FACTS OF THE MOMENT

If you are a worker, you get reward for the services rendered. As a motor driver, you get paid for offering your vehicle, leaving your families and using your time and experience to convey strangers to a far destination.  You do not mind the risk of a long journey to a place where you have no personal business except to bring others to the venue of their own business. But if you have done this for yourselves or your family members, do you expect reward from any one? To whom have you rendered this sacrifice? As a teacher, you get paid because you develop human capacity in others for the good of the society. The society pays you. You are a worker serving the society, a civil servant. But if you are teaching your own children or learning for yourself, who pays you? Hopefully, you expect no salary from anyone. So, in essence, workers are two type: personal or community (societal). As a personal worker, your effort is self directed. If you expect reward from others, be a com...

This sudden noise about the cases of rape in Nigeria keeps me wondering as if it is just one strange event in isolation. Rape is just one out of the symptoms of the rots in our system. Crimes come in clusters. Besides, it is not just happening today. It has always been with us albeit it might have just be in sudden rise in the recent time. The Yoruba literature  book I read in Junior school in the early 90's narrated a scene of serial rape collectively planned by some boys with a girl. There are many serial crimes of human against human in Nigeria that ought to have been drawing hot tears from our collectives eyes. Rape is just one and looking for a solution for it in isolation is just a misjudgement of the mess we find ourselves. The solution for rape is no less than that for the entire root causes of all the criminal acts in Nigeria. In the rising daily reports of failures of the Nigerian state, we can only see rape as just being brazingly added to the catalogue of daylig...

In about twelve years ago, I knew a man whose wife was almost rejected by her families because of her proposal to marry him. They believed she was insane because both had nothing. They were both fresh graduates at the time almost at zero level. She told me what she cherished in him: Islam and most especially his voice while reciting Qur'an and leading people in prayers. Despite all resistance, she agreed to marry him. What do we think her dowry would be from such a wretched but brilliant, ambitious and futuristic mallam? A cassette record of some of her favourite selected chapters in the Qur'an in the man's voice! That was it. They got marry in a room without any colourful merry and public invitation. Where was the money? I saw their suffering and smiling for years. Today, they are well off and better. They are prides of their entire families at both sides. Such was the marriage yesterday. They were enduring and lasting for thirty, forty, fifty years. Ladies used to bel...