Square Pegs and Round Holes

Trump is going to gain more followers from among neutrals and moderates.
Right wing and anti immigrant groups are going to be on the rise in Europe. 

Angela Merkel’s legacy will be questioned for a long time, unfortunately.

Arab migrant youth will be further profiled and targeted and this will, again, push them into the willing hands of the extremists.

Travel industry will be impacted. Global sales will drop and insurance cost will increase on some routes. Travelers will have bad experiences from anxious border control officers, immigration officials and locals acting out of fear and misguided retributive emotions. Visa restrictions will increase and local tourism should see a bounce, but…

Relaxation centres and large shopping malls and other soft targets are going to see a decline in sales. Online shopping will benefit but the human spirit will be the loser.

And that’s the plan. To make the world bigger and add more barriers whilst creating dissension among people of different faiths in order to actualize their agenda. In the end, it will fail, but not before a major climax and confrontation of state sponsors… after the current spate of Ostriching ends.

SAN

I remember my time as a youth corps member at a university in Makurdi. I worked under the HOD to my department. Apart from being his technical assistant I also had the duty of taking one of his classes – practical chemistry.
He would occasionally take me out on socials. Mostly just Isi-ewu and drinks on the odd Sunday or Saturday afternoon at one of the quiet joints in North Bank. He became some sort of mentor to me. I had just come out of a rough patch at UI and this quiet town was a place to reflect and plan the next phase of my life. Prof was just the right influence for me.
He was a very wise, soft spoken, strong willed, lean and bearded gentleman. He was an American returnee who could not help expressing his disillusion with the way things were now he was back home. But he was good to me and always seemed to say the right things that gave me hope without focusing on my shortcomings even as he gave me corrective feedback.

Things went downhill after I went to Prof’s house for Lunch, one Sunday. He did not treat his wife well. He would bark at her for not serving me with the right glass and for letting the baby out without proper clothing. They lived in a small official bungalow. Very basic minimalist furnishing…not by choice I suspected. The wife was very careful when serving lunch. She did not want to make more mistakes.
On the way out to dropping me off, we stopped at the same isi ewu spot. He apologized for the behavior of “that girl”. I was not happy. He kept denigrating her. She must have been an Onwa December type wife. Wide age and polish gap. So what?
So I started avoiding Prof. He had let me down. How could he be so kind to me and yet so cruel and unhappy at home? Then he called me one day and told me I was only there for a few months and he intended to ensure I got the full benefit of the exposure he could give in that time. He wanted the school to offer me a staff position. He noticed I was withdrawn after that day at his house. He advised me to never allow the personal lives of those I looked up to affect the mentorship I could get from them. He said no one was perfect and I would never know the story behind what I saw in people.
I took his advice and I have never looked back.
I was with my dad a few weeks ago and he told me how he thought Awolowo retarded Shagamu because of Remo politics (Akarigbo Adedoyin saga, etc.). My dad held that against the sage. Yet he told me how much more Awo did for him and the rest of his generation and the positive influence he had on the leaders that emerged from there.

I smiled. I remembered Prof and all the other formal and informal mentors I have had since then. You pick what you need and leave the rest. Don’t judge and don’t expect perfection in any human.
Good evening folks.
SAN

I remember the first time I was told my exams would be in the open book format. I looked around me at the rest of the class to be sure I was not dreaming. Of the 30 or so people in that class were two Naijas. So, come exam day, me and my homey loaded every available textbook, class note and other materials we could get our hands on. I remember my heap of books being so high that I could barely see the guy by my side.

So they blew the whistle and I looked at the first question. It went something like: “Stating the models that support your argument, pick a country as a case for a technology colony and predict which of their enabling foreign owned technologies will likely chart the path to their industrial revolution….”

Sir,

I live in an estate where the managers, who are the original promoters, subject us to all kinds of abuse. They make rules without recourse to the residents; they will not show us expenditure records or get us involved in the budget process or determination of annual service charge. They have been known to lock us out of the estate and even threaten to arrest our family members, while we are away at work, using the local police. When we fought back by approaching a higher police command with our case, they got someone to write us from Force HQ in Abuja, etc.

My Response

1. Get your lawyers to advise you with a view to petitioning the estate management to the LASG, Commissioner, AIG and IG of police, and the President and publish it in at least two national dailies.

          This will achieve high embarrassment, de-marketing and speedy resolution of this               issue according to the dictates of the relevant LASG laws guiding this.

2. Also take the estate to court and hinge your case on the NICON town and VGC judgements on similar issue.

Nigerians don’t listen and institutions hardly do their jobs until you cause noise and high embarrassment.

SAN

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So after going through the rigor of registering/applying for the ‘new edition’ tint permit from our ‘beloved’ (pun obviously intended) Nigerian police force online, which includes having to go and register through NIMC (national identity management commission), for a NIN (national identity number), which is a required field in the online form for the new ‘revitalized’ (pun intended), tint permit; I discovered, much to my chagrin, that the process is flawed and wasn’t well thought through:

Firstly, it is difficult to know where the biometrics capturing is being done after the online registration. The NPF website makes a vague reference to police commands but fails to provide a listing of where these commands are. After much googling, I found an address for Lagos state police command as: 1 Oduduwa street Ikeja. When I went to google maps, only Oduduwa road and Oduduwa crescent where listed. I then thought maybe they meant Oduduwa road. After traveling from Lekki to Ikeja and driving the entire stretch of Oduduwa road, nothing looking like a police command was found, so we started asking around and eventually found a police man who directed us to the police command which is not on anything ‘Oduduwa’.

It is tucked near Archbishop Vinning church on Muiz Banire street. After getting there, a policeman at the gate approached us and inquired what we want, to which I replied that we are here for tinting biometrics. He said ‘ha!, it’s not today, we only do it on Mondays, Thursday’s and Friday’s.’ I didn’t know if I should be angry, or sad. I marvel at how we do things in this country. How come there is no information out there that the biometrics is only conducted on the aforementioned 3 days of the week? And the police man added that we have to come very early before or by 7am because some arrive by 5am!! As we drove away from the entrance, I noticed about 3 police men in mufti carrying heavy automatic weapons, and they looked like thugs to me. If any of those 3 should stop me at a check point, I’d immediately conclude they are robbers. Anyway, that’s an ‘aside’.. Back to my story…..

Who in their right senses rolls out a process like this that only uses one centre in a city like Lagos to process a document that is required by millions? How can that work?

And this is after the IGP declared that all existing permits, which we all paid for in amounts ranging from 10-25k, depending on who did it and where it was done, has suddenly become invalid? Who collected all those monies which obviously runs easily into the hundreds of millions?

Something is just not right about this. Why would anyone inflict so much stress and pain on the citizenry for a permit that ought to be easily available and free? I hear that it’s nothing but free. Someone who has done the ‘capturing’ like they call it around here, said he had to part with 5k because the police said the permit is free but they need the money for office maintenance!!

I am looking for someone who has the new permit and didn’t have to pay any money.

Someone needs to call the police to order. You cannot just wake up and invalidate a permit that peeps paid decent money to acquire and then roll out a clumsy, inefficient and stressful process to acquire a ‘free’ one.

I don’t see myself waking up at 5am to go to ikeja for biometrics for a permit which may never come. What’s the guarantee that even if one waits all day till evening, you’d eventually do the biometrics?

Obviously, the deadline of this Friday cannot and will not work. And the IGP needs to be told, if he hadn’t received the feedback yet, that this process is nonsensical.

A colleague noted that a friend of his went to Ikeja Police Command last week from Lekki and was told that the permit has been suspended for now. He was at the Kam Salem House, in Obalende, and the same story was told there. It would seem that the Police organization did not think this through this before the publication and implementation. Also, there wasn’t adequate  preparation in place to implement this. Relevant information needs to be published by police in the media to guide the citizens accordingly and save valuable manhours.

– ‘Tayo Oluyemi, an oil industry professional, writes from Lagos.

Earlier today, the senate threw out the gender and equal opportunities bill after it failed to pass the second reading. The bill, aimed at bridging the gap between men and women’s rights and to tackle the malaise of gender based discrimination in the society.

The bill titled “A bill for an Act to incorporate and enforce certain provisions of the United nations convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, the Protocol of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the rights of women in Africa, and other matters connected therewith, 2016 (SB.116).

The basis for rejecting the bill was on the certain conflicts wit the 1999 constitution and the Sharia Courts of appeal. There was also deep-seated religious and cultural sentiment based on institutionalized patriarchy.

Nigerians on social media have been up in arms, blaming the senate for their failure to pass the bill, etc. However, I have a different take.

What happened today at the senate was really not about the senators. They were simply espousing the predominant view of those they were elected to represent. We must come to terms with the fact that we live in a society still stuck in the last century when it comes to women’s, child rights and that of the most vulnerable.

This is a society that is yet to come to terms with the Child Rights Act of 2003. A society where children are married before the age of consent and women are seen as possessions by their husbands and extended family. Let’s not even speak about what most traditions and cultures have in place for widows. Granted the bill would have provided legal backing for the solution to some of the things mentioned, but the Nigerian society largely feels no sense of outrage for these abuses.

I believe in equal rights and opportunities for women. I believe in the protection of children and the vulnerable.

Do you? What about your religious leaders or the custodians of your culture? Do they?

Don’t blame the senators. They were only representing us.