Dec

28

Nuhu Ribadu, Okiro and a Policy Course

Filed Under News, Opinion | 7 Comments

We woke up this morning to the news that Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, the Chairman of the Nigerian Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, is to go on a course at the Nigerian Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies for a year. Actually, it was announced yesterday by Inspector General Mike Okiro yesterday, but I didn’t hear about it because I was following the news of Ms Bhutto’s assassination.

Mr. Okiro says that Mr. Ribadu’s name is the second, according to seniority, on the list of police officers who are to attend the course. Therefore, he says, Ribadu is to attend the course. When asked about this, Nuhu Ribadu said that he had not been informed about any course.

Reactions
The main reaction of Nigerians has been one that assumes that it is a way to get Mr. Ribadu out of EFCC. I am partly of that persuasion myself. Some things are simply about timing. EFCC has not exactly been living up to the expectations of Nigerians since Mr. Yar’Adua became president, and hearing that the leader, whose reputation is linked to any successes that the EFCC might have had, is going to be off duties for a year does not exactly make Nigerians any more comfortable. It is quite easy to say that an institution should be bigger than an individual, but in a country where institutions are generally weak, one is not exactly wrong if one still links an institution to a personality. This is especially so when the institution is as young and sensitive as the EFCC.

Some analysts also think that there is hardly any way that the Inspector General would announce this without the knowledge of the president. Although people have acknowledged President Yar’Adua’s slowness, the general opinion has been that he has been clean. This might just be a thing that changes the minds of people towards him. But then, Yardy, in his characteristic taciturnity, is not expected to comment on this.

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Dec

20

A Man, His Wife, and His Girlfriend

Filed Under Experiences | 1 Comment

Yesterday, I went with a childhood friend to the 40th birthday ceremony of his uncle. The wife was there, pregnant; the 6 years old daughter was also there. Close to where the pregnant wife and her friends sat were the man’s girlfriend and her two friends. I turned to my friend to ask how a wife would feel knowing that her husband is sleeping with other women. He told me that the women don’t really mind, as long as they know that the husband still comes home to them in the evenings.

No fight broke out between the wife and the girlfriend. And I left thinking of writing about the political economy of gender relations in the town.

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Dec

18

Unwanted Babies

Filed Under Opinion | 2 Comments

Last night, after dinner, my parents and I sat watching TV, and at some point, the local TV station showed an orphanage. I find the way we treat orphans highly linked to our claims to any sense of humanity and humaneness, but like so many other things, I rarely think about the reasons babies end up in orphanages. Of course we normally hear about AIDS orphans in east and southern Africa; last night, I heard about the breed that people generally know exist, but that they nevertheless almost never actually talk about, think about or discuss.

Babies on the dunghill…
I asked my mother about how children end up in orphanages. She said that it was largely because many of the kids were abandoned. I further asked about how common it is for children to be abandoned. She told me that it was really more common than people realise. She told me that a kid was found a couple of days ago at a dunghill close to a panel-beater’s shop. The baby was eventually taken to the local federal hospital where my mother works.

…and at the motor park
I further wondered how it was possible for a person to be pregnant and give birth without anyone knowing. My mother then told me the story of a particular lady. The lady was staying in the home of a couple, sleeping in the same room with the couples children. The mother woke up during one night to hear the cry of her child in the room the lady shared with the children. She got to the room, found that the lady was not there, took care of the crying child and decided to check where the lady was. She checked the bathroom and found traces of blood on the ground. She traced the blood from the bathroom out of the house to a motor park close to the house. She found the lady holding a child, still unbathed, about to leave it at the park. My mother told me the story to illustrate that it was possible to be pregnant without it actually being exactly obvious.

What are the causes?
Why do people have kids that they can’t keep? According to my mother, it often happens when the mothers have tried to abort their pregnancies and have not been successful. Why are they not successful? I think it is because they do not consult experts when they try to abort their pregnancies. Why is that? Because abortion is illegal in Nigeria. Well, that is not exactly true. Abortion is not illegal in Nigeria, but one needs to get the signature of two medical doctors who are willing to say that the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman. But that is not a solution for most of the women who abandon their children. That group is largely made up of women whose main reasons for not wanting to raise a child are economic.

What to do right now?
I really find it hard to think of any solution to stop women from abandoning their babies, but I can think of a way to make sure the babies abandoned do not die. Sometime ago I watched a news item about a hospital in Germany where is it possible to leave unwanted babies in such a way as to make sure that one is unobserved, but that someone is quickly alerted that a baby has been left at the stand. The mother can leave unobserved; the baby can stay alive.

If we cannot change the economy ‘right now’ what can we do? I think the kind of system that the German hospital has would definitely be a good place to start. I also think that pro-choice clinics should be available in Nigeria. Of course, that needs legislation. I don’t know how that can be swung right now but I strongly think they should be available. And there should be a massive campaign in the media to inform people in such desperate situations about where they can get help. At this point, I wonder what on earth those well-funded NGOs that work on family health, women issues and allied fields do. I think there certainly are issues other than HIV.

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Dec

15

Of Traditional Yoruba Religious System and Tolerance

Filed Under Experiences | 5 Comments

Thursday morning, I was at a bank in Ibadan with a friend who teaches at the University. A man came to the bank sometime after we got there with three children. My friend looked at the kids who were busy tossing a filled balloon over their heads and wondered if I felt the thrills of Christmas. I remembered, at that moment, how I used to feel whenever Christmas approached. The Christmas season is a time for ‘Aso Odun’ – cloth bought to be used on Christmas day; it was also time for a few toys. Thinking about it now, I wondered how it came to be that a major feature in the Christmas presents package is a toy gun – water toy guns of dart toy guns. I always looked forward to that. When we were much younger, we all wore ‘anko’. We would be dressed in the same fabric, sown in the same style, for the Christmas day. I remember that even though I was really young I always hated it. After a while that stopped and we simply had Aso Odun.

I turned to the oldest of the children who came to the bank and asked whether he was looking forward to Christmas. He replied Yes. My friend said that he didn’t have that old thrill any more. I said the same thing for myself. The man we met at the bank said that he still looked forward to the Christmas season, not because of the Christmas itself, but because it was a time for people to meet. It was a time for family members who have been away from home for a long time to go to their villages and stay for a while. In Germany, I learnt that Christmas day is a very family day. People go home to their families and have the family dinner together. (One of my friends told me that she normally drank a lot of wine to be able to go through the ordeal of staying with the family.) The man went ahead to say that his father was a Muslim but that he himself had converted to Christianity. He said, however, that he continued the tradition of going back home during the Eid el Kabir celebrations to kill a ram for his Muslim family members.

My friend pointed out that that was a very important part of the Yoruba religious system. In the Yoruba traditional religious system, in the same family, one could have each member of the family worshipping a different god, without any person proselytizing or persecuting another. That, my friend said, was a great indication of tolerance. It, my friend continued, informed why the man we met at the bank still gave presents to the members of his family who were still Muslims, during an Islamic ceremony.

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Dec

10

Plus Ça ne Change pas

Filed Under Experiences | 2 Comments

After a successful conference in Copenhagen, I got on a flight to Lagos, through Paris. The flight went pretty well, and we got to Lagos late in the evening. I had been out of Nigeria for a little over a while, and what struck me was the way things had not changed. I lived in Uppsala, Sweden, for a while, went back a little over a year later, and I could see visible changes: streets had been renovated – or were being renovated – some pubs had closed down, some had just been opened. The same thing happened when I left my eastern German town of Halle for Stuttgart; even that poor German town had its fair share of new pubs and ongoing renovations. And I was only away for about two months. I think the most striking thing is the fact that one could perceive – in a parody of the owners of the Blackberry brand – society in motion. Although if one were to talk about it one would only be able to mention the ones I just did – renovations, reconstructions, new bars etc. – but one knew that the most profound of the changes could not be put down.

But I got to Lagos and I found that things had not changed in that sense. The church that makes a hell of a noise every Sunday beside where I stay has not stopped doing that; the traffic too was painfully familiar. It was all so uncannily unchanged as to give one a wearying sense of déjà vu. The more I thought about these the more I realised that I was going about things the wrong way. One major difference between Lagos and the cities I found myself comparing it with is the fact that Lagos is a state while the others are mere cities. One could easily infer from that that Lagos would be quite larger. And it is. I am in a part of the state-city, and before I could say that there are no changes I would have to visit other parts of the city.

But then there are a few
Oh yea, before I forget, there are some changes. One of them is that there are many new brands of cars on the roads; and phones too. I have been using the same cell phone for close to two years now, but many of my family members and friends have changed their cell phones in the last couple of months (one even begged me to help him get an iPhone from Germany. I was in Copenhagen when he made the request so it was not too difficult to turn him down.)

To more serious things
I will be in Nigeria for quite a while and I promise to keep blogging. I hope to be able to get and present some perspectives from people who are directly affected by the situations about which we normally theorise. By the way, since I am in Nigeria, anybody who is in Nigeria and would like to socialise should please leave me a note.

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Dec

5

My Whereabouts

Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I have not posted in recent times because I have been really busy. Last Friday I left Stuttgart and went back to Halle and today I left Germany for Copenhagen, Denmark, to attend a workshop on informal economic networks and political agency. I will be here till the weekend. I don’t think I need to add that it is going to be a busy next couple of days so I may not have much time for blogging. However, I will blog whenever there is an opportunity.

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