Nigerians were disenchanted. But the real test of his presidency came with the continued fall in oil prices, which had begun the year before his inauguration.
Nigeria’s economy is unwholesomely dependent on oil, and while the plunge in prices was bound to be catastrophic, Mr. Buhari’s actions made it even more so.
He adopted a policy of “defending” the naira, Nigeria’s currency. The official exchange rate was kept artificially low. On the black market, the exchange rate ballooned. Prices for everything rose: rice, bread, cooking oil. Fruit sellers and car sellers blamed “the price of dollars.” Complaints of hardship cut across class. Some businesses fired employees; others folded.
The government decided who would have access to the central bank’s now-reduced foreign currency reserves, and drew up an arbitrary list of worthy and unworthy goods — importers of toothpicks cannot, for example, but importers of oil can. Predictably, this policy spawned corruption: The exclusive few who were able to buy dollars at official rates could sell them on the black market and earn large, riskless profits — transactions that contribute nothing to the economy.
Mr. Buhari has spoken of his “good reasons” for ignoring the many economists who warned about the danger of his policies. He believes, rightly, that Nigeria needs to produce more of what it consumes, and he wants to spur local production. But local production cannot be willed into existence if the supporting infrastructure is absent, and banning goods has historically led not to local production but to a thriving shadow market. His intentions, good as they well might be, are rooted in an outdated economic model and an infantile view of Nigerians. For him, it seems, patriotism is not a voluntary and flexible thing, with room for dissent, but a martial enterprise: to obey without questioning. Nationalism is not negotiated, but enforced.
The president seems comfortable with conditions that make an economy uncomfortable — uncertainty and disillusion. But the economy is not the only reason for Nigerians’ declining hope.
A few months ago, a young woman, Chidera, came to work as a nanny in my Lagos home. A week into her job, I found her in tears in her room. She needed to go back to her ancestral home in the southeast, she said, because Fulani herdsmen had just murdered her grandfather on his farm. She showed me a gruesome cellphone photo of his corpse, desecrated by bullets, an old man crumpled on the farm he owned.
Chidera’s grandfather is only one of the hundreds of people who have been murdered by Fulani herdsmen — cattle herders from northern Nigeria who, until recently, were benign figures in the southern imagination, walking across the country with their grazing cattle.
Since Mr. Buhari came to power, villages in the middle-belt and southern regions have been raided, the inhabitants killed, their farmlands sacked. Those attacked believe the Fulani herdsmen want to forcibly take over their lands for cattle grazing.
It would be unfair to blame Mr. Buhari for these killings, which are in part a result of complex interactions between climate change and land use. But leadership is as much about perception as it is about action, and Mr. Buhari has appeared disengaged. It took him months, and much criticism from civil society, to finally issue a statement “condemning” the killings. His aloofness feels, at worst, like a tacit enabling of murder and, at best, an absence of sensitive leadership.
Most important, his behavior suggests he is tone-deaf to the widely held belief among southern Nigerians that he promotes a northern Sunni Muslim agenda. He was no less opaque when the Nigerian Army murdered hundreds of members of a Shiite Muslim group in December, burying them in hastily dug graves. Or when soldiers killed members of the small secessionist pro-Biafran movement who were protesting the arrest of their leader, Nnamdi Kanu, a little-known figure whose continued incarceration has elevated him to a minor martyr.
Nigerians who expected a fair and sweeping cleanup of corruption have been disappointed. Arrests have tended to be selective, targeting mostly those opposed to Mr. Buhari’s government. The anti-corruption agencies are perceived not only as partisan but as brazenly flouting the rule of law: The Department of State Security recently barged into the homes of various judges at midnight, harassing and threatening them and arresting a number of them, because the judges’ lifestyles “suggested” that they were corrupt.
There is an ad hoc air to the government that does not inspire that vital ingredient for a stable economy: confidence. There is, at all levels of government, a relentless blaming of previous administrations and a refusal to acknowledge mistakes. And there are eerie signs of the past’s repeating itself — Mr. Buhari’s tone and demeanor are reminiscent of 1984, and his military-era War Against Indiscipline program is being reintroduced.
There are no easy answers to Nigeria’s malaise, but the government’s intervention could be more salutary — by prioritizing infrastructure, creating a business-friendly environment and communicating to a populace mired in disappointment.
In a country enamored of dark humor, a common greeting among the middle class now is “Happy recession!”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author, most recently, of the novel “Americanah.”
Author Chimamanda Adichie recently held a webchat session with her fans through Guardian UK’s website. The insightful chat gave us a glimpse into the life of the new mum.
Former Presidential aide Reuben Abati has written an interesting piece on bleaching in Nigeria.
I wrote a piece recently, a tribute to the late veteran actress Bukky Ajayi and the multi-instrumentalist OJB Jezreel, in which I raised a number of issues, including how in Nollywood today, there is an obsession with the whitening of skin, an anti-Negritude yellowing, what I referred to as “the bleaching, chameleon crowd of Nollywood beauties.” The various reactions to the piece conveniently ignored this subject; two young ladies who felt that I was probing an unpopular theme drew my attention to this. I was reminded that being light-skinned is now the in-thing, indeed the socially acceptable norm, because there is now a universalization of the concept of beauty and self-esteem.
The more light-skinned you are, the more acceptable you are in various circumstances, that is. I thought if this was true, then it is a tragedy indeed for the black world. For, once upon a time in the history of the black race, being black was a thing of joy and an instrument of protest. When Jesse Evans gave the black salute at the 1939 Olympics, after winning four gold medals, he was making a racially loaded statement about black pride and achievement. Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali are key historical figures in the struggle for the black identity in the United States not to talk of various moments and efforts culminating in the Obama phenomenon eight years ago.
None of these historical figures would ever have contemplated a globalized notion of beauty and self-esteem, which superiorizes and imposes the idea of being white in 2016, and for same to be validated by blacks, living in the black world’s most populous country- Nigeria. Closer home, the independence struggles across Africa were fuelled by ideas of racial pride, and indeed in the 1960s, the coalescing of that around the negritude movement projected confidence and faith in the black colour, the people’s culture and identity. To be added to this is the expressed faith that black people all over the world can contribute meaningfully and significantly to the march of human history. Being black was nothing to be ashamed of. Cultural workers used their art and narratives to promote black culture.
Writers identified with their natal roots. James Ngugi for example, became Ngugi wa Thio’ngo. Albert Achebe dropped his Albert and became Chinua Achebe. Wole Soyinka argued that “a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude”; it should act and in his writings, he proved the point. Black activists like W.E.B. DuBois left the United States and traced their roots to Africa. But today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that movement are turning back the hand of the clock. They want to be white! They may in the long run constitute a minority, but artificial beauty is a growing trend among black people. I was once asked to buy Brazilian hair, during a trip to Brazil. I went dutifully to a shopping mall asking for Brazilian hair.
Nobody could figure out what I wanted. Brazilian hair is what a lot of Nigerian women wear, or attach to their natural hair to achieve the effect of a straight, Oyinbo-ish hair and to hide their own natural, curly hair. It took me two days of trying to buy Brazilian hair in Brazil before it occurred to me that Brazilian women are not likely to be selling Brazilian hair in their own country since in any case, every one of them is born with it. But here in Nigeria, Brazilian hair is a big deal: it is one of those items a bridegroom must budget for, otherwise, no wedding and I understand, this could be in the range of N350, 000 per hair. The final cost could also be determined by the adopted style: normal leave-out, closure or frontal, all designed to create an artificial effect. Even the eyelashes you see on our ladies these days may not be real: eyeballs are replaced with contact lenses, and there is a new craze now called eyebrow wig: a wig on the eyebrow!
The new global culture of beauty has also imposed on our women what is called acrylic nails, or plastic nails. With those cat-like nails, women find it difficult to wear sanitary pads, jewellery, button their shirts, eat dollops of swallow with their hands, type on their phones or wash clothes and plates, and yet every young lady out there is wearing strange nails in the name of beauty.
Check out the faces too. Make up has been turned into such an art of deception; you could marry your ex-girlfriend and not know she is the one because she has changed colour, changed face and changed everything about her. Make-up and making up are associated with success, but it is pure 419 as many may have discovered. Women talk about laying a foundation on their faces as if they are bricklayers, they also talk about contouring and highlighting the face to look different: the effect is that every ugly girl is contoured and highlighted to become a stunning beauty. We are also in the age of breast implants, breast reconstruction, liposuction, pumping of bum-bum and lip lightening (there is cream method or peeling with machine!) and the use of body pads and slimming girdles and all kinds of borrowed gadgets to make a woman look prettier than she is.
The idea of the “African Queen” celebrated over the years, and more famously by Tu Face Idibia in a song of the same title has thus undergone a transformation. Women and men (yes men also) in Africa’s most populous black nation, and quite a significant number, are all struggling to become either light-skinned or copy the Kadarshian/Kanye West effect. I have been made to understand that in Nollywood for example, dark-skinned actors and actresses are ignored by producers: they say they don’t look good on camera and that only light skinned actors sell movies. So, there is a marketing side to it but it must be crazy if true. Celebrities are also expected to be glamorous all the time. This is why public figures don’t step out of their homes or take pictures unless they are properly made up. And to worsen the story, I am told you need to look clean, and fresh to be considered successful and the black colour does not project success.
Here we are confronted with many men and women who are bleaching their skins, to look fresh and successful. The prostitution angle to it is buried in the argument that men are naturally attracted to light-skinned ladies. And it is a big industry, one of the most lucrative businesses in Nigeria today. The minimum cost of a bleaching cream is N15, 000 per week. These include Egyptian milk, Arabian milk, Snow White and steroid creams like Movate, which is used to bleach the scalp. Yes, the scalp! They bleach the scalp too. There is also a bleaching tablet, which costs as much as $500; four tablets are usually taken per dose. Some people opt for what is called bleaching injection to peel off the melanin, and one injection is a tidy N250, 000. There are special creams for old women and men with resistant skin, at higher cost. The madness is across all age brackets, and may God help you if you have a bleaching wife or girlfriend.
I am not making this up. The various creams and services are hawked daily at Ikeja roundabout, under the bridge. The merchants also advertise tattooing, hips enlargement, penis enlargement and breast reconstruction services. And in Yaba, Lagos, you’d find the biggest cosmetics store run by a certain Mama Tega who is said to be the oldest and the most trusted in the business. The irony is that she, herself, is interestingly dark-complexioned! The girls who work for her and her patrons are not.
The stress and risks involved in bleaching and looking white by all means possible are so much, but the people involved do not care. The knuckles and the lips do not bleach easily, so people go about looking patched up and they have to buy a different chemical to lighten their knuckles, elbows and knees. The side effect of the chemicals used includes bad body odour and stretch marks, the skin is thinner and more sensitive, and the chemicals expose the person to enormous health risks. It is also a lot of work. If you are bleaching your skin, you have to use the cream everyday, morning and night. If you miss the cream for a week, you’d look different, and you have to stick to the same supplier and mixture: so much needless stress.
I am aware that every individual is entitled to a freedom of choice including the choice to look the way they want. But I see the spread of a bleaching culture as a display of so much insecurity and lack of self-esteem, and an assault on the legacy of all the men and women who fought and are still fighting to ensure that black identity matters. It is also shocking that many mothers are now in the habit of introducing their children to bleaching creams very early. They don’t want dark-skinned daughters and sons! And the ones who fail to do this feel terribly embarrassed when they are photographed with their children and the skin colours do not match. Check family photographs these days. And worry about the many ladies out there living a life of pretense engaged in “coded waka runs” (euphemism for underground prostitution) just so they can buy skin whitening creams.
This is a sad story about the way we now live, even as I recall the antiphonal lyrics of James Brown’s “Say it Loud – I’m Black and Proud” (1968) – one of the greatest songs of all time. In Nigeria’s entertainment industry today, being black is almost a taboo. The women want to look like Kim Kardashian and the men seem to think that to be a celebrity is to be light-skinned. In the larger society, a “faworaja” (fake appearance) culture is on the rise. The people are deliberately re-colonizing themselves mentally and physically. What can anyone say to such persons who are ashamed of their own identity? I speak for myself: “I’m Black and Proud”. But even if I wan bleach sef, I black so tay, cream go finish for market…
The Federal High Court in Owerri, presided upon by Justice A.I Allagoa has today Friday 8th of July, 2016 affirmed the election of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State.
At least seven students died, while 21 others were injured in a night fire at Government Girls Secondary School, Jogana, 20 kilometers from the city of Kano.
An Ota Magistrates’ Court in Ogun on Tuesday remanded a 22-year-old man, Akeremisi Ola, in prison custody over alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl. Ola, who resides at No. 8 Omole Estate, Ota, Ogun, is facing a charge of rape.
Amber Rose shared this hilarious meme…Insinuating the man on the left is the sugar daddy she likes but our very own Nollywood veteran actor, Mr Ibu is the type who likes her..
A petrol station, Alkad and Sons Nigeria Limited, situated along Olorunsogo, Ilorin, Kwara state capital suffered heavy loss yesterday, November 23 as the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) gave out their fuel to motorists and motorcyclists free of charge.
Juliet Ibrahim recently directed a photo session in a bid to raise awareness against domestic violence against women as part of the Emmanuel Ikubese Foundation tagged Project RAW (Respect A Woman).
They may not have walked the red carpet together at the American Music Awards on Sunday night, but Kylie Jenner and Tyga were both there, and they didn't look the least bit broken up.
Leader of the dreaded gang of bank robbers which had been terrorising commercial banks in Lagos and Ogun states, responsible for last Thursday's robbery attack at Agbara Housing Estate, Kelly Fotor has revealed that his gang stole N28 million from the banks they raided.
A South African shared these photos on Facebook and it has gone viral. Two Zimbawean women, who work at a farm in South Africa were allegedly busted by their boss, trying to make away with meat strapped to their bodies.
Family sources have revealed how APC governorship candidate, Audu Abubakar died yesterday Sunday November 22nd, hours before INEC declared the state governorship election inconclusive.
Foremost Lagos human right lawyer, Festus Keyamo has revealed the legal implications following the death of the All Progressive Congress governorship candidate at the Kogi State gubernatorial election, Prince Abubakar Audu, under controversial circumstances on Sunday.
Richest comedians in Nigeria: They may be the b*tt of their jokes. They could do anything but be serious. But they’re no fools. While you smile at home, they are rocking and dancing Gobe to the banks! From obscurity to fortune, these comedians are the biggest in the game.
