#KakandaTemple ~ The Hysteria of a Malfunctioning Robot: A Response to Muhammad Mahmud’s Misinterpretation of Texts

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Staff Reporter

Dear Mahmud,

I think you have just made it into the Guinness Book of Records as “the most sophisticated illiterate ever identified in the history of public discourse”. For this, I ought to have sent you a private mail congratulating you for this ignoble accomplishment. However, I feel that your education should be done in public and to the records of especially the social group whose emotions you have appealed to. Before we get into this response to yours, I strongly advise that you start with the prelims–go and read my earlier essay, “Scholars of Misinterpretation, Misquotation and Blackmail” (Blueprint, August 9, 2013). It will prove to be foundational since it was aimed at reactionaries like you, even if slightly more distinguished, who approach texts with the sole aim of misunderstanding them. It will, at least, enable you read what I have written below as opposed to reading what you think I must have written.

Now, I will list below your more intriguing distortions and then provide the actual statements set out in my piece “A Letter to that Nigerian-Palestinian”, which was a wake-up call to that citizen whose empathy has not roused him to stand in solidarity with the victims of tragedies going on in his house, but is now involved in the pro-Palestine campaign:

First, I wrote my letter to “that Nigerian-Palestinian”, did you notice the particular definite article used–that? Go back and read the title and note my refusal to pluralise the definite article. To pluralise, to use “the” for example, would mean generalising and you ought to know that that was deliberate, but your emotions seem to have dispossessed you of the elementary grammar chanted by kids–Singular and Plural. But then, that’s of lesser importance.

Of that Nigerian-Palestinian’s hypocrisy, I wrote: “You see, it’s not the way you internationalise your empathy that disturbs me, it’s this seeming pretence that all is well in your backyard while you weep over the blazing fire in faraway Gaza.” In self-defence, and stubborn exhibition of your trademark ignorance, you wrote: “You assume that my call for the world to stop the genocide in Gaza is a direct contradiction of my efforts, which you seem not to be aware of, to stop atrocities in my country.” Further, you state that “(w)e have been more than half as passionate about our problems than the happenings in Gaza.” Dear Mahmud, thank you very much for being just a little above HALF as passionate about Nigerian happenings as compared to Gaza’s. Surely, since you have not pretended that all is well in Nigeria, since you have even gone further to feel half as passionate about local happenings, you cannot yet be that Nigerian-Palestinian my letter is addressed to, can you? Did you miss the simple logic of this, Muhammad Mahmud? You also mentioned Pakistanis as examples of grieving people who stand up for Gaza, without acknowledging that they are not like “that Nigerian-Palestinian”, for they have never stopped fighting for the redemption of their country, and their famous daughter, Malala, who came to Nigeria as an NGO owner, even took a bullet to protect her country from the pervasive ideology of some psychopathic members of our “brotherhood of faith”.

Second, in your bid to rebel against being referred to as “humanist”, you exhibit a fifty kobo sophistry, claiming “I am not a humanist. I am a Muslim whose religion… revere(s) and sanctif(ies) every soul, be it that of human or animal,” ignorant that humanism is a term for all acts of kindness done either as Muslim or non-Muslim. Islam extols humanism, so all the good things you have done to those “souls, human or animal”, as you are enjoined to as a Muslim is humanism within an Islamic framework. If you understand my explanation, can you now see why the sophistry of your submission is off-putting? Your allegiance to a “Brotherhood of Faith”, admitted by your own mouth, is humanism within an Islamic framework, yet you failed to grasp this simple relationship. How did you fail to grasp this, dear Muhammad Mahmud? Was it in your hurry to write a response to my letter? Or are you simply exhibiting the symptoms of that intellectual shallowness, often seen among your members of social group, those set of persons who have seen Islam as an ideology that must be exclusively opposite to other social ideologies?

My third note identifies your intellectual insularity: it is your tragic deconstruction of the simple word “antisemitism”. I had warned against antisemitism, especially from those shallow-minded fellows who co-opt the entire Jewry as foot-soldiers of Zionism, disrespecting the Jews who have stood up against the genocide in Gaza in the process. In your words: “It looks more likely that you are more in need to read more than me. You need to understand that the Palestines (sic) are also Semites.” Haba! Antisemitism doesn’t mean “anti-semites” or “the hatred of Semites”, it’s not a term for racial, but sociological, labeling. It means, as you would have seen if you had bothered to check it up, “prejudice, hatred of, or discrimination against JEWS as a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.” Obviously, with this embarrassing gaffe, you’re more in need of one book above all and should you send me your postal address, I shall buy you one–a dictionary. But this gaffe is typical of you and your ilk and in the case that you do not understand how you came to such an embarrassing error, let me explain your process to you simply. You activated the literalist mindset which you adopt in interpreting religious texts, in your understanding of common “antisemitism”. Do you see the ruin of herd-type methodology?

But your literalist bias does more damage to your reputation than the serious one of ignorant understanding of simple words. You go on to make this dangerous confession, but as if it was an accusation: “If you have been reading and understanding the Qur’an, you wouldn’t have wasted time trying to exonerate some Jews from the horrors of Zionists. I don’t think there are a people so accused in detail, in the Qur’an, like the Jews.”

This is the difference between you and me, my ability to recognise contexts in reading the Qur’an. Your declaration here brings to mind a debate I had with a Christian some years ago. It was on a verse in the Qur’an, a verse that has become an anthem sung by terrorists who bask in the hallucinations of Jihad:

“(Q9:29) Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

My Christian friend shared in a crime with the terrorists–a destructive intellectualisation of ignorance. Deliberate or otherwise, ignoring context in the interpretation of a verse from either the Qur’an or the Bible is equally an act of terrorism, perhaps deadlier, for the mental mischief is the very inspiration for actual terrorist activities. I started with the popular events that preceded the revelation of the verse; one was an order by the ruler of Persia directing his commander stationed in Yemen to kill the Prophet. In another swish of hostilities, the Prophet’s messenger to a tribe of the Roman Empire, Al-Harith bin Umayr Al-Azdi, was tied up and beheaded; a diplomatic botch-up that led to the Battle of Mu’tah, in which the Muslims were defeated. But, the hostilities continued. Return to Sayyid Sabiq’s Fiqhu as-Sunnah, Vol. 3, p. 80, for an elaborate commentary on this!

This verse and the others in which the Jews are mentioned, are not justifications of antisemitism, as you have interpreted them. They were directives for the Prophet of Islam to protect the Muslim nation from a particular tribe of Jews. Similar verses are also found in the Bible with defend-your-ambience undertones. In one, Jesus Christ says:

“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me. (Luke 19:27) – King James Version (KJV)”

In the other, God Himself instructed Saul through Prophet Samuel:

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (1 Samuel 15:3) – King James Version (KJV)”

I restate, ignoring the historical context that necessitated the verses above is terrorism. You see, insurgency as the one unleashed by Boko Haram is born by deliberate distortion of what Jihad, the Islamic precept, entails. It’s a perverted attempt to cleanse, to fight for Allah who has clearly declared hell for such criminal engagements, repeatedly in the Qur’an.

You’re still holding on to the primordial sentiments that scholars all over the world have addressed without obeying Allah’s command that “And no bearer of burdens shall be made to bear another’s burdens.” [35:18], which is a warning that the sin of the father should never be visited upon the son. Yet you put the burden of the ancient Jews, or Zionists in specific, on all the Jews. Do you even know Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose academic scholarship has been largely on the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, is among the world’s most outspoken critics of the unsympathetically monstrous Israel? He’s a defender of Palestine. Yet your literal understanding of the Qur’an makes Finkelstein too your enemy. You’re clearly in the category of the Muslims referred to as “superficial literalists” by columnist Adamu Adamu.

Another of your unpardonable accusations is the declaration that the #BringBackOurGirls campaign is a “Christian affair”, ignorant that the campaign, which you really need to praise for finally revealing the miseries of the people of northeastern Nigeria to the world, was a brainchild of Nigerian women dominated by Muslim ladies, including Malama Hadiza Bala Usman, who is the coordinator, Barr. Maryam Uwais, Mrs. Sa’adatu Mahdi, Mrs Aisha Yesufu, among others. May Allah forgive you for this malicious accusation of His subjects. Again, also with no measure of respect and decorum, both virtues of an ideal Muslim, you assaulted the sensibilities of the Nigerian Christians, saying that “they are the ones who only condemn attacks on churches and Christians. But we, Muslims, never did that. We condemn attacks on any human being.” Do you know that it’s the corruption of an insidious ideology from our own religion that has caused them this suffering? There can’t be a spiteful remark more dangerous than yours here. Don’t you think it’s virtuous to commend the wisdom of the Christians who resist the polarising stunts and speeches of the hateful President of Christian Association of Nigeria, Ayo Oritsejafor, and refuse to take up arms to form a terrorist cult against innocent Muslims and escalate our troubles, as the Christians in the Central African Republic have done? Wait, in internationalising your empathy, why have you been quiet over the killings of the Muslims in Central African Republic? Are they lesser in spiritual worth than the Arab Muslims?

But why would I be surprised when you have, quite unfortunately, religionised the Palestinian struggle, which you refer to as a Muslim campaign, tele-importing your bigotry all the way from Nigeria to the land of a people whose most foremost intellectual advocate was their Christian brother, the renowned literary theorist Edward Said, of blessed memory. Kindly obtain copies of of Said’s “Orientalism”, “Culture and Imperialism”, “Power, Politics and Culture”, “The Question of Palestine”, and even his memoir “Out of Place”, to properly shape your understanding of the Middle-East politics and plural societies. Add that to the list of texts I am advising, for your education.

You boast that Palestine is your second home, being the location of the “third most sacred places (sic) of my religion”–do you, possibly, mean Al-Aqsa Mosque? If you have really been reading your books, especially the history books, which is why I recommended Edward Said’s, you wouldn’t have forgotten that there’s no place called “Al-Aqsa Mosque” in the geographical expression known as Palestine. The place you call Palestine, as a basis for your obvious privileging of Gaza twice above the northeastern Nigeria, is not a religious space and has no religious sites at all–not in Gaza, not even in the West Bank. It’s simply an entity in danger of Israeli encroachment secured to the small extent that it has been by the political struggles of oppressed Arabs of both Muslim and Christian identity. Palestine, like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is a legacy of European colonialism that came into existence in the first half of the twentieth century, about a millennium and a half after the advent of Islam. I’m sure you’re one of those who see the entire landmass of those former colonies as sacred, elevating them to the spiritual state of the holy sites in their political maps. So, I am now at pains to point out the obvious, arising from simple geography, to you my dear sir. Your claim to being Palestinian (your second home) on the basis of the location of Al-Aqsa is silly, because Al-Aqsa is in the Israeli city of Jerusalem. The mosque you ignorantly refer to as your second home is actually jointly managed by Jordan, Israel and Palestine. But then, this makes you, lucky man, a citizen of multiple nationalities: Nigerian, Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian. Congratulations!

You wrote, and I quote, that “it is not true that the Nigerian situation is similar to that of Palestine,” dismissing that comparison as delusional, but my comparison is even an understating of the situation because we’re actually in worse mess in Nigeria, being that we have no clues to what’s killing us, nothing to approach for a ceasefire and there’s no attempt by us to blur our lines of differences in confronting the politicians who have turned this country into a chessboard. Even in death, the Palestinians have more dignity than the north-eastern Nigerians. Their deaths are being televised, their identities fully revealed. As expressed elsewhere, there’s no inhumanity as having the news of a people’s misery and deaths denied, played down or unsympathetically politicised. The only tragedy worse than this may be the lack of strategy or, as some have said of the ongoing counter-terrorism, of the “will” to end these many killings. The areas of Borno occupied by Boko Haram is worse than Gaza because the eyes of the world are on Gaza, while there’s no media coverage as our people in the northeast lay dying in the den of the ideologically hollow insurgents. It is only thanks to the #BringBackOurGirls campaigners who you accuse of being discriminatory, the world loudly learnt of the happenings in the northeast, rousing a global outrage and solidarity.

You also thought that I did not recognise the efforts of outstanding northerners in counterterrorism. What distortion! If you have read my letter carefully, you wouldn’t have missed where I praised the Civilian JTF, and that my anger is not a “criticism of the northern establishment”, which of course includes the clerics and prominent figures murdered by the insurgents. Saying we’ve not done enough is a self-criticism, which may even be taken as a criticism of your unfortunate statement that #BringBackOurGirl is a “Christian affair”: bigotry. And asking you to prioritise your empathy is not a criminalisation of your pro-Palestine campaign, or romanticisation of Zionism. It is simply what it is: a call for active involvements in domestic affairs, in extinguishing our burning House. Do you, sir, know the number of our people killed and the villages no longer safe for habitation? Is it not our responsibility to document those statistics for the sake of history, just the way Hamas and its sympathisers do in their Palestine? Do we have, or are we members of, neighbourhood defence corps in our respective places of residence? Have our humanitarian supports to the victims of Boko Haram been reaching remote villages in the northeast? There’s clearly a lot we still need to do!

Sadly, the biggest challenge to debating an issue of humanitarian interest through the prism of religion is the usual blackmail by the self-righteous party that a dissident exists “in a bid to please the West, whereas the modern civilisation is not western. What you call western civilisation is an evolution of the collective efforts of renowned scientists, explorers, inventors and scholars from different races and continents. So your boast of being a shariah-compliant Muslim is an everyday arrogance that no longer shocks me; yours was meant to slant or stifle this debate. But of course I won’t let you achieve either of these aims. I know for a fact that you exist in a political space of western-type liberal democracy, perhaps as an interest-earning customer of a Guaranty Trust Bank, one whose savings are being invested in forbidden ventures, conditions that mock your claims of being shariah-compliant. Herein lies the typical hypocrisy of it all.

Islam is being misunderstood largely because of the activities of fellow Muslims. The Muslim World has retrogressed over the years, with the rise of vastly ignorant, illiterate and intolerant followers who have given Islam a bad image in their operations as terrorists and unruly protesters. This decline is tied to generations of Muslims refusing to heed Allah’s “Afala ta’qilun”, stated in thirteen verses in the Qur’an, while pretending they are submitting themselves to Him.

Many Muslims who venture to discuss social realities and challenge impositions of divisive ideologies have all been called names, dismissed as apostates and hypocrites by these mobs who are ever unwilling to tolerate dissenting views. The irony was even experienced this week: a good friend of mine who once labelled me an apostate, challenging that I made a clearly un-Islamic statement in a piece, has also been declared an apostate. For endorsing the rumoured report of Inspector-General of Police’s ban on hijab, a type of which wasn’t specified, in public places. I sent him a congratulatory message for finally discovering the danger of debating Islamic legislations in a society this insular. On Facebook, some deluded Muslims even threatened that Boko Haram would be a “child’s play” if the IGP goes ahead with the reactionary decision, without even bothering to confirm the report and then employ civil engagement in expressing grievance. Are these dangerously programmed robots your idea of “shariah-compliant” Muslims?

This is why I expected you and other “true” Muslims who have not been labelled apostates, to write instead to the robotic Nigerian Muslims, of whom that “Nigerian-Palestinian” is a member, who embark on vandalising and burning structures in their hometowns on learning that some relevance-seeking cartoonists in faraway Denmark has published a caricature of the Prophet, that an inconsequential Indian-Pakistani author has published a blasphemous book or that a prominent leader of another religion has disparaged a practice of the Muslims.

Islamophobia, which is a hatred for Muslims, just the way Antisemitism is of the Jews, is a result of the behaviorally flawed such as the Nigerian-Palestinian and crime-minded malcontents such as those that comprise pseudo-religious mobs. Intellectuals should not, pandering to sophistry or any lowest common denominator, give such people a pseudo-ideological impetus to do things that are clearly unislamic and criminal.

I’ll leave you with the emotional outburst of my friend, Aminu Adnan, an indigene of Kano who, on reading the debates generated by my piece on Tuesday, shared this depressing commentary:

“I find it hard to understand. 18 terror attacks were recorded in Kano in the last 52 hours, although most were averted, but more than 15 people died. In the same time, more than 56 people were killed in different attacks in Adamawa State. These are happening under our noses and we don’t find empathy for that? Yes, the Gazans are Muslims, therefore our brothers; but what about the brothers that are closer to you? Are the Palestinians better Muslims because they are Arabs? The way most of us think really sickens me. I am sure the casualties of Boko Haram from the last 3 years alone outweigh all the people killed since the start of the Gaza conflicts, but I don’t see them carrying ‘pray for Borno’ placards. Say what you want but wallahi your priorities are with your brothers closer to you before those that don’t even know you exist. You see the Gaza violence on TV, but yesterday my cousin lost both legs in the explosion in Hotoro, we are not even sure he’s going to live, and you have the guts to play the universal humanity card in my face? I feel sorry for you and your inferiority complex.”

I hope to read another of your highfalutin rejoinder soon, because I have a lot more to say. Wait, you also cast doubts on my belief in prayers without bothering to know why I signed off all my essays with “May God save us from us”? As much as I pray, I believe that prayer is not a substitute for inaction, and no civilisation has ever been built by amens!

Yours sincerely,
Gimba Kakanda.

By Gimba Kaknda

@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple: Politics of Deportations: Where Are the Northern Governors?

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Staff Reporter

Religion and nationalism are the most powerful forms of indoctrination and, in the name of these two, many injustices can be done so that our idea of a shared humanity [in terms of religion and nationality] is thus contradicted and ridiculed. Nationalism is theoretically the healer of a colourfully diverse country possessed by the ghosts of hatred along the lines of the things that highlight differences, from the shapes of our places of worship to the colour of our skin. And where nationalism fails, where the love for country and appreciation of its diversity are dominated by our allegiances to personal and private interests, conflicts set in, sometimes irredeemable ones, other times those repairable through diplomacy. But where the latter fails and the former is unanimously understood, cartographers are invited to demarcate the geography of our conflicts. Like the split of India and Pakistan. Like the split of North Korea and South Korea. Like the Split of Malaysia and Singapore. And, yes, like the attempted split of Nigeria into two unequal halves.

If our history of the last 50 years is not a memo on how not to run a country, I wonder how this growing sectionalism can be tamed. What’s happening in Nigeria today is a repeat, though reversed, of those dark years where a set of people became the scapegoats for an atrocity carried out by a few aggrieved or deluded citizens who are members of a persecuted ethnicity or region. This is what made the deportation, over the week, of 84 “northerners” by Imo State government very devastating news. On suspicion of terrorism, they said. The deportees, who were in Owerri to study at Imo College of Advanced Professional Studies, ICAPS, had reportedly camped on the premises of a newspaper house while awaiting their registration procedures before their identity became pronounced as the enemies, northerners, “terrorists”, and thus they had too be deported “for fears that they might be members of the dreaded Boko Haram.” A few days before that, it was the case of Igbo youths attacking Hausa traders in Onitsha. Their crime? “(A)lleged killing of a staff of the Anambra State Transport Agency, ASTA, by a trailer driver of Northern extraction (sic)” – Vanguard Newspaper (15/01/2015). Isn’t this, this careless scapegoating, the root of our deepened sectionalism?

The earth almost folded when Lagos State’s Governor Babatunde Fashola, in one of his anti-people policies, deported some Igbos to their home state. The streak of condemnations and especially the screams of marginalisation among Igbo political and intellectual elite and the compliant masses, was deafening, and I must add, frightening. The Igbo deportees have dragged the Lagos State Government to court, and this week they declared their demand for a billion naira in damages. None of us supported Fashola. Interestingly, none of these “human rights activists”, who had shown us the shade of their ethnic activism, bothered about the ill treatments of perceived northerners in the hands of the same Igbos. Only the empathy of a bigot functions is such a manner.

And when some of us stepped out to highlight these issues, there are murmurings about attacks on the Igbos too in the north by Boko Haram insurgents. Is Boko Haram a legitimate advocate of the north, Hausa-Fulani or the Muslims? Isn’t it an enemy of state, against any people, organisation or interest averse to its heavily flawed and misrepresented ideals of Islam? In the lash of its many crimes against humanity, has Boko Haram not killed uncountable innocent Nigerians, as it targets churches, mosques of non-cooperating Muslims, schools of both Muslims and Christians, boys and girls and also public institutions where religious affiliations are not tattooed on workers’ foreheads? Permit me to ask: is the emir of Kano, a frail old man who escaped death in gun attack and now living in fear of the terrorists, a Christian – and an Igbo? Are the young men here in the north called “Civilian JTF” who have risen to fight the terrorists also Igbos – and Christians? Were the murdered retired military officer and elder statesman, General Mohammad Shuwa, and all the northern elite and technocrats lost in this madness Christians and Igbos? And was the father of Kano State’s Governor Kwankwaso who was attacked just last week a Christian and an Igbo? If Boko Haram has enjoyed the backing of the north as is being touted by hate-mongering commentators who do not even know that the north is a region of 19 expansive states, why are indigenous northerners and Muslims also targeted alongside the Christians?

Now where are the northern governors? And where are the so-called representatives of the northern interests, especially the Arewa Consultative Forum? So there is no screaming and calling for Governor Rochas Okorocha’s explanations and apologies, and, threatening to retaliate? Our Governors, especially Katsina State’s Governor Ibrahim Shema from whose State the “terrorist” suspects hailed, must carry out a needful a measure, in the fashion of Anambra State’s Governor Peter Obi’s confrontations of his Lagos counterpart. They must prove to these boys that they are indeed elected to represent them. If those prospective students have been suspected to be of the Boko Haram militants and potentially considered threats by the clairvoyance of the security personnel in Owerri, why weren’t they handed over to the “appropriate authorities” as our bail-abusing policemen are called in friendliest references?

Well, the next election is just a calendar away, you may chant “Sai mai sallah” again in abusing your franchise having been hoodwinked into sectional alignments. What have these political “masu sallah”, those representative of your own religious values and ethnic identities, done for you now that you’re being hauled as worthless third-class citizens with no political representatives? Thank you, Governor Okorocha for exposing that the Boko Haram insurgents from the republic of northern Nigeria now carry identity cards around. We thank you, sir. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple ~ The Future Awards and its Misrepresentation of the Nigerian Youth

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Staff Reporter

I have absolute confidence in the strength and ability of the Nigerian youth. All over the world, the Nigerian youth is a newsmaker, known for exhibiting talent, using his brain either to redeem or to reduce whichever system he is in. The Nigerian youth, despite having bad role models, has defied setbacks and limitations to climb up the ladder of excellence. This is why I am among the many upset by the misrepresentation of their achievements by the sham called “The Future Awards” – an award which was designed to highlight these achievements, but has been reduced to rewarding the ‘efforts’ of the organisers and their friends and friends of their friends!

Whoever is in charge of TFA – a comedian who has recently published a list of 100 most outstanding young Nigerians embarrassingly dubbed “The 100 Guardians of the Future” – has not only misrepresented the achievements of young Nigerians home and abroad, but is delusional for actually believing that cyberspace is a dependable database of successful Nigerians. Going through the list was depressing; I kept muttering, “Are these people really exceptional?” “What here is beyond ordinary?” “How about X?” “What about Y? Z?” The list just validated the the obvious, that TFA is really just a haughty celebration of mediocrity. A body with no fund for research in the age of Google has no business scoring the success of Nigerians and if it must, let it not embarrass the nation with a ridiculous list of self-adulatory make-up artists, actors, musicians, bloggers, and small-time entrepreneurs – tired and irrelevant – as the best of us!

This is why I dismiss the average Nigerian online for pandering to delusions that only escalate our woes: the posturing that we are the best, or represent the best mainly because we can afford the luxury of maximising the use of our gadgets. The Nigerians on Twitter especially, ever elitist in their thinking and method of approaching the nation’s political evolution and social realities, allied to nominate friends or Facebooking-and-tweeting citizens who do what a thousand others outside the social media do even better. The honourees are a cheap list of young Nigerians whose peculiarities are praised because the really peculiar do not tweet or are less known.

A click or two into Google search bar would’ve been motivating. There are Nigerians who graduated top of Ivy League colleges at 19 or a little older, became sought-after scientists and are now among the world’s finest scientists. If we must honour academic excellence, there are many of them. We have hundreds of them! Still in their 20s! Despite all the country has passed through this year, we find in the “Advocacy and Activism” category of TFA a list without a people who are risking their lives fighting Boko Haram, exhibiting a measure of appreciable humanity in the land of terror. No, I don’t mean the JTF soldiers. I mean the young and patriotic men audaciously referred to as “Civilian JTF”. Is there any advocacy or activism as dangerous this year? And there are also young Nigerians risking their lives in the peace building efforts across crises-ridden regions – like the organisers of “Peace Football” in Jos, attempting to blur the ethno-religious lines on the map of that awfully segregated city – yet their struggles are not mentioned in our tweets. Those are influential Nigerians, those are Nigerians who have touched lives intellectually, culturally, economically, politically, name it!

The tragedy is, nominating this people is a waste of time. They are virtually nonexistent: no Twitter account, no Facebook account, no friend and no follower. Nobody to promote their cause. Our obsession with the virtual world has affected our understanding of our realities, and that is why I won’t be surprised if Goodluck Jonathan ends up as our President in 2015. We’re embarrassingly disconnected from our realities. And if this list is a representation of our best, then we’re unfit to succeed these extraordinary Vagabonds in Power!

We appreciate only what we know, that I understand. But that is not the essence of an award. I minded my business when TFA used to be awards shared among friends and friends of friends and friend of friends’ friends, but the moment they gathered at Mr. President’s shadow and declared that those indeed are representatives of our best, the fraud became too obvious, impossible to ignore. Some journalists, for instance, risked their lives, and their families’, exposing the evils of, say, Boko Haram. Some were killed. Some were arrested. Some fled. None was considered for recognition. A few journalists sit in Abuja pinging and tweeting and sensationalising what actual journalists have exposed. Yet only the tweeting group is found worthy of an award for excellence in journalism. And nobody finds anything wrong here. Some journalists have been praised for merely contributing articles to foreign media. And there is another now in exile, with his family, suffering – for stirring Boko Haram’s nest in his newsgathering adventures. He remains unsung!

The Future Awards (TFA) misrepresents our achievements, simple. It’s a popularity contest that not only insults the intelligence and sensibilities of hardworking Nigerians, but hauntingly fraudulent. Its mission is bold, misleading and disturbing. How do we actually gauge an awardee’s influence? In cyberspace: by his ‘followers,’ and by his ‘friends’, no doubt. If we must reward our own, let’s do it right. Let’s stop asking for “your” and “another’s” list. Yes, there are people in the list whose recognitions are deserved, but their inclusion shouldn’t be an excuse to shut up. Nonetheless, I congratulate my friends in the TFA list – the best 100 of us! Also congrats to the Lagos blogosphere, the online version of Lagos-Ibadan Press, for its dictatorial representations of our (under)achievements.

As for my fellow northerners, I hope you see the backlash of our un-progressive attitude. This is how a pack of clowns and opportunists, to whom we’re just “almajirai with laptops”, organise cliquey shams to reward their own. It is not too late to overcome petty antagonisms over religious differences and ethnic supremacy to redeem ourselves. I cannot believe that a Nigerian has been listed as one of our best 100 for merely converting our Constitution into downloadable apps when my brother Nasir Yammama develops apps half-asleep, when a friend in FUT Minna has designed a rocket launcher. These are just my friends. A simple research would show there are Nigerian youth more promising, more successful, more influential, more important than my friends! Who knows, say, Uti Nwachukwu beyond Lagos Blogs? He’s not known for any nationally relevant thing aside from winning BBA, which a few other Nigerians have done, and now wearing good clothes and partying; yet he is deemed a representative of our achievements.

The important question is: how do we gauge influence and exceptionality? Who tells the achievements of the North? Ali Nuhu, even though he is not the best in Kannywood, wouldn’t have been recognised had he not crossed over to the South. How, I ask again, do we gauge influence and exceptionality? Answering this question should be the first task of panels set up to select our best. Everything else comes later. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple ~ Mandela: Remembering the Prophet of One Humanity

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Staff Reporter

The day started with reports of a tragedy, though not unusual, but a terrible tragedy nonetheless, of challenges of being a Blackman especially overseas, among a people to whom black is an inverse of decency, to whom Africa is a civilisation built upside down. It was the news making the rounds that banners bearing “We want peace in Goa. Say no to Nigerian (sic). Say no to drugs” have been put up across India’s Goa State and that the state legislators too, outraged by the criminal conducts of some Nigerians in the coastal State, referred to them as “wild animals” whose presence is perceived as “cancer” in the functionalities of that most richest of India’s States. Perhaps I was rattled because of my romantic attraction to India and because I could have been one of the visiting Nigerians branded as, or mistaken for, “drug peddlers” by the authorities if I had moved to India as planned last June.

While Indians are almost spiritual in their categorisations of dark-skinned people as socially subaltern, Nigerians, typically loud and mindlessly haughty, have given the racist lot grounds to justify their illusory superiority. In his initial reaction to this, my cerebral cousin, Richard Ali, wrote: “While we are busy being righteously outraged, let us not kid ourselves that 5 out of every 10 Nigerians in India are there illegally or are doing illegal things including drugs. The Indians didn’t just wake up and skip Colombians and Italians and then land on Nigerians. It’s a difficult situation. If Nigeria is serious we have to appoint someone to deal with our image in India, to push out in the public mind the other 5 out of 10 Nigerians who are good expatriates in that country.”

Unfortunately, the crimes of some Nigerians in India have become the crimes of not just the entire Nigerians but of dark-skinned people all over the world, simply because of the history of their race and nationalities and if, for instance, a green passport-carrying Nigerian or any dark-skinned African who has never ever seen hard drugs in his life, appears in Goa in the heat of such trouble, the same illogic will be applied in lynching him as the Indians do to the “Nigerian”. This is what I find detestable; we must let every criminal be dealt with as an individual, not as a representative of a country or race. If Nigerians had had the brains of the the Indian mobs attacking them, the indians would have also been massacred in Nigeria for proliferating the Nigerian market with counterfeit drugs, damaging unsuspecting citizens, until NAFDAC was established to check the menace, banning and blacklisting the Indian pharmaceutical channels responsible.

The same Goa, a tourist hub that the Indians claim have been made unsafe by Nigerians, has long been dubbed the “rape capital of India” for the notoriety of its rapists, all Indians, recklessly after and assaulting foreign tourists, possessed by libidos that couldn’t spare even an eight year-old Russian girl. Aside from the Goa statistics, India’s rape rates remain regular features of the international media; yet nobody finds the gut to indict this generation of Indians unfairly as rapists knowing the gravity and backlash of such careless stereotyping. And this hypocrisy challenges us to ponder: why is it so easy to denigrate a black person, an African, a Nigerian? It’s the world’s sensitivity to the history of our persecutions and awareness of the failures of our governments and people which seem to have inspired a consensus that nothing good may ever come from us. We are all in the news for the wrong reasons: killing one another over religions introduced by foreigners, over trivial ethnic and political differences, thus exposing the skeletons of the continent to the people already doubting the authenticity of our humanity. We give the media-dependent world impressions of an Africa of perpetual famine and malnourished children, of needless wars and skirmishes and brainless warlords, of dysfunctional governments and shamelessly corrupt elite, and of the many ethnic, religious and political zealots and uncivilised belligerents. So it’s understandable when we find signposts bearing “Save Africa” planted in coffee bars and airports in New York and London, convincing the almsgivers that Africa is no doubt the playground of the Devil!

I was struggling to outfight the shame stirred up by unfair treatments of my kinds in Goa when the heart of the world literally stopped at once in honour of the passing of a man who, in conventional intellection of his skin colour and ancestry, ought to have been just another “nigger” dead. But he was Nelson Mandela, known first as a human being, a philosophy he successful engraved in our conscience, before any other thing. He came, saw and refused to mind his business as many before him, becoming an activist and then a politician and then a thinker whose mission offered to solder the mortally broken bond between the black and the white, showing us that though the colour of our skin differs, our language too may differ, we’re held together by a much stronger identity: our humanity. Mandela confidently highlighted my proposition that we are all humans first before we are ever any other thing, before we are ever identified as a member of a race, a country, a province, an ethnicity and a religion and until that is properly understood, that a caucasian, an Arab, a Black, an Indian and Chinese who were delivered of a child respectively in the same hospital at the same time only procreated what is first a human being, an undeniably permanent identity: it’s the only identity, of all the acquired and imposed labels, we can never renounce!

Mandela was a product of a turbulent history. He was not a myth or a creation of the western media as presented by dissenters attempting to portray him as a sellout who betrayed the revolution of his people. He began as an angry young revolutionary who had no alternative but to resort to an armed struggle meant to “target only government offices and symbols of apartheid, not people”, in the process of which he was arrested, charged and sent to jail. 27 years later, leaving the prison, he laced up his shoes for a walk that would later dominate the literatures of Freedom and redefine the politics of race beyond the borders of his home country – the first black President of the Republic of South Africa. The dissenters expected him to jail the white beneficiaries of apartheid system, confiscate their assets and let the new majority rule be dedicated to the causes of the blacks. Instead, Mandela chose to heal the wounds of the nation through reconciliations, declaring: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.” Mandela’s resolve to not avenge the evils of apartheid, against the highlighted violent dispositions of his young years that had him branded as a terrorist, was a wisdom perfectly applied. Time had already changed, invalidated the necessity of violence in new South Africa and, more so, we are witnesses to the backlash of reckless revenge in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. And while the mess of the apartheid regimes may not be cleaned up overnight, the fortunes of both South Africa and Zimbabwe are now in the hands of Black politicians, and their failure to redeem their people is no longer the Whiteman’s palaver!

Mandela’s existence was a sort of secular prophethood: he showed us all we must adopt in overcoming racial differences and tensions, and the ways to knot the loose bonds of race relations inherited from histories that must also be flung into the bin of our memories. If African leaders heed the words of Mandela, the least they owe their people is crushing the (in)decisions that keep the people fleeing their home country. They must erect structures in which the talents and brains we sell or abuse overseas can be properly tapped, instead of turning into advocates of dangerous and polarising ideas or beliefs. Mandela was not hypocritical in teaching us his aversions to supremacy of one race to another, of one religion to another and of his commitments to serving humanity, but so long as the customers gathered in coffee bars in New York and London continue to see the “Save Africa” signposts as a result of our people’s disregards for the wisdom of Mandela, and aware that Africa is still far behind Asia in its race to the modern civilisation, their sense of superiority remains unshaken. Mandela’s life has already become a book, every year a chapter, every action a verse, for those who think.

That Mandela, a Blackman, demolished restrictive labels and became a universally acknowledged symbol of Compassion, Peace and One Humanity in a world known for vengeful politicians, even among the people to whom the Blackman is still a divine error or biological dysfunction, challenges us to search within and understand how to “mass-produce” more of such species – of morally courageous black people possessed by a passion to stand out. Despite India’s famed racial prejudice, the flaws in considering even its darker citizens socially inferior, it lowered its flag to half-mast for five-day state mourning of Mandela – and its private citizens too joined in their individual respect to a human loved. And the respect shown Mandela all over the world by the blacks and whites and browns and whatnots is itself an unspoken communication, the last verse of his book of commonsense, telling us that though the structure of the world is complex, by being good and honest and loyal to the doctrine of one humanity we will conquer the expectations of those to whom we are mere lynch-able criminals and inferiors. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple ~ Nigeria: Interpretations of Racism

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Staff Reporter

Photo Credit: Afroromance.com

I will call him Smith, my White friend. I admired him, in my days of naiveté, for once berating a waiter who attended to him, with overdone courtesies, before turning to know the junk I cared to eat. Smith was a conscious expatriate who suspended his curiosities over things he found exotic and checked his tempers in reacting to provocations just to fit into a social box and to blur the thick lines that give him away as “alien”, “privileged”, “special” and even “white”. He does not like labels especially when it’s not earned by his individual identity or reputation. He lives like a man apologising for the persecutions of the entire Black race by his ancestors. Frankly, he was oversensitive and some of his actions seemed too much like affectations, constrained to an idea of good behaviour. The relations between the white and the black in Nigeria are tragedies of inferiority complexes shown by the blacks, especially when the whites are tasked with overseeing a project in which blacks are rank-and-file members. Several cases of the white being hailed as “Master” and given special attention and treatments wherever they seek a service are depressing. It’s almost like watching slavery in its subtlest form, but with similar degradations.

My neighbourhood at Life Camp, Abuja is the headquarters of such shame of tensions around race, it’s the biggest place where you find politically insensitive Whites, mostly management staff and engineers in various construction companies, living in fear of integration, in fear of Black people, and thus fenced in separate estates that bear severe warnings: “Private estate, do not trespass.” “Keep off, defaulters will be penalised.” “Beware of electric fences.” “No entry without ID card.” These methods of exclusion are responses to awareness of their “specialness”; there can’t be any explanation for living as though your Black neighbours, who are largely members of the middle-class, are criminals, other than agreement with the unwritten ethic of racial superiority.

My worst nightmare in the neighbourhood was on the day I strolled out to see Smith. The Black maiguard, perhaps having me stereotyped as an unworthy human being, another mistake of creation, shamelessly declared that I can’t go into the estate unless I’m in the company of a white person. The unlettered Blackman and his lack of education of race politics and history, which powered him to accept his place as a social slave, is a reason the Whiteman finds the “attitudes” of the educated Blackman disturbing, and complex. Many educated blacks on the other hand also live like people seeking apology from the whites, just waiting for a faux pas; they are quick to corrections, quick to highlight a joke on black people or culture taken too far they themselves would freely indulge in and laugh over, quick to cut short anything likely several sentences down the line to become stereotypical… The educated Blackman must be somewhat responsible for Smith’s inability to be free with his words, and be loud as well. So, there is a tension.

An interesting experience of this racial tension was at the bank: a queue of about twenty waiting to carry out their transactions was almost static until a middle-aged white man walked in and went straight to the counter. There was a murmuring, but the man who spoke out not only adopted a British accent, to highlight his education, but also employed language I found very political. “My friend, we don’t do that. Go back and join the queue.” The language rightly portrays the white man as a moron who doesn’t know that jumping queue is an insult and in the use of “My friend”, the white man was humbled and pulled back to the rung of equality. Or, in over-interpreting this in regard to Nigerian context, referring to someone as “my friend” is mostly an act of condescension by a fellow too important to be one’s actual friend. The teller was displeased by what seemed an unfair treatment and was not ashamed to say, “He’s possibly in a hurry!” to which the queue reacted with unkind words, with rage, with one even joking about beating up the Whiteman if he had refused to join the queue.

My inferences from these interpretations of racism come from conversations with Blacks working with Whites, and also from a mix of the two races. The expatriates find educated Nigerians overly judgmental, which is why there are too many Smiths among them. The educated Nigerians wear their badges of racial equality so colourfully they too pass for racists. By over-interpretation. Usage of Language is often the easiest slip to be at the mercy of race police, and this was understood on the day Smith advised that I also needed to sign up at the gym he frequents. “We don’t eat junks,” I cracked with a grin. “‘We?'” He challenged, and I knew that innocent slip would cause me a lecture on race relations. Again I was a racist by over-interpretation, for thinking that gym-going whites are diet-ignoring consumers of junk. And this means I also have to be more critical of Smith’s use of language, and this means the subtle tension between us is only waiting for a slip to be interpreted unto racism. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda

@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple: Nigeria: A Nation of Goodlucks…

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Staff Reporter

President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan may be a good private citizen. I think I have seen his types. But “good” and “luck” are not enough to lead a country, especially one that reeks of ethno-religious and regional monstrosities. GEJ appears like one of those unfamiliar countrymen you can corner at a bar to enjoy an innocent chat around life, politics and, perhaps, zoology. I see him as that person chosen as deputy by his former bosses or political kingmakers in considerations of his subservience – which is actually written, and ever deceptively worn, on his face. Goodluck is a child of “providence”, one of those whose history could excite the largely religious Nigerians. But, he’s practically unprepared for what “providence” has taken to him. He is like me and you, ordinary citizens who have no definable ideology on the way to lead anything beyond the size of our families. A Goodluck is accurately a man who happens to be in the right place at the right time. A Goodluck is an opportunist, a political opportunist. Goodlucks have found themselves on our corridors of power ever since we embarked on this misadventure through Independence. Goodlucks were not forced on us by God, they are miscalculated variables from sentimental permutations of political opportunisms.

And so expecting a miracle from an opportunist who found himself in power through sentiments and the customary corruptions is an absolute misuse of our senses. The trouble with opportunists is not only because they are unprepared, but because they lack what I’d call the constitutional ruthlessness to stand by their ideologies, and the honesty to implement a popular policy which may not favour the parasitic elite around them. GEJ couldn’t be principally honest because he was almost planted there. When you elect a man who has no professed policies, be ready for the confusion and cluelessness being experienced in Nigeria today. An unprepared leader only needs a week of pillow talks with his wife and executive meetings with sycophantic aides to acquire the special abilities to befriend corrupt public officers, disregard the plights of the masses and perpetuate a reign of failed promises. It is not the years spent in politics that grounded a politician’s ideas, it is the genuineness of his intentions. The world had seen how Nelson Mandela, a man with no past in political administrations, came to power and calmed a raging South Africa. Only a patriot with professed policies can save a nation, but where are ours?

The Nigerian patriots are hypocrites lost in the wind of public intellections and social crusades. Our hypocrisy breeds the Goodlucks misusing our resources today. GEJ, like his predecessor the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, is a tragedy that happens in a country where politics is seen merely as a game of the crooks, and the loud-mouthed advocates of change scamper on being challenged to show us their leadership qualities. There are two categories of followers among the Nigerian Goodlucks: the Informed and the Gullible. Membership of both categories comprised the good and the bad clamouring for change, without necessarily following the code of pragmatic effects. The Informed followers category comprised the intellectuals who propound political theories and analyse the system, and the change advocates who are largely the social crusaders, members of civil societies, and the apolitical bourgeoisie who engage government policies to demand for a fair and transparent administration. The Gullible Followers, on the other hand, are the politically naïve masses who rely on the elite and are ever influenced by these moneyed citizens to take a side. They are gullible, and dangerous!

While the informed followers are responsible for the institutional collapse of Nigeria and the emergences of Goodlucks, we’re in this political mess also because of the gullibility of the larger masses who are easily played by politicians, who have no sense of their rights at all, who think that their representatives are actually being philanthropic. Their sins are almost as unforgivable as those of the informed followers who wear garbs of self-righteousness in their academia, air-conditioned offices and under their “lead-us-well” placards, reviewing governments after governments and protesting policies. These citizens deliberately keep themselves away from participation in politics and political appointments because it’s a den of the crooks. To the intellectuals, the country is simply an ideological laboratory to test their political theories and build a library of polemics, and the activists form synergies with donor organisations in their dramatised campaigns for good leadership. Despite the fact that previously apolitical Goodlucks, like the Reuben Abatis who have shown us their indignity, betrayed their propositions for a functional Nigeria, a team of patriots with professed policies can indeed recue Nigeria.

And time is not on our side. This is a time for increased political scheming, a moment for the Goodlucks to come together and contribute to this challenge of nationhood. Our campaigns now should not be just to oust the leaders of this ideologically evil party that have turned every sector of Nigeria into a mess, but also to have a progressive opposition whose blueprints for Nigeria fit into our demands, and which also has principled individuals ready to work for change. Thankfully, the proposed merger of opposition political parties to form the frustrated All Progressive Party may turn Nigeria into an unofficial two-party State. The process so far is a pathway to depression; it’s clearly a chaos of the progressive pilferers and the conservative criminals. May God save us from us!

By Gimba Kakanda

@gimbakakanda (On Twitter)

#KakandaTemple – 2015: The Power of Rants

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Staff Reporter

I do not have faith in Nigeria, no faith in the next elections, but do not trust me when I rant. Ranting is an expression of freedom, it’s the seldom unintelligible language of the oppressed. It’s similar to the persistent, incoherent noise accepted as Afro-Hip hop in parts of Africa. I rant as an escape, I rant also to dramatise my inability to avenge wrongs, to hit back in defiance at the vultures that peck at my senses. Like those hybrids of noise taken for music, rants serve two purposes – they either provoke the villain or amuse the victim. I did not actually know what ours do to these villainous politicians who are quarantined in a mental institution named Aso Villa until poor Dr. Reuben Abati, in his worst ever disservice his to masters, exposed their secrets. I mean, he told us how much pain our pestles of criticisms have battered into the tranquility our less-than-sane gods enjoy in their despised Villa.

Ranting is about the only survival instinct among the majority of Nigerians, who consider armed struggle the portion of the Arab World. Yet our tolerance is being questioned by a brand of tyranny called Democracy, where a clique of moneyed cronies perform wonders with people’s minds and intellects—in their scramble for votes, in their race to rig. And perhaps the anonymity social networking avails the oppressed, which didn’t exist during the military juntas, has made fears of personal safety less an issue? So, we rant! I was pleased with the displeasure once expressed by the Senate Leader about the social media being turned forum to demonise the ‘honourables’, the ‘distinguisheds’ and the ‘excellencies’, mis-leaders of the country. It exposed our political leaders’ insensibility. But then, let’s just waive that on the excuse that he too, like other Three Arms Zoners, was high.

Here is one thing Senator David Mark failed to see: Without the escapism of social media, Nigeria would have been long ago torn asunder in chaos. It could be over a biased report on Boko Haram insurgencies in the north, which some lazy journalists portrayed as disasters endorsed by every Muslim here. It could be a report that Igbo elements are the prime targets in either a strike by Boko Haram or a crisis in volatile city of Jos. But social media frustrates the obvious conspiracies sold to our newspaper houses, it fosters our harmony as Ibrahim gets to see and understand Chinedu and vice versa, in his humane form; his tweets, updates, likes, broadcasts, pokes, pings—rants. I think the e-fraternity, where differences are figured out through dialogues, is an experiment that highlights the possibility of our peaceful co-existence in the absence of politicians.

But our realities make me sober. These days I feel like character Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s mytho-historical novel, Midnight’s Children, triggered by the ticktocks of my country’s clocks. It had been over two decades that our teachers lied to us that we were “tomorrow’s leaders”. This, considering the subjugations of our oldest brothers, does not seem attainable soon as the grandfatherly thieves are still not done with the emptied treasury. And our life expectancy rate which is among the lowest in Africa is being eluded by the aged elites who had even become honorary citizens of First World countries through numberless medical trips and vacations abroads. Our life expectancy is the clock that gets me restless, right from our short but effectual fight during the Occupy Nigeria protests. The clock troubles me now that we return to our rehab, the social media, to play and to exhibit the fibre of our unengaged ideas, intellectuality and visions. The clock troubles me now that we wallow in certain cheap escapisms, like our First Lady’s health condition, which, especially with this impractical proposition of a ridiculously high denomination of Naira bill, is diversionary. She is only an issue only when she stands between policies that affect you and I. But making her health condition a source of entertainment is too cheap. Like Yar’adua, she’s human. She owes me nothing, I owe her nothing. All I need as a citizen is something from her husband.

Like Saleem, I’m restless. Whenever ‘2015’ forms in my mind, my thought goes to that village woman surviving on a muddied pond, her farmer-husband waiting for the fertilizers promised by the Governor or council Chairman or Constituency rep during the electioneering campaign to revive his occupation. Promises which we witness unfulfilled because a certain contractor who knows the man who sponsors the Governor misappropriates the funds meant for the subsidised fertilizers project. And here in the city, I see beggars, I see diseased people far gone, I see an angry battalion of uneducated youths, I see unemployed graduates tweeting, pinging and updating their Facebook statuses to kill time – all claim they await 2015, a new government. And I ask, to do what? This expectation, which is actually a way to tell self that all will be well, only awakens a used-to déjà vu; prior to the elections we would agree that suffering has no ethnic, religious and regional identity only to betray our pact to stand together and save Nigeria on being told a story of early beginning without shoes, which should have only been recommended for publication in Macmillan’s children’s literature series.

Finally, as we pretend that the ongoing government can never be redeemed, gathering our ideas for 2015, let’s be conscious of the power of money, which has conquered the integrity of the Judas Iscariots among us and the electoral officers in conspiratorial tune with the politicians. And we must not shout hallelujah yet because our scandalising rants can also be washed away with a bottle of tequila in that mental Villa!

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (Twitter)

#KakandaTemple: Farewell, Destitution!

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Staff Reporter

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Exploring Abuja this week brought upon me a strange feeling intensified by a visit to an orphanage. It tugged my empathy towards the dregs of the city seen across every part of the country. Earlier in the year I accompanied a friend to an orphanage in Minna where she showed me how best to mark a birthday with her modest donations. Hers was the gesture that roused me this Tuesday to join the Nigerian author Teresa Ameh for her library donation at Heritage Home Orphanage in Gwarimpa, Abuja.

In an instance where the richest man in Africa is from the poorest region of Nigeria, a show of philanthropy from the Kogi State-born writer of children literature is a call to revisit the impact of institutionalised humanitarian activities. It gets me pondering the paradoxes that make up Nigeria; a country where there are no social welfare services, where there are no birth records of citizens, where there are too many destitute beggars and vagabonds enough to constitute another country, where government doesn’t lose a sleep over our spontaneous rush to destruction…

Listening to the matron of Heritage Home Orphanage, I was shoved by the doom that awaits the orphaned babies if they had not been homed there. Some of them were abandoned at birth while others were put up for sale by their teenage mothers. The matron too exuded her grief in recollecting the case of a baby announced for sale at 200 naira by an underclass mother. Yes, it is not a typo – two hundred naira! And in my circuit round Abuja that evening, memories of the matron’s stories returned on the sights of the beautiful African girls, mostly underage, who lined up to hawk their womanhood on Adetokunbo Ademola crescent that evening. For prostitution and crime, among other debasing incursions, would definitely have been the future of the lucky babies at orphanage if the intervention had not come.

Here we must seek a way to trace the histories of our destitution back to the genesis on the spine of the rhetoric “Why does this rate of destitution exist despite the combined efforts of government, humanitarian organisations and individual philanthropists?” Perhaps we got our priorities wrong. Oh yes, our priorities aren’t actually right. So the genesis of our woes must, like charities, begin at home, with our unthinking fathers and callow, orgasm-seeking teenagers surprised by the wonders of puberty. It’s time to be blunt, beloved colleagues. Now is a time to flog the dead knowledge; this spike between our thighs was not for unplanned reproduction. And the silly ride on quasi-religious extolments to sleep with anything that comes our way, without any protective measure, for whatever reason, needs to be tabooed at once. Dubious thank to the Nigerian Population Commission for its impertinent attempts to declare “Game Over” for the sex-maniacs through the proposed family planning legislation. Dubious not because it’s not the business of a government as ours to tell me the number of children I can nurture, but because our population was rendered useless by the same government.

The ninth wonder begging to be discovered is how a shameless government even finds the moral justification to check overbreeding when it has nothing in place even for optimum population. A government that ripped the nation from top to bottom, carting away the very substrates their subjects ought to live on, the very finances budgeted for development, is surely dancing naked in the market square if it panders that diversionary policy.

The slackened bonds that hold our nationhood together has to start with immediate attention to our destroyed human capital. Our government needs an honest student of history, a political economist, to be reminded that, of the two solutions to overpopulation, the positive and the preventive, proposed by the mischievously frank Englishman, Thomas Robert Malthus, one which belongs in a list he called “positive checks” , a quite disquieting terrorism, has already taken down Nigeria!

Human capital theorists all around the country must step out now to remind the government and the moneyed citizens of the tragedies ahead if they forsake the many homeless and parentless children on the streets. A social welfare system should be set up at once to document births henceforth. And please do not tell me that Nigeria can’t afford this. What an individual politician steals in this paradox of a nation can comfortably cover the cost of studies of a thousand children from the kindergarten to the tertiary level – that’s even mathematical conjecture of a small-time politician’s potentiality. And instead of passing a bill to check population, a corporal punishment on misappropriation of tax-payers’ money is the only way to stop what confuses my ever clueless president. Over to you, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, PhD.

By Gimba Kakanda

@gimbakakanda (Twitter)

#KakandaTemple: A Letter to my Unborn Son

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Staff Reporter

Dear Son,

This is the first of the epistles I promised myself I would write. I wish to preempt what anxieties you may soon have and, perhaps, anger too. But this letter was torn out of me by the same force that forestalls your arrival. The events now unfolding in the country seem to have eclipsed the turbulent relationships I have had with women, women I’d hoped would nurture you into a being, into that priceless gem that I shall never forsake.

I will start with them, the women. I will start with the one I named Baby. She’s named after you because she did things like you soon will: fragile, quick to tears, she was a babbler, too. No, she didn’t totter; she was obsessed with putting on airs, and the gait of a cat. We parted ways. I know that you wouldn’t be impressed by her as mother.

Actually, I didn’t leave her because I could not put up with her, but because another woman, one I considered more suitable to nurture you, appeared. She was a foreigner, an American and she was black, in a shade referred to as ‘ebony.’ You will one day know what tourists do; you will gather tales, whenever you do arrive. My friends said she befriended me just to have me as her guide in Nigeria. Yes, the country was unsafe, and an alien needs a dependable guide in a hostile place. When she left, she had our nascent love. She wheeled it across the floor of the departure lounge in that faded, green travel bag. That was the end.

I mourned our love as I would a dead beloved. But, being a wanderer, I soon chanced upon this religious lady who tried to turn me into a bigot. She was so fond of Islam that she thought those who practiced other religions were headed for certain doom. She harangued me, ‘a sinner’, as though she was the mouthpiece of the Creator. She said that addiction to western clothing and lifestyles were a curse, that the people of the book had joined hands with the accursed Satan to destroy me. I asked her about Science, she said that the West got it from the Qur’an. I asked her about Western Education, she said she had had no option but to acquire it. I asked about technology, she said it wasn’t Western. She nagged me, oh, she nagged me, every day, until I let slip that I knew of Christians who were fond of God than her, just as there are Muslims more spiritually attached to theology than Christians. She said I blasphemed. She quitted.

After a few more experimental relationships, I met a Christian girl whom I rechristened ‘Reverend Sister.’ She was fond of mocking my beliefs, so vocal was she that she offered that ‘apostasy’ was the only possibility of her being your mother. Any religion whose original, unadulterated practice didn’t hurt others should never be ridiculed—those were my words to her. She publicly lived in praise of the lord, but her life, in her closet, was the opposite. I wondered what she understood by ‘true religion.’

I met this other lady, another American, whom I mistook for an agnostic. Two years into our relationship, she felt I was too conventional to be her spouse and so set her friend to educate me about her belief, Totemism.

‘Totemism is a powerful cult. A sect. An ideology. We believe that the spirits of specific beasts in this world are here to guide us, and that with true joy and true understanding comes the merging of our souls with our personal guides. It’s the reason why I never call my friend by her birth name—to me, she’s Lupita, the little wolf. Not Martha, that stupid, empty shell. We’re amiable but loners. Ferocious, sensitive, and we practice avoidance. We hold none dear, not for long anyway, and that’s how, I believe, she lives, as well.’

So, I felt sorry for myself, for you, whose arrival continued to be delayed, unnecessarily. That Muslim Lady of Piety, who seemed to have met the criterion of my kin, had left my world. But trust me, I tried to woo her back by hooking up with her best friend. The trick, a simple psychological manouvre, was meant to stir up some jealousy in her. I know it is foolish to fake love. The said friend welcomed my advances, and what happened is too tragic to relate to your tender heart, son. However, while it lasted that friend and I became a popular couple. And soon the pretence became the truth, so true to the strings of the heart that we contemplated having you. But, I wasn’t ready. I was afraid. I didn’t know what marriage was.

And this fear drove me in my ventures into relationships with the ladies that came after her. Ladies who had all grown beyond the age when young women seek sexual adventures, they were at the point where only ‘Mr. Right’ would do. I was not such a one. And when I at last decided to choose one to settle down with, all the good girls were taken. Some smarter men had the woman who would have been your mother.

When I couldn’t bear the torture any longer, I spat on any offer to become a compatible mate. I swerved southward. You will understand what this means whenever you come. The ‘northern’ girls are considered conservative, even though that is very untrue. The ladies in the north, unlike their fun-seeking counterparts at the South of the country, are hypocrites ever playing the religious adherent in order to live up to the expectations of the society, their parents. But, they are all deceivers. I know.

So, I ran to the ladies from the south. The decision was to live my youth with women who knew the music of the time. Life became a circuit of partying with the real women. But, that came with a cost. All I earned was invested in them. This continued, until a certain thespian appeared on the scene of my life, took away every bit of my pride and turned me a programmed being at her beck and call. The last time I scrolled through her phone book, my name was ‘ATM.’ People said she cast a spell on me, and I was indeed less than wretched when I gathered my polythene bag, and returned to the conservative pretenders.

After a season of dysfunctional relationships, your mother showed up. We met at a mall in the process of one thing that truly excites her: shopping. She was not Baby, as she never wept whenever I stood up against her ruses to emasculate me. The only time she did flare up was when I had to run an errand for my boss on the day her 33-year-old sister had chosen for the feast of a silver age! I missed the birthday. It took interventions by our friends to have her retract her vows to part ways with me.

Now, son, the decision to have you is in the recycle bin. But, if by a stroke of destiny she refuses to return, I shall have to do the ‘try your luck’—that’s what dating is—with my Indian friend-turned-lover. She is pretty, prettier than those divas in sari seen in Bollywood movies. But, her parents are racists. They think black men are devils. Those weren’t their exact words, but judging by their daughter’s depression on the day she told them I had proposed to her, their remarks may have been darker than my skin. But, I love my skin! Your future will be forged in my contest with a handsome Rajput suitor chosen by her parents.

We agreed on elopement, but I realise that I don’t have the resources to build a comfortable home with a foreigner. And I don’t want to destroy anyone’s daughter. That’s why I devote these days to making money. I’m upbeat about a promised government contract. And if that’s comes, you will have to learn to live with the stigma ‘half-caste.’

Dear son, read this in whispers: if either of the two ladies, your potential mothers, turns me down, I would have no option but to resort to celibacy, perhaps lifelong celibacy! I know, son, you are scared. I know that this letter may get you upset, make you go berserk. I know… but, please, do not be angry. Join me in the search for your mother. I’m tired of searching alone!

Your Father
Gymber Cacandah
El-Minna, Powerville

By Gimba Kakanda
@gimbakakanda (Twitter)

#KakandaTemple: Beyond Mr President’s Tears

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Staff Reporter

Collated commentaries on and around Nigeria seem to portray a nation waiting to implode. Brilliant Nigerian playwright and poet, Opeyemi Adedayo, in a poem Heritage of Lies, lashes out on what he considers to be the mindsets that cause our country’s failures; he attacks various corruptions and total drought of transparency in our government which, true this, are now being passed on to the next generation through a sort of genetic coding—in the womb. Our system is so warped that the conception and foundation of most sectors, whether private or public, are built on lies and deceits. Honesty is now only attributed to the fools and novices in our labour market. And the knowledge that honest workers are hardly ever patted on the back further slacks the employer–employee bond, irreparably. This marriage of employer lie and employee deceit forms the loft of distrust on which every corporation in Nigeria nestled.

Yet, our tragedies were designed by ourselves from the day we consider as normal every aberration detected in government. Perhaps we were too powerless to confront the government, but are we also incapable of forestalling its many romances with the private corporations, which go on to become our dooms? It’s on records that corporations, often publicly traded and regulated by local laws, offer bribes [or its semantic equivalence, grafts] to government functionaries to either facilitate the rendering of a substandard service unchallenged or to get away with the effect of having done that. At least we’re witnesses to the collective dishonour brought upon us citizens during the many bribery scandals that blew open our chicken-politicians’ rumps—from Halliburton and Siemens bribery scandals down through to the shams perfected by our customs officers at border posts on to internal corruptions institutionalised by our state and local government systems. Ours is a castle of corruption built by the very bricks of lies and deceits.

Venal capitalism and its proponents have fed fat on the corruptions in Nigeria; it has become a monster without a proper authority to cage and tame its excesses. This is the system in which Dana Airlines strove, and it is now graspable that a 22-year-old contraption with almost everything beggaring replacement was cleared to grovel above over 150 million people. When the stories of the Indian-owned mobile coffin taken for aircraft that crashed last Sunday with 153 passengers on board began to take a space on our conscience, it only justified my fear for Nigeria. It only went to prove the dreaded heritage—of lies and corruptions in the authorities concerned, the corporations who cashed on the slack oversight and the consumers who are already “accustomed” to deplorable service—for in the midst of this argument, none of this ternary is exonerated from taking a boot over what befell Dana Air Flight 0992.

Honesty has since been compromised in our polity. Of course we knew the danger when we offered bribes to our customs officers just to smuggle fake or substandard products into the country; we knew the danger when we offered bribes to lecturers in our tertiary schools just to scale through as professional of an apparently impracticable profession; we knew the danger when corruptions produced unsound and half-trained doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, aviators, you name it; we knew the danger when our aviation authorities were compromised by years of ‘mutual understanding’—whatever that worst form of government-capitalist countersign means to you—with the management of Dana Air, such that a pathetically faulty plane, nay coffin, made it to the sky, above a population of indolent grumblers as diverse as ours.

Yet we are suddenly surprised when the latent, rationalised dangers eventually manifests? It’s unfortunate that our authorities are so compromised that a capitalist Dana—whose entrepreneurial aim is solely translation of anything, honest or fraudulent, into profits—could order a carrier of death up on our sky with no concern for our welfare, our very humanity! Yes, how can we be surprised???

A friend of mine who flew aboard the crashed Dana plane just two days to Black Sunday put her shame thus: “We crawled in the air for 1 hour and 20 minutes for a flight of 45 minutes. And the air-conditioner kept dripping water all through that we joked that it was raining in the plane”. Typical Nigerian, we are so accustomed to poor services detrimental to our existence that we don’t see a thing wrong with a 35-minute delay, we don’t see a thing wrong with an air-conditioner dripping water. Imagine what their protest would have forestalled? But they saw the dramatic growling of the sick aircraft as fun; it was all in the Nigerian manner. Some weeks ago, I listened to a recorded sermon by the now notorious spokesperson of the Boko Haram, Imam Shekau. It was rendered many years before they became a newspaper and real-life threat and his ultimatum to Nigeria blared through microphones, heard by an entire neighbourhood and it was even recorded and sold at CD stores and markets, yet our secret service still lied that the insurgency hit them unawares!

This may be wicked to say, but the Dana plane crash became a “monumental national tragedy” only because it affected a large number of the middle-class elements and still bears death for more. The disparity between the poor and some elements of the middleclass was on play even in the media reportage of the plane crash where the identity of the non-passenger victims, the poor and unfortunate residents of the Lagos suburb, was considered unworthy for print. Just because they didn’t belong in a cycle of whatever makes an “important” Nigerian. Despite everything, our fate is grim in the palms of a president whose only achievement so far, as widely observed, is the mastery of condolences. If Dr. Goodluck Jonathan is actually sympathetic as his sobbing at Iju-Ishaga, the site of the plane crash, gave away, why wasn’t that sympathy shown on the killing of innocent protesters during the fuel subsidy protests?

By Gimba Kakanda
Twitter handle: @gimbakakanda

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