Acapella on the Nigerian Condition

#EndSARS: Johnny Just Drop

#EndSARS: They Don't Care About Us

#EndSARS: Nigeria Is Murdering Its Citizens

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) – Nigeria Is Murdering Its Citizens                               LAGOS, Nigeria [Oct. 21, 2020] — For years, the name SARS hung in the air here in Nigeria like a putrid fog. SARS, which stood for Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was supposed to be the elite Nigerian police unit dedicated to fighting crime, but it was really a moneymaking terror squad with no accountability. SARS was random, vicious, vilely extortionist. SARS officers would raid bars or stop buses on the road and arbitrarily arrest young men for such crimes as wearing their hair in dreadlocks, having tattoos, holding a nice phone or a laptop, driving a nice car. Then they would demand large amounts of money as “bail.” 

          SARS officers once arrested my cousin at a beer parlor because he arrived driving a Mercedes. They accused him of being an armed robber, ignored the work ID cards he showed them, took him to a station where they threatened to photograph him next to a gun and claim he was a robber, unless he paid them a large sum of money. My cousin is one of the fortunate few who could pay an amount large enough for SARS, and who was released. He is not one of the many tortured, or the many disappeared, like Chijioke Iloanya.

Nigeria: #EndSARS #EndPoliceBrutality

Nneka Ogwumike: Basketball Queen, WNBA Boss

UNINTERRUPTED Presents: Nneka Ogwumike

1980s Nigeria: The More Things Change...

"Nigeria: A squandering of Riches," a World About Us Documentary by Onyeka Onwenu

Celebrating Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

CxPStudio

Chris Abani: Telling Stories from Africa

Chris Abani - TedTalk Global 2007

Telling Stories from Africa

In Need of Artistes and Intellectuals like Sofola

(By Sylvester Asoya) - “The Artist and the Tragedy of a Nation”

          On March 28, 1991, the late Professor ‘Zulu Sofola, Africa’s first female professor of Theatre Arts delivered one of the most reflective and scholarly inaugural lectures in Nigeria. Sofola, prolific playwright, astute administrator and scholar par excellence was at the time, head of the Department of Performing Arts, University of Ilorin. For those in the audience, the playwright’s superlative performance was not only outstanding, it was also record-breaking. 

          An inaugural lecture is an event of great importance in the life of every academic. It provides a rare opportunity for the newly elevated professor to inform his or her colleagues, the university community and the public of his or her research outcomes and plans for the future. Sofola, who had returned from her sabbatical leave in the United States two years earlier, used the occasion to speak, and eloquently too, on the artiste and a nation on the edge. 

          In 1991, Nigeria’s tragedy was not close to home. For instance, the chaos in public universities today was only incubating and hope was not a scarce commodity. Apart from the fact that there were a good number of Nigerians with discretionary incomes in the middle class, prices of goods and services had not hit the roof, despite Ibrahim Babangida’s voodoo economics. Today, ignorance, hopelessness, ineptitude and disillusionment reign supreme and nothing is being done to reduce poverty, promote inclusive growth or engender hope.

Religion, Nigerian Politicians, & Ruinous Duplicity

(By SegunAdeniyi) - By imposing a theocratic order that pushes the responsibility for ‘blessing the people of the state’ to God … [Nigerian politicians] are assured of support in a society where majority of the people are ever ready to die for the faith they proclaim, even if it does not reflect in their character and lifestyles. The interesting thing is that the same people who order the destruction of vehicles carrying alcohol in Kano may be sharing such drinks with friends in the privacy of their homes. It is the same with Christian governors who build expensive cathedrals in their government houses, to reinforce the unholy wedlock between the pulpit and the political podium. …

We should all be worried about the growing importance of religion as a marker of identity and a tool for political exploitation in our country. While religion can indeed help to restore moral order, the experience of Nigeria has shown that it is actually being deployed in promotion of private interest. By invoking religious sentiments, the people are easily triggered to action in support of whatever cause the political leader seems to be pursuing. In a predominantly illiterate society, nothing can be more appealing than to be seen as ‘one of us’ by the masses.

          The story of the drunkard and his bottles of beer [see below] … is very instructive. The man could pick and choose which bottle to destroy and which one to keep because it was all part of an elaborate scam to keep on deceiving himself that he was making the right choice.

Academics Research Corruption Using Nollywood

(By Yomi Kazeem) - The Nollywood Movie Experiment to Research Nigerians’ Anti-corruption Behavior

The popularity of Nigeria’s Nollywood movie industry—the world’s second largest by volume—was covertly deployed for a social cause five years ago.

Researchers from Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collaborated to commission a feature film to test local habits on reporting corruption. The research for the movie, which was funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and an anonymous donor, was approved by the Princeton Institutional Review Board.

Given the popularity of the local movie industry and the prevalence of corruption in Nigeria, the researchers looked to study how Nigerians report corruption using the high-profile actors to model behavior.

            Nigeria’s corruption problems are well-documented with a landmark survey two years capturing the scale of corruption especially among public officers. Despite his well-publicized anti-corruption stance and message in office, Nigeria’s president Buhari has struggled to definitely address the problem with his administration suffering corruption-related scandals of its own.

#Lionheart and the Metaphor of the Possible

Adanna and her uncle, Godswill

(By Pius Adesanmi) - NIGERIA is notorious for her belief in the indestructibility of a project that everybody purports to hate, dislike, disavow or disown. Somewhere in the core of the Nigerian psyche lies the belief that we are the only people on earth whose country will always survive our unquenchable hate, bitterness, and hostility expressed along our three most intractable fault lines: ethnicity, faith, and political affiliation, worsened by the democracy of social media and the conquest of that space by millennials – Nigeria’s most populous demographic – who no dey look Uche face.

However, I do not believe that Nigeria could have survived another week of hatredvaganza and the attendant cursefest that has happened upon us because of the presidential election season had art and the artist not intervened this week to do what they have done for humanity and society since the beginning of time: provide instrumental catharsis and place in front of  a society on the brink of implosion through self-inflicted injuries a mirror showing pathways of the possible.

That is the symbolic role that Nigeria’s cultural icon, Genevieve Nnaji, played this week with the release of her new movie, #Lionheart, on Netflix. I do not intend to explore the plot of the movie here. Go and watch it like millions of Nigerians have already done. When you are done watching it, join the commentariat on social media who have been busy dissecting scenes, characters, and other elements of the movie in a moment of national cultural jouissance that has united home and diaspora. My intervention is necessitated by a pattern of misses I have noticed so far in the social media commentary.

Snake Swallows Cash in Nigeria: Deja Vu

(By Peter Adeosun Keyz) - Snake Swallows ₦36m: 4 Things You Didn’t Know About the Story 

A snake allegedly swallowed money in a government office in Nigeria.

To further demonstrate how rooted corruption has become in Nigeria, another story trended recently. A public official was asked to account for a missing money in her custody. She replied that she couldn’t find the money because a snake had swallowed it. She looked everybody in the eyes and said a mysterious snake swallowed a sum of ₦36m. In words – thirty-six million naira. How brave!

It happened at the national headquarters of the examination body, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB). They noticed some money was missing and they tried to make an inquiry into what happened. Then this woman came up with this. If you think this is some fiction or fairy tale, a video link has been attached towards the end of this article.

My Father's House by Reggie Ugwu

(By Reggie Ugwu)

After my brother dies and my father was partially paralyzed, my family traveled 7,000 miles in search of an old home, a new house, and the things we'd lost on the road in between.

I remember feeling grateful that we never said “Merry Christmas.” We didn’t say it on Christmas morning when we awoke in Virginia, during a layover at the world’s most desolate Hampton Inn & Suites, and took long showers and poured too much batter into the waffle machine. Or at Washington Dulles International Airport, 1,400 miles from our cul-de-sac in Houston, where, at 8 a.m., bright, deserted corridors seemed to me pleasantly indifferent to the calendar. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, we had wished for a shuttle in lieu of a sleigh, making our plea with a dead-eyed driver who we’d been told could take us to the Hampton Inn. His broad white vessel didn’t have a ramp for Dad’s electric wheelchair — the one that chirped like a repair droid (meep murp) whenever you turned it on — and was too far above the ground for us to maneuver him out of it and into a seat. The driver suggested that my sister Adaeze and I ride the shuttle with our bags while Mom and Dad follow in a taxi. But Mom threw me a look that even I understood meant “I don’t want to be alone,” and so Adaeze rode with the bags while the three of us stayed behind, waiting by the curb at passenger pickup as the cool black night ticked into morning.

When I Travel in Nigerian Commercial Buses

(By Nkechi Bianze) – Whenever I'm in Nigeria and I'm traveling a long distance on public transport, one of my ultimate priorities is MY COMFORT. I sometimes go as far as paying for two seats, one for myself and the other seat for MY HANDBAG.

I once paid for THREE seats on "God is Good motors", traveling from Benin to Lagos. One seat for me, one for my box and the other for my handbag.

I was traveling one day from Asaba to Abuja, I paid for two seats. I had a small box (handbag size) and my handbag. I kept my small box and handbag on one, and sat on the other. Then less than 30minutes into the journey, this woman with three children, all over the age of three, asked me if I could carry my box and handbag so that one of her children would seat there, because they wanted to sleep through the journey.

Nigerian Patriarchy, American Patriarchy

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi) - 

America (read: The US) is a patriarchy.

Nigeria is a patriarchy.

America strongly discourages polygamy, domestic violence, spousal rape and other acts which denigrate the self-worth of the female person.

Beyond a sociological aversion for all these, America creates and maintains institutional agencies to push her cultural preferences, so that even though she remains a patriarchy, the birth of a female child is not as tantamount to a mild tragedy which must be endured and borne stoically at best, as most in Nigeria have been forced over time to see it as in our enclave.

America is a patriarchy.

Nigeria is a patriarchy.

The American legal system won't let anyone on their soil withdraw their underaged daughter and go marry her off to a man because she is a girl.

In patriarchal America.

No cultural paradigm can be foolproof as they are results and by-processes of conscious evolution of a developing species.

Nigeria's Multi-Ethnicity: Blessing to Nollywood

Ime Bishop Umoh

(By OlaideOlaitan) – Nigeria is a multi-ethnic country. This status has brought the country different chaos at different times of its history but for the entertainment industry, the diversity of the ethnicity in the giant of Africa nation, is a colossal blessing.

The Nigerian movie industry is endowed with talents from all the geo-cultural regions of the country. The beauty of this assortment has not only made our entertainment industry unique but it has also made Nollywood movies more interesting than it’d have been if Nigeria had no cultural differences.

Sitting down to watch a Bishop Okon with his ‘Calabarness’ can make one temporarily forget the recession rocking the country. An ‘Akpos’ character often played by comedian, Ayo Makun could relieve stress. That is not to talk of the local Yoruba girl character (Jenifa), played by Funke Akindele in her Jenifa’s Diary. A doctor won’t lose his medical licence if he/she prescribes a dose of Jenifa’s Diary every evening, to a patient about to lose his/her life to depression.

Away from the prophylactic effect that the infusion of the different Nigerian cultures in Nollywood movies has on consumers, this same factor is also the reason why the industry can attain the height of being the third largest movie industry in the world. The value is also reflected on the nation’s account books. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also confirmed that Nollywood is the second biggest employer in Nigeria.

Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Gender Relations

(By Temidayo Ahanmisi)--It's interesting though seeing die hard misogynists coming out from the woodworks...literarily. Like the craven worms they truly are.

The oodles of comic outrage about the president's "other room" gaffe just makes me want to chuckle and choke someone dead in amusement.

I mean..like...really?

"My wife belongs in my heart, my life, my office..."

"I am a mother, a wife, a career woman. I don't belong in the..."

Aaaah spare me!

Nobody fucking cares. Go suck a lemon...

Nigeria and the "Facebook Feminist"

(Temidayo Ahanmisi)--You are all being manipulated, but you are either too clueless or too pompous to realise this.

This is why you lend your energy to being agents in turn of the grand delusion.

It is social media. It doesn't take a genius to control the minds of anyone in this matrix. The subjects lend themselves for use and control.

Once you realise this, everything falls into place and you see your own silliness for what it is.

So I saw one of those "submission matters" post by a dear friend this morning, and gave in to the urge to say this much, because this friend largely "gets it" when it comes to the matter of Feminism vis a vis Matrimony.

This much I submitted:

Feminism and Submission are contrived battles on the social media. Those who argue on either side are caught in a spiral of delusion and manipulation of their reasoning as well as the thoughts of the other.