Columns

Tobi Amusan’s tears

Published

2 years ago

July 31, 2022

Tobi Amusan’s tears

By now, almost everyone across Nigeria has heard of Tobi Amusan, the Nigerian superlative athlete who won a gold medal at the World Athletics Championship Women’s 100m hurdles in Oregon, the United States of America. That singular feat, the first of its kind for Nigeria, drew social media attention. When Tobi climbed the podium to collect her well-deserved medal, the Nigerian national anthem was sung, and she wept.

Those tears have generated countless emotional fellowship across the world, especially among Nigerians home and

abroad. Standing on that podium, and struggling with her tears, Tobi represented the very feature of a hero who had struggled with most herculean predicaments, personal and national, to arrive at that particular point in history. Receiving that deserved medal was not the social media story.

What is, is the singing of the Nigerian national anthem, and the evocation of national pride and national revulsion in equal measures among all those who have different understanding of what Nigeria means, especially for sportsmen and women. Why would Tobi play the national anthem when the Nigerian state nearly destroyed her ambition? Why would the Nigerian governmentman killing five-year-old son, others | Punch

associate with the success of someone it nearly cast, as is usual, into the rubbish heap of destroyed talents? These two questions have generated a serious social media furore.

My point of entry in this piece is Tobi’s tears. In depth and context, it is similar to that of Prof. Oyewale Tomori who, some months ago, teared up in agony over Nigeria’s protracted predicament. Tomori lamented the idea of a country that provided all it took for him to become a world-class scholar and virologist; the same country that is failing its own citizens now. On Tobi’s face, one could imagine the many thoughts rushing through her mind as the national anthem played—thoughts of pains and depression at what could have been her lot if she had not got the scholarship to the University of Texas; thoughts of winning at the Nigerian Olympic Trials but the officials did not turn on the electronic timer; thoughts of the injury that the Nigerian government neglected which could have ruined her aspiration forever; thoughts of all the greatness the Nigerian state encodes.

Like Tomori, what were Tobi’s tears telling us? Tears tell many stories and more so tears shed within the crannies of Nigeria’s governance failures. Let me borrow a sense of this from American historian and essayist, Washington Irving.

He said, “There is sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than 10 thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”

Of course, anyone who insists that Tobi’s heart is not grieved, even to the extent that she was joyous at her triumph, does not know her story, and does not understand the

pain of not being encouraged to shine by one’s country. Her personal trajectory before she arrived at Texas and at that moment of fulfilment. In an interview, she said with tacit grief, “When I was injured, they didn’t care about me. That is how my career ended.” How could her tears not have been motivated by such an incidence of not fulfilling her dreams because of an injury the Nigerian state could have intervened in?

However, the power behind Tobi’s tears lies in her stubborn patriotism. Standing and crying while the anthem washes over her speaks eloquently about a sacred belief and, indeed, unspeakable love for a country that has the potential to be more. Citizenship in Nigeria is a baffling phenomenon. Outside of the spurious nationalism of the political class and elite, Nigeria has lumped almost all Nigerians into the same space of suffering and lack of fulfilment. There are many Nigerians who have fled that space in search of greener pastures. Who is to blame anyone

who is searching for meaning outside of the limiting confines of national space? Imagine the many professionals whose professional competence have almost been put to shame because of the constraint of practising in Nigeria. Many medical doctors/professionals recently left for Saudi Arabia where the medical infrastructure not only attends to their search for personal meaning but also enhances their professional skills and capacity to serve humanity.

But you also have those, like Tobi, who have been offered opportunities to become better in terms of career opportunities abroad, but who doggedly still fly the banner of the Nigerian state. This is the category of Nigerian citizenry that Tobi Amusan represented when she stood on that podium and sang the words of the national anthem. It was a moment of contrition; as if she almost made

the decision to reject Nigeria and all her woes, but she drew back at the last minute and chose to believe in Nigeria’s possibilities. But there is also a last category of Nigerian citizens; those who do not have the opportunity or simply chose not to travel out and seek greener pastures, but who have equally been worsted by the Nigerian government, but who have counterintuitively latched on to the Nigerian dream in its very absence. In the dark space of the Nigerian streets and several informal spaces, these patriotic Nigerians shed tears of frustration. And yet they have a glow in their hearts, watered by the possibility of Nigeria becoming great soon. When the Nigerian youth carried the banner of the #EndSARS recently, it was a demonstration of tough love for a country that must be forced to become better. No wonder many turn to the religious and the spiritual as the anchor to hold the soul in the face of the battering of life and the government misdeeds in the Nigerian existential space.

I have had reasons to shed tears for what I have come to call the missing pieces in Nigeria’s development—the obstacles, misgovernance, lost opportunities and all sorts that keep putting Nigeria backward, and delaying her possible greatness. In 1992, I was on my own quest for meaning. I had started a family, and the responsibility to make ends meet had become quite

daunting. I had started working at the Speech Writing Unit of the Presidency when I then got a job at the United Nation. But then, the late Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade compelled me to stay on in the Nigerian civil service rather than pursue the more prestigious UN appointment. We had both shed some tears in my office at the Aso Villa that day. It was as if I was watching the promise of a better future flying away out of my reach. Aboyade was my mentor; and I had to believe his dream about

Nigeria. He regaled me with the story of how, as a student at Cambridge University in the late 50s, he was a part of a core of dreamers who were determined to redefine Nigeria’s greatness in the comity of nations. Those dreamers later reconstituted into different levels of multidisciplinary teams that began mapping Nigeria’s developmental path. Aboyade himself played a huge role in.

With the Tobi Amusan story, we are forced to ask: how many more generations will the Nigerian state waste? How many more heroic acts would the state reject from those who believed in her? I think it is most providential that the Tobi story is unfolding in the build-up to the 2023 elections.The electoral promises have started piling up without any significant nudge yet towards an ideological and issue-based itemisation and discussions about what matters in taking Nigeria seriously. How, for instance, could the heroism, energies and patriotism of the many Tobi Amusans all across Nigeria and around the world be harnessed to facilitate progress for Nigeria?

Nigeria, like the continent itself, is a youthful nation that embeds enormous human capital

development that could drive national progress. This makes education, across all spheres, a significant matter for electoral engagement by aspirants for the highest offices in the land.

How do we make education the bedrock of national development? If any of the aspirants does not have the blueprint for a genuine and realistic engagement with education, then such an aspirant does not deserve our votes. Any aspirant that does not have a plan for youth engagement is just a player who wants four years to squander Nigeria’s chances at national greatness. We have got to a stage in Nigeria’s national trajectory where political rhetoric should not sway us again.

A final message to Nigerians: Tobi Amusan demonstrated the dogged will to survive despite Nigeria’s crippling limitations. With her success, no one has any excuse to keep blaming Nigeria. The dreams we hold should become the touchstone of our successes. My dreams withstood the terrible dysfunction of the Nigerian administrative system and even an untimely retirement at my prime. Tobi’s dreams withstood the terrible mess of sporting organisation in Nigeria. Our collective aspirations can become the foundation for greatness; not only personal ones, but also our collective greatness as a nation.

Olaopa is a professor at the NIPSS, Kuru, Jos, Plateau State

Columns

The Rise and Fall of Garkida, a Social Decline

Published

1 week ago

November 7, 2024

Ochuwa Ibrahim

The Rise and Fall of Garkida, a Social Decline

By: Balami Lazarus

In my recent visit to see my aged mother in Shaffa, a small rural town. In a chat with some of my peers, Garkida came up, and one of us immediately informed the group that the town is socially dredged. I made some findings, and you may wish to agree. I believed students of history my generation were once taught about the rise and fall of great empires, kingdoms, rulers, warriors, and other historical events during our secondary school days. In the cause of those lessons, our imaginations were always taken far to other lands.

We never thought that someday there would be a fall or decline of our own, which could be a town, village, or settlement, but never like the fall of the known historical empires/kingdoms of Oyo, Jukun, Fante/Ashante, Kanem-Borno, Songhai, etc. To rise is a difficult task in life or in the course of growth, be it individual, town, or city. But to fall is easy. Garkida has rose and fallen, or, to say, declined socially. Once a bubbling rural town in Buraland, being in Gombi Local Government Area of Adamawa State has nose-dived from the social ladder.

As a historian, I will not subscribe to the use of the term fall; it will defile my histo-journalistic sense of reasoning because Garkida is a proper noun and is there real. So it will rather go well with me and perhaps some readers of this essay to accept Declined as a better use of historical language for the purpose of this work. I am not a native of Garkida and have never lived there, but it was the home of my cousins and nieces long before now.

As a young man, I had it well with friends when the town was in her social chemistry and apogee. In spite of her decline, the arrears in our kitty, notwithstanding the flow of time, are the mutual friendship, an indelible mark in our social life. I remember clearly as a holiday-maker with my grandmother at Shaffa, Garkida was the in-thing in our youthful days because of the mass social activities that used to take place there.

There were social interactions with friends and relatives from different places, parties of all kinds—a social front burner. And to most of my peers, it was the center of today’s mobile social handle—Facebook, where you meet and make new friends. That was Garkida for us. As a rural town, it flourished with glamour, elegance, and pride, triggered by the social engineering of Who is Who? The creme de la creme of her sons and daughters who made nane in their vocations or professions that promoted and spread the name of Garkida as social lighthouse.

It was the abode of top military brass in the ranks of generals. Her businessmen once made the town tick as a cluster of has. It was the nerve of vogue and socialites in Buraland. There was declined in this capacity. Historically, Garkida came to the limelight and appeared on the colonial map of Nigeria in 1923, when the white Christian missionaries of CBN/EYN first settled there and made it their home on the 17th March of the aforementioned year. The beginning of her social mobility started in the 1970s, through the 1980s, to the dawn of the 1990s, her zenith.

I doff my hat for the united daughters of Garkida; credit goes to them; their exposures, taste, beauty, love, elegance, sophistication, unity of purpose, and social agrandisement made them wives of husbands of men from far and near who are of different walks of life. The women of Garkida were a central force, once the venus de milo of the town before its social decline. I cannot conclude this article without appreciating the fact that Garkida was the center of learning and vocational training and once the hold of good and efficient healthcare services in Buraland and its neighbors. Today, Garkida is no longer in the vantage position.

Balami, a Publisher/Columnist, 08036779290.

Columns

Kashim Shettima, Leadership, and the Flood in Maiduguri

Published

2 months ago

September 13, 2024

News Net Global

Kashim Shettima, Leadership, and the Flood in Maiduguri

Kashim Shettima, Leadership, and the Flood in Maiduguri

By Dr. James Bwala

These past few days, I have been thinking back on the flood in Maiduguri. I have spoken with at least thirty people who have been impacted by the flood, and their responses and comments regarding the flood and Vice President Kashim Shettima’s leadership struck me as something people had never observed at the worst of this natural calamity. In addition to highlighting the environmental issues the area is facing, the recent flooding in Maiduguri has also highlighted the leadership style of Nigeria’s Vice President, Kashim Shettima. Due to excessive rainfall, a section of the Alau dam broke, and insufficient drainage systems, the region’s already preexisting socioeconomic vulnerabilities have been made worse by the floods. In light of this, Shettima’s reaction and crisis management techniques are worthy of close scrutiny.

Shettima’s proactive attitude to governance, especially during times of crisis, has frequently been described as a hallmark of his leadership style. During his term as Borno State’s governor, he made large infrastructural improvements meant to increase the state’s resilience to severe catastrophes. Notwithstanding these endeavors, Maiduguri’s persistent shortcomings in urban planning and emergency preparedness are brought to light by the latest floods. It is admirable how Shettima can organize resources and interact with the community in times of need.

The former Borno State governor and current vice president of Nigeria, Kashim Shettima, has taken the lead in resolving these crises. His proactive approach to leadership is marked by a desire to both build community resilience and lessen the effects of natural disasters. Shettima has advocated for long-term infrastructure improvements in addition to organizing resources for emergency relief operations in response to the flooding issue. Through collaboration with several entities, such as non-governmental organizations and foreign agencies, his objective is to furnish those impacted by the floods with basic amenities like potable water, food, and medical support.

Nigeria’s VP Kashim Shettima

READ ALSO: https://newsng.ng/police-witness-tells-iip-sars-how-peter-ekwealor-slumped-after-allegedly-confessing-to-killing-asp-akoh-ude/

Severe flooding has caused serious problems for Maiduguri and made the humanitarian crises already plaguing the area worse. Kashim Shettima’s prompt action has been essential in meeting the impacted communities’ urgent needs. He took preemptive steps to deliver relief supplies such as food, medical supplies, and shelter for displaced people by organizing local resources and liaising with national agencies. This prompt action not only demonstrates good leadership, but it also emphasizes how crucial leadership is in emergency situations.

The Vice President’s strategy included a thorough evaluation of the flooding damage, which made it possible to identify the most vulnerable groups for focused actions. Through his interactions with local officials and citizens, he made sure that relief efforts were appropriate for the setting and sensitive to cultural differences. By encouraging a sense of ownership among local stakeholders, this participatory technique improved confidence in government activities.

Different stakeholders in the state have responded differently to the visit of Nigeria’s vice president, Kashim Shettima, to address flood victims. Numerous localities have experienced devastation as a result of the extraordinary floods, which has resulted in property and human casualties. Many of the victims Shettima spoke with expressed hope that his presence would spur government action to provide desperately needed relief and to begin rehabilitation efforts. The significance of direct involvement from high-ranking officials was underscored by community leaders, who saw it as an indication that their predicament is being recognized on a national scale.

Kashim Shettima spoke about the suffering of flood victims who have been badly impacted by unusual flooding while on a recent visit to Maiduguri. His words were meant to be comforting, but they also served as a guide for healing and restoration. Shettima underlined the necessity of unity and group efforts to address this environmental catastrophe. He emphasized that in order to ensure that relief efforts are efficient and timely, the government would mobilize resources to aid individuals who have been displaced by the floods.

Shettima’s speech also emphasized how crucial community resilience is to surviving tragedies like this. He asked residents and local authorities to work together with government organizations to identify high-risk locations and put precautionary measures in place to avoid similar flooding incidents in the future. Shettima sought to empower communities while easing their immediate pains through coordinated relief activities by encouraging a sense of shared responsibility.

Dr. James Bwala, PhD, writes from Abuja.

Kashim Shettima, Leadership, and the Flood in Maiduguri

Columns

Letter to Kashim Shettima at 58: Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice President

Published

2 months ago

September 1, 2024

News Net Global

Letter to Kashim Shettima at 58: Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice President

Letter to Kashim Shettima at 58: Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice President

By: Dr. James Bwala

To Kashim Shettima, my esteemed vice president, I would like to wish you a very happy 58th birthday on this memorable day. Many people have found inspiration in your leadership and commitment to serve our nation, and I am honored to have the chance to offer my sincere congratulations on reaching this significant accomplishment.

As a default-level student of the Kashmir political class, I am impressed by your poise and ethics in navigating the complexity of politics. The policies you have supported and the initiatives you have started demonstrate your dedication to raising the standard of living for the citizens of our country. I sincerely appreciate and support your idea for a brighter future for everyone.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice President

What it means to be a public servant has been exemplified by your leadership. We have taken note of your persistent efforts to push for positive change and address the issues affecting our nation. I sincerely appreciate your commitment to enhancing infrastructure, healthcare, and education since it has positively impacted countless lives. It is well known that you are a kind and accomplished person, especially now that you are 58 years old. You have undoubtedly contributed significantly to the advancement of both your state and the nation as a whole. More leadership and counting have been seen in your records

READ ALSO:https://newsng.ng/umth-child-institute-center-safe-haven-for-child-care/

Your empathy for others who are less fortunate is one of your best traits. Everywhere you go, you have continuously sought to make a difference in the lives of vulnerable and underprivileged groups. You have put in place a number of social welfare initiatives aimed at helping the poor, widows, orphans, and internally displaced people. You continue to be a tremendous achiever who has advanced significantly in a number of areas in addition to your compassion.

During your tenure as the governor of Borno State, you managed the execution of multiple developmental initiatives that yielded favorable results for the state’s healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Borno State benefited from increased access to high-quality education, broader healthcare coverage, and greater infrastructure development under your leadership.

In Borno State, an area beset by violence and insurgencies for more than ten years, you have played a crucial role in promoting peace and security. In spite of the obstacles presented by the Boko Haram insurgency, you persisted in your will to advance peace and stability in the area.

You have been an outspoken supporter of peaceful cohabitation among Borno State’s diverse population and have devoted countless hours to bridging the divide between various ethnic and religious groupings. You distinguish yourself from other political leaders by your commitment to public service and your care for the well-being of your constituents. Many people in Nigeria and beyond admire and respect you for your outstanding accomplishments and kindness.

As a kind and accomplished individual who has significantly aided in the growth of Borno State and Nigeria overall. You are a genuinely amazing leader because of your devotion to serving the public, your desire to better the lives of those who are less fortunate, and your support of peace and security. As you commemorate your 58th birthday this year, it’s obvious that future generations will be motivated by your example to work for a more positive, inclusive society for all.

As you become older, your charitable endeavors also become more significant in addition to your political career. Thousands of lives have been impacted by the Kashim Shettima Foundation, which helps the less fortunate in Borno State and beyond with healthcare, education, and other services.

It has also contributed to the reduction of poverty and enhancement of the general well-being of the populace. You continue to be regarded as a significant role in Nigerian politics on many fronts, valued for your honesty, diligence, and devotion to helping your fellow citizens. Your tenure as Borno State’s governor has left a lasting impression on the people you served, and it will continue to motivate upcoming generations of leaders to give selflessly to the advancement of our society.

I hope you pause to consider all that you have achieved and the lives you have impacted as you celebrate your 58th birthday. Your leadership has had an impact, and I have no doubt that your love and dedication to serving our country will continue to motivate others. Mr. Vice President, I hope your special day is filled with joy and happiness. I hope you have a happy, healthy, and prosperous day.

Happy 58th birthday! Sincerely, Dr. James Bwala, PhD.

Letter to Kashim Shettima at 58: Happy Birthday, Mr. Vice President