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Nigeria Economy | |
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Monday,
November 19, 2018 11.47AM / OpEd By Tope Fasua / Image
Credits: Dianova International
I have been getting
invitations to vote for a young Nigerian lady who is being nominated by no less
than CNN as a world hero. I am happy for her and the strides she has achieved,
teaching young girls from poor families - precisely from Makoko (one of
Nigeria’s many slums) - how to code. This is however not the first I would
hear about poor children learning how to code.
The Punch reported on
May 13, 2017, in a story titled ‘Amazing Stories of Ajegunle Girls who Design
Computer Programs’, where a group of girls were trained to code from the slums
of Ajegunle as well, based on the work of Anu Adelakun and Jerry Odili who were
sponsored by the US Consulate (Carrington Youth Leadership Initiative). A
google search also reveals this happens in Ghana, Kenya, India among other
countries. The African bit is usually financed by US based companies or
government organizations. It’s however hard to trace how well these girls
have succeeded in their chosen ventures after the training.
These reports however
throws up two issues. The first is the keen focus on the girl child and an
apparently increasing neglect of boys, most of whom are now abandoned to drugs,
cultism and crime - especially from the same poor areas. The second is
whether higher level, sophisticated knowledge such as coding is what we need in
these parts. In other words, is the teaching of coding to poor children the
best that can be made of limited resources? Even though the resources being
used this time are private, the publicity behind the news is prime time. We are
talking of a country with at least 13.2million children out of school - the
highest of any country in the world. That figure could be much higher.
Let’s stay on the issue
of coding. John Perkins wrote a book “Confessions of an Economic
Hitman” (a book that should be the Bible of all patriots in developing
countries, but deliberately ignored as we fool ourselves all over the place),
in which he narrated how the Americans captured Saudi Arabia’s crude oil. He
said he was once at the Saudi Ministry of Agric and looked out of the window to
see goats feeding from a large pile of refuse right outside the office gate. Of
course Saudi was then littered with refuse. He asked his Saudi friends why this
is so and was given an honest reply that no self-respecting Saudi person will
be caught dead packing refuse. The Americans then struck a deal to build
Saudi’s infrastructure and help tidy the country, in exchange for a permanent
stake in Saudi crude oil. This arrangement continues till today. Add the huge
Saudi patronage of American arms and ammunition and you will see why the USA
cannot do anything about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
But Nigeria is not as
lucky, though we may be almost as lazy as the Saudis were given the state of
our environment. We don’t really like the hard grind. Since our leaders
naturally come from among us, they carry into leadership a general blindness to
the state of our environment. It’s just as well that they are afforded bullet
proof and tinted heavy vehicles that seals their ignorance of their society and
environment. I recently engaged some Nigerians on the recent (much belated)
pronouncement by President Buhari, that Nigeria was the second worst country in
the world in terms of open defecation. A number of them wondered why a
president should care. They couldn’t just see how fundamental that matter is to
human dignity, and how, without human dignity, a people can never attain real,
sustainable development.
Nigeria is therefore a
country of people who want to make the sudden leap into socio-economic
development, without the messy part. We want to leave all that needs to be
done; hygiene issues, industrialization of any kind, the long, hard process of
owning our technology and innovating that which we need and use, and become a
nation of coders. When we aren’t doing that, we rush into banking, telecoms,
cryptocurrency, cybermarketing, network marketing, pyramid schemes, betting,
anything but the hard, painstaking, thought-demanding, slow-building,
sustainability-demanding stuff. Anything where we won’t have to break sweat.
That is us. And this will never take us anywhere.
And so I will encourage
the lady to keep training the poor children but I will also encourage Nigerian
government to get serious and focus on real development, just as I will
encourage CNN to help us focus on things that can assure real progress for us,
not fleeting fancies that leave us right where we are after the euphoria is
over. For even if any of these children escape abroad and becomes a Zuckerberg,
their abodes in Ajegunle and Makoko may likely remain as terrible as they are
today. We must cease to be defined by those environments. The larger Nigerian
society is also likely to frustrate their efforts if they reman here after that
training. So what really is the point at the end of the day? I recall learning
about something called POVERTY TOURISM in one of my PhD classes.
Some people in the world
get their kicks seeing such documentaries of despicable African countries and
people living worse than beasts, layered on some token assistance such as
training people to ‘code’, when they can barely feed. It makes some feel really
superior. We need to be changing our spaces radically, banning the terrible
slum life our people are living in, getting them to live with dignity. We can.
We have the resources. We can organize ourselves better. We must not preserve
these spaces for voyeuristic adventures of those who associate us with filth
under any guise. Our priority, in my view, should not be about teaching
children there how to code, but helping them live in much better environments.
If we can, we should pilot the two projects together.
As regards the overdrive
of feminism, I was recently at an event when a very popular lady whipped up
emotions against the male species so much that I became afraid; not for myself
but for our growing sons. The lady rightly charted the trajectory of how men
had oppressed and cheated women over time and how women were now getting their
own back. She predicted a day when women will dominate and revenge, and I
wondered why we cannot all just try and achieve an intricate balance. Must one
gender dominate and oppress another? Are we not all equal before God and
humanity? What I did at that occasion was to apologize on behalf of all men for
the past deeds of our forefathers and also appeal against the rage of the
female gender.
William Congreve (1697)
wrote that “Hell knoweth no fury than a woman scorn’d”. The problem we
have now is that even un-scorned women are made to feel scorned by the negative
emotions moving around in the uber-feminist world. Also I will want to appeal
that the boy child needs attention too. We must never neglect and abandon them
in favor of the girl child. Take the unfortunate phenomenon called Boko
Haram and Chibok/Dapchi girls. Tens of thousands of boys are kidnapped,
brainwashed, drafted into war, used as cannon fodder, drugged out and killed in
these war zones, but nobody cares.
There are no NGOs
anywhere trying to solve this problem with vulnerable boys. It’s as if they are
mere numbers. And from the boy child being mere numbers, they become adult
villains (as we are now being painted by the world). In some quarters one will
almost feel awkward as a man. I have been invited to some meetings where
feminists gather and the daggers in their eyes would kill Julius Caesar all
over again. And there seems to be a certain global agenda against men for
whatever reason - sometimes powered by men themselves. I am not sure that is
healthy.
I wonder if we could not
all live in a world of shared, balanced responsibilities. Look at the world of
sexual irresponsibilities. Men get all the blames. But there is already a great
imbalance. This evening I saw on facebook, a clip of an American woman who
lives with her husband and boyfriend. They sleep on the same bed. Children are
in the house. This kind of behavior suddenly seems normal for a woman. She is
seen as slightly confused. But if it was a man, he will be called names; dirty,
stupid, greedy, uncontrollable and so on. What is going on with the world
really? If we are all equal, we should share responsibility. The burden should
not be on one gender alone. For example, how did fashion among ladies become
equated with nakedness and an obsession with makeups - which is essentially
presenting to the world a thoroughly enhanced and unreal image of
oneself? And men are supposed to deal with all the open displays and
enticement. It’s simply a tough life for our sons growing up as life will get
more slippery for them. How many men have been convicted of rape and are in
jail simply because a woman got terribly cross with them? This is not to
say there aren’t many miscreants among more who get involved in all sorts of
felonies.
However the institution
of marriage is becoming more and more unpopular, brief and shaky for these
reasons. Abroad where we imported these ideas from, people don’t even get
married anymore. They now have ‘partners’, ‘live in lover’ and of course
what is now popular among those ‘heroes’ our children worship and whom our
government respects, ‘baby mamas’. Like it obtains in the world of
economics and technology, we are importing stuff we cannot create and that we
do not understand. And we have no abilities, nor readiness, to analyze and
document the full effect of these new imports on our lives and societies.
I also watched a clip
made by a Nigerian lady on facebook. It was meant to be some sort of
motivational talk. But she started out encouraging women whose husbands are not
contributing to the upkeep of their children. I wondered for a moment of that
was her own major challenge. Then I also wondered why men were more likely to abandon
responsibility in this manner. Is it our short attention span? Is it that we
are just irresponsible? What exactly? My best analysis is that men are buckling
under the weight of societal burdens which have been thrust on them, and which
they have also reached out to carry over time.
The times have changed
and those burdens can no longer be sustained by most men. Men get laid off from
work quicker than women. These days they even find it harder to find a job than
women.
We find ourselves in
dead end professions and careers faster than women. We are the ones who often
want to do something bigger, to assert ourselves and to step up to increasing
responsibilities as we age. Society wants us to be big. Dependents crowd around
men than they do women. Men also book dependents within their families and
elsewhere, often in the hope of making it big to be relevant. It is men,
because they don’t get pregnant and have children that are likely to philander
more and sire children all over the place. It’s no wonder we often burnout and
crash unlike most women. But rather than this growing antagonism, I think we
should push for more understanding. Where are the masculinist groups? Oops, the
names sounds unacceptable already lol.
Anyhow, men need
help! We are the specie that dies in silence. We go around foolishly
feeling like King Kong, believing we can conquer all. We take unnecessary and
un-calculated risks. We often die as unsung heroes, totally demystified and
defamed even in the eyes of our children. Think about this., especially for our
sons coming behind. I worry about this for one major reason; in my little
sojourn on earth, and as I learn lessons all by myself, I have found, that
women are simply the stronger sex. Any man who holds on to the primitive idea that
muscles equals strength, is a fool. Anyone who deploys that muscle to assault
women is worst than a beast. In almost every other area, women are
stronger, smarter, more coordinated, more intelligent, more determined, better
kitted for the long haul. Men are often frail. Life comes with those
paradoxes. If the world would become a better place, ask the women.
About The
Author
Tope Kolade Fasua is an economist, writer and founder/CEO of Global
Analytics Consulting Limited, a consulting firm with its headquarters in Abuja,
Nigeria who is standing as the Presidential candidate of the Abundant Nigeria
Renewal Party (ANRP) in Nigeria’s 2019 elections. Fasua has authored numerous
columns on newspapers and published six books.
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