Former President Olusegun Obasanjo says he has written 12 story books as part of efforts to preserve culture and prepare children for the future.
Obasanjo said this on Tuesday while speaking at an event entitled ‘Story time with Baba’. It held at Ibogun in Ifo local government area of Ogun state.
He said stories contained values which guide children to differentiate between right and wrong actions.
The former president said while growing up, his parents and other community leaders gathered young children including himself under the moonlight to give them riddles and tell them stories.
“They normally required us to solve the riddles so as to make us think deeply and sharpen our wits while they told us stories to inculcate moral values into us,” Obasanjo said.
“Most of the stories revolved round animals, particularly the tortoise, and will normally end with lessons to build character by pointing us to what to do and what not to do.
“We have grown up with those moral values and they served as foundations upon which we built our lives and conducted ourselves wherever we went.”
He expressed concern that the practice of story telling had been jettisoned by parents of this generation.
Obasanjo further distributed copies of his books to pupils who attended the event.
The programme was organised by the Centre for Human Security, Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL), as part of activities heralding the 80th birthday of the former president on Sunday.
The school walls have a fresh coat of paint and classrooms are crammed, but it will take longer to undo the damage done to thousands of Iraqi children who lived under Islamic State for more than two years.
Although the school term began officially in September, only this week have pupils in the northern town of Qayyara been re-issued with standard Iraqi textbooks, which the militants replaced with their own in an attempt to brainwash a generation.
Students attend classes after the city was recaptured from the Islamic State militants in Qayyara, Iraq, November 17, 2016. (Photo: REUTERS/Ari Jalal/File Photo)
Islamic State was driven from the town three months ago in the early stages of a campaign to recapture the city of Mosul, which lies about 60 km (40 miles) to north and is now under assault by Iraqi security forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition.
As Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate is eroded, a clearer picture is emerging of the group’s project and the enduring mark left on those who lived through it.
“We are happy to be back at school,” said eight-year-old Iman, who like most of her classmates stopped attending classes after Islamic State took control. “They wanted us to come but we didn’t want to because we don’t know how to study in their language, the language of violence.”
When the militants overran the area in the summer of 2014, they allowed schools to run as normal, local people said. But later they banned subjects they considered un-Islamic such as geography, history and civic education, and used boys’ schools as a recruiting ground.
The following school year, beginning in 2015, Islamic State imposed an entirely new curriculum to inculcate children with their ideology. Maths exercises were expressed in terms of weapons and ammunition: “one bullet plus two bullets equals how many bullets?”.
At that point, most parents stopped sending their children to school, and many pupils who were old enough to make up their minds left voluntarily.
As a result, most children have been set back by two grades, and since some teachers have been displaced by the violence, there is only one teacher for roughly every 80 pupils at the girls’ school in Qayyara.
“They have forgotten their lessons… Now we are reminding them,” said their teacher Maha Nadhem Kadhem, pacing around the classroom, in which four girls are squeezed onto each bench made for two. “We don’t want them to be illiterate and ignorant.”
The headmistress, who asked to remain unnamed, said Islamic State’s vice squad known as the Hisba had made regular visits to the school to ensure compliance with the group’s strict dress code for women and girls.
Others such as Farouq Mahjoub, the assistant headmaster of a secondary school for boys in Qayyara, said he had been threatened with death unless he turned up to work, even though no pupils came to class by the end.
“The biggest impact is on children,” said Mahjoub, whose school was hit by an airstrike several months ago. “Children are malleable; you can change their opinion and beliefs quickly.”
Mahjoub said children behaved more aggressively than before, and that the games they play now are violent, estimating it would take no less than five years to reverse the damage, even if a plan to rehabilitate them was put into effect.
Missing from the classroom in the girls’ school are dozens of pupils whose male relatives were associated with Islamic State and are no longer welcome in Qayyara. Mahjoub said around 10 of his own students had joined the militants.
Behind the school are the remains of a car bomb that has yet to be removed and the sky is dark with smoke from oil wells the militants set ablaze, making it hard to breathe and turning sheep black.
On a nearby street, a group of boys coughing from the smoke described what they had seen under Islamic State, including the bodies of its opponents strung up in public places as an example to others.
Dancing and singing the same Iraqi patriotic songs blaring from passing military convoys, 11-year-old Thamer paused to describe how a local Islamic State member called Abu Suleiman had been lynched after Iraqi forces recaptured the town.
The man’s brain and heart spilled out of his body, said Thamer in a high-pitched voice: “They took revenge on him,” he said. “It was right. We were happy.”
Timothy LaHaye, the evangelical minister and co-author of the “Left Behind” book series, died Monday in San Diego following a massive stroke. The 90-year-old minister, the son of a Detroit autoworker, had a stroke while walking down his driveway Thursday to retrieve a newspaper and did not regain consciousness, his son Larry LaHaye told CNN.
LaHaye, along with Jerry B. Jenkins, wrote the blockbuster “Left Behind,” a series of 16 novels dealing with Christian “end times” from an evangelical perspective. In the novels, which reportedly sold more than 65 million copies, true believers have been taken to heaven in the rapture, leaving others behind to battle the Antichrist.
“Thrilled as I am that he is where he has always wanted to be, his departure leaves a void in my soul I don’t expect to fill until I see him again,” Jenkins told Christianity Today.
San Diego Christian College, which was founded by Timothy LaHaye, expressed grief over what it called the passing of a remarkable life.
“Dr. LaHaye has been a friend to me like no other,” said college President Paul Ague. “The impact the LaHayes have had on the students since founding San Diego Christian College in 1970 has been remarkable. Dr. LaHaye was known on SDC’s campus as a constant encourager, a champion of the next generation, and a scholar of biblical wisdom. I have been blessed to call Tim a dear friend, and he will be missed greatly by the SDC Community.”
LaHaye was born in Detroit on April 27, 1926, to Frank and Margaret LaHaye. His father died when LaHaye was 9, and the son credited the pastor’s eulogy at the funeral for giving him confidence they would be reunited in the rapture.
“All of a sudden, there was hope in my heart I’d see my father again,” LaHaye told the Christian Science Monitor, according to his ministry.
He married Beverly Ratcliffe in 1947, who founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 as a conservative counterweight to the National Organization for Women. “Their union prompted Time magazine in 2005 to name them ‘The Christian Power Couple,’ ” according to LaHaye’s biography.”The proclamation came as the magazine named Dr. LaHaye as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.”
As a couple, the LaHayes hosted a radio show and, later, a TV program called “The LaHayes on Family Life.” In keeping with their faith, the show promoted Christian values, according to his official Facebook page.
Services are still in the planning stages, according to Larry LaHaye.
Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka yesterday vowed to “draw blood” with his latest book, InterInventions.
The book ,InterInventions, Between Defective Memory and Public Lie, A Personal Odyssey in The Republic of Liars, was presented to the public at the June 12 Cultural Centre Kuto, Abeokuta by the Edo State governor, Adams Oshiohmole.Soyinka said.
“(InterInventions), it is the nastiest book I have ever written. It is so truthful that it hurts… it is my vengeance against public lies. It is not one of the butterfly books. No, it is not a butterfly book.
“I want to draw blood (with it). I’m warning all of you, if you feel vengeful, read this book and you will be alright. It is like homeopathic medicine.”
