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Common misconceptions: Things we know that just aren’t so

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:36:31 +0000

by Philip Yaffe

We all live with misconceptions about the world. This is quite normal. No one can be an expert in everything, so we simplify our learning into easy-to-remember snippets, which are often very close to the truth, but never quite there.

Generally, our misconceptions are insignificant and do little harm. Some times they are very significant and do a lot of harm.

For example, many people believe that when they leave home in winter, they shouldn’t turn off the heat entirely, but rather lower it a few degrees. If they normally maintain a temperature of 20°C when at home, when they leave they should turn the thermostat down to about 15°C. Why? Because they insist that letting the house get very cold when they are away, and then heating it up again when they return, uses up significantly more energy than keeping it at a moderate temperature throughout the day.

I have heard this for years, but never paid much attention to it, largely because when energy prices were low, it didn’t really make much difference. However, we now face severe energy shortages and the potentially devastating effects of climate change. So recently when I heard someone say this, I responded, “As a physicist, I can’t see why this would be true.”

I didn’t insist that the idea was wrong. As a scientist, I know that general principles (“physical laws”) cannot be applied willy-nilly to specific cases, because unknown local conditions might mute their effects or cancel them entirely. I therefore decided to research the issue on the Internet.

No matter how man different key words or combination of key words I tried, I could find no web site that even discussed the idea. Apparently it was either so widely accepted that it didn’t need discussion, or so patently ridiculous that the experts never even considered it. After about a half-hour of fruitless effort, I landed on the site of the United States Department of Energy, who did feel it necessary to comment on the issue (www.eere.energy.gov/erec/factsheets/thermo.html).

Based on years of research, they concluded that “the fuel required to reheat a building to a comfortable temperature is roughly equal to the fuel saved as the building drops to the lower temperature. You save fuel between the time that the temperature stabilizes at the lower level and the next time heat is needed.” In other words, the colder you let your house get when you aren’t there, the more energy you save.

They also dealt with a related misconception. That is, the higher you set the thermostat, the more heat the furnace will put out. Thus, if you want the house to warm up from 15°C to 20°C as rapidly as possible, you should set the thermostat several degrees higher. However, since the furnace will have to work harder, you risk damaging it.

Also not true. “Furnaces put out the same amount of heat no matter how high the thermostat is set. The variable is how long it must stay on to reach the set temperature.”

In short, by turning the heat off completely when you leave the house, you save valuable energy with no damage to the furnace. The big danger lies in not turning it off completely.

As noted earlier, most common misconceptions do little harm. Here are some of my favorite misconceptions. It is up to you to determine how important or insignificant they may be in your own life. If you have doubts, do some research.

NUTRITION

Eating at night does not cause weight gain. It is total calories that count. If your body requires 2000 calories a day for normal functioning, then if you take in 2100 calories you will gain weight and if you take in 1900 calories you will lose weight. Many diet plans recommend eating small portions throughout the day to avoid over-eating in the evening, which will almost certainly result in your taking in more calories than your body needs.

Fasting does not help rid the body of toxins. Fasting may give the perception of “cleaning out” impurities, but there is no scientific evidence that this actually happens. It is more a question of mind over stomach.

“Low fat” does not mean low calories. Low-fat foods often have the same or more calories than regular versions, especially for fat-free products. To maintain flavor, fat-free foods often contain add sugar. Read the label.

Olive oil does not have fewer calories than other oils. Like the others, olive oil is 100 percent fat and has essentially the same energy content, about 120 calories per tablespoon. “Light” olive oil refers to the flavor, not the calories.

Fresh vegetables are not necessarily more nutritious than frozen ones. Just-picked vegetables do indeed have more vitamins and minerals, but they gradually lose their nutrients the longer they are stored. Vegetables flash-frozen very soon after picking do not lose their nutrients. So if you prefer fresh vegetables, eat them immediately; otherwise eat frozen.

Searing a cut of meat does not “seal in” its juices; it may actually cause the meat to somewhat dry out. Searing consists of briefly cooking both sides of the meat at a very high temperature, then reducing the temperature to complete the cooking process. Searing meat converts surface sugars and amino acids into a caramelized crust, which enriches its flavor. That is its purpose.

HISTORY

Viking warriors did not wear horned helmets. Horned helmets were used in Celtic religious rituals. Because they could have easily got caught on weapons, such helmets were not unsuitable for combat.

Christopher Columbus did not try to prove that the world is round. Sailors and navigators of the time already knew that the world was not flat, as did the ancient Greeks. Columbus’s objective was to find a shortcut to India, which turned out to be much farther away than he had calculated. When he landed in the Americas, he labeled the native populations “Indians” because he thought he had reached his goal.

The 13 American colonies did not become independent of Britain in 1776. This was the year the colonies declared their intention to achieve full separation from the mother country. However, the War of Independence (American Revolution), which started in 1775, continued until the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The United States of America officially came into being as a federal union in 1789.

The words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the American Constitution. The phrase was first used by Thomas Jefferson to reassure religious minorities that they would be protected under the Bill of Rights, the collective name for the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. The First Amendment actually says: ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Napoleon Bonaparte was not abnormally short. At his death in 1821, his height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches. However, these were French feet and inches, corresponding to today’s 5 feet 6.5 inches (1.69 meters). Napoleon was in fact slightly taller than an average Frenchman of his time. Most historians believe that his nickname “the little corporal” (le petit caporal) had nothing to do with his height.

King Christian X of Denmark did not wear a yellow Star of David during World War II in defiance of a Nazi edict that his Jewish subjects would have to do so. Jews in Denmark never did wear the Star of David. It is true that the Danes were very active in helping Jews flee the country to avoid persecution and deportation.

Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly non-stop across Atlantic Ocean; he was the first man to do it solo. The first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight by a team of aviators was achieved by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in June 1919. Because of the incredible endurance needed to achieve the feat, Lindbergh’s solo flight in 1927, which lasted 33 hours and 32 minutes, made him an international hero.

ASTRONOMY

The Great Wall of China is not the only man-made object visible from the Moon. According to the Apollo astronauts, who went there between 1969 and 1972, no man-made object is visible from the Moon. The misconception originated from a conjecture by astronomers decades earlier that if any man-made object could be seen from the Moon, it would have to be the Great Wall, but it isn’t true.

The “dark side of the moon” is not dark. All parts of the Moon’s surface are illuminated by the Sun roughly half of the time. The phrase uses the word “dark” in the sense of “unknown” or “obscure”, because the dark side is never visible from Earth.

A meteor is not hot when it lands on Earth. It appears to be burning as it flashes through the night sky only because friction with the atmosphere vaporizes its outer layers of ice. Since its frozen interior does not have time to heat up, when a meteor hits the ground it may even be covered with frost.

Polaris, the North Star, is not the brightest star in the northern hemisphere. Sirius is. Sirius has an “apparent magnitude” of ?1.47 (the lower the number, the brighter the star). Polaris has an apparent magnitude of just 1.97, meaning that nearly 50 other stars outshine it. Polaris is so important because it is almost permanently fixed directly above the north geographic pole, so you can always determine which direction is north by locating it in the night sky.

PHYSIOLOGY

The human tongue is not divided into four distinct areas of taste (sweet, salty, sour, bitter). Taste buds can detect all these taste components all over the tongue. The original “tongue map” was based on a misinterpretation of a poorly conducted experiment carried out in Germany in 1901.

People do not use only 10 percent of their brain. While it is true that only a small minority of neurons are active at any given time, the inactive neurons also play a role in controlling body functions and intelligence.

Shaving does not cause hair to grow back thicker, coarser, and darker. We get this impression because uncut hair has tapered ends. Freshly cut hair does not tapered ends, making it seem thicker and coarser to the touch. It may appear darker because uncut hair is often bleached by the sun. When cut, the lighter top-layer is removed, revealing the darker layer underneath.

Hair and fingernails do not continue growing after death. When a person dies, the skin dries and shrinks away from the base of hairs and fingernails, giving the appearance of growth.

An exceptionally high proportion of body heat is not lost through the head. Although a poorly conducted military study once claimed that “40 to 45 percent of body heat” is dissipated in this way, more recent studies have shown that loss from the head is completely proportionate to heat lost elsewhere in the body.

BIOLOGY

Exposure to rain or low temperatures does not increase the likelihood of catching a cold. Colds are caused by a virus; experiments have failed to produce any evidence that short-term exposure increases susceptibility to infection. The rise in the number of colds during winter is more likely to be due behavioral changes, notably increased time spent indoors with people who already have colds.

Humans cannot catch warts from toads or any other animal. The bumps on toads are not warts. Warts on human skin are caused by viruses that are specific to humans only (Human papillomavirus).

Lemmings (a type of small rodent) do not engage in suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. Occasionally they fall off cliffs when venturing into unknown territory, but this is unintentional.

Bats are not blind. Most use echolocation, a type of sonar, to augment their vision. However, all species of bats have eyes and are perfectly capable of seeing.

An earthworm does not become two worms when cut in half. When cut, only the front half, where the mouth is, will survive; the other half will dry out or starve to death.

It is not true that more than half of all humans who ever lived are alive today. Or at least it is hard to substantiate this claim. Other than biblical references, there is no definite starting point for the human race. Even adopting conservative values for the start of humanity, population experts generally agree that significantly less than half of all the people who have ever lived at currently alive.

OPHTHALOMOLGY

Using computers does not damage eyesight. Ophthalmologists say that working on a computer for long periods may cause the eye to tire and give the feeling of eyestrain. But the eye is not damaged.

Eating carrots does not improve eyesight. Carrots are rich in vitamin A, which is essential for sight, but so do many other foods. A well-balanced diet, with or without carrots, generally provides all the vitamin A necessary for good vision.

People with weak eyes should not necessarily avoid reading fine print. The idea that the eye is like a muscle is incorrect; it is more like a camera. A camera does not wear out faster because it is used to photograph small objects.

EVOLUTION

The theory of evolution does not try to explain the origin of life. It is concerned only with how species have changed over time, and thus presupposes that life already existed.

The theory of evolution does not claim that humans evolved from apes or monkeys. Rather, it says that humans and other simians (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, baboons, etc.) all have a common ancestor that lived some 7 million years ago. In other words, simians are like the branches of a tree, all starting from a single trunk but then going their separate ways.

The theory of evolution does not claim that changes in species must necessarily take millions of years to show their effects. Rapid evolution has been observed many times both in controlled laboratory experiments and in nature.

The theory of evolution does not proclaim “the survival of the fittest”, i.e. certain species are considered to be “strong” are destined to eradicate other species considered to be “weak”. Any species whose members are capable of reproducing themselves before dying is considered to be “fit”. In other words, the species will survive despite any weakness.

In science, the word “theory” does not indicate doubt. On the contrary, it denotes a well-defined set of principles that help explain and make predication about occurrences in the physical world. A hunch or suspicion still to be tested is called a “hypothesis”. Thus, the theory of evolution, theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, and a host of other theories are all considered to have scientific validity.

GENERAL SCIENCE

Electricity does not flow through a wire at the speed of light, if by “electricity” you mean “electrons”. Electrons are negatively charged subatomic particles. When an electric current flows in a wire, the electrons barely move, but the electrical impulse (electrical signal) travels from one end of the wire to the other at blinding speed. It is roughly like what happens when you tap one end of the spring. The impulse is seen almost immediately at the other end; however, the individual coils of the spring stay pretty much where they are.

The blue color of lakes and oceans is not a reflection of the blue sky. When water molecules encounter light, they absorb red frequencies more easily than blue frequencies. Blue is reflected, so this is what we see. Because the effect is small, the blue color becomes evident only when the water is fairly deep. Shallow water appears colorless.

Airplanes flying long distances do not take less time going west-to-east than east-to-west because of the Earth’s rotation. The effect is caused by jet streams and trade winds, which usually flow in an easterly direction.

The belief that there is no gravity in space is not correct. Astronauts float and experience other aspects of weightlessness because they are in orbit. Scientists call this effect “microgravity” or “simulated zero gravity”. A similar sensation is briefly experienced during skydiving and the rapid descent of an elevator. Gravity exists everywhere in the universe, although in some places it may be very slight and difficult to measure.

A “north wind” does not blow north. It is called a north wind because it comes from the north; it actually blows south. The same is true of all other winds. A “south wind” comes from the south and blows north; an “east wind” comes from the east and blows west, etc.

The frequency and intensity of earthquakes are not increasing. At least, the people who study these things say so. What may be true is that their destructive power is increasing because, due to world population growth, more and more people are living and constructing buildings where earthquakes happen.

RELIGION

The Bible does not say that the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was an apple. It simple says they ate the “fruit of the tree”. The belief that it was an apple probably comes from the similarity of the Latin words malus = “bad” and malum = “apple”. Moreover, until as late as the 17th century, in English “apple” was a generic term for all kinds of fruits other than berries.

The Bible does not say that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. In fact, very little is said about her at all. That she was a prostitute is an interpretation made by the sixth century Pope Gregory the First.

The term “immaculate conception” does not refer to the conception of Jesus by the Virgin Mary, but rather to the Roman Catholic teaching that Mary herself was conceived without original sin.

“Allah” does not refer to a Muslim god different from the Christian one. It is simply the Arabic word for God. Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews also refer to God as “Allah”.

The word “jihad” does not mean a “holy war against Christians”, but simply a struggle or striving. One can have an internal jihad, a family jihad, or a religious jihad, which does not necessarily mean doing violence to non-Muslims. Likewise, “crusade” does not mean a “holy war against Muslims”, but a struggle or striving, such as a crusade against child abuse, a crusade against pornography, a crusade against poverty, etc.

A fatwa is not a death sentence issued by a Muslim cleric, but rather an interpretation of Islamic law issued by an Islamic scholar. This popular misconception probably results from the death sentence pronounced in 1989 as a fatwa on author Salman Rushdie, whose book The Satanic Verses was considered to be blasphemous.

Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press with movable type; these were already used in China centuries before. He was the first European to use a press with movable type, which he probably invented without any knowledge of what the Chinese had already done.

Thomas Edison did not invent the electric light; the idea was already well known. What he did was invent a gas-filled bulb that lasted long enough to make electric lighting commercially viable.

Henry Ford did not invent the automobile; rather he invented a method for manufacturing them at dramatically reduced cost. Before Ford, automobiles were only for the rich. Ford made them available to everyone.

MISCELLANEOUS MISCONCEPTIONS

The “black box” used to help determine the cause of airplane crashes is not black. It is bright orange to make it easier to find and recover from a crash site.

A black belt is not a sign that the holder has achieved supreme mastery of a martial art. There are several levels of black belts. While a black belt signifies advanced achievement, it is still possible for one holder to be more (or less) proficient than another.

The term “Romance language” is not derived from the word “romance”, meaning a romantic relationship. It derives from the Latin “Romanus,” meaning “Roman”.

Frankenstein was not a monster. Victor Frankenstein was in fact the creator of the monster in the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley. Even the monster wasn’t a monster. As described in the book, he was rather gentle, but forced to ferociously defend himself against people who attacked him because of his frightening appearance.

A cold nose does not signify that a dog is healthy. Dogs frequently lick their nose, which why it is wet. Evaporation of this moisture in turn makes the nose cold. Thus, a dog sick with fever can still have a cold, wet nose.

Philip Yaffe is a former reporter/feature writer with The Wall Street Journal and a marketing communication consultant. He currently teaches a course in good writing and good speaking in Brussels, Belgium. His recently published book In the “I” of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional is available from Story Publishers in Ghent, Belgium (storypublishers.be) and Amazon (amazon.com).

For further information, contact:

Philip Yaffe

Brussels, Belgium

Tel: +32 (0)2 660 0405

Philip Yaffe is a former writer with The Wall Street Journal and international marketing communication consultant. Now semi-retired, he teaches courses in persuasive communication in Brussels, Belgium. Because his clients use English as a second or third language, his approach to writing and public speaking is somewhat different from other communication coaches. He is the author of In the ?I? of the Storm: the Simple Secrets of Writing & Speaking (Almost) like a Professional. Contact: phil.yaffe@yahoo.com.

Interview with Eduardo Galeano

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:40:40 +0000

INQUIRIES ON PARADIGM

Interview with Eduardo Galeano

By Dr. Jorge Majfud

Tranlated by Dr. Bruce Campbell

I. Past

II. Presente

III. Future

I. Past

Jorge Majfud: A humanist vision considers history to be a human product, which is to say, a product of the freedom of its individuals and the diverse groups that have enacted it and interpreted it. An anti-humanist vision asserts that, on the contrary, those individuals and those groups are the result of history itself, and their freedom is an illusion. If you will permit me an artificial restriction within this possible spectrum, where do you situate yourself?

Eduardo Galeano: Based on what I have experienced in my life, I have the impression that we make the history that makes us. When the history that we make comes out crooked, or is usurped by the few among us who rule, we blame it on history.

J. M.: In this view there is no room for materialist determinism or for any kind of religious fatalism…

E. G.: Fatalisms are comforting, they allow you to sleep soundly, fate is inscribed in the stars, history moves along by itself, don’t be bitter, one must either accept it or accept it. Fatalisms lie, because if life is not an adventure in freedom, someone should come and explain to me whether living is worth the trouble. But notice: the enlightened ones lie also, the select few who are attributed the power to change reality by touching it with their magic wand: and if reality does not obey me, it doesn’t deserve me.

J. M.: If the time of modern revolutions, that is, of abrupt and violent revolutions has passed, is it progression or resistance that is the better alternative in our times?

E. G.: Who knows how many worlds there are in the world, and how many times there are in time. History walks with our feet, but sometimes it walks very slowly, and sometimes it seems motionless. At any rate, when the changes come from below, from down in the depths, sooner or later they find their way, at their own pace. From below, I mean, from the foot, like in the Zitarrosa song. The only things made from above are wells.

J. M.: Your latest book Espejos (Mirrors) represents an effort that is both creative and archeological and covers a vast geographic and temporal space. Which periods of history do you believe would win first prize for cruelty and injustice?

E. G.: There are too many favorites in that championship.

J. M.: Okay, more to the point, could you sum up cruelty in an image, in a situation that you have experienced?

E. G.: It happened to me years ago, in a truck that was crossing the upper Paraná. Except for me, everyone was from that area. Nobody spoke. We were packed closely together, in the bed of the truck, bouncing around. Next to me, a very poor woman, with a baby in her arms. The baby was burning up with fever, crying. The woman just said that she needed a doctor, that somewhere there had to be a doctor. And finally we arrived somewhere, I don’t know how many hours had gone by, the baby hadn’t cried for a long time. I helped that woman get down off the truck. When I picked up the baby, I saw that it was dead. The killer who had committed this cruelty was an entire system of power, and was neither in prison nor travelling around on rickety old trucks.

J. M.: With memories like that one we should stop here. But the world keeps turning. Do you believe that the pre-Colombian past has survived so many years of colonization and modernization, enough to define a Latin American way of being, of feeling, and even of thinking?

E. G.: For centuries, the gods have come, who knows how, from the American past and from the African jungle and from everywhere. Many of those gods travel with other names and use fake passports, because their religions are called superstitions and they continue to be condemned to the underground.

II. Present

J. M.: Are we witnessing the end of capitalism, of a paradigm based on consumerism and financial success, or is this simply one more crisis which will end up strengthening the system itself, the same hegemonic culture?

E. G.: I frequently receive invitations to attend the burial of capitalism. We know quite well, however, that this system - which privatizes its profits but kindly socializes its losses, and as if that weren’t enough convinces us that that is philanthropy - will live more than seven lives. To a great degree, capitalism feeds off of the discrediting of its alternatives. The word socialism, for example, has been emptied of meaning, by the bureaucracy that used it in the name of the people and by the social democracy that in its name modernized capitalism’s look. We know that this capitalist system is managing quite well to survive the catastrophes that it unleashes. We don’t know, on the other hand, how many lives its main victim – the planet we inhabit, squeezed to the last drop – will be able to live. Where will we move, when the planet is left without water, without land, without air? The company Lunar International is already selling plots of land on the moon. At the end of 2008, the Russian multimillionaire Roman Abramovich made a gift of a little plot to his fiancee.

J. M.: Perhaps he intends to be the first man to give a piece of the moon to his wife, which turns out to be a kind of romantic capitalism. Do you believe that if China, for example, had a hegemonic economy it would quickly become a new empire, colonialist and dominating like any other empire?

E. G.: If I were a professional prophet, I would die of hunger. I’m not even right in soccer, and that is something I know something about. All I can say to you is what I can see: China is putting into practice a successful combination of political dictatorship, in the old communist style, with an economy that functions at the service of the capitalist world market. China can thus provide an extremely cheap workforce to U.S. enterprises like Wal Mart, which bans unions.

J. M.: Speaking of which, on the most recent “black Friday,” the one day of the year that the large retail chains in the U.S. sell at cost, an avalanche of shoppers couldn’t wait for the doors to be opened at one of those Wal Marts and it ran over an employee. The man was crushed to death… Despite all of this absurdity, can we think that humanity finds itself in an improved state of individual rights and of collective conscience? What is best about our times?

E. G.: In the 20th century, justice was sacrificed in the name of freedom, and freedom was sacrificed in the name of justice. Our time is now the 21st century, and the best it has to offer is the challenge it presents: it invites us to fight to assist the reunion of freedom and justice. They want to live real close to each other, back to back.

J. M.: Can we compare the appearance of the Internet with the revolution produced by the printing press in the 15th century?

E. G.: I have no idea, but it is important to remember that the printing press was not born in the 15th century. The Chinese had invented it two centuries earlier. In reality, the three inventions that made the Renaissance possible were all Chinese inventions: the printing press, the compass, and gunpowder. I don’t know if today education has improved, but before we used to learn a universal history reduced to the history of Europe. From the Middle East, nothing or almost nothing. Not a word about China, nothing about India. And about Africa, we only knew what professor Tarzan taught us, and he was never there. And about the American past, about the pre-Colombian world, some little folkoric thing, a few colored feathers… and ciao.

J. M.: What is the greatest danger of technological progress in communication?

E. G.: In communication, and in everything else. Machines are no saints, but they are not to blame for what we do with them. The greatest danger lies in the possibility that the computer can program us, just like the automobile drives us. With frightening ease, we become instruments of our instruments.

J. M.: As a writer and as a reader, what kind of reading occupies most of your time these days?

E. G.: I read everything, starting with the walls that accompany my steps through the streets of the cities.

J. M.: Are cruelty and injustice the greatest provocations for the literature of Eduardo Galeano?

E. G.: No. If that were the case, I would have already fallen ill from unmitigated sadness. Luckily I am a busybody, curious by birth, and I am always seeking out the third bank of the river, that mysterious place where humor and horror meet.

J. M.: Why do you think our times will be remembered in the centuries to come?

E. G.: Will be remembered? Will there be centuries to come? May God hear you, and if God is deaf, may the Devil hear you.

III. Futuro

J. M.: Eduardo, do you believe the world will move in the direction of a greater balance of its geographical, social and cultural divisions or, on the contrary, are we condemned to repeat the same forms of what we today consider physical and moral violence?

E. G.: Condemned, we are not. Fate is a challenge, although at first sight it might appear to be a curse.

J. M.: Does an improvement of our present lie mainly in the deepening of humanist values from the European tradition, or in a revaluation of a lost origin in the “peripheral” nations?

E. G.: The European tradition is not enough. We Americans are the children of many mothers. Europe yes, but there are also other mothers. And not only the Americans. All the little humans, everybody is much more than what they believe they are. But the earthly rainbow will not shine, in all its brilliance, as long is it continues to be mutilated by racism, machismo, militarism, elitism and all those isms that deny us the fullness of our diversity. And by the way, it is fitting to clarify that the humanist values of the European tradition were developed while Europe was exterminating indigenous people in the Americas and selling human flesh in Africa. John Locke, the philosopher of freedom, was a shareholder in a slave-trading enterprise.

J. M.: Yes, somewhat like the imperial democracies, from ancient Athens to the United States. But does that mean that history always repeats itself?

E. G.: She doesn’t want to repeat herself, she doesn’t like that one bit, but very often we oblige her to. To give you a very current example, there are parties who come into the government promising a program of the left, and they wind up repeating what the right wing did. Why don’t they let the right continue doing it, since they have the experience? History grows bored, and democracy is discredited, when we are invited to choose between one and the same.

J. M.: What role do “non-organic” intellectuals fulfill in society today? Do they continue to be, at least a few of them, a critical and provocative force?

E. G.: I believe that writing is not a useless passion. But that generalization, “intellectuals,” organico or non-organic, doesn’t look much like the real world. It takes all kinds to make the world. In my case, I can tell you that I work with words, that I am totally useless otherwise, and that is the only thing that I do more or less well, and that it seems to me, based on my own and other’s experience, that the act of reading is a secret, and sometimes fertile, ceremony of communion. Anyone who reads something that is really worth the trouble, does not read with impunity. Reading one of those books that breathe when you put them to your ear, does not leave you untouched: it changes you, even if only a little bit, it integrates something to you, something that you did not know or had not imagined, and it invites you to seek, to ask questions. And more, still: sometimes it can even help you to discover the true meaning of words betrayed by the dictionary of our times. What more could a critical consciousness want?

J. M.: But contemporary writers tend to avoid that word, “intellectuals.” Why?

E. G.: I will answer for myself, not in the name of “writers,” which is also a dubious generalization. I write wanting to speak and express myself in a language that issentipensante (feeling-thinking), a very precise word taught to me by fishermen of the Colombian coast of the Caribean sea. And for that reason, precisely for that reason, I don’t like at all to be called an intellectual. I feel like I am thereby turned into a bodiless head, which is also an uncomfortable situation, and that my reason and emotion are being divorced from one another. One supposes that an intellectual is someone capable of knowing, but I prefer someone capable of comprehending. A cultured person is not someone who accumulates more knowledge, because then there will be nobody more cultured than a computer. A cultured person is someone who knows how to listen, to listen to others and listen to the thousand and one voices of the natural world of which we are a part. In order to speak, I listen. I write on a round-trip journey, I pick up words that I return, stated in my method and manner, to the world from which they come.

J. M.: Speaking of which, what is your narrative technique, that is, your writing habits and behaviors?

E. G.: I have no schedules. I don’t make myself write. In Santiago, Cuba, an old drummer, who played like the gods, taught me: “I play” – he told me – “when my hand itches.” And I paid attention. If I don’t itch, I don’t write. In literature, like in soccer, when the pleasure turns into duty, it becomes

something pretty similar to slave labor. The books write me, they grow inside of me, and every night I fall asleep thanking them, because they allow me to believe that I am the author. And having said this I will point out to you that I write each page many times, that I scratch out, I suppress, I re-write, I tear up, I start over again, and all that is part of the great happiness of feeling that what I say is similar to, and sometimes very similar to, what my pages want to say.

J. M.: Your books after the military dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina, after exile, are different in style. Or perhaps they deepen one characteristic: your gaze continues being that of a non-conformist rebel, but your voice becomes more lyrical. If I remember correctly, it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said that a writer’s technique transmits his conception of the world. How would you define your style? Does it reflect your perception of the world or, perhaps, your aspirations about it, or is style something accidental, a form of doing things that comes from a history of aesthetics, from an influence of the adolescent years?

E. G.: My style is the result of many years of writing and erasing. Juan Rulfo used to tell me, showing me one of those pencils that you now almost never see: “I write with the graphite in the front, but I write more with the back part, where the eraser is.” That is what I do, or I try to do. I try to always say more with less.

J. M.: One common element of committed literature, of the revolutionary utopias up until the seventies, from the years prior to the dictatorships in South America, seems to be happiness. As an example to illustrate this we could make an exhibit of photographs of the severe faces of the Pinochets, on one side, and of the smiling faces of the Che Guevaras on the other. Does a connection exist between the “aesthetics of sadness” of the literature of the 20th century and society’s conservative forces? In what degree is happiness, the Epicureanism of which Amerigo Vespucci spoke with reference to a certain image of native Americans, subersive?

E. G.: I will return to the Colombian coast, and I will tell you that there, the worst insult is amargao (a bitter person). Nothing worse can be said to you. And not without reason, because at the end of the day, there is nothing in the world that doesn’t deserve to be laughed at. If the literature of denunciation is not, at the same time, a literature of celebration, it distances itself from life as lived and puts its readers to sleep. Its readers are supposed to burn with indignation, but they are nodding off instead. It frequently occurs that the literature that claims to speak to the people, only speaks to those who are already persuaded. Without taking any risks, it seems more like masturbation than the act of love, even though according to what I have been told the act of love is better, because one gets to know people. Contradiction moves history, and the literature that truly stimulates the energy of social change helps us to find the secret suns that every night conceals, that human feat of laughing in the face of the evidence. The Judeo-Christian heritage, which so praises pain, does not help much. If I remember correctly, in the entire Bible not a single laugh is heard. The world is a vale of tears, the ones who suffer the most are the chosen ones who ascend to Heaven.

J. M.: How do you imagine the world in fifty years?

E. G.: At my age, I imagine that in fifty years I will no longer be here. As you can see, I have a prodigious imagination.

J. M.: Onetti once said that he wrote for himself. Would Galeano write if he had the bad fortune to be the sole survivor of a world-wide catastrophe?

E. G.: The sole survivor? Uy! I would die of boredom. Perhaps I would write anyway, because I have the vice, but writing for nobody is worse than dancing with your own sister. Onetti got mad at me one night when I committed a juvenile insolence. He told me that, that he wrote for himself, and I proposed to carry to the Post Office for him those letters for Juan Carlos Onetti, Gonzalo Ramírez Street, Montevideo, etc., etc. He got pissed off. He got pissed off because he was lying, and he knew it quite well. Anyone who publishes what they write, writes for others.

J. M.: What would you do differently if you had the experience and opportunity to do it all over again? What does Eduardo Galeano regret?

E. G.: I have no regrets. I am also the sum of all the times I put my foot in my mouth.

Translated by Dr. Bruce Campbell

January 2009

Jorge Majfud (1969?) is a Uruguayan writer.He was born in Tacuaremb?, Uruguay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Majfud

Winston Churchill?s Famous War Cry Is Fully Applicable for Today’s Entrepreneurs

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:38:23 +0000

“What Is Our Aim? Victory, Victory at all Costs..!

Winston Churchill’s Famous War Cry Is Fully Applicable for Today’s Entrepreneurs

Arguably, the courage and moral leadership provided to the western world by Winston Churchill was the key instrument essential to keeping World War 2 from ending early, and ever so badly for the cause of freedom. The ability to use words as a tool for effecting an outcome was never so vividly displayed, before or since. A demoralized and near beaten people took heart, did not quit in the face of overwhelming losses and turned an imminent route into ultimate victory. This lesson is vital for entrepreneurs to apply to their struggle to gain traction and successfully compete in contemporary markets roiled with competition.

Churchill had spent most of his career as a maligned backbencher in the British Parliament. A prodigious writer, journalist, historian and social commentator, Sir Winston had railed for years about the poor preparation and fecklessness the British military and political castes in the face of the largest, most obvious tyranny in history, Nazism. He was the butt of jokes. Called Sir Whiney. The power structure in Britain had buried this most brilliant of strategic thinkers and visionaries.

Nevertheless, Winston Churchill had the confidence of his convictions and more importantly, a rational, fully rounded understanding of history and the lessons to be learned from studying the past. He studied history and learned from it. He did not just hope that things would go well, or entertain delusions that reason could trump fanaticism. Churchill’s great strength was his crystal clear view of the reality his world faced.

“”What is our aim?…Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror; victory, however long the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival”. Churchill spoke these words to the British House of Commons on May 13, 1940, after being recalled as Prime Minister, a last gasp hope given little chance of success. At the time the German Luftwaffe was bombing London nightly. German U-Boats had closed shipping lanes, thus disrupting delivery of crucial supplies of war material. The United States was isolationist and almost 20 months away from entering the war; and only then, after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. This small island nation, with almost no natural resources was essentially surrounded. France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, indeed all of western Europe was directly controlled by Hitler’s Nazi hordes. Great Britain’s future seemed dim at best.

This famous quote, heard at the time by the British public while hiding in bomb shelters and in darkened homes over primitive crystal radio sets, provided a turning point for the population. Did the nightly bombings stop? Was food more readily available? Were the shipping lanes more open? Was the Royal Air Force or the Royal Grenadiers any closer to stopping the Nazi’s and returning to the European mainland? The answer to each of these questions was an obvious: NO!

However, Winston Churchill’s daily chats, broadcast into British homes and pubs, connected with the core of the British spirit. Slowly confidence returned. Resolve was rebuilt. Fight replaced “Peace with Honor” and cowardice. The nation was paying for a generation of neglect, but a corner had been turned and a proud people, with a luminous history, now believed that victory could be earned. It would be a long fight, costly in blood and treasure. The vivid word pictures painted nightly by Churchill motivated an inner spirit that had been slaked by the comforts of modern life and a fantasy that wild-men and terrorists could, or ever would be rational.

Every entrepreneur, no matter the level of success attained, can apply the lessons of history to their quest. Quit and your opportunity dies. Vision is an essential element of success. If you are outworked, failure is assured. The heights to be scaled will be very high, but the reward when the summit is conquered will be very sweet. Obstacles are many, difficult and ever changing. The odds are stacked against success. If it were easy every one would be a success, and a look around any environment provides clear proof that success is elusive for many.

Winston Churchill was the ultimate entrepreneurial leader. Initially, words were virtually his only weapon. His ability to motivate and re-activate spirit was crucial in Britain hanging on, fighting back and finally allying with the United States to turn the tide and win freedoms greatest victory.

The ability to communicate a vision was crucially important to Churchill’s success, and is equally important to every budding entrepreneur’s opportunity to overcome the naturally occurring hurdles imposed by a capitalist marketplace. Drive, belief, passion, courage and creativity are not just seminar or self-help jargon words. They are the building blocks for success that have been essential to win at war, business, politics and life.

I encourage my students and clients to study history. The sins of the past can be more readily overcome if we know what those sins actually were. Sir Winston Churchill is the alpha example of a pro-active leader, facing seemingly insurmountable odds and overcoming with pluck and grit. Each of us, entrepreneur or not, have much to learn from his glorious example.

Geoff Ficke has been a serial entrepreneur for almost 50 years. As a small boy, earning his spending money doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, he learned the value of selling himself, offering service and value for money.

After putting himself through the University of Kentucky (B.A. Broadcast Journalism, 1969) and serving in the United States Marine Corp, Mr. Ficke commenced a career in the cosmetic industry. After rising to National Sales Manager for Vidal Sassoon Hair Care at age 28, he then launched a number of ventures, including Rubigo Cosmetics, Parfums Pierre Wulff Paris, Le Bain Couture and Fashion Fragrance.

Geoff Ficke and his consulting firm, Duquesa Marketing, Inc. (www.duquesamarketing.com) has assisted businesses large and small, domestic and international, entrepreneurs, inventors and students in new product development, capital formation, licensing, marketing, sales and business plans and successful implementation of his customized strategies. He is a Senior Fellow at the Page Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Business School, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Memories Of My Grandmother

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:36:50 +0000

Part One As for myself; I am 82 years of age and so much time has passed between that winter in which started me to being what I always knew myself capable of being which is a man of internal fortitude. It seems strange to me that the number of years separating me from the joy and love I learnt of from my grandmother are not so many but the events that have transpired since suffice to make it all seem as if in another lifetime. My grandmother was my great love as I was hers for it was she who out of desperation for warmth let me see what my age forbade me from experiencing in a way that was not incest even if she was my grandmother. She was my grandfather’s wife and by virtue of that position I considered her to be my grandmother even if she was not my father’s mother who in fact died without my ever knowing her or ever seeing neither photograph nor painting of her. Maria Anna Grekowa was her full name and she was born in Russia (in the year 1900) before it became the Soviet Union that took away everything she and her family had worked so hard to earn as it was the “October Revolution” that brought not only the Soviets to power but caused her family’s exodus form their country of birth. How much her family had lost I could imagine as she often though with neither a sense of loss nor boastful intensions did she talk about those majestic parties that had been held in her family mansion near Saint Petersburg. Grand her life must have been I thought to myself as her tales created paintings in my mind of the stories it was bringing to life for hers were such colorful descriptions that it was as if she were telling an adventure we had both shared. Once she even told me that she would not have discussed such matters with me if she felt that I did not come from the same kind of family like hers which put so much value on those things that make one noble. With regards to Maria’s relationship with my family it started in the year 1928 (the same year I was born in and the year of her arrival in America) when John Smith, a close friend of my grandfather introduced her to him in the hope she might become our governess which our house was very much in need of specially since my mother had died in the act of bringing me in to the world. By the time Maria was thirty years of age she had spent some time; first living in France and then in England where she first got and held on to her post as governess for three years until she met John Smith who convinced her to come to America where he knew of a family which was more in need of her and had better financial means to provide her with higher wages. In reality it can be said that John Smith was indirectly responsible for her ever reaching the United States as he was the one to convince her that her talents as governess would not only be more appreciated by a family like mine; not only in the monetary manner but also in every other. He told her that my family had suffered a great loss as my mother had died in child birth leaving not only a child motherless but a house in disarray with need for a refined lady’s touch. It was with this knowledge that she accepted to cross the Atlantic to a country which she had never had the slightest inclination of visiting, always believing it to lack that grace she had known in her native Russia and all the other places in Europe she visited. Looks wise I describe her with fear that my adoration for her might not permit me to see her with neutral eyes but how else might her beauty impact on my being? She as far as my memory takes me, had hair a red as fire which she kept long till her dying day always wearing it tied up and never releasing it unless it was in her own privacy or that of whom she wished to share with. It was this curly shoulder length hair that was my delight to gaze upon and run my fingers through when I was a child and later when our relationship turned carnal. Hers was not only hair; for she had a face that had all the features I had in years of childhood always associated with motherly affection. Eyes, a light green which told me how much of me she could see and this above all was what made her face special to me as the rest though pleasing to the eye with a nose and mouth that only fit to match her eyes were mere companions in the delightful portrait that was she. Maria’s body however was one that I did not take a notice to at least till adolescence when the opposite gender was what preoccupied my mind for at first she was my mother in the way she was the one I looked to play the role. Naturally I was always made aware that she was not the one who had given birth to me but it was hard for me see this as a factor that should dissuade me from thinking of her in the manner other children my age thought of the person who took care of them. She despite all her motherly care perhaps for the reason she was not entered my eyes through a whole new light when puberty approached me as her tall slender body became more apparent. How much added worthiness did those shapely mounds gain when my age arrived at the point where I was able to appreciate them along with the rest of her womanly features which contrasted mine so nicely. Naturally it was not Maria who had changed but my perception of her given the development my body was undergoing due to the period of my life I found myself in. She at that point in my life had become a woman as she had also become one to my father who started a courtship of her that would end up in marriage. Now, if it is about myself that I must speak of I will say this, my name is Tom Faust and I am average in height standing at 5 feet 6 inches. This being a height I reached at an early age in life and never went beyond with weight that is well proportioned. I really can’t say much about my face as it neither provides me pride nor shame as I do not consider my looks to be outstanding in anyway but what I will describe is the vague details such as my eyes which are blue, nose which is not straight but small with lips that are just that. With regards to my family it was my father, grandfather and grandmother who were the ones I grew up with at least till the age of 14 when during the summer of 41 my grandmother died leaving a sadness that my grandfather never really got over. Financially speaking most people would classify my family as being wealthy though we really were not as much as most people who saw our estate thought. It being true we did have more than most or enough to have household servants but we never really did recover to the monetary position we held before the “great depression”. My life began with the death of my mother I am sad to say but despite this I can not claim to have had a sad childhood as it was spent in a big house in the country that allowed me when ever I was not being occupied with school work or the many chores my grandfather kept me busy with to live out my childhood fantasies. How many an hour would I spend on the lake rowing the boat my father gave me believing I was traveling the world looking for adventure. So much did I experience in this house that it would be hard to imagine that my childhood could have taken place any where else under any other set of circumstances. There is not much I can say about my mother in the way she died before I had a chance to even see her with eyes that remember let alone spend any time with but I can not help but wonder when confronted with the memory of the many pictures I saw of her how she must of loved me. She gave birth to me and lost her life doing so knowing their was risk which she faced bravely for me or perhaps because she wanted a part of her to out life her. Who knows but what I do hold certain in my knowledge is that I loved her even though I never met her. It was only through what my father and grandfather (not her father) that I learnt of how she took care of the family and helped it along that we were able to not loose all that we had in the way so many families had during the depression. It actually seems strange to me when I look back on how my mind associated Maria with the stories I had heard of my mother in a way that made them seem as if they had been about her. I of course knew it was not she who was being described but still it was something my mind could not avoid doing for it was she who was playing the role of my mother. My life was for the most part joyful, living in a big house in Long Island with my grandparents, father and Maria or at least till my grandmother died of a cause I was never informed of in the summer of 1941. It was not that my family was foreign to loss but my grandmother’s death transformed almost all in a way that made my father see that he should find another mate in life as what sense was their in living out the rest of ones life in mourning. My father had basically thrown himself in to his work and the family business since the death of his wife as much for the sake of having less time to think of his wife’s death than as a way of increasing the family fortune but his was a lonely life. He wanted and needed someone but who? He had me, his son, who would be suitable? Maria had been suggested by my grandmother before she died as a possible candidate for my father to take to wife as she had been with the family for a long time and was cherished by all. We all knew it would be the best thing but it was my grandmother who argued on her death bed not that my father needed all that much convincing that Maria would be ideal for him as she had not only accepted his son but had already taken care of him since his birth having gained not only his affections but having replied to them with her own. Another reason why I gathered my grandmother supported the view that my father should wed Maria was that she knew Maria wanted a child of her own but unfortunately was not in years that would allow her the luxury of being able to wait much longer. I don’t doubt my grandmother’s words had their influence but I also don’t think my father was the kind to marry a woman whom he did not feel something for despite what anybody might have said. With regards to being in love this is something I did not understand or know much about at the time so this is why it would be hard for me to say if it was love or perhaps a longing to legitimize her position in my life as a relative if not a mother. Of course with time I even came up with other theories of my own that saw my father getting married to Maria due to his longing to in a way give her something for not only all she had given his family but lament for how much he felt life had taken away from her. My grandmother’s death came at a time when my country, the United States of America was on the verge of going to war as talk was every where about how it would not be long before we were at war with Japan, Germany and Italy. I even believe that this was another reason that led to my father’s decision to wed Maria as he who had not had any sort of romantic life after my mother’s death wanted someone to come home to at a time when he decided to rejoin the Navy. Part Two It to a certain extent was even ironic that it was Maria who given the state of world affairs reassured my father that going back in to the Navy was the right thing to do specially since he had been a Naval officer during the first world war but how could she or anybody have foreseen what occurred on December 8 at Pearl Harbor? So many were killed that day as we were pulled in to the war which later would be dubbed “World War 2″ by an attack that claimed my father’s life. The attack on Pearl Harbor left our nation shocked but as much as it might have led America to action it also led my family to despair specially my grandfather who had seen his wife of many a long year as well as only son die in the span of less than half a year. He wanted so much to do something but his age was not his ally as quit the contrary he was old. What could he do? He had like my father also served in the Navy so it was with a great deal of determination that he joined once again as a commissioned officer to serve much to his disappointment in Washington as a desk officer instead of one on a battle ship or aircraft carrier like his heart had been set on. My grandfather did not feel good about not being sent to where the fighting was taking place but was convinced by an admiral friend of his that his experience could be put to better use in Washington after all he was 70 years of age and a veteran of both “The Great War” and “The Spanish-American War”. However my grandfather’s decision to rejoin the military did not come till after Christmas and New Year’s day of the year after Pearl Harbor; so it was with great grief rather than festivities that the three of us my grandfather, Maria and I tried to celebrate Christmas. I had always enjoyed Christmas as a day on which our house was decorated to the maximum; so that it might play host along with our family to all our relatives who would come over for dinner on Christmas day. How ostentatious those gatherings had been as all our relatives and friends would never forget to make a stop over at our house to partake in those feasts prepared by my grandmother that included just about everything one could ever imagine set on a table that was 12 feet long. The tree was also magnificent as it seemed to be the tallest thing I had ever seen in my life because every year we would bring in one from our forest that seemed to surpass the previous one. The presents under the tree were also a sight to behold as there was something for everyone with me always being the biggest recipient. It was every year that this followed but not that year as grandmother was no longer alive to prepare the feast and my father had also been taken from us just as he and Maria had been married in a rather small wedding as father had to leave almost immediately after to join his ship out in Hawaii. It was a truly depressing period in my life which could not have come at a worse time of year as far as I was concerned not that something like what had happened could have come at a good time of year but it coming at the time of year it did only served to make things several times worse. What was sadder yet was that it was not just Christmas that had been ruined but all that led up to it as the time before the actual day to me had seemed as special as the day it self but now we would have none of that. My grandfather did not even want to hear the word “Christmas” as news of his son’s demise added to the one he had gotten about his wife less than half a year before disheartened him to the point of taking to drink. Something he had never done in large amounts. As for my own grief this was something I could also not bare given I too had lost two people whom I never considered being without so it was with tears that I faced this time however my sadness was different than that of my grandfather’s. I wanted to at least try to enjoy Christmas as much as I could in the hope that the loneliness of spirit which had come over me would let me be at least during the time that I spent in preparing for Christmas but unfortunately my grandfather felt the celebrating of Christmas at least as far as that year was concerned to be improper. Maria was also grieving my family’s losses for my family was hers and my father had been her husband even if just for a brief period of time given that they had gotten married on December 5. One day before my father went away to Hawaii. With regards to my grandmother this was the loss I believe she felt even more deeply than that of my father as they had become very close to the point of giving me the impression that Maria had in part married my father because she knew it was what my grandmother wanted. As for the whole affair that changed my life it began on Christmas eve which found my house dark and empty of guests with only my grandfather, Maria and myself there to share the moment that was. It really was not a case of this not being enough company or wrong kind but the mood that had been set in the house by not only those whom death had taken away but the tension that had been created by my grandfather. My grandfather not only had not allowed for anybody to come to the house he had gone as far as to not even allow us to plan any sort of celebrating for this occasion claiming it was his house and that was the only way he would have it. I so much wanted to tell my grandfather what Christmas signified to me and maybe by doing something for Christmas it would perhaps give our minds a break from our tragic losses but it was no use as when I approached my grandfather I could see that alcoholic beverages where lending soil to his disposition which had been among the sweetest I had ever known. It was exasperating for me but there was really nothing I could do. Arguably the dinner I had with my grandfather who was as inebriated as I had ever seen him and Maria whom I could also sense had had some spirits of her own on that day was even more depressing than the funeral. The situation was strange as I sat there trying to eat what was in front of me while listening to my grandfather trying to get out words through his slurring as I did not want to say anything from fear of saying the inappropriate. So incomprehensible were his words that I had no idea what he was talking about or to whom he was speaking to or if his were questions but one thing was sure I wanted to finish up fast and go to my room so I could cry like I had so wanted to. I really am not certain what it was that kept me from breaking out in tears at the table, maybe it was not wanting my grandfather to react toward it but there was something that kept my emotions hidden from my grandfather but not from Maria. She knew I was anxious to go to bed but could see I had not finished my food so with her looking at me I suddenly got the idea to go to bed. I just said “I am finished, I am going to bed now good night, grandpa”. It was just as I was about to go off to my room that my grandfather who was sitting at the other side of this table and could not see my plate which I had not emptied asked Maria if I had finished my dinner to which Maria lied on my behalf saying I had. My grandfather did not say anything after that; not even good night as Maria winked at me in solidarity. I remember going to my bedroom with the knowledge that the following day would be Christmas yet not with the feelings of joy that usually accompanied me on the night known as Christmas eve. This night was different as the following day Christmas would be only a day on the calendar but nothing else as all that I associated with this day would not be. There would be no family to share the day, no dinner that was special for the occasion, no presents, no decorations and above all my father and grandmother would not be there even if the memory of them would not go out of my mind. Once in my bedroom with sadness all about me from not only my mind but everything that surrounded me I went to bed where I turned out the light on my night table so I could look out the large window. I really do not know what it was about the view from my bedroom window that always managed to set my mind to wonder about as my eyes took in the view that went as far as the horizon. So beautiful was the sight that went as far as the eye could see and how this view was dear to me; only I knew as I had never enjoyed it with anybody. Perhaps my fears lay along the lines of having it taken away from me if I were to share it. Perhaps this may seem inane now but then it did not as this view was special just because it was mine and whenever I let my eyes wonder through out it so was it that my mind did the same. On occasions my mind would wonder so far from the scope of my life that it seemed that I had stepped out of who I was and the life I knew as this view let my mind look at things from such a dispassionate point that I forget myself and the person I was and turned in to only a mentality that saw the world for what it was instead of the from the person I was. As far as that particular night is concerned there was snow to be seen everywhere covering everything in white making my mood even more melancholic as it added to the feeling of Christmas which was not inside me. In a way that night my sentiments were alien to me as I cried without fully realizing the motive behind my teas. Were they for my father who had been killed abroad a ship in Hawaii or perhaps for my grandmother who had also passed away not long ago or were they for myself whose life had been changed in a way that would never include the society of those he had lost? This I did not think of at the time as despair was all around me which was being aggravated by the Christmas that we could not celebrate due to my grandfather’s drunken behavior who had even labeled it as immoral to even think of it. It was under these circumstances that Maria entered my room as she too was being dragged down by the weight of tragic loss and grief over how this time of year which normally held so much cheer was now bringing all the opposite. Part Three I had seen Maria enter my bedroom late at night so many times and for so many reasons during the time she had been with us that it did not catch my attention until that night. There was something rare about her that night as she came in to my room wearing her white nightgown and sat on my bed turning on my night lamp as she could see that I was not asleep. As the light went on the vision of her made its way to the back of my mind which was seeing her really for the first time as a woman who was in need of comfort as was I and as she saw me she knew I wanted to talk to her like I had done so many times in the past. Maria really did not look different but there was something about her that night that let me know that this visit she was making to my bedroom was not only for me but for herself as well. Her eyes as she sat up on my bed while I lay told me she had come to tell me something she needed me to hear as if I could offer her any words of wisdom. “Are you having trouble sleeping?” were her first words to me as she sat on my bed holding my hand as if she contrary to what had always been expected me to listen to her. “No, I am not having trouble sleeping, I could fall asleep but I prefer to just think about things for awhile” was my answer as I looked in to Maria’s eyes which I detected were looking at me differently than they ever had. “I also have to think a lot about what happened and maybe it is good to think about things so we can understand” Maria replied as she continued to hold my hand and look at my face and as our eyes looked at one anther’s and she smiled in a way that seemed unnatural. She was beautiful to gaze upon and particularly that night as she had something that made her attractive and more so to a boy my age given the changes my body was undergoing that gave me the taste for the opposite sex. “I came to talk because we have not had chance to since your father died, you know I am sad too, he was my husband and I did love him” Maria spoke out almost as if trying to justify her decision or perhaps convince me of what I already knew to be true with tears in her eyes as if she were really talking to my father; Walter. Maybe she was seeing him when she looked at me as I had been told that I resembled my father in so many ways. It was a weird sensation as Maria cried in front of me and had spoken to me in a way usually reserved for a more advance age than mine. I then while seeing Maria cry sensed for the first time what she must have been going through and in a way felt a certain proud feeling of adulthood knowing that she had come to share her feelings with me like I had done on so many occasions in the past with her. She even seemed warm in the weakness she portrayed that I could no longer lay back as I sat up and looked at her directly in the face as I took both of her hands in mine causing her to lean her head on my shoulder. We were now entering new ground in our relationship as the moment and her soft body next to mine propelled me to embrace her taking her seemingly by surprise as she did the same to me like we had done when we heard the news of my father’s demise. We held on to each other for a few seconds with me not knowing what to say or do as she hugged me in a way no one ever had. Her breast covered by her nightgown which were being pressed against my chest were making me feel different sensations which then given my lack of experience were new making me feel oddly like a child while at the same time like something unknown to me was going to happen. A kiss was the next thing I felt but it was not like the ones I had received till that moment as there was something different not that she planted it on my mouth but the manner which she did it that started to excite me in a way I had never known before. My actions at that time were limited as she in the emotions of all that engulfed us gave in to something that till this day I do not know and kissed me on the mouth in a way that scared me at first till it excited me. It was all new to me; making me close my eyes as her soft lips touched mine. Our lips meeting softly till instinctively our tongues made their way to one another as they started to taste each other in an action that we performed with eyes that did not see, us being on the verge of going further though I did not know at the time how. At that point my male aggression started to take over however with more desire than wisdom of what it was that I should do. My hands taking to her body at first clumsily over her nightgown. Maria may not have been more experienced as she in a strange fluke had not actually consumed her marriage with my father who had planed to introduce her to the world of sexual intercourse during the honeymoon they had planned to take in Hawaii where she had agreed to meet him but she at least knew what needed to be taught. My root was hard as could be and my hands were busy as her hands did the same but was there an aim to all we did apart from caressing like we were already doing? Suddenly Maria stopped giving me the false impression that I had done something wrong which scared me as she might leave or worse tell my grandfather but it was not with such intensions. She laid down on my bed and in front of me removed her nightgown over her head leaving her body completely in the nude to my eyes that were receiving her sexuality which made me frightened as it made my pulse raise with anticipation of what might come. I really did not know what to do then as this was something I had never envisioned or planned; yes I had thought of touching Maria’s legs but that was as far as my mind could take things. Maria realizing her pupil was untutored after having exposed herself fully, breast and lower part which I could see had a lump of hair that was as red as the one on her head and seeing my bewilderment; said in tone of voice that showed the tension that must have been hers “touch my body, please”. It was not that I did not want to but the feeling of doing this which I never thought would be mine at that age scared me, making my body tremble as if with chills. As I slowly started to touch her body it felt like it was something I should not but yet wanted to perhaps because I should not have. Everything was making my instinct take over which touched her breast and instinctively was followed by my lips and tongue. Naturally I was in complete ignorance to what Maria’s body was undergoing as I savored her with my hands which were being guided by her to the parts that needed to be taken care of. I kissed her in the mouth like I had done with eyes shut as she led my hands all over her body till I felt the hair between her legs which felt strange in its moisture as my finger to my shock entered. I felt surprise which made me stop what I was doing and open my eyes in alarm as my finger had gone in to the part of her anatomy that was as new to me as the male presence was new to it. There was something oily about its feel as I continued to touch now only conscience of this motion which I thought was even painful to her as she made sounds as if in discomfort. She must have noticed my apprehension as she told me to continue saying between breaths “please do it, more I like it”. At first the feeling had been strange but now it took on pleasure which I felt made her more and more animated as if growing in desperation perhaps for me to stop or go on. As for me I was now lost in that which I could not understand but knew it was what I wanted. Once again Maria did something, she stopped our actions and suddenly without saying a word and moving with a purpose she removed my clothes like she had done when she would give me bathes and laid me down on the bed. She was now in complete control and I minded not in the very least that my body was being used by her or perhaps it was the other way around as she after having removed every stitch of clothes from my body, sat on me putting one of her legs on each side. At first I did not know what were her intensions, her taking this position in which she took my root in her hand and placed it so that it might slide in to her womanly entrance. This exploit of her placing my root inside her and sitting down with all her weight created slight pain in me as I felt myself penetrate the same area of her body my finger had known only not with so much ease as I heard her also cry out in pain which I saw on her face as she descended toward me. I did not know what to do as I was confused should I stop but I felt a great sensation like none other I had experienced before that combined discomfort with sheer joy. Once she had made her way down I noticed she started to move up and down making the sensation spectacular particularly in the moments the edge of her red rose passed over the top of my root giving, something I had never had before not that I had not touched this part of my body but never like this. Fear suddenly replaced my ecstasy when I felt a wetness around where she was and as I looked I could see it was blood or so it appeared making me ask almost in the horror that was my guilt “Are you bleeding? Am I hurting you?”. She then stopped moving up and down and bent her body toward me and said looking me directly in the eye in a voice that almost laughed “Don’t worry! You are not hurting me, it is not pain, it happens to all women who do what we are doing for first time. I like it. Do you like it?” I felt slightly embarrassed as she leaned over me and nodded my head in the affirmative which made her kiss my forehead as she straightened up again and continued the motion on my root which was strangely telegraphing sensations all through out my body. “What are we doing?” suddenly I asked which made her reply “We are making love!” before continuing only more intensely giving the sensation that slowly something was stirring in me that was going to make something come out. I even believed that I had to go to the bathroom. This new awareness which seemed to be creeping up on me was getting stronger as I was more and more convinced that I was going to urinate and should say something “I am sorry but I think I have to go to the toilet” I suddenly cried out. She again smiled at me as she continued not ceasing up and said “don’t worry it is not that, it something else”. Mine was not disbelief that led me to question her but my own conviction of what I was feeling “Are you sure it is not that?”. “Yes, I am sure please trust me” were here words as she continued with the pressure getting stronger in me for something to explode which it did even though I tried to prevent it. Wonder which I could not describe other than it was what it was! Once it came out in an action which seemed to last several minutes, I was lost needing to know what it was that my body had unconstrained so I inquired with fear “What was it?”. Maria who seemed to have felt what I had done even more strongly than me said getting off me and putting on her clothes “It was beauty, tomorrow I tell you or maybe show you what it was but now I leave your room and go, good night and please say nothing to your grandfather about what we do” was her reply before leaving my room. Part Four Maria left in a hurry apparently needing to get something or perhaps running away from something but what? I for my part also needed to think about things as I was left there wondering if what we had done would have any implications apart from the action itself. I in Maria’s absence was left in a bed covered in blood which stained the white sheets and I sat with mixed emotions as I started examining myself to find out what fluid had been created from inside me that according to Maria was not urine. I also started wondering what I was going to do about my bed that had had its sheet bled on but then I just thought I did not have to sleep with a sheet and just as I was about to remove it, Maria came back to my bedroom carrying a clean white sheet which she changed for the one her blood had gotten on. I really don’t know what she wanted but I asked her to stay in bed with me not so we might repeat what we had done but so she might be with me in this moment where all was new. She agreed though she did warn of caution because my grandfather just might though it was highly unlikely given all he had drank wake up in the middle of the night. It was actually during the night that we held on to each other that she told me what we had done and what could happen as a result of which that I understood everything from what liquid my body had released to why she had bleed. She even told me that the two us were rare in having made love. Me at such a young age and her for having it for the first time at such an advanced stage of life. The night which we spent in each other’s arms discovering what treasures were to be found in what neither of us had known passed us by and though I can not claim what Maria was experiencing, I can describe mine. Her body was truly a woman’s for me. Her breast being so soft yet firm to the touch while her belly was nicely rounded and above all pleasant as was the rest of her which she claimed to be old but not to me as to my lust she was everything. Her long legs my hands passed over always ending up in the place where she had a patch of hair that hide the spring of her womanhood. This I did as if a child who could not get enough of a teddy bear he had just gotten. How she felt was indescribable and more so the way it made me feel to have the woman whom I had admired for so many years finally to myself giving herself to me, telling me in deeds that I was not a child anymore but a young man capable of pleasing a mature woman with my body. This alone would have sufficed to elevate my ego beyond anything however there was more to Maria who was a woman who had more than surface beauty. She had a grace about her in everything she did from the way she walked to the way she sat down, always with her head high that gave away an aristocratic back ground that was so plain to see and how much more this was apparent to my eye when she had shared herself in passion with me. It was during that Christmas that I discovered many things which now seem so obvious as I observed how touches created desire. It was as dawn approached that I started kissing her mouth strongly when my urge had been reanimated by the hope that she would want to make love again. It seemed strange to me how one thing led to another, how one touch led to the next and how soon my root was made ready for her to get on top of like she had done before but this time she did something different. She took the part of my body that came to be very hard when ever agitated and while I was lying on my back she kissed it almost as if she were kissing a dove. So slight was the touch of her lips that it only left me wanting more of this which she gave me when she passed her tongue over it before taking it in to her mouth. It was incredible for me to see or to imagine someone could to what she was doing as this had always been the part of my body I had always been to told to wash my hands after having touched for it was dirty. How she could do this was something beyond me even if it was an enchanting sensation that was producing in me the same urges to release like I had done before. Of course it seems incredulous to me now looking back at how high my energy level was that I could do what I had done and yet still want more as if this was not ample to have spent so much of myself but still I wanted her again not that she having renounced her virginity less than a day ago did not long for the same. She did and even though her concern might have been for me to conserve my energy, her desire for what life had taken her so long to present her with was strong even to the point of going against all convention. Our kisses, I remember by then had become more intensive with my tongue taking the initiative while my hands surged forward to please and be pleased as we both explored to the point where it was my mouth being guided by my tongue that had taken over for my hands. The taste of the flesh had become my enjoyment. My tongue making its way down to Maria’s stomach and to the place between her legs where her hair was so soft and red that I kissed it softly around the edges as I sensed her body shake with every touch. She was almost shivering as my head found itself between her legs prompting her to lead me up to the missionary position which was the second position she instructed me on. This was different because it gave me more control over what I did as now it all depended on my movements that sent my root inside and outside of her with the force I through my own improvisation was generating by pulling myself up from the top of the bed. Up till that point I had not really taken the time to see how divine she looked when performing this act but now that I was seeing her. She was a picture of delight in the way she closed her eyes as if grasping for air with her body twitching to everyone of my trusts as if they were sending sensations to every point in her body. The expression on her face was one as if she were floating; making her appear more lovely than ever to my eyes as I again delivered my seed in the very core of her womanhood as she cried out. Eventually the sun came up on that night which had changed my whole life and we had to join my grandfather for lunch who given his late night drinking had not managed to wake up any sooner. My grandfather naturally was completely in the dark about what Maria and I were involved with when he joined us at the dinning room table for lunch which was a typical meal however my grandfather in a way had changed. He seemed to have grown cheerier as if he had come to realize during the night that not celebrating Christmas would not make matters worse, so he apologized to Maria and me; telling us that he would make it up to us next year. With regards to Maria and me, we continued drawing from the well we had found when ever we were not in view of anybody. How many times did we make love and in how many places does not matter but what does is that it was a time with an intensity which I knew would never come back for life only delivers one such occasion. Sometimes, I think how could we have done what we did without anybody catching on like one of the other servants or my grandfather but they did not even when at the table suddenly Maria stretched out her foot which she used to stroke without anybody noticing (an aunt and uncle of mine being present) the part of my body which had become the source that bounded our joy. Oh, how exhilaration and craving took over my body as she performed this simple yet erotic act under the table with all watching but nobody seeing; that I made up some excuse to get her to accompany me to the kitchen. She naturally was aware of what it was I wished but could not have envisioned my minds invention which was to take her from behind while her attention was in getting something out of the pantry which forced her to bend over. The daring of the youthful and desperate was the fuel that lasted us all through out not only the holidays that stretched from Christmas to New Year’s Eve but beyond the point that it was discovered that our carnality had yielded a child which my grandfather naturally amused was a product of his son and not his grandson. How he would have been shocked was something which Maria and I calculated would be better untested so it was with this in mind that Maria and I let him believe what conventional wisdom dictated. My grandfather had always admired Maria from a far so it was with the idea that Maria not be an unwed mother that he took her to wife. His wedding to Maria also made it easier for him to leave her half his earthly possessions and for her to adopt me when he passed away a month after the following Christmas. Maria left me for good when the number of my years had gone up to 18 with a daughter whose birth certificate falsely accredits as being my sister and that is the way her knowledge of the truth has remained. Tatiana went on to be raised by my wife Victoria, one of Maria’s much younger cousins who came to join us when Maria’s death was near. Victoria and I had a son (Thomas) and a daughter (Megan) making ours a happy marriage and home. With regards to my feelings for Maria this I can not deny that they were true love as she made me see through her aristocratic background what a person like me as well as a family like mine could amount to if we took full advantage of all the possibilities our position gave us. To many people however Maria’s behavior would cast her in the mold of immoral and this they have the right to think if this is what their believes dictate to them. I however do not believe my moral fiber to be more corrupt than those who would take this line of thought regarding my grandmother but different as I see what they may not wish to. Maria was 42 years of age when she was diagnosed with a terminal cancer that should have ended her life in a little over a year. She was also a woman who had never experienced the pleasures of the flesh as she had been raised to repudiate unmarried sex which along with the desire to have a child prompted her to marry my father; who got killed before he even had a chance to bring this sensation to her. Maria to my way of seeing things did nothing that her extreme circumstances did not warrant to have a child of her own which was all she longed for and this is what would have happened had my father not been killed. It was with this backdrop of the despair that surrounded her life that led to our affair that went on to her dying day.

My name is Gianni Truvianni, I am an author who writes with the simple aim of sharing his ideas, thoughts and so much more of what I am with those who are interested in perhaps reading something new. I also am the author of the book entitled “New York’s Opera Society” which is now available on Amazon.

Does The Fruta Vida Drink Really Work?

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:36:13 +0000

I was introduced to the health drink Fruta Vida through an e-mail that I didn’t request (spam) but that really caught my attention. It said that if I was to drink this drink called “Fruta Vida” that it would be a kind of a fountain of youth and that it had enough vitamins and minerals in it to really give me the energy I needed to face my 20 students a day at the public school where I teach.
The e-mail was so-well orchestrated I had to investigate further. I started to read through the testimonials. “I’ve lost 20 pounds without diet or exercise. I feel better than I have for twenty years. The hair on my head has actually got it’s color again.”
And on and on and on…
At this point I’ve got to try it. Hey, I’m reaching 40 years of age, and I want all of my internal parts to continue to receive the nutrients they so much need, and I want to stay looking young and fit!
Needless to say, a week later, a small box arrived at my front door, via UPS, and I popped open my first bottle of Fruta Vida! The directions say I can take one to two onces, so I take one, and within a few days, I notice barely anything. I did notice though that some of the aches and pains of muscles and body aches were lessening.
So, I said to myself, “Why not try taking 2.5 ounces? The bottle says I can try up to 3! So, I’m not kidding, starting that night or the following day, I was impressed with the positive effects. I had more energy during the day, I had almost no aches and pains from muscles and body aches, and then one other awesome thing happened.
In the morning, when it usually took forever for my eyes to open and have the feeling that I’ve woken up. You know that feeling? Well, believe it or not, it’s true. After taking the 2.5 ounces in the morning, followed up by a small glass of O.J. my eyes literally opened and my vision was clear within fifteen seconds.
Sounds unbelievable, I know, but it’s true. Then I started doing more research about Fruta Vida and I found out that the World War II fighter pilots used to use the ACAI berry to improve their vision on the night flights so that they could see the enemy and hit their targets!
Hey, if it’s good enough for the U.S. Military, it’s good enough for me, that much is sure! Well, without ever failing me, this precious and tasty (so many health drinks out their taste like castor-oil) drink is tasty.
It’s worth trying and I’m very pleased with my evaulation of the all natural rain forest Amazon Fruit Drink Fruta Vida. I love the impact it’s had on my vision and on my health as a man.
Perhaps someone else out there will give it a try, and maybe, just maybe, they will prolong their life and even see a major improvement in their health.
If that happens, every word I’ve just written will be worth it. As Spock said on Star Trek, “For the good of the one, and not the many…”

Don Alexander

http://www.something4you.biz

A website dedicated to your health, well-being, and the longevity of your life on planet earth.

Leaders Know High Expectations Lead to High Performance

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:36:04 +0000

Leaders know high expectations lead to high performance. Leaders know that the more people believe in themselves, and their leaders believe in them, the more they will accomplish – at all levels.

We often think of leadership in terms of the Jack Welch’s; the leaders of the military; the leaders of our government and institutions; the leaders of our industries. But leadership doesn’t come in any particular wrapper – it shows up all over the place.

Let me share a story of real leadership:

A young girl, in second grade in a small town in Wisconsin was tested and classified as a below grade level student. That designation put her in an educational wasteland. Not much expected of her, not much effort spent on her development. Her parents discovered she had a vision problem – she had been accommodating it by memorizing everything. It caught up with her in second grade. Her parents fixed the vision problem. Her parents talked to the school, but they were firm in their decision to keep her in a below grade level class. The young girl had a hard time thinking of herself as being as good as other kids – after all, her school said she wasn’t up to standard. And now she was the only kid in class with glasses.

After this young girl had completed fourth grade, her family moved to California. It was a good time to let this young girl catch her breath academically, and so she repeated fourth grade. No onus on it – she was in a completely different place.

And then the stars aligned and this young girl met the leader who would take her to a new place in her life.

Her fourth grade teacher was Mrs. Kruger. A former military nurse who had been in the South Pacific during WW II. No nonsense, firm, tough. On parents night she warned all parents to let her students be accountable for their actions. If a student forgot their lunch, don’t bring it to school. They won’t starve. Let the kids know they are responsible for their own actions. There were no below grade level kids in Mrs Kruger’s world. The young girl did forget her lunch early in the year. She came home hungry, but she never forgot it again.

Mrs Kruger taught from high expectations. If an assignment was turned in that didn’t meet her expectations for that student, they got to do it over, and over, and over – until she was satisfied that they had done their best work. The young girl was forced to redo her work often, and she didn’t always like it. But the work she turned in after being forced to redo it was always better for the extra effort – and she saw that – and knew hard work resulted in accomplishment.

There was no horseplay in Mrs Kruger’s class – no disrespect. She simply would not let it happen. Her class was a demanding, but safe place for her students to learn. She was energetic, critical, optimistic, and a wonderful teacher for this little girl. Her students respected and feared her – although she never threatened or used force of any kind. She just demanded her students do their best – even if they weren’t convinced they could do better. And when they did, she recognized them with praise.

After a year with Mrs Kruger, this young lady had achieved a three grade level improvement in reading, writing and arithmetic. It wasn’t easy – she worked really hard. But she knew she had performed – and what a change that made in her feelings about herself.

From that start – from that year with Mrs Kruger, this young woman went on to Honors Level classes in high school, to graduating from Boston College, and to getting her Masters in Special Education from Simmons College in Boston.

We’re very proud of our daughter- and we’re very thankful that she had the opportunity to spend a year of her young life learning from Mrs Kruger – a true leader.

There are so many qualities that a leader may possess – but the qualities of optimism; of demanding and expecting the best; of rewarding accomplishment; rank at the very top of the leadership list.

Take a look at how much you expect from yourself – and from others. If there is room for improvement, think of this story of Mrs Kruger, who made such a difference in our daughter’s life – and then go out and make it happen.

Do it today. We all can be Mrs Kruger in our own way.

Andy Cox is President of Cox Consulting Group LLC. He founded his firm in 1995 after extensive experience in leadership positions in Fortune 500 corporations. His focus is on helping clients select, develop, retain and enhance the performance of leaders and emerging leaders. He can be reached at http://www.coxconsultgroup.com . Visit his blog at http://multiplysuccess.blogspot.com

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE Pt. VI

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:40:36 +0000

A lawyer is a person who practises law; one who conducts lawsuits for clients or advises clients of their legal rights and obligations. A barrister is a legal practitioner whose main function is to practice advocacy in court. They often have less interaction with clients. Barristers spend their working hours in chambers where they prepare their cases.

Kew Gardens in Thames, London is best known for being the home of the Royal Botanical Gardens (now a world heritage site). Other points of interest-include the Kew Palace and the National Archives (previously known as the Public Records Office) The Kew Gardens is special because it is an important international botanical research and education institution with a staff of over 700 people.

This is a campaign introduced by Japan. In order, to save energy, it asks office goers and politicians to remove their ties and jackets to minimise the use of air conditioners and thereby reduce consumption of electricity and also the emission of greenhouse gases. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel who is currently visiting Japan to discuss, among other things, ways to tackle global warming, had a taste of the ‘cool biz’ campaign when the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe informed her that his entourage wouldn’t be wearing their ties to adhere to the ‘cool biz’ campaign.

Before the advent of pockets in shirts and trousers, money was kept in bags and sachets. Later, a smart tailor made a pocket on a garment and it became so useful, further innovations made a pocket suitable to safely keep money From then on, money kept in pockets for expenses came to known as pocket money

It is the horizontal upper part of a wall or storey of a building designed on the principles of classical architecture. It is usually supported on columns, and consists of three parts. These are the architrave, the lowermost part; the frieze, the decorative band in the middle; and the cornice, the crowning ornamental projection. Entablature was originally conceived by Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect.

The world’s first air show was the International Air Meet held at Rheims, Franceheld in 1909. India’s first air show, AVIA-93 was held in December, 1993 in Bangalore. The world’s biggest air show was the 47th Paris Air Show. However, the world’s largest military air show the RoyalInternational Air Tattoo (RAF Fairford, United Kingdom), held annually in July.

A circuit filter is used in trading of shares in stock exchange. It’s applied to all the shares, to supposedly safeguard the interest of general investors from the extreme volatilities in markets by preventing any unexpected fall or rise of share price in a single day beyond a limit. If the limit is crossed by any of the shares in a single trading day it is frozen for trade.

The Gini Coefficient is a measure of inequality of income distribution or inequality of wealth distribution. It is defined as a ratio with values between 0 and 1: the numerator is the area between the Lorenz curve of the distribution and the uniform distribution line; the denominator is the area under the uniform distribution line. Thus, a low Gini Coefficient indicates more equal income or wealth distribution, while a high Gini Coefficient indicates more unequal distribution.

The three-finger salute is used by members of Scouts and Guides organisations around the world when greeting other Scouts and Guides and at some ceremonies. The salute is made with the palm face out, the thumb holding down the little finger, and the fingertips on the brow. In computer parlance, the triplefmger salute refers to describe the three-key sequence — Alt + Ctrl + Del — developed by David Bradley This term became popular after IBM PC compatible users continually hold down these keys each time their computers froze or had other problems.

The Wellcome Collection traces The development of medicine through history and spanning several cultures. Located in central London, it is a combination of exhibitions, libraries and cafes where people can learn more about the development of medicine. Part of the Well-come Trust, it was founded by Sir Henry Wellcome, a pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector, who garnered a unique collection of articles relating to medicine and health. Recently, a British heart transplant patient, Jennifer Sutton, donated her old heart to the Well-come Collection, after receving a new one.

Baushayan Sulv Sutra (1000 BC) is today known as the Pythogorus theorem, which states that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. In Baudhayan theorem, this has been expressed as follows: in a Deerghchatursh (triangle), the chetra (square) of rajju (hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of squares of the parshvamani (base) and triyangmani (perpendicular line). It is amazing to note that the pythagorus theorem was known in our country as far back as 1000 BC.

The number 1, in fact, does not fit the definition of a prime number. A positive integer is called a prime number only if there are exactly two divisors of that number. Since 1 has exactly one divisor (which is 1 itself), it does not fit this definition. Another equivalent definition of a prime number is this prime number’s only positive divisor should be less than 1 and itself. Again, 1 does not fit this definition either— there are no positive divisors of 1 which are less that 1.

Vatican City, the world’s smallest country, has the smallest army. This army of 110 men, is also known as the Swiss Guard. Last year, the Vatican celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Swiss Guard. The celebration commemorated the 150 Swiss Helvetian mercenaries who came to Rome to serve Pope Julius II, on January 22,1506. The mercenaries covered a distance of 723 km in 27 days to enter Rome from Bellinzona, Switzerland. Swiss Helvetian mercenaries, famous for their courage, die-hard attitude and loyalty to their employers, were part of the regular armies of various countries at that time. As allies of the Pope, they helped to shape Italy’s destiny and thus they were granted the title ^Defenders of the Church’s freedom’ by the Pope. During the Sack of Rome on May 6, 1527, the Swiss Guard, comprising 189 personnel at that time, resisted a Spanish attack on Rome and the Vatican. But they had to retreat after suffering heavy casualties. Only 42 men survived the attack. However, the Guard was able to ensure Pope Clement VII’s escape to safety.

Wine is the fermented juice of grapes. Probably, the first people to make wine were Persian farmers living near the Caspian Sea. The Egyptians learned how to make wine from them as long back as 3000 BC. In the fourth century BC., the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great carried grapevines and the knowledge of wine-making to Central Asia. Roman invaders probably took vines to northern France and Germany in later centuries. Wine was common in the everyday lives of the early Greeks and Romans. It was important to their religious ceremonies. The God of wine was called Bacchus by the Romans and Dionysus by the Greeks.

Socialism is a modern doctrine and is Western in origin, emerging with the development of industrial capitalism at the start of the nineteenth century. Socialism denotes a broad system of ideas. Marxism is a materialistic conception of history which seeks to explain the development of all societies and furthermore, make predictions about future social change. Marxists consider the material world, nature and society as constantly moving. Whereas, the socialists emphasise the organic unity of society. Marxists consider the material world as an integrated whole in which all things and phenomena are interconnected and interdependent. Whereas, socialists believe in equality and abolition of private enterprise. Marxism provides a scientific explanation of nature and society and hence, was a powerful instrument for revolutionary transformation. The society envisaged by socialists rests on certain values: redistribution of wealth to get rid of inequality, cooperative production to get rid of selfish competitors and new patterns of work and education to promote the growth of well-rounded individuals.

Hypercube is the generalization in n-dimensions of a square in two dimensions and a cube in three dimensions. A square has four vertices (22), a cube, 8 vertices (23). Similarly, an n-dimensional hypercube has 2n vertices. In the famous painting ‘Christus Hypercubus’, Salvador Dali depicted Christ crucified on an unfolded four-dimensional hypercube. Examining the shadow of a cube reveals a square within a square. Similarly, the shadow of a four-dimensional hypercube will be a cube within a cube.

The alphabet has often been described as an arbitrary collection of symbols representing an arbitrary collection of sounds. Its order is equally random. The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta, the first two words in the Greek alphabet.

Steaming distance is the shortest distance between two ports, which a ship traverses while sailing from one port to another. It need not be along a straight line as, due to various physical and political constraints, it may not be always be desirable to sail along a straight route.

This has long been a subject of much debate and to this day no one is absolutely sure which is the oldest civilisation. This is mostly because people cannot agree on the definition of the word civilisation. The most common definition of the word is ‘an advanced state of development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of writing, and complex political and social institutions’. Mesopotamia is considered as the most likely answer to the question, based on archaeological evidence and the above definition. It is believed that Mesopotamian history starts from the emergence of urban societies in Southern Iraq in the 4th millennium.

GDP or Gross Domestic Product is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders in a specific time period. GDP is customarily reported on an annual basis. It is the nation’s broadest gauge of economic health. It includes all of private and public consumption, government outlays, investments and exports and imports that occur within a defined territory The most common approach to measuring GDP is the expenditure method: GDP = consumption + investment (govern- ment spending) + (exports – imports). Another way of measuring GDP is to measure the total income payable in the GDP income accounts. This should provide the same figure as the expenditure method. Another formula is: GDP = rent + interests + profits + statistical adjustments (like corporate income taxes, dividends, undistributed corpo-1 rate profits) + wages.

University of Toulouse is one of the oldest universities of France and is located in Toulouse, a city in Southern France on the banks of the Garonne river. It was founded in 1229 AD as a result of the Paris Treaty marking the end of the battle between the Roman Catholic Church and its opponents. Foulques de Toulouse, the then bishop of Toulouse, played a major role in the setting up of the university. Now, the university has an enrolment exceeding 1,00,000, and is the second largest university in France. The sixteenth century philosopher and astronomer Bruno and the Chemistry Nobel Laureate Sabatier, and the artist Dulac were some of its most illustrious faculty members.

Pigeons were used for sending messages not only in ancient times, but as recently as early the 1900s, during World War I. A particular breed of pigeons called homing pigeons are specially suited for carrying messages, because they possess the uncanny ability of flying back to their home over long distances at high speeds. According to some reports, a homing pigeon flew back to its home after flying over 1600 miles at the peak speed of 60 miles per hour. Exactly how such birds navigate themselves is still not clear. Scientists hypothesise that the pigeon uses a variety of sources like the direction of the Sun, Earth’s magnetism, and odours associated with different places for finding its direction. Before the advent of telegraph, telephone and radio, using pigeons for sending messages was quite popular among the military, newspapers, and stock brokers. Such a messaging system was known as pigeon post.

Atlas is the term used to refer to a collection of maps, printed in a set order: world map, maps of the continents, each followed by maps of the several regions within that continent, and with an alphabetical gazetteer or list of place names, giving coordinates for various places, rivers, regions etc. The first use of the term atlas dates back to 1595 with the publication in Duisburg of the Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi Et Fabricati Figura by Gerard Mercator (1512-94). It was named after King Atlas, a mythical King of Mauretania in Libya, who was, according to legend, a wise philosopher, mathematician and astronomer and who supposedly made the first celestial globe. However, the more widely known Atlas is a figure from Greek mythology He is the son of the Titan lapetus and Clymene^or Asia), and brother of Prometheus. Atlas was punished by Zeus and made to bear the weight of the heavens and Earth on his back.

One theory about the phrase’s origin lies in the misplaced public belief that the English law allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick measuring no longer than his thumb. There was actually no such English law enacted at any time. This phrase has been in circulation since the 17th century This phrase commonly refers to any means of estimation based on a practical and ready method but not on scientific measurement. Another theory concerning the phrase’s origin involves the numerous ways in which thumbs have been used for estimation. Some examples are — measurement of distance based on an estimated inch which is about the length of a thumb; judging the alignment or distance of an object by holding the thumb at eye level etc.

Certain requests used by Interpol are sent in the forms of notices. The colour of each notice determines the type of information being sent or received by Interpol and its members. A red corner notice is issued at the request of a country’s law enforcement authority. The requesting country asks for a red notice to be issued when a criminal evades arrest and escapes from the country.

The largest city in the world by population is Tokyo with over 35 million people. It was the world’s most populous urban area between 1965 and 1970. However, despite Japan’s declining population, it is still growing. The smallest city in the world by population is Hum. It has a population of only 23 people. It is a tiny town in the central part of Istria, North-West Croatia, 7 km from Roh, 14 km South-East of Buzet on a hill above the Mirna Valley The largest city in the world by area is Hulun Buir, encompassing 263,953 km. The smallest city in the world by area is Vatican City with an area of 44 hectares (108.7 acre). It is a landlocked sovereign city state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome. It is officially called State of the Vatican City.

There is no statistical evidence of two time zones being economically beneficial other than restoring a sense of normalcy to the area that follows its local meridian time zone. India geographically extends from 68 degrees East to 97 degrees East (29 degrees) from Gujarat to the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, thereby encompassing two time zones. However, it has adopted the Allahabad meridian of 72 degrees, which makes it convenient for the railways, airlines and media. This leads to weird experiences for travelers from Central India who visit the North-Eastern states which receive daylight before 5 am. This entails an extra cost to the economy in terms of industrial arid office lighting spent in these regions, since daybreak here doesn’t coincide with the rest of the country. Also, there tends to be more traffic when it is dark.

The Indian Standard Time is based on the meridian at 82 1/2 degrees East, which is 5 1/2 hours ahead of the Greenwich meridian. India’s geographical middle lies at 82 1/2 degrees East, which was incorrectly mentioned as 72 degrees East.

Securitisation is the process through which existing assets or future cash flows are converted into marketable securities. Those assets or cash flows are, inherently, not marketable. There are two types of securitisation — assetbacked securitisation and futureflows securitisation. Some of the assets that can be securitised are loans and future cash flows like credit card payments, car rentals or any other form of future receivables. Securitisation is common in the US and Europe, but in India it is in a nascent stage.

Acta Diurna’ was the first news paper published in Rome, around 59 BC. In 1605, the first printed weekly newspaper to be published in Antwerp was called Relation. Johann Carolus (1575-1634) was the publisher of the Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien (Collection of all Distinguished and Commemorable News). The ^Relation’ is recognized by the World Association of Newspapers, as well as many authors, as the world’s first newspaper. The German Relation was published in Strasbourg, which had the status of an imperial free city in the holy Roman empire of the German nation.

The Battle of Los Angeles took place during the night of February 24/25, 1942 in Los Angeles, California. The battle involved heavy firing of anti-aircraft shells by the US forces aimed at several mysterious flying objects reportedly sighted in the sky over Los Angeles. These objects were thought to be Japanese military aircraft. However, even till today, their identity has not convincingly established. Even though six civilians lost their lives in the bombardment, there was no evidence that the firing destroyed any flying object. The firing was preceded by a blackout and Sounding of air raid sirens. Now, many believe that the battle was the result of a false alarm, triggered by weather balloons, or Japanese blimps. Some even think the source of the alarm could be a flying object of extraterrestrial origin.

The origin may be Themis, a Greek mythological goddess, who advised Zeus after his purge of the old pantheon. A daughter of Themis and Zeus, Dike, known as a goddess of justice but not divine justice, presided over the apportionment of things among mortals, the protection of individuals and the social and political order. At times, Dike is said to be the same as (or is confused with) Astraea. Astraea is also a daughter of Themis and Zeus and is known as a goddess of justice. In western tradition, Lady Justice sometimes wears a blindfold and carries a sword and scales. She symbolises the fair and equal administration of the law, without corruption, avarice, prejudice, or favour.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. is a United States presidential memorial built to honour its 16th President Abraham Lincoln. The architect is Henry Bacon (an American Beaux-Arts architect), the sculptor is Daniel Chester French, and the painter of the murals inside is Jules Guerin. The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple and contains a large, seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln and inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln.

According to UNESCO, India tops the list with 8,407 universities. It’s followed by the United States (5,759), Argentina (1,705) and Spain (1,415).

Hobos is an American word which refers to homeless people wandering about in search of work. In earlier days, hobos were supposed to move around by hopping from one freight train to another, just to save the cost of transportation. Hobos and hobo culture began in mid-19fh century, when the ending of the Civil War caused severe unemployment in the US and several people left their homes and started moving about the whole country in search of jobs. A similar phenomenon happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the term owes its origin to the above phenomena, it is used today to refer to a tramp in general, an aimless traveller not necessarily looking for work. There are several theories related to how the word hobo got coined: some say the word has been derived from the phrase hopping box cars, and some others that it is a shortened version of the rail-road greeting ‘Ho Beau,’ popular in the 19th century

With over 1,000 ports, Europe is perhaps the continent with most number of ports. The UK alone has over 200 ports and European ports handle about 3.5 billion tones of cargo.

A sandlot refers to a vacant lot used by children to play games, mostly unorganised ones. Unlike a playground specifically created for certain games, sandlots perhaps developed as informal spaces which children made use of to serve as makeshift playgrounds. In the US, sandlot baseball refers to an advanced version of the game played by teams not affiliated with either the Major or Minor leagues in the country

Wing walkers are those who walk on wings of an airplane in flight. Recently, a wing walker hung from a 450 Stearman aircraft when it was in flight. This stunt was performed as part of the Flying Circus Air Show in Bealeton, Virginia.

P-Notes are financial instruments that facilitate investment in Indian securities by foreign investors or hedge funds that are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India. Indian brokerage houses buy the securities on behalf of these foreign investors and hedge funds and issue P-Notes to them. Any dividends or capital gains collected from the underlying securities will keep going back to the foreign investors and hedge funds. The value of P-Notes is determined on the basis of shares listed on the stock exchanges.

The Republic of South Africa is referred to as a Rainbow Nation to describe the unity of various cultural, racial or ethnic groups in the country during the postapartheid era (after 1994) compared to the earlier divisiveness based on skin colour. This phrase was coined by the then Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, and later used by Nelson Mandela, the first President of the Republic of South Africa elected in the first polls conducted after apartheid rule officially ended. In some South African cultures, the rainbow is always associated with hope and a bright future. Incidentally, the South African Hag also has six rainbow-like colours.

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) of Israel shared the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature with Nelly Leonie Sachs (1891-1970), a GermanSwedish poet. This was 53 years after Tagore won the prize in 1913. The first Asian after Tagore to win it solo was Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), a Japanese novelist, in 1968.

Although the origins of the postal system date back to antiquity, the British Postal Museum claims the oldest functioning post office in the world is on High Street in Sanquhar, Scotland. According to the museum, this post office has functioned continuously since 1712 AD. Sanquhar is a quiet, insignificant town, but in its heyday, its residents included many influential aristocrats, who must have played a significant role in having the first post office located there. Those days, horses and stage coaches would carry mail.

It is a musical instrument with a loud, shrill sound that’s audible miles away It is used to attract attention at circuses and fairs. It was invented in the United States around 1850 by A S Denny and patented in 1855 by Joshua C Stoddard. It consists of a boiler which forces steam through a set of whistle pipes. Either a keyboard or a pinned cylinder (like that of a barrel organ or music box) controls the entry of steam into the pipes.

Today, the Sun Temple, a magnificent pagoda, is located 2 km from the sea but, in olden times, it was much closer. So, the temple was used as a navigational point by European sailors. They referred to it as the ‘Black Pagoda’ due to its dark colour and its magnetic power that drew ships into the shore and caused shipwrecks.

In 1980, the first Sicab (Salon Internacional del Caballo) was organised in Seville. The following year, it took place in Madrid. Today, there are more than 200 horse shows a year dedicated exclusively to the Purebred Spanish Horse.

Chopsticks were made over 5,000 years ago in China. The earliest version of chopsticks were plain sticks or branches from trees which were used to retrieve food from fire. The teachings of Confucius forbade followers to use knives at the dining table, which further increased the popularity of chopsticks in Eastern Asia. Today, chopsticks are no longer confined to culinary purposes. Japan has even launched a bra called ‘My Chopsticks Bra’ which is made from recycled chopsticks. This would reduce the decimation of entire forests to manufacture chopsticks.

A ‘breathing fabric’ is designed to prevent the wearer from getting too hot or cold by adjusting itself to both the internal and external temperatures. The textile is made up of a layer of thin spikes of wool, or another water-absorbent material that opens up when it’s made wet by the wearer’s sweat. When the layer dries out, the spikes automatically close up again. A second layer underneath protects the wearer from the rain.

Titanium toothbrushes, which were invented in Japan and now are being exported to the US, might help do away with toothpaste. One variety of the toothbrush uses titanium dioxide, which causes an electrochemical reaction while brushing and this helps remove plaque. The other type uses titanium bristles that last for several years.

In Roman mythology, Saturn is regarded as the god of agriculture. He is usually depicted holding a scythe to harvest land. Farmers in ancient Rome believed that Saturn had the power to bring a good harvest and if made angry could destroy it. In order to receive his blessings, they held a festival named Saturnalia. According to another myth, Saturn established the Golden Age in Rome. He introduced agriculture to his people by teaching them how to farm the land.

If an observer stands on dew-covered grass with his or her back turned towards the early morning sun, the observer is likely to observe a faint glow around the shadow of his or her head on the grass. Such a faint glow is called Heiligenschein, and the above optical phenomenon, the Heiligenschein effect. It occurs because the dew droplets act as tiny lenses focusing both the sunlight falling on the surface on which the shadow is cast, and the light that is back-scattered by the surface. In general, when a long shadow is cast on certain irregular surfaces with specific optical characteristics, the above effect occurs. Although Heiligenschein must have been known for a long time, it was first described in writing by the Italian sculptor and painter Benevenuto Cellini (1500-1571). Sometimes it’s called the Cellinis halo. In German, Heiligenschein means holy glow.

An alkene, olefin or olefine is a class of highly reactive unsaturated hydrocarbons, recovered from petroleum, with at least one carbon-carbon double bond. The simplest alkenes, with only one double bond and no other functional groups, form a homologous series of hydrocarbons with the general formula CnH2n, eg. Ethylene (ethane), propylene (propene), butylenes (butene) and so on. The olefins are widely used for making synthetic fibres.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14,1947. He flew a plane faster than the velocity of the sun and broke the sound barrier which caused explosive vibrations over the atmosphere.

The Monty Hall problem talks about a situation where there are three closed doors —a goat lies behind two and a car behind the third. A person is asked to select a door (which is not opened immediately). Instead, one of the two unchosen doors are opened and the content is revealed, which incidentally turns out to be a goat. The person is now asked whether he would like to switch his choice to the other unopened door. This gets him thinking. Will changing his choice increase the possibility of winning the car? Common knowledge lets us assume that since now there are two closed doors (one with a goat and the other with a car), chances of winning a car if either of the doors are chosen is 1/2. Hence, it really isn’t a winning situation to motivate a person to change the choice. However, what one needs to remember is the fact that when the person initially made the choice, all three doors were closed and the probability of having a goat behind a closed -toor was 2/3. Now that we already know of ie door that has a goat behind it, chances f winning the door with the car if the peron decides to change his initial choice is /3, which is higher than what he would am if he refuses to change his decision.

French inventor Launoy and Bienvenue created a toy with rotary wings which could take off vertically and fly The term helicopter was later coined by French writer Ponton D’Amecot: helico for spiral and pter for wing. It was only in 1907 that the first helicopter was piloted by PaulCornu, who also created the model. The 100th anniversary of the helicopter’s first flight was celebrated on November 13,2007.

Hotel or Pu-Tai is better known as the Laughing Buddha. The image of Hotel is based on a Chinese Zen monk who lived over 1000 years ago. Many regarded him a future Buddha because of his benevolent nature. It was due to his large protruding stomach and smile that he came to be known as the Laughing Buddha; His image graces many temples, restaurants and homes in China and Japan. Legend has it that if one rubs the Laughing Buddha’s great belly, it brings wealth, good luck and prosperity

A bluelaw is enacted by the people of the Dominion of New Haven. These laws in the United States and Canada are designed to enforce moral standards, particularly the observance of Sunday as a day of worship or rest. They came to be known as bluelaws because they were supposedly printed on blue paper. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence to support this assertion.

Marilyn vos Savant is an American magazine columnist, author, lecturer and playwright who rose to fame through her listing in the Guinness Book of World Records under the Highest IQ category, with a score of 228. She wrote for acolumn called Ask Marilyn in a magazine in which she answers questions from readers on a variety of subjects.

Overseas Courier Service, the world’s first courier service providing firm, was established in 1957 by a consortium of major newspaper publishers in Tokyo as a global, overnight delivery system for time-sensitive business publications. It was the first such private international network, dedicated entirely to overseas air-speed shipping.

Las Vegas was named by Spaniards in the Antonio Armijo Party, who used the water in the area while heading along the Old Spanish Trail from Texas. In the 1800s, areas of the Las Vegas Valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas or meadows (vegas in Spanish) and hence the name Las Vegas.

The earliest way of telling the time was by looking at the progress of the shadow cast by a twig stuck up-right in the ground. Round about 1300 BC, this was developed by the inhabitants of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia into the sundial. The sundial served for a thousand years until the invention of the clepsydra, or water clock. This was the first clock with moving parts. The mechanical clock was not invented until the 13th century and it was driven by weights. The spring-driven clock was invented sometime around 1450 AD.

The primitive type of clock was invented by Henry de Wick in 1368. He installed it on the tower of the castle of the king of France. Using the technique of a pendulum, the clock was developed by French engineer Hyudhence in 1639. Electricity was deployed in the clock by Alexander Ben around 1840-50.

They refer to obese little boys in China without any siblings. They are heavily doted on by their parents and grandparents, who feed them calorie-laden candies and fast food. As a result, obesity has become a problem amongst Chinese teenagers. It’s also seen as a fallout of the strict population policy of China which restricts couples from having more than one child, because of which parents and relatives tend to spoil their children with fatty foods.

The Gulag, a system of forced labour camps in the former USSR, was first established in 1919 under the Cheka, its secret police. Prisoners included murderers, thieves, and other common criminals along with political and religious dissenters. The Gulag, whose camps were located mainly in remote regions of Siberia and the far North of USSR made significant contributions to the Soviet economy in the period of Joseph Stalin. Conditions in the camps were extremely harsh. After Stalin died in 1953, the Gulag population was reduced significantly, and condition of inmates somewhat improved.

Ernesto Che Guevara was a Cuban revolutionary leader. Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution. By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend, not only in Latin America but also around the world. His fearless last words, reportedly, were “Shoot, coward, you’re only going to kill a man”.

Though a comrade of Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, Ernesto Che Guevara was actually from Argentina, not Cuba. His nickname ‘Che’ (loosely translates as ‘yaar’ in India) is an Argentinian slang.

Jazz originated among the Black people in New Orleans in the late 19th century and is characterized by syncopated rhythms and improvisation. It has since developed various styles. Jazz originally drew on Ragtime, Gospel, Black spiritual songs, West African rhythms, and European harmonies. The term jazz originated in southern United States (it is first recorded in 1909, applied to a type of ragtime dance), and it is tempting to speculate that its ancestor crossed the Atlantic on the slave ships from Africa. In the absence of any certain origin, various colourful alternative theories have been put forward, for instance, the name jazz came from the nickname of a certain Jasbo Brown, an itinerant musician along the banks of the Mississippi.

Agent Orange is a defoliant herbicide mixture used during the Vietnam War to destroy forests in Vietnam. The United States sprayed 20 million gallons of Agent Orange over forests in Vietnam, and as a result, members of the armed forces were exposed to it. Agent Orange, named as such due to the orange colour of its storage drums, is a 50:50 mixture of the butyl esters of 2, 4-D and 2,4,5-T. It is probable that damage to humans would be due to the highly toxic impurity dioxin present in Agent Orange.

Jerusalem is one of the oldest cities of the world, having a history that begins in the fourth millennium BC. There was a mention of the city even in the Egyptian texts that belonged to 20th century BC. David was the first Jewish king to conquer the city of Jerusalem in 1007 BC and adopt it as his capital. Over the next several centuries, the city has been conquered and ruled by several different groups of people and countries, and has become a holy city for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Today, it is under the control of Israel and happens to be Israel’s largest city. What has been the city of Jerusalem until 1860s, is the 0.9 square kilometre walled portion inside the modern city of Jerusalem. The walled portion is called the old city today. The old city is divided into four quarters, Armenian, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, and houses many important shrines.

Just as athletes participate in athletic events, matheletes are those who compete in mathematics competitions. The word is a trademark of MathCount Foundation. Recently, a French mathlete named Alexis Lemaire calculated the 13th root of a 200-digit number in just over 70 seconds. By doing so, he beat his own previous record of 72.4 seconds at an event in London’s Science Museum.

A mom-and-pop shop is a colloquial expression for a single-family operated business with few or no employees other than the owners. Sometimes, fewer than ten employees work in these small or micro businesses. People who speak of mom-and-pop businesses often refer to the unique perspective offered by patronizing a family business. Some encourage the unknown experience of entering a mom-and-pop establishment over franchise businesses, which typically offer comparable stores and similar consumer experiences, regardless of location. For example, mom-and-pop businesses are often highlighted in travel guides, because going to a business owned and operated by a family allows a traveller to fully experience and understand the people of another culture.

Thomas Adams, a rubber scientist, invented chewing gum. He was working with a substance called chicle, a gum prepared from the latex of the saphodila tree, a tropical evergreen plant. By chance, he popped a small piece of chicle into his mouth and chewed it casually to while away time. Suddenly, it occurred to him that others may derive pleasure from chewing chicle, which is, even today, a chief ingredient in chewing gum.

Adcomsubordcomphibspac is the longest English acronym. It’s a navy term which stands for Administrative Command, Amphibious Forces, Pacific Fleet Subordinate Command.

A mural is any large painting on a wall, ceiling or any other large structure. There are many techniques used to make them. A fresco, executed using water-soluble paints on wet or dry limestone, is one of the techniques and probably the most popular. A primary characteristic of a fresco is that the paintings, though often done in parts, are generally related by a common thread. For example, the frescoes on the walls and ceilings of Ajanta caves in India (6th century) depict the Jataka tales — stories from Buddha’s life.

If lay persons say ‘yay’, then hardcore gamers would say ‘wOOt’. This phrase, an expression of joy by on-line gamers, has been selected as the word of the year by the US dictionary publisher Merriam Webster.

In data communication, the sampling theorem states that a continuous signal can be completely represented in its sampled form and recovered from the sampled form if the sampling frequency f is equal to 2W, where W is the maximum frequency of that continuous signal. This minimum sampling rate of 2W samples per second for a signal having maximum frequency of W is called the Nyquist Rate.

Fear or dislike of foreigners or aliens is called xenophobia. The word xenophobia is a combination of two Greek words — xenos (foreigners) and phobos (fear). When a majority of people in a country suffer from xenophobia, the phobia can lead to mass expulsion of people of foreign origin, or banning of certain foreign cultural elements. Xenophobia is different from racism, although often both words are used interchangeably Racism implies a hatred of people of other races, irrespective of whether they belong to one’s own country, whereas xenophobia implies hatred of people of other countries or regions. In science fiction, xenophobia refers to fear of extraterrestrial beings. Scientists explain xenophobia as a defence mechanism evolved in humans in response to the need to win in inter-group competition in society and Nature.

The Gudermannian function, named after Christoph Gudermann (1798 -1852), relates to the circular and hyperbolic trigonometric functions without using complex numbers.

The word originally referred to any small boat; the modern meaning arose around 1480. A barge is a flatbottomed boat, built mainly for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Most barges are not self-propelled and need to be moved by tugboats or towboats. Barges on canals contended with the railways in the early industrial revolution but were outclassed when it came to carrying high-value items due to the higher speed, falling costs, and route flexibility of rail transport. A boat is a watercraft designed to float on, and provide transport over water.

The Green Gold or Oro Verde project seeks to ensure the safety of miners and also protect them from exploitation. A jewellery shop in Chichester, England along with miners in a cooperative in Choco in North-East Colombia and the Fair Trade Foundation embarked on this project which promotes the purchase of green gold or jewellery which isn’t created by putting labourers through hardships.

The Antarctica Treaty, signed in 1959, was a path-breaking agreement among countries of the world. There are certain regions located beyond the sovereign jurisdiction of any country of the world. Therefore, they require common governance by the international community These are known as ‘res communis humanitatis’ or Global Commons. It includes not only Antarctica but also the ocean floor and outer space. According to the treaty, Antarctica’s environment and ecosystem will be protected. Since 1959, activities in the area have been limited to scientific research and development, fishing and tourism. Even these limited activities have not prevented this region from being degraded by waste, for example, oil spills. The expansion of the treaty was Antarctic Environmental Protocol of 1991.

A pagoda, in South-east Asia, is a cone-shaped monumental structure built in memory of the Buddha. But in the Far East, a pagoda is a tower-like, multi-storeyed structure of stone, brick, or wood, usually associated with a Buddhist temple complex. The pagoda is derived from the stupa of ancient India, which was a dome-shaped commemorative monument, usually erected over the remains or relics of a holy man or king.

According to a popular legend, July was named after Julius Caesar and hence it had 31 days. Later, when Augustus Caesar took over the Roman Empire, he wanted August, the month named after him, to have 31 days as well. Hence, the two extra days were taken from February, which was then left with 28 days. However, some historians d.on’t agree with this reasoning. They believe February always had 28 days ever since the time of King Numa Pompilius. He decided that a year would have 355 days, the length of 12 lunar cycles. Back then, even numbers were considered unlucky So, he created seven months with 29 days, and four with 31. Since he now needed one short even-numbered month, he chose February, as it was considered the least favourite month for it arrived during the middle of winter. And hence, it was given only 28 days.

Rice wine is made from fermenting freshly steamed glutinous rice. Most rice wines are low in alcohol content, light in colour, noncarbonated and have a sweet flavour. Rice wine is categorized according to the degree to which rice is polished. It does not usually improve with age and should be preferably consumed within one year of bottling.

New Amsterdam was established by Dutch colonisers in 1624 in what is known today as New York city The town of New Amsterdam became a city in 1653 when it received municipal rights and was reincorporated as New York city in June 1665. The town was founded on the southern tip of Manhattan island as the most optimal place for permanent settlement by the Dutch West India Company and was strategically located on the south of the Hudson river. The location was best suited to defend the integrity of the New Netherlands province and was entrusted to safeguard the West India Company’s exclusive access to New Netherlands’ other two estuaries — the Delaware river and Connecticut river.

If we define war as a large-scale violent conflict between two states employing the military, the earliest recorded wars might have taken place between various city states in the Mesopotamian region during the period 3,000-2,300 BC in the Bronze Age. The first recorded evidence of such a war was the one between the two city states Lagash and Umma, estimated to have taken place in 2525 BC. From the stone slabs bearing inscriptions related to the war, it could be inferred that the war employed professional soldiers wearing helmets who moved on chariots. The weapons employed were maces and swords.

The original Santa Claus lived nowhere near the North Pole. If the 4th century bishop known as Saint Nicholas of Myra — the inspiration for Santa Claus — existed at all, he lived in Lycia, a province of the Byzantine Anatolia, now in Turkey Santa Claus is a corruption of the Dutch name Sinte Klaas for St Nicholas, the patron saint of children and unmarried girls. Tradition says he gave bags of gold to three daughters from a noble, but poor family as their dowries, thus saving them from a life of prostitution. As the legends developed in the Netherlands, the three bags of gold were replaced by a bulging sack of presents which Santa Claus distributed to children on December 6, St Nicholas’ feast day Later, this custom caught on to other parts of the world, to give gifts to good people and punish the bad.

The principle of the thermocouple was first described by Seebeck in 1821. Seebeck discovered that when wires of two dissimilar metals were joined together to form a circuit of at least two junctions, a current would flow when the junctions were at different temperatures. This phenomenon, called the Seebeck Effect, is the basis upon which thermocouples are designed.

What we normally see today in theatres are two-dimensional movies with multi-channel sound. In three-dimensional movies, viewers are required to wear special glasses which create 3-D images of objects in the movie. Chhota Chetan and Shiva Ka Insaaf were such movies released two decades ago. Fourth dimension in a movie creates an overall different experience. In addition to the effects of 3-D features, viewers can experience the movies through other senses like sight, sound, odour, touch and also have personal remote control. Viewers are seated in special seats which have bass shockers and other special fittings which make them a part of the complete 4-D experience.

In aerodynamics, bow shock is a normal shock that occurs in front of an object within a supersonic flow. Unlike an oblique shock, the bow shock is not attached to the tip, off the object in the flow. Oblique shock angles are limited in formation based on the corner angle and upstream Mach number. When these limitations are exceeded, a bow shock occurs instead of an oblique shock. Therefore, bow shocks are often seen forming around blunt objects. In astrophysics, bow shock is a boundary between a magnetosphere and an ambient medium. For stars, this is typically the boundary between their stellar wind and the interstellar medium. In a planetary magnetosphere, the bow shock is the boundary at which the solar wind abruptly drops because of its approach to the magnetopause.

Assumption Day is, according to the Roman Catholic church, the day on which the Blessed Virgin Mary was, along with her body and soul, accepted (or ‘assumed’) in heaven. It is usually celebrated on August 15 by Roman Catholics. In some parts of the world, Assumption Day is a public holiday; in some parts it is a day of solemnity and prayers, whereas in some other parts, it is a day of feasting and festivities. Although in the early days of Christianity some held that it was not certain how the Virgin Mary’s life ended, from the 5th century AD onwards, Christians believed that the Virgin Mary did not actually suffer a physical death and that she passed into heaven with her physical body and soul on Assumption Day The above day was officially recognised through a Dogma by the Church only in 1950. The Assumption has also been a subject of Christian art for several centuries.

An heirloom plant, heirloom variety, or (especially in the UK) heirloom vegetable is an open-pollinated cultivar that was commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but not used in modern large-scale agriculture. Since most popular heirloom plants are vegetables, the term heirloom vegetable is often used instead. The trend of growing heirloom plants in gardens has been growing in popularity in the United States and Europe over the last decade. This is called heirloom gardening. Some examples are heirloom tomato, forbidden rice and Bhutanese red rice.

Dies Irae literally means day of wrath. The mediaeval Christians were preoccupied with the end of the world; they anticipated the Last Judgement, followed by the millennium. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West there was a revival of the belief in the end of time. The year 1000 likewise excited mythological speculation, as did famines, plagues, and earthquakes. Most influential were the views of the visionary Joachim of Fiore. He divided history into several ages and said that 1260 would be the fulfilment of the Age of the Spirit, which had begun with St Benedict. At that time, mankind could expect a new revelation, the coming of the anti-Christ, and the last days of wrath. This myth, written down at the behest of the Papacy, exerted a potent influence on mediaeval thought, and in its vision of a future world where the Holy Roman Empire and the Church of Rome would give place to a free community of perfected beings who have no need of clergy or sacraments or scripture, it anticipated modern millennial theories.

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are the three countries through which Europe’s third-longest river flows. It originates in the south-west of Moscow and flows through Smolensk (Russia), Mogilev (Belarus), Kiev (capital of Ukraine), Dnepropetrovsk and Kherson (Ukraine) and empties into the Black Sea.

The current geological epoch we live in is called Holocene, which began around 9600 BC. However, considering the way humans have altered the course of the Earth scientists suggest that the epoch be renamed anthropocene. Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen coined this term in a casual remark in 2002, while talking about how the Earth was entering a new epoch due to increasing human population and economic activity However, other scientists want this word to refer to the human impact upon the planet.

If any company exports a product at a price lower than what it normally charges in its home market, then it is dumping the product. Opinions differ as to whether or not this is unfair competition, but many countries take action against dumping by imposing anti-dumping duty Thus, anti-dumping duty is an extra import duty on a particular product from a particular country in order to bring its prices closer to the normal value of that product in the country it is imported to. It is done to protect its own industry from predatory pricing. The World Trade Organisation does not prohibit antidumping policies and allows any country to take anti-dumping action against the countries which violate the principles of General Agreement on Trade and Tariff.

An unforseen chain of events due to an act affecting a system, much like how a waterfall cascades down, is called cascade effect. Cascade effects are commonly visualised in tree structures called event trees.

Lapis Lazuli is an intense blue semiprecious stone. It has been mined for 6,500 years in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. It has lazurite as the main component. It’s used in jewellery, mosaics, architecture and as a pigment called ultramarine in tempera paintings. It was used by Assyrians and Babylonians for seals, as an eyeshadow by Cleopatra and Romans believed it to be an aphrodisiac. It was thought to keep limbs healthy and free the soul from error, envy and fear.

In pharmaceutical terms, magic bullets are those drugs which attack the affected organ/cells and not the healthy ones. For example, the medicine for blood cancer I — called Glivec — is known to be a magic bullet as it attacks only those cells which are affected by the disease and not the healthy or surrounding cells.

‘The art of moving’ or Parkour involves moving from one point to another as quickly and efficiently as possible. It entails overcoming obstacles using the power of the human body and is practised in several urban areas the world over. Recently, members of the Du Yize Parkour Club of Beijing showed their prowess at the Forbidden City

It is a system of coordinates in Geometry whereby the position of a point, say P, in a plane can be determined with reference to a fixed point called origin, denoted by 0, and a predetermined direction represented by a ray OA. The measure of length OP, denoted by r, and the measure of the angle that OP makes with OA, generally denoted by a Greek letter theta, are called polar coordinates of P and, P is called the graph of r and theta. One pair of values of r and theta corresponds to only one point in the plane and one point in the plane corresponds to only one pair of the values of r and theta.

These are thin narrow flat strips made of wood or metal, which are used as an auxiliary air foil at the leading edge of the wing of an aeroplane.

Jallikattu, which is bull-baiting or bull fighting, is an ancient Tamilian tradition. There are several rock paintings, more than 3,500 years old, at remote Karikkiyur village in the Nilgiri district in Tamil Nadu that show men chasing bulls. Another single painting discovered in a cave at Kalluthu Mettupatti, about 35 km west of Madurai, between Madurai and Dindigul, shows a lone man trying to control a bull, Researchers estimate that this painting, done in white kaolin, is about 1,500 years old.

‘Top dog’ means one who is dominant or victorious. When wooden planks were sawn by hand, two men did the job using a two-handed saw. The senior man took the top handle, standing on the wood, and the junior took the bottom, in the saw-pit below. The irons that were used to hold the wood were called dogs and that the bottom position was much more uncomfortable. The term ‘top dog’ originated from this practice.

The term art gallery refers to two different kinds of places: 1. A place which exhibits items of art (an art museum), and 2. A place which sells art items. The oldest art museum is supposed to be housed in the Cosquer Caves, the under-water caves, near Marseilles. The caves consist of finger tracings, impressions of painted hands, and painted and engraved figures of animals. The oldest works in these caves were estimated to have been created 29,000 years ago. Art galleries that exhibit and sell works of art on a large scale have been in existence since the 17th century AD. Most of the oldest art auction houses that exist today in Europe have been founded in the first half of the 18th century Viennabased auction house Dorothium, which claims to be the oldest art auction house of the world, was founded in 1707, and Sothebys, the oldest and largest art auction house of England, was founded in 1744.

They refer to the new language developed by cellphone-addicted teenagers, based on predictive text on their handsets. They are also known as adaptonyms or cellodromes. Using predictive text, the first alternative to certain keywords are used in textonyms.

The vibrant tradition of folk art in West Bengal’s Bankura district includes a variety of clay handicrafts. The district’s most famous product is the Bankura Horse, a very stylised figure with a long neck and elongated ears, in warm terracotta colours. Artisans have used the same techniques of hollow clay moulding and firing for generations. Sizes vary from minute, palm-sized to gigantic creations over 1 metre high. The horses are votive figures and are usually kept or placed in front of local deities.

Queen Victoria founded The Most Exalted Order of the Star of India in 1861, which was an order of chivalry, meant to be given to viceroys of India, nawabs and princes for their meritorious service and loyalty to the British empire. The people admitted to this order were called knights. In the year of its founding, Nawab Sikandar Begum Sahiba, Nawab Begum of Bhopal was made the Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India (GCSI). La

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“Born into this”: a review of three seasons of HBO’s “The Wire”

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:35:26 +0000

Okay, let’s grant this at the outset: no one needs me to tell them about the – let’s face it – unparalleled excellence of HBO’s The Wire, given that we’re dealing, after all, with a truth acknowledged by everyone who’s ever sat in front of a cathode ray tube in the hope of filling up the silence of the infinite spaces that surround them…So, if any of you heart-wrenchingly attractive people still need my testimony to be convinced of the greatness of this show, then you are not only a friendless (if lovably eccentric) technophobic anchorite who’s spent far too much time with no-one to talk to but the tins of “Chunky Irish stew” that line your fallout shelter, but you’re also someone who needs to hear the following harsh truth the way you need a tin-opener and maybe some kind of gaming console:YOUR FRIENDS ARE DELIBERATELY CONCEALING THINGS FROM YOU IN ORDER TO LAUGH AT YOUR CONFUSION.Yes, the Illuminati are running this caper, ladies and gentleman, which is why your life is now, and forever shall be, one part The Truman Show, one part Emir Kusturica’s Underground. (Not a bad film concept, incidentally, as long as all the hierarchies of angels can somehow conspire to make the likes of James Cameron stay away from the thing….)

But, anyway.The Wire is one of those shows, that despite being (at least now in its resurrected ‘DVD boxed set’ days) so popular that, if you’re a 20 to 50-ish vaguely middle-class person of the kind who’s seen at least one HBO drama, than you can safely bet your last marketable organ that at least two-thirds of your friends are, on any given night, sedulously watching the latest episode instead of attending your birthday party/wedding/stupefying Houellebecqian orgy as they mumblingly promised they would while drunk and/or attempting to seduce you with their endearing sensitivity. Believe me, then, when I say that even as you read this, people you know are already thinking of how they can bestpretend to be deadin order not only to escape your Friday night drinks, but to indulge in the kind of Wire marathons that would make the Bayreuth festival look like the punch-line to a pun.And don’t misunderstand me: I’m not just saying that your shy, housebound, irredeemably uncool friends are abandoning you in favour of watching the show, I’m saying that this is true even of the resolutely sociable and earnestly self-improving ones – the ones who purposely don’t own televisions. Trust me when I say that – all hyperbole aside –these people, are, even as we speak, finding the flimsiest of pretexts to drop in on your mutual friends (“Hi Hailey, Hi Amanda…just thought we’d stop by and see the new baby…ooh..how excit-ing…” in the hope of getting even a whiff of Omar Little and his merry band of social-realist-story-telling uplifted and transformed-by-a-panoramic-perspective, acute insights into systematic injustice and -larger-than-life character archetypes who, as in Dickens, play the role of putting flesh on structures that do, at least in a certain sense, and contra a famous May ‘68 slogan: walk the streets. (Anyone who doubts me on that last point should read Joan Copjec’s book Read my Desire >until they…y’know…submit).The Wire, at its heart is so vast, so baroque, so generally magnificent and has also had so many gazillions of words put forward attesting to its vastness and baroqueness, that it’s hard to know where to start. In deference to this, I’ve decided to try introducing my own commentary by means of one gratuitously over-extended knock-knock joke. (As I believe Lao Tzu said: have blog, need gimmick: otherwise how else will I ever get to do that hipster froideur thing via which the more important doyens-of-the-blogosphere manage to patronise all the non-entities in their comment boxes? So, here we go: Knock, knock. “Who’s there…?” “That was…” ”‘That was’ who…?”"That was the American Dream abandoning this city like it was post-Katrina New Orleans on the day that it was announced that the city was being turned into a nuclear test-site which was to be entirely populated by the post-Apocalyptic (i.e. zombie) progeny of Glenn Beck and the Beckhams. As it drove off into the sunset (listen to those tyres screech, people) the Dream, of course, took with it the standard obscene CEO payout, a couple of the more attractive secretaries – that was the horn of the getaway car proposing to raise the dead of another city less lost than this one — and all the amusing stickers from the receptionist’s desk. Oh, and the ‘knocking’, sound? That was the Dream announcing that it had left a calling card on your doorstep whose glossy promise of secular transcendence will undoubtedly haunt (and in a strange way even edify) your short and brutish (if not always nasty) life, like the vengeful ghost of every promise of liberty, equality and fraternity once made by the founders of the Republic that now lies ostentatiously bleeding to death on an unregarded housing project corner. But, you know, take heart: the little calling card is still enough to tie some kind of subjectivity together into a mish-mash of affects sutured to actions by fantasies resilient enough to live as if it were not inevitable that the former should be distorted into psychosis and the latter crushed under the heels of the city of Baltimore like another of those ubiquitous discarded drug drug-vials that cake the shoes of anyone who visits the many depressed and posthumous parts of the city (East or West). And, I mean sure, you can even feel, on the odd night, your possibility of redemption, that you might be getting closer to the goal, that the cash, the girls, the house, and even the rap star ‘lifestyle’ isn’t far behind you:: you’re part of a good crew now after all, your star’s rising, people treat you with respect/ Bang/Huh? What was that?/Nothing. Just your pointless death. You’re a statistic now. It’s like fame only crunchy. And don’t worry it’s bad for “5-0″ (as in “Hawaii” or what the show’s characters call ‘po-lice’) as well – they’re ruled by numbers and quotas and corruption so all-pervasive that it’s as if the vestiges of civic virtue and government ‘by the people, for the people’ seem like the irritating parasite on the host organism of the corruption.”Alternatively, I could have just summarised the above by taking a line from the first season: Drug dealer (being dragged away in a police van and beaten en route) “You can’t f*!#ing do this, man: this is America!”Random Police Officer: [laughing] “This is.West.Baltimore.”But, as I say, you don’t need me to tell you that The Wire is to television what a cigar-chomping, gun-toting, Hegel-reading reincarnation of H.W. Fowler would be to the obscenely self-regarding Australian Press — no matter how much I just did this. Also, given that I do agree with the prevailing excited consensus on the greatness of the show, I can’t attempt to offer you any shiny faux-contrarianism to take away the bad taste that’s left by so great an oxymoron as a “critical consensus.

So, instead of talking about the sheer ambition and daring of The Wire, its extraordinary writing, its frequently hilarious, frequently poignant vignettes coloured by those almost constant “I can’t believe this is happening” moments that will make you cover your eyes, and groan out loud to the gods even after you’ve watched seasons of the stuff and mistakenly think you’ve become desensitized to the show’s implacable “corruption squashes virtue” logic (a kind of scissors, paper, rock, without the paper and in which one side always uses the rock.) And yet, if you’re a natural sceptic, you might still think that all of this nicely-packaged excellence is basically the familiar stock-standard “quality television” that can be found in almost any HBO show and that The Wire might be nothing more than The Sopranos with a little more incomprehensible Baltimore street argot thrown in to fulfill its ‘life on the streets’ authenticity quotient.But, no. Let me explain this by way of a remark that will also allow me to opportunistically explain something that I said in a previous post:I recently made a video that went by the name, the Australian Middle Class Saves the World”. After I posted this video on Youtube and elsewhere, I started to squirm guiltily at the number of times the word ‘racism’ came out of the mouth of my idiot-hipster character ‘Maddie’ (who says this word — as she says everything — as if it meant ‘general badness which I oppose every time I go into a trendy bar as opposed to somewhere less hip.’) Now, this squirming on my part, was and is, of course, stupid and pathetic, not to mention revelatory of any number of equally pathetic neuroses of the “oh, maybe I’ve said something that will lead to my beautiful soul being tragically misrepresented, thus leading to situation where I won’t get invited to all those parties that… I…er…don’t go to.” (Hmm. So, everbody wins after all…)At any rate, at the time, I was worried that by making Maddie constantly invoke the term in her stilted, Xtranormal (and indeed “extranormal”) speech, some censorious and easily offended mythical reader of mine might somehow break through the ‘why would she give a shit?’ barrier and publically censure me for implying that racism exists only as a chimera in the mind of self-important morons. Now, of course: a) I never meant to say anything of the kind and b) no-one’s actually made such an accusation because well, you know, www.whywoudlanyonecare.com. But, to clarify this anyway, for narcissistic reasons: I wasn’t making light of racism, as much as I was attempting to satirise what I think is the prevalent ideological illusion that good and bad (and even the task of combatting present present social injustices stemming from historical ones) is in the end a matter of making sure the right people have the right attitude, that everything will be all right as long as the privileged groups have the right (“Aw…we like those people…they make nice food…”) aesthetic outlook on the victims of the injustice.Now, what I’m worried about here is the potential for a kind of ‘consumerist’ distortion of what it means to hold ethical and political positions. The distortion operates like this: under the perpetual “Web 2.0″, “find celebrity or die” imperatives of the present, potentially any and all decisions (always conceived as choices from life’s extensive menu) can be perverted such that they are principally a means of ‘expressing ourselves’ through our consumer choices. In an environment governed by the imperative to ‘make sure you show what kind of person you are at all times because this is somehow terribly important’ the danger is that even our most passionately proclaimed ethical and political can take on the appearance of (even if they don’t actually become this) nothing more than tribal tattoos which we desperately try to make intricate or distinctive enough to not be mistaken for everyone else’s (crappier, duller, less “edgy”) attempts to have their selfhood recognized and thus given substance.I think you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about: the weird contexts in which even perfectly honourable moral and political positions that are supposed to be about solidarity, equality, justice and which are supposed to give rise to what Badiou calls the ‘tent-words’ under which an elusive ‘we’ might shelter together, and work together for a better world, suddenly becomes instead less about ending oppression or actually achieving certain goals than a convenient way for me to show the (apparently perpetually watching) world my latest kung fu move in the endless game of (to quote Fight Club) “which colour scheme best expresses who I am as a person: the fuchsia, the cobalt or the cafe latte creme caramel?”Now, I’m not saying that I think that politics needs to be like this or even that it is like this most of the time: but I am saying that there’s at least a marked tendency given the way selfhood in our epoch is thought of (as a function of shopping and other gestures of self-display) that we will turn our political “alignments” as well as our attested to (as opposed to acted upon) moral principles into just another way of selling ourselves. As an example, of this, I’d point to the Australian columinist Catherine Deveney, who is familiar to me chiefly for what seems to be her horrifying genius for spouting deceptively progressive sounding rhetoric in a way that must be incredibly comforting for the political right that she thinks of herself as opposing. This is because, in her amazingly self-regarding discourse, ‘politics’ is persistently portrayed as if its main purpose was to provide an outlet for the smug self-assertion practiced by the inhabitants of the hipper suburbs, a self-assertion that consists in finding any opportunity to imply one’s both moral and aesthetic superiority to all of those crass, ignorant unenlightened types who don’t share Our Way of Life [sic] and who will thus be deservedly Passed Over when the revolution finally acknowledges that the aforementioned ‘let’s live in the interesting parts of the city with access to real life types’ are the saviours of muddled humanity….Now, I won’t surprise anyone when I say that the ideology of “it’s all about your attitudes and choices” is particularly common to Hollywood and even more so to American television.To explain: how many films have you seen where a problem of “race”, poverty and Imperialism” is portrayed largely as a consequence of the subjective nastiness or prejudice of individual imperialists/capitalists?The recent apotheosis (or perhaps Apocolocyntosis) of this sort of thing is James Cameron’s Avatar, a film which though it does feature an undeniably pretty and pleasingly blue CGI jungle for its puppy-dog eyed, noble savages with sexy feline noses to frolic in, is, despite this saving grace, unbearably, pompously earnest in its constant, humourless attempts to portray the evils of Imperialist exploitation as ultimately the handiwork of psychopathic crew-cutted military fucknuts doing the bidding of smarmy, slump-shouldered, cynical corporate half-humans, who together constitute an alliance so evil that it wears a death’s head mask on either nipple and has a smiling corporate logo that says “we’re the bad guys” and goes on to explain how said alliance is dedicated to stomping on every flower that ever made an innocent child smile, even and especially when those flowers grow in magical, extra-terrestrial forests full of shiny blue indigenous people with carefully constructed super-sensual Angelina Jolie lips. The unbelievable superficiality and childishness of Avatar’s moral outlook derives mainly from its cartoonish portrayal of oppression and exploitation as principally deriving from a lack of sensitivity and wonder, and thus as something that couldn’t possibly be abetted or perpetuated by normal, sensitive, beauty-loving people who don’t actively relish the sight of Arcadian innocence being summarily cluster-bombed by steroid-abusing thugs.But, of course, the problem with this portrayal of capitalist Imperialism is it implicitly identifies the standard cinema-going audience’s rudimentary capacity to be moved by drama (“I’d be all like ‘Go blue cat people, I’ll> endure a cosmopolitan inter-species shag with Cat Woman Pocahontas if it stops those nasty U.S. marines from their ogre-like brutality”) as the key to solving the planet’s plunge into ecological degradation as well and at the same time as the best way to improve the condition of that inconveniently poor and dying billion people currently living who so recalicitrantly refuse to be ‘uplifted’ by what economists have long been telling us is the inevitable downward trickle of global wealth. By doing this, i.e. by portraying exploitation as a reality that is in no way compatible with the existence of the average movie goer and his feelings, the film completely negates what is nonetheless its enormously inflated moral-political pretensions to ‘communicate’ an important message to the people via the multiplex. In the end, Avatar and its filmic fraternity will never be a call to arms for anyone to anything simply because (like Cameron’s much less watchable, and indeed execrable ) it feeds and flatters pervasive ideological illusions rather than dispelling them in the name of truths that might re-orient the field of what we think we know.To make the more general point: there’s a certain way that people in general and Hollywood films in particular have with dealing with “Imperialism” (say, the British Raj) as if it were mainly the consequence of “Whig notions of the upward march of progress and civilisation”, as if racism, class-distinctions,Titanic and exploitation all comes down to someone saying explicitly “screw these savages/poor people/they’re not civilized so we can do what we want to them.” Now, while of course, this was (and is) undoubtedly an element of the colonial mindset, the illusion here is that Colonialism would never have happened (or would have taken another rosier road) if only the Colonial Offices of say, the East India Company, were filled with the standard movie-going public of our time, i.e. with people who defined themselves by what is mistakenly believed to be the opposite of the “Whig” attitude: i.e. a capacity for wonder at the beauty at “difference” – at the cultural wealth and depth of ‘other cultures’.The problem with this argument is that it is, of course, super-sized nonsense. In a bag. Where the bag has a full-body shot of James Cameron’s’ gripping his Academy Award and calling for a minute’s silence for the victims of the Titanic. (Yes, he really did that.)Thus, I’m continually surprised and shocked by how many post-colonial studies types [yes, I just crossed myself ostentatiously] types who are supposed — surely — to take Edward Said’s Orientalism as their bible – seem entirely unaware that Orientalist attitudes (“ah, these blue cat-people have a spirituality and contact with nature that our grey ugly civilization has tragically left behind, but perhaps can regain if only it opens its heart to the mysteries of the East) goes perfectly well if not better with imperialist domination than a Whiggish sense of one’s own cultural superiority: in fact it’s the ultimate (not-so-dangerous) supplement to Imperialist ideology that makes the system function all the more smoothly: allowing the Company to sell the odd sari, and copy of the Vedas back in London along with the tea. Two words for you people who don’t get this: Lord.Curzon.Along these lines, one of the really great things about The Wire is how utterly un-Cameronesque it is. This is principally because more than any American television show that I’ve seen (even The Sopranos this a program that shows poverty and even a certain ‘not-what-is-usually-meant-by-the-term’ racism in a way that makes everything else I’ve seen from the U.S. look as sanitized as Tom Sawyer’s fence after his inaugural scam. Best of all, The Wire manages to achieve this without either sentimentality of the ‘every drug dealer in the projects is a hero in their own special way if he’d only discover the power inside himself to attract money with happy thoughts” kind or pandering to the inveterate belief of the well-meaning liberal audience of HBO programming that the main reason that bad things happen is that there are unenlightened, insensitive people in the world and that everything would be okay, as long as People Like Us could rule the world from our living rooms.Of course, I’m not saying that outright bigots don’t exist; they obviously do, and (much worse) they’re seemingly self-consciously summoned into existence with alarming frequency by the prestidigitations of unscrupulous right-wing demagogues of the kind who seem to have unleashed the tea party on Obama’s America, Le Pen on France to start what would have to be a very long list. But a remarkable thing about The Wire, is how rarely individual sentiments (as opposed to individual actions) are portrayed as being in the least bit important to the on-going functions of the system. It’s not that the world is portrayed, as an arch-cynic might, as being totally devoid of individual virtue — we’re not talking about Mad Men after all — it’s just that the show continually reinforces the fact that if individuals really have to struggle in the face of an utterly corrupt system (to the point that the fates of certain of the more well-intentioned characters throughout the show frequently recall the plot of de Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue”and Voltaire’s Candide): i.e. no good intention (let alone deed) goes unpunished in a world where having a good attitude (“I can speak to people of all creeds and colours without any screaming ‘kill the interloper’ prejudices”) means precisely what Kurt Vonnegut would call “doodly-squat” in the face of the deeply embedded social inequalities that are all geared up to perpetuate themselves into the next century.(For, any Lacan lovers among you, out there, I’ll just quickly say that The Wireconstantly shows the destitution of the imaginary – the sphere of ego and alter – in the symbolic, while at the same time showing the terrible actions of those who will not admit the existence of a ‘hole in the Real’: i.e. the properly capitalist-bureaucratic psychosis that equates what can be counted with what ‘is’. But, to spare the rest of you, that’s all I’ll say on the matter, for now.)To put this another way, in The Wire, racism is not so much an attitude, as an organizing principle: it’s autopoietic, self-perpetuating, built into the heart of things like an inherited disease that is now encoded in every cell of the body, it’s like the information contained in every cell that dictates the direction in which the social body will grow. Now, you might object here, that racism is, by definition, a subjective disposition/attitude that we usually infer from certain forms of speech and action. And you’d be right. However, it’s precisely these kinds of subjective dispositions that, in the world of The Wire seem, if not exactly irrelevant to the way “Baltimore” operates than something very close to this. It’s as if the series at once suggests that, yes, “life in the city” is, as neo-liberal economic theory would have it, simply the aggregate of all those atoms bumping into each other a la Democritus (or, in a different sense, Friedrich Hayek’s) binding together to handle a complexity beyond that which could be ‘managed’ by any government. And yet the show continually shows us how illusory is the neo-liberal notion that this social reality can ‘be anything at all’ in a way that would suggest these individual encounters and reactions are not already structured by the whole of which they form parts. Instead, what we see in The Wire is the tendency for an already existing pattern (of social injustice, inequality et cetera) gets perpetuated through, by, and very occasionally despite the seemingly isolated and autonomous actions of these same individuals. The point is not to suggest skepticism about the possibilities of human autonomy, but rather skepticism about ‘atomic’ social theory: as the philosophically inclined, among you, will already know, society may be made up of monads, but monads are most definitely not atoms.Put differently, the fact that Baltimore is, as they tell us somewhere in The Wire’s third season, 65 per cent “African American” added to the fact the show’s universe has a black mayor, police commissioner, senators and generally no lack of prominent black, Hispanic, Polish and Irish citizens and that WASPS of any kind seem conspicuous only in their absence, doesn’t change the fact that Baltimore’s indigent and incarcerated populations are disproportionately African-American.The show manages — without needing to invent a single easily despised, pot-bellied bigot to fuel audience indignation by coming over all Ku Klux Klan — to show that whatever the attitudes of individuals the fact stilll remains that the poorest districts on either side of the city are all occupied by people who are of the same colour, who speak the same language, and who are so used to and unlikely to escape the housing Project world into which they are born, that they even grow up amidst an urban lore which passes down legends of the great drug KingPins of yore down the generations. It is a fact that, as I like to say, is obscured by its very obviousness.Thus, racism is here objective rather than subjective, such that although there are indeed many horrendous characters (and there are many of these in the show, most of them concentrated in the higher ranks of the Baltimore PD) this is peripheral to the fact that if you’re black you have a far greater (disporportionate) chance of being born in one of the “Towers” in which the show spends so much time, i.e. of coming from one of the many places where people are – to quote Charles Bukowski: ‘born like this/into this/as the chalk faces smile/…. As political landscapes dissolve/as the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree/as the oily fish spit out their oily prey/as the sun is masked/ Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness/Into bars where people no longer speak to each other/Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings/ Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed/into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes…”Also, in the name of chasing this elusive, frighteningly mobile, all-pervasive corruption, the narrative of The Wire across its seasons, operates by a device of continually pulling back the camera to encompass an ever more sweeping vision of the city, itself a microcosm of America: Baltimore is a teeming, thirivng thing: with its alleyways, and its corners (the sites where dealers hang out from dawn ‘til dusk) , its civic centres designed for clandestine political horse-trading, and its abandoned office buildings where the police use type-writers and old SLR cameras in a way that made me think, until half-way through the first episode that the show might be set during the 1980s (we hardly ever see a computer on any desk of the Baltimore PD.)The fact that the shows narrative becomes increasingly panoramic as the seasons wear on is a feature that several commentators have rightly identified as the show’s curiously (especially for U.S. television) “Dickensian” quality. Like in Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House (the latter of which, I – admit to not having actually read) there’s a dust-heap (or a last will and testament) at the centre of everything: a money if not a paper trail that connects an endless panoply of colourful characters: police, gangsters, drug dealers, users, the frighteningly efficient members of one or more international crime syndicates with local dock-workers (“stevedores”)and their union, schoolteachers, politicians: an endless cavalcade of humanity that, for all the colour of the parade never verges on caricature: you never doubt that you’re witnessing characters drawn from life who echo and express the real life from which they came. Most remarkably, when in later series the show achieves the remarkable feat of showing the interconnection of all aspects of life in the city via the vast self-propelling system of graft, crime, dodgy deals, and facts that are quickly obscured when they don’t fit with the various ‘target numbers’ of management-marketing bureaucrats it manages to do this without having to resort to any of the gimmicky jump-cut techniques of films like Syriana or Traffic, films which, as Fred Jameson once pointed out, tend to lose the very ‘globalisation’ they are attempting to portray in the manner of an elusive “something that has ‘had a trace put on it’ as we find in a certain kind of Hollywood action film, where the audience sees a map of the world with a light that bounces from LA to New York, to Paris, to Moscow, but then dissipates into the the aether like the argument of an ill-thought out thesis. [Actually, come to think of it, I think Jameson meant that, the vanishing from the map might be a better representation of the reality of globalisation then the attempts to ‘show the connections' a la Syriana. But let's save that for another girl, another planet.]The first season of The Wire, then, tells what initially looks like the story of cops attempting to catch drug dealers and drug dealers attempting to evade cops: if you didn’t look closely enough, you’d be (as Brooker says) forgiven for thinking that this is “just another cop show”, albeit one with a strong cast and and the standard absence of Manichean distinctions which tends to graitfy all those nice, liberal-in-the-American sense, well-heeled and well-educated HBO watching types. But by the second and third seasons (and I’ve spent several months getting to this point in the show), there’s no question that you’re seeing something that goes beyond drugs, that becomes something like a biography, or better, an ethnography of a city.The show’s quietly devastating second season, is, in the words of the show’s creator David Simon about the “decline of work”, (a theme which, incidentally, it shares with the excellent Australian movie The Boys).The second season follows the characters from the first series through a series of complex plots that revolve around a dock workers’ (stevedores’) union whose charismatic Polish-American shop steward (is the term used in America? What’s its local equivalent?) Frank Sabotka (below) is desperately struggling to keep his union alive, while facing among other things, a vendetta stemming from a high-ranking police officer who will even allow a prohibited murder investigation to continue (oh, the irony) if it might humiliate Sabotka in revenge for some past slight.Sabotka’s job is, as he, but also many of his fellow dockers see it, to keep his struggling men (and their families) waving, rather than drowning in an increasingly desperate economic situation in which the work which has for generations has kept these people alive is turning from a daily reality into a distant memory. In post-Fordist (but remember pre-financial crisis) Baltimore: the men (Polish, Irish and African-American) of the stevedores union are guys who would have grown up expecting to spend and even end their lives doing the kind of difficult, physical, full-time work that their fathers and grandfathers did. But now, they’re struggling. It’s hard to get more than a few hours a work a week, even with the help of the union (which everyone has joined because it’s a community, a multi-generational family, the only point of resistance against the brutal imperatives of capital). Thus we are introduced to a number of characters who, unable to pay their bills, and completely unaware of how they might go about getting any other kind of work thus find themselves in a situation very like that of the kids from the Projects, except for dock-workers lacking the dubious “advantage” of their contemporaries in not having been ‘born into’ a world on the fringes of the criminal shadowlands, and who thus are at once less resigned to this world as a condition of existence, but also less capable of surviving in it. Of course whenever we see poverty attached to ever-present hopes of fulfilling the American dream (even in the relatively sober version of a small (possibly rented) house, a car, some medical insurance, some vestiges of dignity in regular work) the temptation that the dock-workers face is naturally that of finding an easier road than the hard week’s work that is, at any rate, becoming increasingly unavailable to them. Thus, the second season heads towards a devastating final act that will show us the consequences of these essentially decent (but, again, unsentimentally portrayed) being increasingly by crime and thus embroiled with criminals whose ruthlessness far surpasseswhat these characters are capable of imagining.This allows the viewer to see even more of the vast networks that circulate money and influence (and ultimately drugs) through the Byzantine channels that connect “City Hall”, with the dealers on the corners of the previous season, to the young dock workers and their families, to our familiar “point of identification” characters who make up the few well-meaning ” po-lice”; to their obstructive, malicious, and vindictive superiors of the former group. In the second season all of this is also shown to connect with what also seems to be something like a pan-European crime syndicate that is not above the kind of casual murder that would make the druglords of the first season shudder.The third season is (again I here quote from the show’s creators) about attempts at “reform”. Thus, it is also, given from the outset that it is a season that will show the kind of rocks upon which both the well- and not-so-well-meaning attempts to ‘clean up the system’ flounder: thus whether it is gangsters trying to convert their operation into a ‘legitimate business’ (a theme of course which recalls The Godfather), to various characters making quixotic attempts to clean up corruption everywhere from the police department to the mayoral office, or even just the admirable attempts of one tired, soon-to-be-retired senior cop who tries to come up with a strategy of simply containing (rather than eliminating) the everyday catastrophe that is the is the total, dismal failure of Baltimore’s (and everywhere else’s) “war on drugs” by coming to an accommodation with the dealers; the third season continually rubs in its audience’s face a stark, wince-inducing portrayal of an all-too-familiar aspect of modern life that was already burned through the audiences’ eyeballs in scene after scene of the previous two seasons: I’m talking here about the soul-destroying, ruthless, reign of numbers (not only money, but of particular pre-delineated ways of counting what is and isn’t reality) to which the show continually testifies. By the reign of number, I’m talking about the classic bureaucratic ‘if it’s on the page it’s fine, if it’s not on the page it doesn’t exist’ (No hole in the symbolic, in other words,: reality is what can be measured/counted accoridng to the ways we’ve counted, c.f. my Middlesex post). This, we all know is how institutions work whose bureaucracies have been infected with management and marketing principles that now serve as the only legitimation discourse of the instiutiton.Baltimore, we see, is run, not only by a modern version of the Benthamite philosophy that forms the basis of Dickens’ Hard Times, but by that familiar-to-everyone-these-days combination of corporate Newspeak acting as the basis for legislation that pays no attention to reality, and that uses numbers and spreadsheet data (“is the murder rate up or down…if it’s too high we’ll have to pretend that a few of those murders didn’t really happen/or that we solved them, by arresting someone random from the streets who no-one will care about”): as the only guage for reality. Everything is subordinated to giving the higher echelons of the bureaucracy the ‘numbers’ they need, given that these numbers have now become the only legitimate way of finding out what counts as reality: all else is subjective psychosis.Thus, some of what I found to be the hardest scenes to watch in the whole show (thus far) occur in the third season. These are not brutal gun fights that leave the streets bloodied (although this season in particular certainly has its share of such things). Instead, the really unwatchable scenes, for me, are the ones that involve smug, smarmy, insouciant, and cautiously corrupt higher-ranking policeman publically humiliating their subordinates for not making their ‘policing data’ turn out the way they’re supposed to and, in the process, being awarded with ever more promotions for their exemplary ‘management’. The worst thing about this, is that we know, from our own experience in considerably less desperate and tragic worlds than that of The Wire that the same kind of principles run the world at large: the university, the public service, and other once last bastions of a different logic, a different way of counting reality, are of course, no exception to this.In essence: I’ve never seen anything to match The Wire for portraying corruption as so embedded in the heart of a city (and a social system) so capable of completely resisting the efforts of the few remaining honest men and women. At the same time, it’s important to note the way that this pervasive, systematic ‘corruption’ is portrayed. Essentially, the show tackles corruption in a way that multiplies moral ambiguities at epidemic speed: it’s not just the usual “oh, we get to see the light and dark sides of both dealers and of cops thus humanizing them both” blather: instead, the audience is constantly being given unpleasant forced choices between varying degrees of corruption. Thus a character whom we have seen commit some act of unmitigated bastardry suddenly looks like a crusading hero when he’s moved for complex reasons to oppose the machinations of another character who will himself look like the lesser of two evils in a different situation in which he is not a power-broker. This focus on systematic corruption means that there’s no evil in the show in the sense of a metaphysical (or naturalized) property attached to certain individuals: there’s no Joker figure continually motivated only by an obscure desire to cause mayhem. Instead, everyone is alternately decent and a monster according to the logic of different situations and how these characters perceive the extent to which their interests can be advanced or threatened. Obviously, the point here is not to deny the existence of human freedom, nor of the mind’s capacity for transcendence: the show -does- portray characters who nobly sacrifice themselves in adherence to principles and who refrain from letting their principles be dictated by the exigencies of a situation: but although these characters are (for certain obvious reasons) protagonists they are never 1) never portrayed as White Knights and more importantly 2) we get, very often, to see these good-guy through the eyes of their colleagues and superiors: i.e. as lunatics who are hubristically setting themselves up for disaster.To give you a sense of how much this theme of all pervasive and yet graded corruption permeates the show, early in the first season we see one of the show’s most consistently sympathetic characters beating an adolescent with a night-stick, for the minor crime of having basically shoved one of her fellow police officers. It’s a brutal scene, that comes at the climax of an episode, and that places most of the violence off-camera such that we get the disturbing vision of the beating continuing as the credits roll in our living rooms. We’re just left with the feeling that even the show’s “good po-lice” still have their moments of relishing the violence that, it is, after all, so often part of their de facto if not de jure brief to inflict especially when it comes to one of the show’ frequent, futile ‘let’s appease the media’ with a few raids on the housing projects). Casual police violence to witnesses that would have led to a whole story arc in other shows are mainly shrugged off by even the most sensitive of characters: it’s the way things /‘battles have to be picked’ / and so on.Last of all I suppose I should attempt some criticism of the show. The weakest character in the Wire is undoubtedly at least to my mind) its putative protagonist (despite the excellent performance by English actor Dominic West). West’s character McNulty, though undoubtedly a likable Irish-American rogue is too much of a cop-show stereotype (hard-drinking, divorced, unable to quite make his alimony payments &c., dedicated to solving the case to the detriment of everything else in his life) to be of comparable interest to some of the other characters, despite the fact that he does have a 3-dimensionality that elevates him above his equivalents in more pedestrian programs. But even the relative blandness of McNulty is really a small flaw, because the show never seems to make the character more than a lynchpin: a familiar face that we can follow into unfamiliar parts of town with some sympathy, and some recognition. In this sense, the show is from its beginning, and ever more from its first season onwards, an ensemble piece where the ensemble recalls not only a modern Dickens but his inevitable French “version” (to say a phrase that would have me lynched in Paris) Victor Hugo.Lastly, I should also say, at the risk of anti-climax that the show has one character, who, I’m tempted to say belongs to the literary-treasure house of the world, despite the fact that his presence in the show marks the intersection of the world of The Wire with something from a completely different genre. I am talking here about the character of Omar Little (played by Michael K. Williams). Omar is a character, who among all of the rhythmic, poetic dialogue, has perhaps the most rhythmical delivery and poetic phrasing of any of the characters: it’s a delight to watch him saunter between one scene and the next, scattering his strange drawling in the argot of the Baltimore street like a kind of gangster Zen master whose always one step away from turning to the camera for a Shakespearean soliloquy that will have the audience in tears. Omar’s role is brilliantly, wonderfully preposterous: a scarred, openly gay, fearless, muscular, shotgun-carrying lunatic/urban-cum-avenging angel who makes his living (as he happily admits to anyone who asks) stealing drugs from other drug-dealers at shot-gun point, in between sleeping with handsome young men, and (later in the series) keeping together a tight family-like “crew” that includes gun-toting lesbian couples of a kind that might have sprung from a late night drinking session between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.If you think that this seems like a strange carry-over from the graphic-novel superhero story you’d be right. And yet (the Dickensian thing again) Omar is, like Estella, or Sidney Carson or Scrooge or Jean Valjean or Eponine or Monsieur Thernadiér or Claude Frollo is completely believable as much as he is ludicrously extravagant, and present for the purpose of delighting the audience. In fact, the poignancy of what happens to his character, as the show goes on is all the greater because it’s like seeing an Immortal character from a more comic-book kind of film (Clint Eastwood’s character from a spaghetti Western, or even “Iron Man”) suddenly being forced to realise that not even the man with super-powers is immune to the toll taken by everyday life on the streets of Baltimore. (Oh, and a propos of nothing, Williams should definitely be cast as ‘Thor’ in the upcoming film of the same name.)Thus, for all of Omar’s extravagance and charisma, we never doubt that his prototype could have really once walked the streets of the real (as opposed to fictional) Baltimore. It is interesting on this note that, even the actor who plays Omar apparently has – more than anyone else in the cast — a background most similar to that of his character. One example of this is the fact that the enormous scar that marrs Omar’s face is not the result of any labour by The Wire’s make-up department.What this demonstrates is the well-known principle that the legend is sometimes closer to the reality – that if you leave out the more extravagant, fanciful parts of reality and only to print what seems to fit the sober law of averages and bell curves, you miss part of realit just as much as if you had told a story that featured nothing but caricatures. And no-one, believe me could ever accuse The Wire of “Romanticism” a word which, in the endlessly evocative ‘tattoo-across-the-soul’ Baltimore’ that it presents, probably means something like “hoping that your most diligent works might make even an iota of difference to anything or anyone.” On this theme, it’s possible that the show will be (or has been) criticized in some quarters for the ostensibly ‘pacifying’ effects of its pessimism. But I’m not at all sure that this would be justified. While, of course, watching The Wire is, in one sense, as ‘passive’ as watching any other television show (i.e. no-one has yet found, that I know of, a way to storm the Bastille from the couch, )I see no reason to suggest that the show’s attempt to portray systematic injustice unflinchingly (as opposed to the tragedy of this or that individual soul), yet with the dramatic nous that makes it a genuine pleasure to watch should be as a sign that the show contributes to cynicism, and thus to apathy or despair. This argument would make sense only if you were prepared to argue that any focus on structural problems as opposed to simply enumerating the rich possibilities for collective action inevitably had the lesson that ‘there’s no point in doing anything’: at, any rate, by this logic Das Kapital is ‘pacifying.’Against this, I”ll suggest that there’s always something at least potentially emancipating in a gaze that is prepared to look for the truth of something. As long as we don’t make the classic cynical mistake of taking truth for merely the absence of illusions, it’s still possible to find that a gaze that tries to, in journalistic cliché, “stare unflinchingly at reality” may succeed at the important task of making what was previously invisible, visible. And every change in the distribution of the visibile and the invisible is one more step towards changes in what we take for granted as setting the bounds of the psosible. Anymore than this, is obviously, up to us, becomes genuinely political: hard to ask more of entertainmen, especially of the kind that by its nature tends to be consumed in (at least relative) isolation.

[Original article (includes pictures, parenthetical remarks and links to other websites can be found at http://http://prettycoolforaniconodule.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/born-into-this-in-which-i-review-three-seasons-of-the-wire-and-mention-avatar-with-the-lip-curling-scorn-it-deserves/]

Maladjusted is a philosophy PhD student from Melbourne Australia whose interest include Plato, Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, the history of political philosophy and contemporary Christian theology.? His second blog ‘pretty cool (for an iconodule)” is dedicated to? cultural criticism, satire and shameless auto-hagioraphy.

NAVIGATING THE NATION THROUGH TODAY?S SHAME TO TOMORROW?S FAME: SOCIAL STUDIES AS PILOT, A Love Song to My Husband and the New Nigeria, 17TH IN THE SE

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:35:57 +0000

NAVIGATING THE NATION THROUGH TODAY’S SHAME TO TOMORROW’S FAME:

SOCIAL STUDIES AS PILOT

17TH IN THE SERIES OF INAUGURAL LECTURES OF THE DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY, ABRAKA, NIGERIA.

Delivered by

Professor Emman Osakwe

B.Sc. (Nig), M.Ed. (Philadelphia), M.A. (London) Ph.D (Ibadan)

Professor of Social Studies and Dean, Postgraduate School,

Delta State University, Abraka.

On Thursday, February 26, 2009

© Copyright 2009 Delta State University, Abraka

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or by any means, Photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY, ABRAKA,

DELTA STATE, NIGERIA.

Justice Jeco Press and Publishers Ltd.,

Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria.

PROLOGUE/PREFACE

This Processed Teacher is Professor+… Famous+, Nigeria Will Become

(A Love Song to My Husband and the New Nigeria)

And he said: “marry me, May!”

‘I do no such thing: marry no ‘teacher’ said May

Dreg of Professions: the teacher – disqualified

Yet, most telling, lingering voice from the classroom!- qualified

This teacher now processed, is professor, prophet and priest.

Palm oil, the broom and sponge, banga soup – processed palm

Through fire, through water, the sharp blade, agents of decay – processed

As kero, diesel, petrol, cream, jelly, this balm – processed crude

Emman Osakwe, processed teacher, a voice heard beyond

Beyond the rostrum to the nations.

Processed through pain, deprivation, denial, derided then,

Today’s lecturer mounts the rostrum, behold he comes:

My husband, my principal, mon pére

Processed through fire, through waters, denied his due

This principal teacher of teachers of teachers

Is a teacher, teaching teachers of teachers of teachers.

Promotion to peak denied for ten years!

My co-parent, persevering through the years!

Like diamond; processed from carbon, my patient prince and peace maker

This principal teacher loaded with knowledge:

Intellectual and divine, has a message:

Nigeria is processing through shame –

Shame of corruption, of grave-like greed!

Shame of maladministration and misrule

Misrule, yielding tall poverty from giant opulence

Shame of monumental wastage of resources

Shame of wickedness and religious godlessness

Processing through shame to our desired fame:

Our famous fatherland, yes our motherland;

Land of my birth, land of my pain, land of my shame

Land of your birth, land of your pain, land of your shame

Dependent too long after independence, fragile like the eaglet

For this fragile eaglet, ready to fall, unable to fly,

Will become the great eagle in flight

Famous bird; not to fly but to soar –

Land of my birth, land of your birth, land of our birth

Land of my fame, land of your fame, land of our fame –

Nigeria is your name!

Mabel Ejime Osakwe (2009)

Chair, English Language

Delta State University, Abraka

COURTESIES

The Vice-Chancellor,

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Admin.)

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic)

The Provosts, Asaba and Oleh Campuses,

The Acting Registrar,

The Bursar,

The University Librarian,

The Provost, College of Health Sciences,

Dean, Faculty of Education,

Deans of Other Faculties,

Professors and other members of Senate,

Heads of Department and other academic Colleagues,

Members of Administrative and Technical Staff,

My Lords Spiritual and Temporal,

Members of my family, Nuclear and Extended,

My In-laws,

Distinguished Invited Guests,

Gentlemen of the Press,

Great DELSUITES,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Preamble

I feel highly honoured and priviledged to be called upon to deliver the 17th Inaugural Lecture of the Delta State University, Abraka. I thank God for granting us journey mercies to this gathering and I believe He will take all of us home safely in Jesus Name – Amen.

Did you buy and read today’s papers? How many mind bugging and gory stories? What is the latest on militancy and criminality in the Niger Delta? How painful! You may try to take your mind off those depressive issues and feed your mind with the Obama big dream come true and so will ours. Yes, welcome to this forum! To this God given opportunity for us to reflect and discuss social issues akin to those raised earlier in this welcome tip. Sorry to tell you though that I have the monopoly of the floor in this discussion that is why it is called a lecture. But release your mind to travel along, as Social Studies pilots our navigation, through today’s shame to tomorrow’s fame.

INTRODUCTION

The first thing to give attention to is the nature and purpose of Social Studies and how it serves as a vehicle for responding to issues of our time. Succinctly put, Social Studies is about learning to live and participate in this world, at a particular time and place; hence we have the formula:

SSE               =      PSpt

P      =      People

S      =      Society

P      =      place

t       =      time

This lecture being an indepth discourse on an aspect of my academic expertise, and my contribution to social studies as a field of knowledge, will be guided by the SSE formula as stated and the nature of Social Studies.

Here then, P means The Nigerian People; S means The Nigerian Society; p means The geographical entity called Nigeria and t means Nigeria yesterday today and tomorrow. In this lecture, Nigeria yesterday implies pre-colonial Nigeria to the era before the 2nd Republic, while Nigeria today spans the period 2nd Republic to date.

We recognize that this audience is not only interdisciplinary “gown” but also a heterogeneous “town”. Attempts will be made then to operate within this defined perimeter.

Social Studies touches on every facet of human existence: man himself as a product of nature, and social man as a product of nurture; arising from the social, political, economic and physical environment. Social studies has therefore for long been identified as a veritable tool or avenue for reshapening society. (Lawton and Durfour 1973, Osakwe 1993) The very nature, content and scope of social studies, makes it a virile instrument for developing a new social – political order. This lecturer has professed majorly in this area of social studies and has 20 publications related to the present discourse. Four of such are listed here:

Osakwe, E.O. (1992) “Social studies and the Military in Nigerian politics” Nigerian Journal of Social Studies Review Vol. 2, No 2, pp. 89-91

Osakwe, E.O. (1993a) Citizenship Education: The Hub of Social Studies Nigerian Journal of Social Studies Review. Vol. 2, No. 3, Pp. 23-38.

Osakwe, E.O. (1994a) Citizenship Education in a Multi-ethnic Society: Some Pedagogical Insights. Studies in Education Vol. 2. No 1. April. Pp 60-64.

Osakwe, E.O. (1994b) Instructional Strategies for teaching the Social Studies: Using Exemplars and Non-Exemplars Nigerian Journal of social Studies Vol. III, No. 1 & 2 pp. 49-55.

In Nigeria, Social Studies found practical expression into the school system after the 1969 National Curriculum Conference. The subject is geared towards building individuals and thereby building the nation (Osakwe 1993). The potentials of Social Studies are yet to be fully exploited in our quest for a desirable socio-political and economic order.

Social Studies is concerned with human relationships. The world is constantly undergoing changes and Social Studies remains a veritable instrument for examining these changes, whether they be positive or negative. Social Studies revolves around humans (people) and all that impinges on them.

Areas of Emphasis in Social Studies

The knowledge included in Social Studies is related to important generalizations about human relationships, institutions and problems, together with supporting facts to ensure that these generalizations are clearly understood (Osakwe and Itedjere 1993). Social Studies examines issues and problems from a holistic viewpoint – consequently, in resolving a problem or an issue, social studies examines the historical, cultural, sociological, economical, physical and other related dimensions. Unlike the vertical concentration that is noticeable in most school subjects, social studies adopts a horizontal spiral approach in the analysis of it problems. Social Studies, has strong affinity with the Social Sciences, but must not be seen as an amalgam of the social sciences.

Social Studies education is an avenue for providing young people with a feeling of hope in the future and confidence in their ability to solve the social and environmental problems of individuals, their community, state or nation.

On this occasion, this lecture addresses an aspect of my discipline which is of academic and public interest – Navigating the Nation, Through Today’s Shame to Tomorrow’s Fame: Social Studies as Pilot.

Addressing the issues of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow automatically provides three segments of discourse: Nigeria Yesterday Nigeria Today and Nigeria Tomorrow.

NIGERIA – YESTERDAY

It is simplistic to address the problems of nation building in Nigeria today without paying due attention to our past and the global past as it affected our past and present.

Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Sir, the educational system which we inherited from our colonial masters, although criticized for alienating us from our culture, produced disciplined individuals and people we will regard as pillars of our democracy and national development. Our educational system of yesteryears was highly structured, organized and predictable. This was the era when education was fully the responsibility of Government or Mission Agencies. Educational institutions were adequately staffed, equipped and supervision was effective. The academic calendar was stable with hardly any disruption. An entrant into the system was able to predict when he/she will graduate. Non graduation of a candidate at the appropriate time was never the fault of the school or institution but the inability of the student to work hard enough to graduate as planned by the educational establishment. The period under discussion was marked by students in primary and secondary schools putting on uniforms that were uniform indeed. There was no provision for students making their own seats/desks or for boarders, providing their own beds. Laboratories in secondary and tertiary institutions were comparable with what obtained in other parts of the world.

Sound moral education was part and parcel of the education in pre 1970 to late 80s Nigeria. Relationship between pupils and teachers, students and teachers and students and lecturers at various levels of education was to a very great extent professional. Incidents of examination malpractice were very rare and anyone caught compromising the integrity of examination was promptly dealt with. Incidents of students negotiating grades with their lecturers or lecturers/teachers asking for “incentives” were almost non-existent. During the period under review, academic standards in Nigeria’s first generation universities was commendable and comparable to what obtained in the more advanced countries of Europe and America. The period witnessed massive staff exchange from overseas universities. Our universities had real international orientation and reputation, with staff and students coming from different parts of the world. Apart from the international outlook of our universities and academics, university lecturers were highly respected and were at the apex of social rating. Okecha (2008) rightly noted that the mention of the title “Professor” attracted much attention. The office of the Vice-Chancellor was highly reverred. The Vice-Chancellor was more respected than any government appointee.

Most Nigerians who went through tertiary education enjoyed one form of financial support or the other from the Government. Education was a worthwhile venture and was seen as the key that unlocked the door to success and fame.

Indolence, robbery, prostitution, ostentatious living, greed, oppression, social and spatial inequality were considered extremely disgraceful in Nigeria of yesteryears. It was common practice for example, for the vendor to leave the Dailies at the Porter’s Lodge as students were trusted to drop the money and pick the papers. Similarly, the proceeds of Rag Day were used for charity as expected. Social vices were frowned at and there was greater sense of accountability among the citizenry including public office holders. Workers reported at their duty posts at the expected time and remained at work till closing. School and other institutional gates were closed at 8 a.m. and remained so until closing. Truancy was an aberration and something seriously frowned at. There was freedom of political association, although political cleavages was along the three major ethnic groups with the exception of the Middle Belt that had her own political identity. It was possible for close relatives to belong to different political parties and yet still live in harmony. The example of the Ikokus can attest to this fact – that a father and son belonged to two opposing parties.

Humans are generally political animals. The ability to organize people into groups with whatever political motive is a basic instinct inherent in human beings. Nigerians are highly articulate political beings. There is the practice of traditional and community politics which has always been with us. There has been a merger between traditional and modern social life and party politics. Since culture is not static, traditional practices also adjusted to accommodate new challenges and developments including cross-cultural contacts with its attendant implications. The social life of a people and their political culture, to a great extent affects several other areas of living. Nigeria is a political amalgam. This is indicative of the cultural plurality of the country. To a great extent the North was much more politically articulate and responsive. This probably accounts for the practice wherein our Northern brothers are always with their radios and listening to local and international news, thereby being always informed. Social life and party politics is not a function of Western education. Some southerners in spite of their level of education, are still politically naïve and cannot read or understand the political horizon. Nigeria’s economy during this period was very stable and was hinged on agriculture. This was the era of the groundnut pyramids. Nigeria was the world’s largest producer of groundnuts, rubber, palm oil and kernels, soya beans, beniseed and also a major producer of cotton, 2nd world producer of cocoa. It was within this period that Malaysia came to Nigeria to get our oil and rubber seedlings, to try out in their country. We know where both countries stand today in the production of palm oil and rubber.

Solid minerals like coal, tin and columbite were mined in economic quantities and Nigeria was known to be a major world player in the production of these minerals. The buoyancy of the economy was further boosted with the discovery of the black gold (oil) in Nigeria. Gradually, emphasis started to shift from agriculture to petroleum ……….the mainstay of Nigerian economy. The Nigerian currency was strong and highly sought after during this period.

Exchange Rate Between the 70s and 80s

Nigeria               British                          American            German

N1                    pd Stg                       US $                  DM 3.64

The figures above presents a vivid picture of the strength of the Naira at this time.

Nigeria was well served by road, rail, sea air transport. During this period there were over 95,000km of tarred roads and over 3,200km of one-metre gauge railway. Nigeria had just two international airports at Lagos and Kano. Both the northern and southern parts of the country attracted significant investment in infrastructural development, especially in rail and feeder roads, as well as some measure of social services such as electricity, water supply, hospitals, schools and colleges. This period was marked by staff of the Public Works Department (PWD) clearing of the grasses by the sides of the road to ensure long distance and clear vision for drivers and other road users. Roads were regularly maintained – although then, roads were narrow and sometimes windy, they were motorable throughout the year.

Nigeria Airways was the pride of West Africa. It towered over and above other airlines in the sub-region. Nigerian pilots were renowned for their courtesy, competence and confidence. Their take-off and landing was remarkable and devoid of jerks and hiccups. Nigerian Airways flew constantly to Europe, Asia, U.S.A. and several African routes without blemish. The DC 10s, Boeing 737, 707 and 747 were constant on the international routes while the smaller aircrafts served the local (internal) routes. Closer home here, the waterway from Sapele to Obiaruku through River Ethiope was navigable and building materials were transported through that channel.

Security of lives and properties was to a very great extent guaranteed during this period. It was possible to travel all night without fear of robbers. Night travel was preferred by a number of Nigerians. Incidents of armed robbery was rare and it was easy to track criminals. It was not fashionable to engage in criminality because there was a general societal rejection or disgust for any individual who was known to be a criminal or social deviant.

NIGERIA TODAY

Today, Nigeria has traded her dignifying values of diligence, patriotism, high ethical standards, her abundant natural resources of yesteryears for inglorious habits colloquially referred to as the “Nigerian factor”: the pursuit of injustice, upturned values, endemic corruption and gross misrule. Today Nigeria is fatally sick from a deliberately self inflicted injury. Most of what is happening in Nigeria today amounts to national shame, our pain and disgrace. This shame is most manifest in our “New politics” which is marked by violence leading to loss of lives and properties, massive rigging and assassinations. The undeserving beneficiaries are quick to make efforts at convincing and confusing the masses into supporting the outcome of their political exploits. Almost immediately endorsement is rushed in from all over the country, especially from some Christian and Islamic clerics and other self-seeking leaders who pontificate on the fallacy that governments and leadership are chosen and ordained by God and that we should accept things the way they are in order to save our nascent democracy. But peace without justice cannot stand the test of time and is an invitation for anarchy.

Unlike what obtains in Western democracies and other stable polities where election results are declared less than 24 hours at the close of polls, in Nigeria, it could take three days. In some ridiculous situations like local government elections that are even smaller geographical entities to manage, it still takes days before results are officially released. This usual drag leaves room for manipulation and panel-beating of figures. In spite of all these, ridiculous figures are released as results. In some instances, there are more votes than the number of registered voters. Multiple voting is not uncommon. The tribunal judgment in Edo State revealed that fictitious voters voted and some others voted several times including supposed voters from across the Atlantic.

The bedrock for any stable and functional democratic state is the electoral process. This should be seen as the key issue in a country like ours. The electoral process represents a political choice by the populace. Next to market gossips and corridor discussions, voting is the one activity that demonstrates the extent of people’s involvement in politics. When free and secret ballot voting takes place, the direction and quantum of individual’s participation come out boldly in their true form.

In a survey carried out by this lecturer in 1998, the degree of apathy expressed by young people was startling.

Possible percentage participation in National Elections

S/NO

CATEGORY

NO OF STUDENTS RESPONDING TO EACH CATEGORY

TOTAL NO OF STUDENTS

PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL

1.

Indifferent or undecided

162

250

65%

2.

Yes or Interested

63

250

25%

3.

No or not interested

25

250

10%

The above was almost a decade before the 2007 monumentally fraudulent election, yet the figure reveals high level of alienation or disenchantment with politics and the electoral process among young people. In most cases, this alienation or apathy leads to high level political-disinterest. Effective citizen participation depends upon a knowledge of how the system really operates.

Our citizens have not been systematically exposed to the methods of operations of our political system. A good number of our youths have been left to wander aimlessly in Nigerian political arena. This has resulted in either misinformation or the stifling of the political instincts in youths towards national affairs.

Our electoral process and the attendant protestation of results is unparalleled in the annals of elections in any part of the globe. Many Nigerians are now of the opinion that an individual’s vote does not count – that results are predetermined. This has led to serious apathy and despondency on the part of a large segment of the electorate (See Osakwe 1998, Ogini 2008). The June 12, 1993 election, adjudged to be free affair was annulled with ignomity to the chagrin of Nigerians. Since then, the situation has worsened. There is understandably now much cynicism towards election and the electoral process by several Nigerians.

Another disturbing dimension in this discourse is that politics in Nigeria is no longer seen as an avenue for service, rather it has become an avenue for quick ascendancy to wealth, and public recognition. This has led to the emergence of political upstarts with warped minds on the political expectation of the electorate. Their life style is marked by flamboyant living, luxury cars, including bullet-proof vehicles, escorts with sirens and intimidation of all perceived opponents and those who refuse to acknowledge their new found position and affluence that they find difficult to manage. What we now witness is a replay of the Biblical Haman-Mordecai saga. Haman, a political upstart paid a huge sum of money to ensure that the entire Jewish race is wiped out just because Mordecai the Jew did not bow down to him.

It is a mark of political immaturity to try to use political opportunism to settle scores. It is a show of shame and reflection of the struggle against a complex. Politics should be a very exciting part of our national life, but it is now an issue of life and death, sometimes sending shivers down the spine of the populace. That is why, organizing or conducting elections in Nigeria is warfare and several lives have gone with elections in Nigeria.

Political Assassinations

Between 1999 and 2009, 39 cases of politically – motivated murders were reported in the country. The timing of these assassinations reveals that it is usually more prevalent in the years preceding the elections and the election year proper. For example, there were 17 assassination cases between 2002 and 2003; 9 cases were recorded between 2005 and 2007 (another pre-election and election period).

Political Assassinations – 1999-2009 (- A Graphic Representation)

In the more recent elections in Nigeria, firearms were freely used. In the Jos crisis of November/December 2008, over 500 lives were lost in the mayhem that trailed that election. Several of those hospitalized were victims of bullet wound. How does this compare with what obtains in other parts of the world, where election results are respected and the electoral process is carried out in an orderly manner?

A common feature of the political terrain in Nigeria is the issue of recycling of individuals and families – giving the impression that there is some eternal mandate that these individuals and families must always be there. How do we explain a situation where some political actors who were contemporaries of the Late Sage, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, are still hovering around the corridors of power. There are some individuals who have remained in political flirtation all through the 29 years of military –rule into the democratic era in Nigeria. What a shame that almost two years after the 2007 general elections, there are still several yet-to-be-resolved court cases.

It is a fact that ever since the contentious elections, Nigerians of varying endeavors, have been united in seeking a reform process that waters the tree of a transparently, free and fair election in order to eliminate the rancour that greeted the results of the April, 2007 polls and literally created hatred and anarchy.

For how long will Nigerians live with this level of rancor and uncertainty? When will transparent elections be conducted so that at the end the loser is even quick to concede defeat and congratulate the winner? In the United States elections of November 4, 2008, Republican presidential candidate, John McCain gracefully conceded victory to the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama in less than 24 hours after polls. The winner and loser in the American elections did not have to wait for the Electoral boss to announce the result of the most celebrated election result in the world. They relied on the results as announced live by the Cable News Network (CNN).

It is instructive to state here that Nigeria’s national television, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) had a live coverage of the American election. Why has it not been possible to cover our national elections live. Some international observers were refused entry and their reports discountenanced by our electoral authorities, yet Nigerians went to Ghana to monitor elections! Our electoral process is not transparent and acceptable. It is yet to be made so nationally and internationally.

CORRUPTION

Corruption is used here to capture a condition or state of falsehood, impropriety, illegitimacy, illegality or injustice geared towards acquisition of power, money or position for private and sectional profit.

Corruption has become endemic in Nigeria and a culturally corrupt system would generate a corrupt society. A society and people would naturally produce its kind, except there is a drastic cultural surgery or there is a re-orientation as a result of time: Recall the Social Studies formula. The Nigerian society provides a very fertile ground for fraudulent practices, thereby leading to the institutionalization of corruption. A corrupt society according to Lewis (2008) produces corrupt leaders and followers; corrupt leaders copy or establish corrupt institutions and corrupt institutions create a multiple of corrupt systems. This may explain why there is hardly any institution or system that is corruption-free in Nigeria. Religious establishments are not exempt in this. Corruption indeed is Nigeria’s worst enemy preventing the citizens from enjoying the huge natural resources. Corruption is detrimental to economic growth. It increases income inequality and poverty by reducing economic growth. It also promotes and sustains unequal distribution of asset ownership and an unequal access to education (Olajide, 2008).

In spite of the establishment of anti-corruption agencies such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) corrupt practices have continued to manifest in several ingeniously notorious ways and forms in Nigeria. This monster called corruption has continued to be the bane of the country’s drive towards the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Recently, at an interactive session with the House of Representatives Committee on Drugs and Narcotics and Financial crimes, the Chief Executive of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), alleged that some Nigerians have cashed in on the falling global prices and had been criss-crossing the globe day and night to acquire properties with money looted from the country. Perpetrators of this crime know how to beat all the mechanisms put in place to check their nefarious activities. Our image has been seriously dented by the activities of corrupt Nigerians. Corruption among Nigerians also manifests in internet fraud and the notorious Advance Free Fraud (aka 419). A number of unsuspecting Nigerians and foreigners have been victims of both internet and Advance fee fraud. A number of young people now live big and fat from the proceeds of corruption and fraud.

Nigeria’s image has been seriously dented across the globe as a result of the fraudulent practices of some of our citizens. Several Nigerians are languishing in jails in a number of countries – Some who were not so lucky, were executed by the authorities of those countries where they committed the atrocities. The war against corruption seem to have had a focus during Obasanjo’s regime. Yar Ardua’s administration promised that there would be no sacred cows in his administration’s anti-corruption fight. However, his anti-corruption war came under serious skepticism and cynicism following the redeployment of the former Chairman of the anti-graft agency and his numerous travails thereafter that culminated in his dismissal. It is a very sad commentary and sends a very wrong message to Nigerians and the international community.

The anti-corruption crusade tempo is gradually grinding to a halt and some watchers are getting really concerned, because the sufferings of the masses, they feel have been caused by a few individuals who have diverted money meant for the welfare of the masses for their personal gain. One of the apparent reasons why corruption has continued to pervade the length and breadth of Nigeria may be that the three arms of government pay lip service to its eradication.

The damage corruption has done to the polity and the generality of our people is immeasurable and incalculable. The malaise pervades all strata of the society, including public institutions. According to This Day Opinion of November 5, 2008, nothing works well in Nigeria because of corruption. Several roads are in a deplorable state, even when attempts   are made at rehabilitating the roads, corruption will not allow for a thorough and enduring job.

Education and Corruption

Sexual harassment has become so pervasive in Nigerian tertiary education. It is a highly disturbing state of affairs. The issue of sexual harassment in higher institutions has attracted the attention of a number of academics – (Osakwe 2008, Igborgbor 2008, Okecha, 2008). Sexual harassment is a manifestation of power relations and most times girls and women are at the receiving end. Sexual harassment is not restricted to any age level – some academic elders have been known to engage in this abominable game. Some academics have lost their jobs arising from this misdemeanor. Some have continued to exploit and defile girls and make public boast of their sexual escapades. Some girls and married women have been traumatized, all in a bid to acquire a university degree or diploma from other tertiary institutions. Closely related to the issue of sexual harassment is corruption in our educational system from primary to university level. Pupils and students are compelled to pay for one levy or the other. Signing of referees report, clearance, course form, data card – all attract illegal charges. Sometime ago in the history of Nigeria,

Teachers at all levels of education earned a great deal of respect from members of the public. Seen as honest, disciplined and morally above board, it was then most fashionable to look for a teacher whenever a public position that called for a person of high integrity became vacant. They had the aura of saints and always proved their admirers right whenever they had the opportunity to bring their experience and knowledge to bear on public affairs. However, this hallowed integrity of the academic class appears to have taken its leave as the country continues to stink with corruption (Aghedo 2008).

Within the last couple of years, three professors paid the price for sexual exploitation of girls and had to be disgraced out of office. There are still many more waiting to be disgraced. Academic corruption has assumed different dimensions ranging from plagiarism, victimization, gagging of academic freedom, erosion of mentoring to production of foot soldiers/”academic hostage taking” – by which junior academics under a senior colleague have no choice but to do their master’s bidding. Academic freedom that once characterized the university system is fast eroding and giving way to dangerous campus politicians, cliques and other interest groups – whose interests are some other things except academics.

Examination malpractice has also become a major problem besetting education in Nigeria. The phenomenon has become monstrous and will take only very bold and ruthless measures to wipe out. The unfortunate situation is that some people who are expected to address this issue are products of examination malpractice themselves.

Transport and Corruption

The airports lack necessary facilities; the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) cannot locate sites of air wreckages. The most recent defied location until several months after by hunters. The railway lines remain dysfunctional – some rail lines are now used by traders to display their wares.

General Attitude to Corruption

People no longer express bitterness and shock each time they hear of billions of Naira being stolen from public coffers, since it has now become a daily occurrence. For example, it was reported that in one month, a Governor in a state spent N1bn (One billion Naira) in his state for security matters – a state where there was no war, nor the breakdown of law and order.

The status of corruption in Nigeria today is a product of the inconsistency and irregularity of the war against corruption – Having been fought to a standstill by General Murtala Mohammed between 1975 and 1976, a follow up such as Buhari/Idiagbon and later by Nuhu Ribadu would have brought the monster to its knees. But the intervening period between Mohammed and Buhari brought in General Babangida who ruled between 1985 and 1993. Unlike the Buhari regime that came hard on looters of public fund several of whom were handed various prison terms, Babangida returned the assets of the various officers and restored the ranks of the dismissed officers. Call it reward of corruption! This history may repeat itself once again, if the travails of Nuhu Ribadu is allowed to continue. Call it punishment for fighting corruption! The war against corruption at the moment is asleep.

Corruption and the Power Sector

Two thousand (2,000) megawatts of electricity was being generated in 2008 as against the 3,000 generated in 2003. These are ridiculous figures. South Africa with a population of 60 million, generates 45,000 megawatts and the government of South Africa is aspiring to increase her capacity to 60,000. How can Nigeria still claim to be the giant of Africa? Our industries and small scale businesses provide their own electricity – how can they break even in the face of exorbitant production cost essentially because of the lack of steady public power supply. How can industrial dreams of Nigeria be actualized in the light of the current energy challenges. In spite of the President’s plan to declare a state of emergency in the power sector, things have not improved. Small scale businesses, artisans and several self-employed Nigerians have been forced to close their businesses due to non-availability of power.

It was reported (Tell December 8 that in one month (November, 2008) the worsening power situation forced the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to announce the loss of 800 MW generation capacity – within the same period the Sapele Power Station was completely shut down, and the Egbin power station in Lagos was operating “at reduced capacity”. Exactly 10 days after, PHCN reported additional loss of 200 MW. All these have been responsible for the 12 hourly zonal power rotational rationing to maintain system stability and ensure even distribution of the limited generation output from the functioning plants. Under the rotation plan, PHCN divided the country into zones. Each zone gets electricity for 12 hours; even this is no guarantee that the light would come. There are areas/sections of the country where power outage is more regular than public power supply. Even the “promised” additional 6,500 MW by 2009 is a far cry from our expected electricity demands in Nigeria.

We are further informed (Tell December 2008) that each University spends more than N120 million annually on diesel. What a colossal waste of money that would have been ploughed into other critical areas of University administration. Not many Universities in Nigeria can even afford to spend that staggering sum of money for electricity. This of course, does not include the regular electricity bills from PHCN.

CORRUPTION AND IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY

The iron and steel industry has gulped billions of dollars, since the 1980s – yet there is nothing to show for it. The Federal Government set up the Ajaokuta and Delta Steel plants, alongside three Inland Rolling Mills at Oshogbo, Jos and Katsina. The steel plants and the Rolling Mills have not been able to meet the steel aspirations of Nigerians, mainly because of corruption and beaurcactic bottle-necks. What we now have is more like steel museums instead of steel plants. How do we explain the astronomical cost of imported iron and steel products when we are supposed to be producers of the product? In some of the plants, the components and spare parts are no longer being produced in any part of the world. The computer components are totally obsolete thereby leaving the engineers to cannibalize existing components to the point that there is nothing to fall back on.

The Minister of State overseeing the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, pleaded recently with Nigerians to be patient with the pace of development, stating that, “theirs is not a go slow government”. Unfortunately, Nigerians can not but believe that the present and past administration have no clear-cut policy on how to reengineer the iron and steel industry and position it for Nigeria’s industrial take off. For how long will Nigerians wait for the take-off of an effective iron and steel industry? Several Nigerians were sent to Europe, Russia and Japan to be trained for the iron and steel industry. All these high calibre manpower have been laid off in the face of the privatization Policy of the last administration. Some of the steel plants were concessioned to the political partners/business associates of the government of the day.

The iron and steel industry is the bedrock of any meaningful technological and industrial development of any nation. Nigeria cannot afford to remain an eternal importer of steel products. This sector ought to contribute significantly to the economic development of Nigeria. There seem not to be a clear road map that would lead Nigeria to becoming a major participant in steel development on the African continent. How can the dream of making Nigeria one of the best 20 economies of the world by 2020 come true? How can this be achieved when the primary steel mills have been privatized into wrong hands? The control of the primary source of steel (liquid and flat) is the control of the industrial development of the nation. The iron and steel industry then is a critical area of economic development that should not be left in the hands of investors whether foreign or indigenous.

The dedicated rail line linking Delta Steel Company, Aladja, Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited and the Nigerian Iron Ore Mining Company Itakpe are yet to be completed – until this is done the full value of the companies can never be realized. The rail line project, like several other government projects is more like an abandoned project that is already suffering fast depreciation. The River Niger is yet to be dredged and the Escravos estuary is yet to be cleared. Liquid steel can never be produced at Ajaokuta without all these things being put in place.

EXTRA JUDICIAL MURDERS

An issue that has bothered many Nigerians and sent shivers down the spines of the citizenry has to do with extra judicial murders. A number of families have been traumatized arising from the loss of their loved ones in incidents bordering on extra judicial murder. The unfortunate aspect of this development is that evidences are either totally obliterated or the victims are presented as criminals – the dead cannot speak for himself or herself. A few examples will buttress the point here – Almost two decades ago, a Nigerian star athlete Dele Udo was shot dead at a Police check point. This has also been the lot of a number of innocent Nigerians at various police check points across the country at one point or the other. In 2002, some traders traveling along the Okene – Lokoja highway were intercepted by some policemen who discovered they had a lot of money on them. The policemen tied up the traders and bundled them into the bus and set it on fire, while making away with their millions of Naira. One of the traders miraculously survived and escaped and reported the incident. The policemen were late apprehended, tried and sentenced appropriately. A renowned journalist, Bayo Awosika died in circumstances bordering on extra judicial killing. It was alleged that he died after his vehicle hit a police van and thereafter somersaulted several times before landing at another part of the road. In spite of the claim of sommersault, there was no dent on the vehicle; the handbreak of Bayo’s car was still on; and there was a piece of fire wood under the car. The post mortem examination revealed that the young man died from a missile injury – that is, he was hit by a fast moving metal (bullet). Could this have been another case of extra judicial murder. The case of citizen John Abah in Benue State is still very fresh. On November 14, 2008, bullets fired by a police patrol team felled him, the young man had gone out that night to relax with his friends when his life was cut short. The incident that led to his untimely death is traceable to a rift between the deceased and a police officer at a public beer parlour. In 2006, policemen killed a young man in the same town – Oturkpo, over a protest by residents to a PHCN facility due to power outage.

On December 2, 2008, the authorities of Lagos State University, were compelled to issue a press release on the shooting of its students. This was sequel to the shooting on the 25th of November, 2008 of 4 students of the University who had gone for Local Government identification. Arising from the swift reaction of the authorities of Lagos State University, the State Governor swung into action. The erring policemen were arrested and subsequently dismissed. One of the students shot eventually succumbed to his injuries despite the combined efforts of Lagos State Government and Lagos State University to save his life. The question is for how long will Nigerians put up with this barbaric and senseless killing of her citizens by people who are expected to protect them? The killing of a student in Athens, Greece early December 2008 sparked off protests from students and teachers for several days running. The killing of a Brazilian in the United Kingdom during a terror raid led to the prosecution of the police officer concerned. In December 2008 a lady was killed in Ogun State – she was taken for an armed robber. The police made spirited effort at explaining away the fact that the woman was an armed robber. A young man was shot dead by policeman in front a bank in Benin City for engaging in a brawl in front of the bank – this incident took place in January 2009. In the same month of January a young man was shot dead in Lagos by policemen under unexplained circumstances. Some commercial drivers have been victims of either police shootings or other forms of brutality for their refusal to part with their money illegally “usual toll”.

MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDGs)

Following from the United Nations Millennium Declaration which was adopted at the Millennium summit held in New York, September 6th – 8th, 2000, Nigeria committed herself to realizing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. These goals were targets for making measurable improvements in the lives of the world’s poorest citizens.

Goal I:       Eradicate Extreme poverty and Hunger

Poverty still stares millions of Nigerians in the face. The degree of hunger manifests clearly at burial, wedding and other social events where free food and drinks are served lavishly by a select few. In such gatherings, several uninvited guests scramble for food. Worse still, are the milling teenagers who anxiously wait for those properly served, to leave the remnants for them to either eat or carry away. Many of our young people have now become scavengers in the midst of supposed plenty.

According to Bolatito (2008), poverty exists where people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. These may be defined in a restricted sense as those needs necessary for survival, or broadly those needs reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community. Poverty describes a situation where peoples resources (material, social and cultural) as so limited as to exclude such people from the minimum acceptable way of life. Poverty is multifaceted (Bolatito 2008); it includes poor access to public services and infrastructure, unsanitary environment, illiteracy and ignorance, poor health, insecurity, voicelessness and social exclusion, including low levels of household income and food insecurity.

Between the period 1980 to 1996, the proportion of poor people rose from 28.1% in 1980 to 65.6% in 1996. This, in terms of numbers translates to 17.7 million poor people in 1980 and 67.1 million people in 1996. It is estimated that by 2015, between 30.1 million and 40.4 million people would still be living in poverty in Nigeria.

According to African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD 2005), Nigeria with an annual per capita income of barely $300, is one of the 20 poorest countries in the world. It is estimated that Nigeria grows at about 3% and the national savings rate is about 15%. In the midst of other daunting challenges of infrastructural decay and corruption, how can Nigeria attain the Millennium goal number one?

Since independence, Nigeria has steadily fallen into the group of countries with a low level of human development, as characterized by an (HDI) coefficient of less than 0.5 (on a scale of 0-1). With a score of 0.470, Nigeria occupies a lowly 158th position, where countries like Eritrea and Senegal fare better. This is a very big shame indeed. How can it be said that Benin Republic and Rwanda are higher up the ladder than Nigeria in GDP per capita.

Table 1: Nigeria’s human development index 2005

HND value

Life expectancy at birth       (years)

Adult literacy rate

(%ages 154 and older)

Combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio     (%)

GDP per capital (PPP USS)

1. Iceland (0.968)

1. Japan (82.3)

1. Georgia (100.0)

1. Australia (113.0)

1. Luxembourg (60.228)

156. Senegal (0.499)

163.Botswana (48.1)

102.Algeria (69.9)

136.Nepal (58.2)

158.Rwanda (1,206)

157.Eritrea (0.483)

1653.Cote d’Ivoire (47.4)

103.Tanzania (United Republic of) (69.4)

137.Equatorial Guinea (58.1)

159.Benin (1.141)

158.Nigeria (0.470)

165.Nigeria (46.5)

104.Nigeria (69.1)

138.Nigeria (56.2)

160. Nigeria (1,128)

159.Tanzania (United Republic of)(0.467)

166.Malawi (46.3)

105. Guatemala (69.1)

139. Bangladesh (56.0)

161. Eritrea (1.109)

160. Guinea (0.456)

167.Guinea-Bissau (45.8)

106.Lao People’s Democratic Republic (68.7)

140.Yemen (55.2)

162. Ethiopia (1,055)

177.Sierra Leone (0.336)

177.Zambia (40.5)

139.Burkina Faso (23.6)

172.Niger (22.7)

174.Malawi (667)

Human Development Report 2007/2008 Country fact Sheets – Nigeria

Table 2: Selected indicators of human poverty for Nigeria

Human Poverty Index (HPI-1) 2004

Probability of not surviving past age 40 (5) 2004

Adult illiteracy rate (%ages 15 and older)2004

People without access to an improved water source (%) 2004

Children underweight for age (% ages 0-5) 2004

1.Chad (56.9)

1.Zimbabwe (57.4)

1.Burkina Faso (76.4)

1.Ethiopia (78)

1.Nepal (48)

27.Yemen (38.0)

12.Congo (Democratic Republic of the (41.1)

34.Lao People’s Democratic Republic (31.3)

8.Congo (Democratic Republic of the (54)

22. Angola (31)

28. Burundi (37.6)

13.Guinea-Bissau (40.5)

35. Guatemala (30.9)

9. Fiji (53)

23.Maldives (30)

29. Nigeria (37.3)

14.Nigeria (39.0)

36.Nigeria (30.9)

10. Nigeria (52)

24.Nigeria (29)

30.Malawi (36.7)

15.Cote d’Ivoire (38.6)

37.Tanzania (United Republic of)(30.6)

11.Madagascar (50)

25.Sri Lanka (29)

31.Rwanda (36.5)

16.Uganda (38.5)

38.Algeria (30.1)

12. Mali (50)

26. Philippines (28)

108. Barbados (3.0)

173.Iceland (1.4)

164.Estonia (0.2)

125.Hungary (1)

134.Chile (1)

Human Development Report 2007/2008 – Country Facts Sheets – Nigeria

Tables 1 and 2, summarize the sordid state of affairs as it relates to Nigeria poverty rating at the global level. How realizable is MGD1 in the face of this staggering poverty level in Nigeria?

GOAL 2:     Achieve Universal Primary Education

The National Policy on Education (2004, revised) states that “the Government recognizes education as an instrument par excellence for effecting national development. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) is saddled with the responsibility for ensuring that Nigeria attains the goal of Universal Primary Education by the year 2015. How can this lofty goal be attained in the face of the non-cooperation of several states in the federation, in not meeting up with the demands for accessing their state fund for the Universal Basic Education programme? Less than 50% of the states in the country have been able to comply by paying their counterpart funding. Unless and until this is done, such defaulting states, and by extension, the country will be unable to meet the 2015 target date for attaining universal primary education. What could be responsible for the lacklustre attitude of several state governments towards fulfilling their part of the obligation in this regard? Can it be that education is undervalued by the current democratic actors or that the conditions for accessing the fund does not permit for the usual huge financial seepages into the wrong hands?

Nigeria also endorsed the Jometien conference on Education for All (EFA) by the year 2000, that set out targets for early childhood care and development, primary education, junior secondary and adult literacy. The trend in gross enrolment ratio (GER) indicates considerable fluctuation in enrolment between 1991 and 2000. Enrolment increased appreciably between 1990 and 1994, rising from 68% to 86%. Thereafter, enrolment declined to 81% in 1995 and 70% in 1996. Therefore, Nigeria did not achieve the Jometien EFA goal of 2000.

The Universal Basic Education (UBE) guideline stipulates that each primary and junior secondary school should have one general science laboratory to cater for elementary science and domestic science; one well ventilated toilet for a maximum of 40 pupils or students per toilet; one teacher to teach or handle 40 pupils or students. These conditions by what is obtainable in our schools is utopian, and may not be attainable even by the year 2015. Very few schools have the semblance of a laboratory. The nearby bushes provide toilet facilities in some of our schools.

GOAL 3:     Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

The target of this goal is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and to all levels of education not later than 2015. The indicators here are:

-              Ratio of girls to boys, in primary, secondary and tertiary education.

-              Ratio of literate females to males of 15-24 years old.

-              Share of women in wage employment in the non-agriculture sector

-              Proportion of seats held by women in national parliament.

Gender disparity still manifests strongly in access to primary, secondary and tertiary education leading to unequal access to employment (Millennium Development Report 2004)

An estimated 50% of Nigeria’s population is made up of women and girls; however, gender disparity in access to primary, secondary and tertiary education dates back to the pre-colonial era and has its roots in Africa traditional culture. Will the target of gender equality and empowerment of women be reached by 2015. The answer is obviously in the negative. Society must be ready to deal with gender-stereotyping and the acceptance that the female gender can aspire to the highest height if society will allow. The age-long notion of women as just being there to make children or to meet the pleasure demands of the men folk must be jettisoned. Women excel in whatever chosen career they go into; they are very good and better managers of the home and society. There should be no gender discrimination on job, whether public or private.

GOAL 4 – Reduce child Mortality

The National Millennium Goals Report (2004) noted that not much progress has been made in reducing child mortality. Estimates from the 2003 National Demographic and Health Survey put under-five mortality rate as 217 per 1,000 with large regional variations. Urban and rural areas had under five mortality rates of 243 per 1,000 and 153 per 1,000 respectively. The projection of the goal under consideration, is that, there must be a reduction by two thirds (2/3) of under-five mortality by the year 2015. In other words, Nigeria should be able to reduce under-five morality to 49 per 1,000 by 2015. It is most unlikely that Nigeria will meet the 2015 target of reducing under-five mortality by two thirds (2/3).

The major obstacles towards achieving goal 4 of the MDGs are poor access to health care facilities (poverty), HIV/AIDS and poor maternal health. Good health services costs money and this is not within the reach of the poor that unfortunately make up the majority of Nigeria’s population. Corruption and greed has not yet permitted for free-health services to the poor. Unfortunately, those in government who ought to ensure high class medical facilities in our public health institutions have failed in their responsibilities. It is these same persons who can afford to travel overseas for the slightest ailments.

Availability of Health Care facilities, 1996 – 2000

(Per’000 People)

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

No. of Doctors

0.212

0.207

0.201

0223

0.22

No. of Hospital Beds

0.677

0.643

0.613

0.575

0.639

The table depicts the very appalling state of health care facilities in Nigeria. What efforts are on ground to ensure that the picture changes drastically in the positive direction before the year 2015?

GOAL 5:     Improve Maternal Health

The target of this goal is to reduce maternal mortality ratio by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. Although there has been slight decrease in maternal mortality since 1990, the level still remains high at approximately, 1,000 per 100,000 live births from the late 1990s to 2001. The national maternal mortality rate was 704 per 100,000 live births with considerable regional variation (MDG Report 2004)

Maternal deaths in Nigeria, like in most developing countries are usually traceable to women’s powerlessness and their unequal access to employment, finance, education, basic health care, and other resources.

The challenges to the achievement of goal 5 of the MDGs include teenage pregnancy, harmful cultural practices, lack of health personnel and other infrastructure, especially in the rural areas. Nigeria accounts for 10% of global maternal deaths (UCAID 2008).

52,000 Nigerian women die yearly from maternal related complications. Lanre-Abass (2008) stated that majority of births in Nigeria (66%) occur at home. A smaller percentage of women receive postnatal care, which is crucial for monitoring and treating complications in the first two days after delivery. Nigerian health system has been bedeviled with problems of service quality, including unfriendly attitude of some health personnel (doctors and nurses), inadequate skills, decaying infrastructure, shortage of essential drugs and fake drugs.

GOAL 6:     HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases

It is estimated that over 4.5 million Nigerian adults and children are living with HIV/AIDS in 2008. The cumulative deaths from AIDS as at 2008 was about 4.2 million people. These are startling figures that should disturb any group of people (Osakwe 2008). The age groups most affected by the virus includes 20 – 29 year olds, while the regions with highest prevalence rates include the North Central, North East, and South-South zones. It is shocking to know that University treated 10,800 persons with HIV between January and October, 2008.

Several factors contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria; this includes sexual networking practices such as polygamy, a high prevalence of untreated sexually transmitted infections (STIs.), low condom use; poverty; low literacy; poor health status, stigmatization and irresponsible sexual habits. The prevalence of malaria in Nigeria has remained high, and this is due to the abundance of blocked drainages and general uncleanliness that aids the malaria vectors. It is estimated that about a million deaths are recorded annually in Nigeria arising from malaria. The fact that we have inadequate number of well-trained medical personnel to implement programmes like the national AIDS programme remains a major challenge towards the realization of Goal 6 of the MDGs.

GOAL 7:     Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Nigeria is still grappling with the challenge of environmental sustainability. There are still major problems related to land degradation, pollution, flood, erosion, desertification, inefficient use of energy resources, loss of biodiversity, environmental disasters and deforestation. There is still poor access to improved sanitation facilities in Nigeria, which may be blamed on poor implementation of health and housing and other related policies, high levels of poverty, low level of awareness about issues concerning environmental sustainability and general rural improvement. Why has the perennial gully erosion in the South East, parts of Delta and Edo defied attention – instead, farmlands and buildings are annually washed away; roads cut-off and communities separated; children and adults are washed away by floods. How explainable is it that in the 21st century, even in some university campuses, students defecate anywhere and worse in some female hostels! “Short-put” has acquired a new meaning for this anti social behaviour. Students defecate into black polythene bags and throw same behind their halls or leave them at the toilet ends. Sometimes these human wastes are washed away into gutters and drains thereby creating health hazards. Excavations for construction and building sand may not be as obvious an environmental hazard as short put; but excavation without recourse to the environmental consequences leaves much pain and anguish for the people. Some Nigerians daily contribute to environmental degradation and threat to lives and properties by their careless and environmentally – unfriendly activities.

GOAL 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Nigeria has continued to play a prominent role in regional cooperati

Professor Emman Osakwe
B.Sc. (Nig), M.Ed. (Philadelphia), M.A. (London) Ph.D (Ibadan)

Professor Emman Osakwe

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:36:28 +0000

NAVIGATING THE NATION THROUGH TODAY’S SHAME TO TOMORROW’S FAME:

SOCIAL STUDIES AS PILOT

17TH IN THE SERIES OF INAUGURAL LECTURES OF THE DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY, ABRAKA, NIGERIA.

Delivered by

Professor Emman Osakwe

B.Sc. (Nig), M.Ed. (Philadelphia), M.A. (London) Ph.D (Ibadan)

Professor of Social Studies and Dean, Postgraduate School,

Delta State University, Abraka.

On Thursday, February 26, 2009

© Copyright 2009 Delta State University, Abraka

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or by any means, Photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

DELTA STATE UNIVERSITY, ABRAKA,

DELTA STATE, NIGERIA.

Justice Jeco Press and Publishers Ltd.,

Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria.

PROLOGUE/PREFACE

This Processed Teacher is Professor+… Famous+, Nigeria Will Become

(A Love Song to My Husband and the New Nigeria)

And he said: “marry me, May!”

‘I do no such thing: marry no ‘teacher’ said May

Dreg of Professions: the teacher – disqualified

Yet, most telling, lingering voice from the classroom!- qualified

This teacher now processed, is professor, prophet and priest.

Palm oil, the broom and sponge, banga soup – processed palm

Through fire, through water, the sharp blade, agents of decay – processed

As kero, diesel, petrol, cream, jelly, this balm – processed crude

Emman Osakwe, processed teacher, a voice heard beyond

Beyond the rostrum to the nations.

Processed through pain, deprivation, denial, derided then,

Today’s lecturer mounts the rostrum, behold he comes:

My husband, my principal, mon pére

Processed through fire, through waters, denied his due

This principal teacher of teachers of teachers

Is a teacher, teaching teachers of teachers of teachers.

Promotion to peak denied for ten years!

My co-parent, persevering through the years!

Like diamond; processed from carbon, my patient prince and peace maker

This principal teacher loaded with knowledge:

Intellectual and divine, has a message:

Nigeria is processing through shame –

Shame of corruption, of grave-like greed!

Shame of maladministration and misrule

Misrule, yielding tall poverty from giant opulence

Shame of monumental wastage of resources

Shame of wickedness and religious godlessness

Processing through shame to our desired fame:

Our famous fatherland, yes our motherland;

Land of my birth, land of my pain, land of my shame

Land of your birth, land of your pain, land of your shame

Dependent too long after independence, fragile like the eaglet

For this fragile eaglet, ready to fall, unable to fly,

Will become the great eagle in flight

Famous bird; not to fly but to soar –

Land of my birth, land of your birth, land of our birth

Land of my fame, land of your fame, land of our fame –

Nigeria is your name!

Mabel Ejime Osakwe (2009)

Chair, English Language

Delta State University, Abraka

The Vice-Chancellor,

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Admin.)

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic)

The Provosts, Asaba and Oleh Campuses,

The Acting Registrar,

The Bursar,

The University Librarian,

The Provost, College of Health Sciences,

Dean, Faculty of Education,

Deans of Other Faculties,

Professors and other members of Senate,

Heads of Department and other academic Colleagues,

Members of Administrative and Technical Staff,

My Lords Spiritual and Temporal,

Members of my family, Nuclear and Extended,

My In-laws,

Distinguished Invited Guests,

Gentlemen of the Press,

Great DELSUITES,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Preamble

I feel highly honoured and priviledged to be called upon to deliver the 17th Inaugural Lecture of the Delta State University, Abraka. I thank God for granting us journey mercies to this gathering and I believe He will take all of us home safely in Jesus Name – Amen.

Did you buy and read today’s papers? How many mind bugging and gory stories? What is the latest on militancy and criminality in the Niger Delta? How painful! You may try to take your mind off those depressive issues and feed your mind with the Obama big dream come true and so will ours. Yes, welcome to this forum! To this God given opportunity for us to reflect and discuss social issues akin to those raised earlier in this welcome tip. Sorry to tell you though that I have the monopoly of the floor in this discussion that is why it is called a lecture. But release your mind to travel along, as Social Studies pilots our navigation, through today’s shame to tomorrow’s fame.

INTRODUCTION

The first thing to give attention to is the nature and purpose of Social Studies and how it serves as a vehicle for responding to issues of our time. Succinctly put, Social Studies is about learning to live and participate in this world, at a particular time and place; hence we have the formula:

SSE               =      PSpt

P      =      People

S      =      Society

P      =      place

t       =      time

This lecture being an indepth discourse on an aspect of my academic expertise, and my contribution to social studies as a field of knowledge, will be guided by the SSE formula as stated and the nature of Social Studies.

Here then, P means The Nigerian People; S means The Nigerian Society; p means The geographical entity called Nigeria and t means Nigeria yesterday today and tomorrow. In this lecture, Nigeria yesterday implies pre-colonial Nigeria to the era before the 2nd Republic, while Nigeria today spans the period 2nd Republic to date.

We recognize that this audience is not only interdisciplinary “gown” but also a heterogeneous “town”. Attempts will be made then to operate within this defined perimeter.

Social Studies touches on every facet of human existence: man himself as a product of nature, and social man as a product of nurture; arising from the social, political, economic and physical environment. Social studies has therefore for long been identified as a veritable tool or avenue for reshapening society. (Lawton and Durfour 1973, Osakwe 1993) The very nature, content and scope of social studies, makes it a virile instrument for developing a new social – political order. This lecturer has professed majorly in this area of social studies and has 20 publications related to the present discourse. Four of such are listed here:

Osakwe, E.O. (1992) “Social studies and the Military in Nigerian politics” Nigerian Journal of Social Studies Review Vol. 2, No 2, pp. 89-91

Osakwe, E.O. (1993a) Citizenship Education: The Hub of Social Studies Nigerian Journal of Social Studies Review. Vol. 2, No. 3, Pp. 23-38.

Osakwe, E.O. (1994a) Citizenship Education in a Multi-ethnic Society: Some Pedagogical Insights. Studies in Education Vol. 2. No 1. April. Pp 60-64.

Osakwe, E.O. (1994b) Instructional Strategies for teaching the Social Studies: Using Exemplars and Non-Exemplars Nigerian Journal of social Studies Vol. III, No. 1 & 2 pp. 49-55.

In Nigeria, Social Studies found practical expression into the school system after the 1969 National Curriculum Conference. The subject is geared towards building individuals and thereby building the nation (Osakwe 1993). The potentials of Social Studies are yet to be fully exploited in our quest for a desirable socio-political and economic order.

Social Studies is concerned with human relationships. The world is constantly undergoing changes and Social Studies remains a veritable instrument for examining these changes, whether they be positive or negative. Social Studies revolves around humans (people) and all that impinges on them.

Areas of Emphasis in Social Studies

The knowledge included in Social Studies is related to important generalizations about human relationships, institutions and problems, together with supporting facts to ensure that these generalizations are clearly understood (Osakwe and Itedjere 1993). Social Studies examines issues and problems from a holistic viewpoint – consequently, in resolving a problem or an issue, social studies examines the historical, cultural, sociological, economical, physical and other related dimensions. Unlike the vertical concentration that is noticeable in most school subjects, social studies adopts a horizontal spiral approach in the analysis of it problems. Social Studies, has strong affinity with the Social Sciences, but must not be seen as an amalgam of the social sciences.

Social Studies education is an avenue for providing young people with a feeling of hope in the future and confidence in their ability to solve the social and environmental problems of individuals, their community, state or nation.

On this occasion, this lecture addresses an aspect of my discipline which is of academic and public interest – Navigating the Nation, Through Today’s Shame to Tomorrow’s Fame: Social Studies as Pilot.

Addressing the issues of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow automatically provides three segments of discourse: Nigeria Yesterday Nigeria Today and Nigeria Tomorrow.

NIGERIA – YESTERDAY

It is simplistic to address the problems of nation building in Nigeria today without paying due attention to our past and the global past as it affected our past and present.

Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Sir, the educational system which we inherited from our colonial masters, although criticized for alienating us from our culture, produced disciplined individuals and people we will regard as pillars of our democracy and national development. Our educational system of yesteryears was highly structured, organized and predictable. This was the era when education was fully the responsibility of Government or Mission Agencies. Educational institutions were adequately staffed, equipped and supervision was effective. The academic calendar was stable with hardly any disruption. An entrant into the system was able to predict when he/she will graduate. Non graduation of a candidate at the appropriate time was never the fault of the school or institution but the inability of the student to work hard enough to graduate as planned by the educational establishment. The period under discussion was marked by students in primary and secondary schools putting on uniforms that were uniform indeed. There was no provision for students making their own seats/desks or for boarders, providing their own beds. Laboratories in secondary and tertiary institutions were comparable with what obtained in other parts of the world.

Sound moral education was part and parcel of the education in pre 1970 to late 80s Nigeria. Relationship between pupils and teachers, students and teachers and students and lecturers at various levels of education was to a very great extent professional. Incidents of examination malpractice were very rare and anyone caught compromising the integrity of examination was promptly dealt with. Incidents of students negotiating grades with their lecturers or lecturers/teachers asking for “incentives” were almost non-existent. During the period under review, academic standards in Nigeria’s first generation universities was commendable and comparable to what obtained in the more advanced countries of Europe and America. The period witnessed massive staff exchange from overseas universities. Our universities had real international orientation and reputation, with staff and students coming from different parts of the world. Apart from the international outlook of our universities and academics, university lecturers were highly respected and were at the apex of social rating. Okecha (2008) rightly noted that the mention of the title “Professor” attracted much attention. The office of the Vice-Chancellor was highly reverred. The Vice-Chancellor was more respected than any government appointee.

Most Nigerians who went through tertiary education enjoyed one form of financial support or the other from the Government. Education was a worthwhile venture and was seen as the key that unlocked the door to success and fame.

Indolence, robbery, prostitution, ostentatious living, greed, oppression, social and spatial inequality were considered extremely disgraceful in Nigeria of yesteryears. It was common practice for example, for the vendor to leave the Dailies at the Porter’s Lodge as students were trusted to drop the money and pick the papers. Similarly, the proceeds of Rag Day were used for charity as expected. Social vices were frowned at and there was greater sense of accountability among the citizenry including public office holders. Workers reported at their duty posts at the expected time and remained at work till closing. School and other institutional gates were closed at 8 a.m. and remained so until closing. Truancy was an aberration and something seriously frowned at. There was freedom of political association, although political cleavages was along the three major ethnic groups with the exception of the Middle Belt that had her own political identity. It was possible for close relatives to belong to different political parties and yet still live in harmony. The example of the Ikokus can attest to this fact – that a father and son belonged to two opposing parties.

Humans are generally political animals. The ability to organize people into groups with whatever political motive is a basic instinct inherent in human beings. Nigerians are highly articulate political beings. There is the practice of traditional and community politics which has always been with us. There has been a merger between traditional and modern social life and party politics. Since culture is not static, traditional practices also adjusted to accommodate new challenges and developments including cross-cultural contacts with its attendant implications. The social life of a people and their political culture, to a great extent affects several other areas of living. Nigeria is a political amalgam. This is indicative of the cultural plurality of the country. To a great extent the North was much more politically articulate and responsive. This probably accounts for the practice wherein our Northern brothers are always with their radios and listening to local and international news, thereby being always informed. Social life and party politics is not a function of Western education. Some southerners in spite of their level of education, are still politically naïve and cannot read or understand the political horizon. Nigeria’s economy during this period was very stable and was hinged on agriculture. This was the era of the groundnut pyramids. Nigeria was the world’s largest producer of groundnuts, rubber, palm oil and kernels, soya beans, beniseed and also a major producer of cotton, 2nd world producer of cocoa. It was within this period that Malaysia came to Nigeria to get our oil and rubber seedlings, to try out in their country. We know where both countries stand today in the production of palm oil and rubber.

Solid minerals like coal, tin and columbite were mined in economic quantities and Nigeria was known to be a major world player in the production of these minerals. The buoyancy of the economy was further boosted with the discovery of the black gold (oil) in Nigeria. Gradually, emphasis started to shift from agriculture to petroleum ……….the mainstay of Nigerian economy. The Nigerian currency was strong and highly sought after during this period.

Exchange Rate Between the 70s and 80s

Nigeria               British                          American            German

N1                    pd Stg                       US $                  DM 3.64

The figures above presents a vivid picture of the strength of the Naira at this time.

Nigeria was well served by road, rail, sea air transport. During this period there were over 95,000km of tarred roads and over 3,200km of one-metre gauge railway. Nigeria had just two international airports at Lagos and Kano. Both the northern and southern parts of the country attracted significant investment in infrastructural development, especially in rail and feeder roads, as well as some measure of social services such as electricity, water supply, hospitals, schools and colleges. This period was marked by staff of the Public Works Department (PWD) clearing of the grasses by the sides of the road to ensure long distance and clear vision for drivers and other road users. Roads were regularly maintained – although then, roads were narrow and sometimes windy, they were motorable throughout the year.

Nigeria Airways was the pride of West Africa. It towered over and above other airlines in the sub-region. Nigerian pilots were renowned for their courtesy, competence and confidence. Their take-off and landing was remarkable and devoid of jerks and hiccups. Nigerian Airways flew constantly to Europe, Asia, U.S.A. and several African routes without blemish. The DC 10s, Boeing 737, 707 and 747 were constant on the international routes while the smaller aircrafts served the local (internal) routes. Closer home here, the waterway from Sapele to Obiaruku through River Ethiope was navigable and building materials were transported through that channel.

Security of lives and properties was to a very great extent guaranteed during this period. It was possible to travel all night without fear of robbers. Night travel was preferred by a number of Nigerians. Incidents of armed robbery was rare and it was easy to track criminals. It was not fashionable to engage in criminality because there was a general societal rejection or disgust for any individual who was known to be a criminal or social deviant.

NIGERIA TODAY

Today, Nigeria has traded her dignifying values of diligence, patriotism, high ethical standards, her abundant natural resources of yesteryears for inglorious habits colloquially referred to as the “Nigerian factor”: the pursuit of injustice, upturned values, endemic corruption and gross misrule. Today Nigeria is fatally sick from a deliberately self inflicted injury. Most of what is happening in Nigeria today amounts to national shame, our pain and disgrace. This shame is most manifest in our “New politics” which is marked by violence leading to loss of lives and properties, massive rigging and assassinations. The undeserving beneficiaries are quick to make efforts at convincing and confusing the masses into supporting the outcome of their political exploits. Almost immediately endorsement is rushed in from all over the country, especially from some Christian and Islamic clerics and other self-seeking leaders who pontificate on the fallacy that governments and leadership are chosen and ordained by God and that we should accept things the way they are in order to save our nascent democracy. But peace without justice cannot stand the test of time and is an invitation for anarchy.

Unlike what obtains in Western democracies and other stable polities where election results are declared less than 24 hours at the close of polls, in Nigeria, it could take three days. In some ridiculous situations like local government elections that are even smaller geographical entities to manage, it still takes days before results are officially released. This usual drag leaves room for manipulation and panel-beating of figures. In spite of all these, ridiculous figures are released as results. In some instances, there are more votes than the number of registered voters. Multiple voting is not uncommon. The tribunal judgment in Edo State revealed that fictitious voters voted and some others voted several times including supposed voters from across the Atlantic.

The bedrock for any stable and functional democratic state is the electoral process. This should be seen as the key issue in a country like ours. The electoral process represents a political choice by the populace. Next to market gossips and corridor discussions, voting is the one activity that demonstrates the extent of people’s involvement in politics. When free and secret ballot voting takes place, the direction and quantum of individual’s participation come out boldly in their true form.

In a survey carried out by this lecturer in 1998, the degree of apathy expressed by young people was startling.

Possible percentage participation in National Elections

S/NO

CATEGORY

NO OF STUDENTS RESPONDING TO EACH CATEGORY

TOTAL NO OF STUDENTS

PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL

1.

Indifferent or undecided

162

250

65%

2.

Yes or Interested

63

250

25%

3.

No or not interested

25

250

10%

The above was almost a decade before the 2007 monumentally fraudulent election, yet the figure reveals high level of alienation or disenchantment with politics and the electoral process among young people. In most cases, this alienation or apathy leads to high level political-disinterest. Effective citizen participation depends upon a knowledge of how the system really operates.

Our citizens have not been systematically exposed to the methods of operations of our political system. A good number of our youths have been left to wander aimlessly in Nigerian political arena. This has resulted in either misinformation or the stifling of the political instincts in youths towards national affairs.

Our electoral process and the attendant protestation of results is unparalleled in the annals of elections in any part of the globe. Many Nigerians are now of the opinion that an individual’s vote does not count – that results are predetermined. This has led to serious apathy and despondency on the part of a large segment of the electorate (See Osakwe 1998, Ogini 2008). The June 12, 1993 election, adjudged to be free affair was annulled with ignomity to the chagrin of Nigerians. Since then, the situation has worsened. There is understandably now much cynicism towards election and the electoral process by several Nigerians.

Another disturbing dimension in this discourse is that politics in Nigeria is no longer seen as an avenue for service, rather it has become an avenue for quick ascendancy to wealth, and public recognition. This has led to the emergence of political upstarts with warped minds on the political expectation of the electorate. Their life style is marked by flamboyant living, luxury cars, including bullet-proof vehicles, escorts with sirens and intimidation of all perceived opponents and those who refuse to acknowledge their new found position and affluence that they find difficult to manage. What we now witness is a replay of the Biblical Haman-Mordecai saga. Haman, a political upstart paid a huge sum of money to ensure that the entire Jewish race is wiped out just because Mordecai the Jew did not bow down to him.

It is a mark of political immaturity to try to use political opportunism to settle scores. It is a show of shame and reflection of the struggle against a complex. Politics should be a very exciting part of our national life, but it is now an issue of life and death, sometimes sending shivers down the spine of the populace. That is why, organizing or conducting elections in Nigeria is warfare and several lives have gone with elections in Nigeria.

Political Assassinations

Between 1999 and 2009, 39 cases of politically – motivated murders were reported in the country. The timing of these assassinations reveals that it is usually more prevalent in the years preceding the elections and the election year proper. For example, there were 17 assassination cases between 2002 and 2003; 9 cases were recorded between 2005 and 2007 (another pre-election and election period).

Political Assassinations – 1999-2009 (- A Graphic Representation)

In the more recent elections in Nigeria, firearms were freely used. In the Jos crisis of November/December 2008, over 500 lives were lost in the mayhem that trailed that election. Several of those hospitalized were victims of bullet wound. How does this compare with what obtains in other parts of the world, where election results are respected and the electoral process is carried out in an orderly manner?

A common feature of the political terrain in Nigeria is the issue of recycling of individuals and families – giving the impression that there is some eternal mandate that these individuals and families must always be there. How do we explain a situation where some political actors who were contemporaries of the Late Sage, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, are still hovering around the corridors of power. There are some individuals who have remained in political flirtation all through the 29 years of military –rule into the democratic era in Nigeria. What a shame that almost two years after the 2007 general elections, there are still several yet-to-be-resolved court cases.

It is a fact that ever since the contentious elections, Nigerians of varying endeavors, have been united in seeking a reform process that waters the tree of a transparently, free and fair election in order to eliminate the rancour that greeted the results of the April, 2007 polls and literally created hatred and anarchy.

For how long will Nigerians live with this level of rancor and uncertainty? When will transparent elections be conducted so that at the end the loser is even quick to concede defeat and congratulate the winner? In the United States elections of November 4, 2008, Republican presidential candidate, John McCain gracefully conceded victory to the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama in less than 24 hours after polls. The winner and loser in the American elections did not have to wait for the Electoral boss to announce the result of the most celebrated election result in the world. They relied on the results as announced live by the Cable News Network (CNN).

It is instructive to state here that Nigeria’s national television, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) had a live coverage of the American election. Why has it not been possible to cover our national elections live. Some international observers were refused entry and their reports discountenanced by our electoral authorities, yet Nigerians went to Ghana to monitor elections! Our electoral process is not transparent and acceptable. It is yet to be made so nationally and internationally.

CORRUPTION

Corruption is used here to capture a condition or state of falsehood, impropriety, illegitimacy, illegality or injustice geared towards acquisition of power, money or position for private and sectional profit.

Corruption has become endemic in Nigeria and a culturally corrupt system would generate a corrupt society. A society and people would naturally produce its kind, except there is a drastic cultural surgery or there is a re-orientation as a result of time: Recall the Social Studies formula. The Nigerian society provides a very fertile ground for fraudulent practices, thereby leading to the institutionalization of corruption. A corrupt society according to Lewis (2008) produces corrupt leaders and followers; corrupt leaders copy or establish corrupt institutions and corrupt institutions create a multiple of corrupt systems. This may explain why there is hardly any institution or system that is corruption-free in Nigeria. Religious establishments are not exempt in this. Corruption indeed is Nigeria’s worst enemy preventing the citizens from enjoying the huge natural resources. Corruption is detrimental to economic growth. It increases income inequality and poverty by reducing economic growth. It also promotes and sustains unequal distribution of asset ownership and an unequal access to education (Olajide, 2008).

In spite of the establishment of anti-corruption agencies such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) corrupt practices have continued to manifest in several ingeniously notorious ways and forms in Nigeria. This monster called corruption has continued to be the bane of the country’s drive towards the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Recently, at an interactive session with the House of Representatives Committee on Drugs and Narcotics and Financial crimes, the Chief Executive of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), alleged that some Nigerians have cashed in on the falling global prices and had been criss-crossing the globe day and night to acquire properties with money looted from the country. Perpetrators of this crime know how to beat all the mechanisms put in place to check their nefarious activities. Our image has been seriously dented by the activities of corrupt Nigerians. Corruption among Nigerians also manifests in internet fraud and the notorious Advance Free Fraud (aka 419). A number of unsuspecting Nigerians and foreigners have been victims of both internet and Advance fee fraud. A number of young people now live big and fat from the proceeds of corruption and fraud.

Nigeria’s image has been seriously dented across the globe as a result of the fraudulent practices of some of our citizens. Several Nigerians are languishing in jails in a number of countries – Some who were not so lucky, were executed by the authorities of those countries where they committed the atrocities. The war against corruption seem to have had a focus during Obasanjo’s regime. Yar Ardua’s administration promised that there would be no sacred cows in his administration’s anti-corruption fight. However, his anti-corruption war came under serious skepticism and cynicism following the redeployment of the former Chairman of the anti-graft agency and his numerous travails thereafter that culminated in his dismissal. It is a very sad commentary and sends a very wrong message to Nigerians and the international community.

The anti-corruption crusade tempo is gradually grinding to a halt and some watchers are getting really concerned, because the sufferings of the masses, they feel have been caused by a few individuals who have diverted money meant for the welfare of the masses for their personal gain. One of the apparent reasons why corruption has continued to pervade the length and breadth of Nigeria may be that the three arms of government pay lip service to its eradication.

The damage corruption has done to the polity and the generality of our people is immeasurable and incalculable. The malaise pervades all strata of the society, including public institutions. According to This Day Opinion of November 5, 2008, nothing works well in Nigeria because of corruption. Several roads are in a deplorable state, even when attempts   are made at rehabilitating the roads, corruption will not allow for a thorough and enduring job.

Education and Corruption

Sexual harassment has become so pervasive in Nigerian tertiary education. It is a highly disturbing state of affairs. The issue of sexual harassment in higher institutions has attracted the attention of a number of academics – (Osakwe 2008, Igborgbor 2008, Okecha, 2008). Sexual harassment is a manifestation of power relations and most times girls and women are at the receiving end. Sexual harassment is not restricted to any age level – some academic elders have been known to engage in this abominable game. Some academics have lost their jobs arising from this misdemeanor. Some have continued to exploit and defile girls and make public boast of their sexual escapades. Some girls and married women have been traumatized, all in a bid to acquire a university degree or diploma from other tertiary institutions. Closely related to the issue of sexual harassment is corruption in our educational system from primary to university level. Pupils and students are compelled to pay for one levy or the other. Signing of referees report, clearance, course form, data card – all attract illegal charges. Sometime ago in the history of Nigeria,

Teachers at all levels of education earned a great deal of respect from members of the public. Seen as honest, disciplined and morally above board, it was then most fashionable to look for a teacher whenever a public position that called for a person of high integrity became vacant. They had the aura of saints and always proved their admirers right whenever they had the opportunity to bring their experience and knowledge to bear on public affairs. However, this hallowed integrity of the academic class appears to have taken its leave as the country continues to stink with corruption (Aghedo 2008).

Within the last couple of years, three professors paid the price for sexual exploitation of girls and had to be disgraced out of office. There are still many more waiting to be disgraced. Academic corruption has assumed different dimensions ranging from plagiarism, victimization, gagging of academic freedom, erosion of mentoring to production of foot soldiers/”academic hostage taking” – by which junior academics under a senior colleague have no choice but to do their master’s bidding. Academic freedom that once characterized the university system is fast eroding and giving way to dangerous campus politicians, cliques and other interest groups – whose interests are some other things except academics.

Examination malpractice has also become a major problem besetting education in Nigeria. The phenomenon has become monstrous and will take only very bold and ruthless measures to wipe out. The unfortunate situation is that some people who are expected to address this issue are products of examination malpractice themselves.

Transport and Corruption

The airports lack necessary facilities; the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) cannot locate sites of air wreckages. The most recent defied location until several months after by hunters. The railway lines remain dysfunctional – some rail lines are now used by traders to display their wares.

General Attitude to Corruption

People no longer express bitterness and shock each time they hear of billions of Naira being stolen from public coffers, since it has now become a daily occurrence. For example, it was reported that in one month, a Governor in a state spent N1bn (One billion Naira) in his state for security matters – a state where there was no war, nor the breakdown of law and order.

The status of corruption in Nigeria today is a product of the inconsistency and irregularity of the war against corruption – Having been fought to a standstill by General Murtala Mohammed between 1975 and 1976, a follow up such as Buhari/Idiagbon and later by Nuhu Ribadu would have brought the monster to its knees. But the intervening period between Mohammed and Buhari brought in General Babangida who ruled between 1985 and 1993. Unlike the Buhari regime that came hard on looters of public fund several of whom were handed various prison terms, Babangida returned the assets of the various officers and restored the ranks of the dismissed officers. Call it reward of corruption! This history may repeat itself once again, if the travails of Nuhu Ribadu is allowed to continue. Call it punishment for fighting corruption! The war against corruption at the moment is asleep.

Corruption and the Power Sector

Two thousand (2,000) megawatts of electricity was being generated in 2008 as against the 3,000 generated in 2003. These are ridiculous figures. South Africa with a population of 60 million, generates 45,000 megawatts and the government of South Africa is aspiring to increase her capacity to 60,000. How can Nigeria still claim to be the giant of Africa? Our industries and small scale businesses provide their own electricity – how can they break even in the face of exorbitant production cost essentially because of the lack of steady public power supply. How can industrial dreams of Nigeria be actualized in the light of the current energy challenges. In spite of the President’s plan to declare a state of emergency in the power sector, things have not improved. Small scale businesses, artisans and several self-employed Nigerians have been forced to close their businesses due to non-availability of power.

It was reported (Tell December 8 that in one month (November, 2008) the worsening power situation forced the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) to announce the loss of 800 MW generation capacity – within the same period the Sapele Power Station was completely shut down, and the Egbin power station in Lagos was operating “at reduced capacity”. Exactly 10 days after, PHCN reported additional loss of 200 MW. All these have been responsible for the 12 hourly zonal power rotational rationing to maintain system stability and ensure even distribution of the limited generation output from the functioning plants. Under the rotation plan, PHCN divided the country into zones. Each zone gets electricity for 12 hours; even this is no guarantee that the light would come. There are areas/sections of the country where power outage is more regular than public power supply. Even the “promised” additional 6,500 MW by 2009 is a far cry from our expected electricity demands in Nigeria.

We are further informed (Tell December 2008) that each University spends more than N120 million annually on diesel. What a colossal waste of money that would have been ploughed into other critical areas of University administration. Not many Universities in Nigeria can even afford to spend that staggering sum of money for electricity. This of course, does not include the regular electricity bills from PHCN.

CORRUPTION AND IRON AND STEEL INDUSTRY

The iron and steel industry has gulped billions of dollars, since the 1980s – yet there is nothing to show for it. The Federal Government set up the Ajaokuta and Delta Steel plants, alongside three Inland Rolling Mills at Oshogbo, Jos and Katsina. The steel plants and the Rolling Mills have not been able to meet the steel aspirations of Nigerians, mainly because of corruption and beaurcactic bottle-necks. What we now have is more like steel museums instead of steel plants. How do we explain the astronomical cost of imported iron and steel products when we are supposed to be producers of the product? In some of the plants, the components and spare parts are no longer being produced in any part of the world. The computer components are totally obsolete thereby leaving the engineers to cannibalize existing components to the point that there is nothing to fall back on.

The Minister of State overseeing the Ministry of Mines and Steel Development, pleaded recently with Nigerians to be patient with the pace of development, stating that, “theirs is not a go slow government”. Unfortunately, Nigerians can not but believe that the present and past administration have no clear-cut policy on how to reengineer the iron and steel industry and position it for Nigeria’s industrial take off. For how long will Nigerians wait for the take-off of an effective iron and steel industry? Several Nigerians were sent to Europe, Russia and Japan to be trained for the iron and steel industry. All these high calibre manpower have been laid off in the face of the privatization Policy of the last administration. Some of the steel plants were concessioned to the political partners/business associates of the government of the day.

The iron and steel industry is the bedrock of any meaningful technological and industrial development of any nation. Nigeria cannot afford to remain an eternal importer of steel products. This sector ought to contribute significantly to the economic development of Nigeria. There seem not to be a clear road map that would lead Nigeria to becoming a major participant in steel development on the African continent. How can the dream of making Nigeria one of the best 20 economies of the world by 2020 come true? How can this be achieved when the primary steel mills have been privatized into wrong hands? The control of the primary source of steel (liquid and flat) is the control of the industrial development of the nation. The iron and steel industry then is a critical area of economic development that should not be left in the hands of investors whether foreign or indigenous.

The dedicated rail line linking Delta Steel Company, Aladja, Ajaokuta Steel Company Limited and the Nigerian Iron Ore Mining Company Itakpe are yet to be completed – until this is done the full value of the companies can never be realized. The rail line project, like several other government projects is more like an abandoned project that is already suffering fast depreciation. The River Niger is yet to be dredged and the Escravos estuary is yet to be cleared. Liquid steel can never be produced at Ajaokuta without all these things being put in place.

EXTRA JUDICIAL MURDERS

An issue that has bothered many Nigerians and sent shivers down the spines of the citizenry has to do with extra judicial murders. A number of families have been traumatized arising from the loss of their loved ones in incidents bordering on extra judicial murder. The unfortunate aspect of this development is that evidences are either totally obliterated or the victims are presented as criminals – the dead cannot speak for himself or herself. A few examples will buttress the point here – Almost two decades ago, a Nigerian star athlete Dele Udo was shot dead at a Police check point. This has also been the lot of a number of innocent Nigerians at various police check points across the country at one point or the other. In 2002, some traders traveling along the Okene – Lokoja highway were intercepted by some policemen who discovered they had a lot of money on them. The policemen tied up the traders and bundled them into the bus and set it on fire, while making away with their millions of Naira. One of the traders miraculously survived and escaped and reported the incident. The policemen were late apprehended, tried and sentenced appropriately. A renowned journalist, Bayo Awosika died in circumstances bordering on extra judicial killing. It was alleged that he died after his vehicle hit a police van and thereafter somersaulted several times before landing at another part of the road. In spite of the claim of sommersault, there was no dent on the vehicle; the handbreak of Bayo’s car was still on; and there was a piece of fire wood under the car. The post mortem examination revealed that the young man died from a missile injury – that is, he was hit by a fast moving metal (bullet). Could this have been another case of extra judicial murder. The case of citizen John Abah in Benue State is still very fresh. On November 14, 2008, bullets fired by a police patrol team felled him, the young man had gone out that night to relax with his friends when his life was cut short. The incident that led to his untimely death is traceable to a rift between the deceased and a police officer at a public beer parlour. In 2006, policemen killed a young man in the same town – Oturkpo, over a protest by residents to a PHCN facility due to power outage.

On December 2, 2008, the authorities of Lagos State University, were compelled to issue a press release on the shooting of its students. This was sequel to the shooting on the 25th of November, 2008 of 4 students of the University who had gone for Local Government identification. Arising from the swift reaction of the authorities of Lagos State University, the State Governor swung into action. The erring policemen were arrested and subsequently dismissed. One of the students shot eventually succumbed to his injuries despite the combined efforts of Lagos State Government and Lagos State University to save his life. The question is for how long will Nigerians put up with this barbaric and senseless killing of her citizens by people who are expected to protect them? The killing of a student in Athens, Greece early December 2008 sparked off protests from students and teachers for several days running. The killing of a Brazilian in the United Kingdom during a terror raid led to the prosecution of the police officer concerned. In December 2008 a lady was killed in Ogun State – she was taken for an armed robber. The police made spirited effort at explaining away the fact that the woman was an armed robber. A young man was shot dead by policeman in front a bank in Benin City for engaging in a brawl in front of the bank – this incident took place in January 2009. In the same month of January a young man was shot dead in Lagos by policemen under unexplained circumstances. Some commercial drivers have been victims of either police shootings or other forms of brutality for their refusal to part with their money illegally “usual toll”.

MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDGs)

Following from the United Nations Millennium Declaration which was adopted at the Millennium summit held in New York, September 6th – 8th, 2000, Nigeria committed herself to realizing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. These goals were targets for making measurable improvements in the lives of the world’s poorest citizens.

Goal I:       Eradicate Extreme poverty and Hunger

Poverty still stares millions of Nigerians in the face. The degree of hunger manifests clearly at burial, wedding and other social events where free food and drinks are served lavishly by a select few. In such gatherings, several uninvited guests scramble for food. Worse still, are the milling teenagers who anxiously wait for those properly served, to leave the remnants for them to either eat or carry away. Many of our young people have now become scavengers in the midst of supposed plenty.

According to Bolatito (2008), poverty exists where people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. These may be defined in a restricted sense as those needs necessary for survival, or broadly those needs reflecting the prevailing standard of living in the community. Poverty describes a situation where peoples resources (material, social and cultural) as so limited as to exclude such people from the minimum acceptable way of life. Poverty is multifaceted (Bolatito 2008); it includes poor access to public services and infrastructure, unsanitary environment, illiteracy and ignorance, poor health, insecurity, voicelessness and social exclusion, including low levels of household income and food insecurity.

Between the period 1980 to 1996, the proportion of poor people rose from 28.1% in 1980 to 65.6% in 1996. This, in terms of numbers translates to 17.7 million poor people in 1980 and 67.1 million people in 1996. It is estimated that by 2015, between 30.1 million and 40.4 million people would still be living in poverty in Nigeria.

According to African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD 2005), Nigeria with an annual per capita income of barely $300, is one of the 20 poorest countries in the world. It is estimated that Nigeria grows at about 3% and the national savings rate is about 15%. In the midst of other daunting challenges of infrastructural decay and corruption, how can Nigeria attain the Millennium goal number one?

Since independence, Nigeria has steadily fallen into the group of countries with a low level of human development, as characterized by an (HDI) coefficient of less than 0.5 (on a scale of 0-1). With a score of 0.470, Nigeria occupies a lowly 158th position, where countries like Eritrea and Senegal fare better. This is a very big shame indeed. How can it be said that Benin Republic and Rwanda are higher up the ladder than Nigeria in GDP per capita.

Table 1: Nigeria’s human development index 2005

HND value

Life expectancy at birth       (years)

Adult literacy rate

(%ages 154 and older)

Combined primary, secondary and tertiary gross enrolment ratio     (%)

GDP per capital (PPP USS)

1. Iceland (0.968)

1. Japan (82.3)

1. Georgia (100.0)

1. Australia (113.0)

1. Luxembourg (60.228)

156. Senegal (0.499)

163.Botswana (48.1)

102.Algeria (69.9)

136.Nepal (58.2)

158.Rwanda (1,206)

157.Eritrea (0.483)

1653.Cote d’Ivoire (47.4)

103.Tanzania (United Republic of) (69.4)

137.Equatorial Guinea (58.1)

159.Benin (1.141)

158.Nigeria (0.470)

165.Nigeria (46.5)

104.Nigeria (69.1)

138.Nigeria (56.2)

160. Nigeria (1,128)

159.Tanzania (United Republic of)(0.467)

166.Malawi (46.3)

105. Guatemala (69.1)

139. Bangladesh (56.0)

161. Eritrea (1.109)

160. Guinea (0.456)

167.Guinea-Bissau (45.8)

106.Lao People’s Democratic Republic (68.7)

140.Yemen (55.2)

162. Ethiopia (1,055)

177.Sierra Leone (0.336)

177.Zambia (40.5)

139.Burkina Faso (23.6)

172.Niger (22.7)

174.Malawi (667)

Human Development Report 2007/2008 Country fact Sheets – Nigeria

Table 2: Selected indicators of human poverty for Nigeria

Human Poverty Index (HPI-1) 2004

Probability of not surviving past age 40 (5) 2004

Adult illiteracy rate (%ages 15 and older)2004

People without access to an improved water source (%) 2004

Children underweight for age (% ages 0-5) 2004

1.Chad (56.9)

1.Zimbabwe (57.4)

1.Burkina Faso (76.4)

1.Ethiopia (78)

1.Nepal (48)

27.Yemen (38.0)

12.Congo (Democratic Republic of the (41.1)

34.Lao People’s Democratic Republic (31.3)

8.Congo (Democratic Republic of the (54)

22. Angola (31)

28. Burundi (37.6)

13.Guinea-Bissau (40.5)

35. Guatemala (30.9)

9. Fiji (53)

23.Maldives (30)

29. Nigeria (37.3)

14.Nigeria (39.0)

36.Nigeria (30.9)

10. Nigeria (52)

24.Nigeria (29)

30.Malawi (36.7)

15.Cote d’Ivoire (38.6)

37.Tanzania (United Republic of)(30.6)

11.Madagascar (50)

25.Sri Lanka (29)

31.Rwanda (36.5)

16.Uganda (38.5)

38.Algeria (30.1)

12. Mali (50)

26. Philippines (28)

108. Barbados (3.0)

173.Iceland (1.4)

164.Estonia (0.2)

125.Hungary (1)

134.Chile (1)

Human Development Report 2007/2008 – Country Facts Sheets – Nigeria

Tables 1 and 2, summarize the sordid state of affairs as it relates to Nigeria poverty rating at the global level. How realizable is MGD1 in the face of this staggering poverty level in Nigeria?

GOAL 2:     Achieve Universal Primary Education

The National Policy on Education (2004, revised) states that “the Government recognizes education as an instrument par excellence for effecting national development. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) is saddled with the responsibility for ensuring that Nigeria attains the goal of Universal Primary Education by the year 2015. How can this lofty goal be attained in the face of the non-cooperation of several states in the federation, in not meeting up with the demands for accessing their state fund for the Universal Basic Education programme? Less than 50% of the states in the country have been able to comply by paying their counterpart funding. Unless and until this is done, such defaulting states, and by extension, the country will be unable to meet the 2015 target date for attaining universal primary education. What could be responsible for the lacklustre attitude of several state governments towards fulfilling their part of the obligation in this regard? Can it be that education is undervalued by the current democratic actors or that the conditions for accessing the fund does not permit for the usual huge financial seepages into the wrong hands?

Nigeria also endorsed the Jometien conference on Education for All (EFA) by the year 2000, that set out targets for early childhood care and development, primary education, junior secondary and adult literacy. The trend in gross enrolment ratio (GER) indicates considerable fluctuation in enrolment between 1991 and 2000. Enrolment increased appreciably between 1990 and 1994, rising from 68% to 86%. Thereafter, enrolment declined to 81% in 1995 and 70% in 1996. Therefore, Nigeria did not achieve the Jometien EFA goal of 2000.

The Universal Basic Education (UBE) guideline stipulates that each primary and junior secondary school should have one general science laboratory to cater for elementary science and domestic science; one well ventilated toilet for a maximum of 40 pupils or students per toilet; one teacher to teach or handle 40 pupils or students. These conditions by what is obtainable in our schools is utopian, and may not be attainable even by the year 2015. Very few schools have the semblance of a laboratory. The nearby bushes provide toilet facilities in some of our schools.

GOAL 3:     Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

The target of this goal is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and to all levels of education not later than 2015. The indicators here are:

-              Ratio of girls to boys, in primary, secondary and tertiary education.

-              Ratio of literate females to males of 15-24 years old.

-              Share of women in wage employment in the non-agriculture sector

-              Proportion of seats held by women in national parliament.

Gender disparity still manifests strongly in access to primary, secondary and tertiary education leading to unequal access to employment (Millennium Development Report 2004)

An estimated 50% of Nigeria’s population is made up of women and girls; however, gender disparity in access to primary, secondary and tertiary education dates back to the pre-colonial era and has its roots in Africa traditional culture. Will the target of gender equality and empowerment of women be reached by 2015. The answer is obviously in the negative. Society must be ready to deal with gender-stereotyping and the acceptance that the female gender can aspire to the highest height if society will allow. The age-long notion of women as just being there to make children or to meet the pleasure demands of the men folk must be jettisoned. Women excel in whatever chosen career they go into; they are very good and better managers of the home and society. There should be no gender discrimination on job, whether public or private.

GOAL 4 – Reduce child Mortality

The National Millennium Goals Report (2004) noted that not much progress has been made in reducing child mortality. Estimates from the 2003 National Demographic and Health Survey put under-five mortality rate as 217 per 1,000 with large regional variations. Urban and rural areas had under five mortality rates of 243 per 1,000 and 153 per 1,000 respectively. The projection of the goal under consideration, is that, there must be a reduction by two thirds (2/3) of under-five mortality by the year 2015. In other words, Nigeria should be able to reduce under-five morality to 49 per 1,000 by 2015. It is most unlikely that Nigeria will meet the 2015 target of reducing under-five mortality by two thirds (2/3).

The major obstacles towards achieving goal 4 of the MDGs are poor access to health care facilities (poverty), HIV/AIDS and poor maternal health. Good health services costs money and this is not within the reach of the poor that unfortunately make up the majority of Nigeria’s population. Corruption and greed has not yet permitted for free-health services to the poor. Unfortunately, those in government who ought to ensure high class medical facilities in our public health institutions have failed in their responsibilities. It is these same persons who can afford to travel overseas for the slightest ailments.

Availability of Health Care facilities, 1996 – 2000

(Per’000 People)

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

No. of Doctors

0.212

0.207

0.201

0223

0.22

No. of Hospital Beds

0.677

0.643

0.613

0.575

0.639

The table depicts the very appalling state of health care facilities in Nigeria. What efforts are on ground to ensure that the picture changes drastically in the positive direction before the year 2015?

GOAL 5:     Improve Maternal Health

The target of this goal is to reduce maternal mortality ratio by three quarters between 1990 and 2015. Although there has been slight decrease in maternal mortality since 1990, the level still remains high at approximately, 1,000 per 100,000 live births from the late 1990s to 2001. The national maternal mortality rate was 704 per 100,000 live births with considerable regional variation (MDG Report 2004)

Maternal deaths in Nigeria, like in most developing countries are usually traceable to women’s powerlessness and their unequal access to employment, finance, education, basic health care, and other resources.

The challenges to the achievement of goal 5 of the MDGs include teenage pregnancy, harmful cultural practices, lack of health personnel and other infrastructure, especially in the rural areas. Nigeria accounts for 10% of global maternal deaths (UCAID 2008).

52,000 Nigerian women die yearly from maternal related complications. Lanre-Abass (2008) stated that majority of births in Nigeria (66%) occur at home. A smaller percentage of women receive postnatal care, which is crucial for monitoring and treating complications in the first two days after delivery. Nigerian health system has been bedeviled with problems of service quality, including unfriendly attitude of some health personnel (doctors and nurses), inadequate skills, decaying infrastructure, shortage of essential drugs and fake drugs.

GOAL 6:     HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases

It is estimated that over 4.5 million Nigerian adults and children are living with HIV/AIDS in 2008. The cumulative deaths from AIDS as at 2008 was about 4.2 million people. These are startling figures that should disturb any group of people (Osakwe 2008). The age groups most affected by the virus includes 20 – 29 year olds, while the regions with highest prevalence rates include the North Central, North East, and South-South zones. It is shocking to know that University treated 10,800 persons with HIV between January and October, 2008.

Several factors contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria; this includes sexual networking practices such as polygamy, a high prevalence of untreated sexually transmitted infections (STIs.), low condom use; poverty; low literacy; poor health status, stigmatization and irresponsible sexual habits. The prevalence of malaria in Nigeria has remained high, and this is due to the abundance of blocked drainages and general uncleanliness that aids the malaria vectors. It is estimated that about a million deaths are recorded annually in Nigeria arising from malaria. The fact that we have inadequate number of well-trained medical personnel to implement programmes like the national AIDS programme remains a major challenge towards the realization of Goal 6 of the MDGs.

GOAL 7:     Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Nigeria is still grappling with the challenge of environmental sustainability. There are still major problems related to land degradation, pollution, flood, erosion, desertification, inefficient use of energy resources, loss of biodiversity, environmental disasters and deforestation. There is still poor access to improved sanitation facilities in Nigeria, which may be blamed on poor implementation of health and housing and other related policies, high levels of poverty, low level of awareness about issues concerning environmental sustainability and general rural improvement. Why has the perennial gully erosion in the South East, parts of Delta and Edo defied attention – instead, farmlands and buildings are annually washed away; roads cut-off and communities separated; children and adults are washed away by floods. How explainable is it that in the 21st century, even in some university campuses, students defecate anywhere and worse in some female hostels! “Short-put” has acquired a new meaning for this anti social behaviour. Students defecate into black polythene bags and throw same behind their halls or leave them at the toilet ends. Sometimes these human wastes are washed away into gutters and drains thereby creating health hazards. Excavations for construction and building sand may not be as obvious an environmental hazard as short put; but excavation without recourse to the environmental consequences leaves much pain and anguish for the people. Some Nigerians daily contribute to environmental degradation and threat to lives and properties by their careless and environmentally – unfriendly activities.

GOAL 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Nigeria has continued to play a prominent role in regional cooperation initiative

Mabel Ejime Osakwe (2009)
Chair, English Language
Delta State University, Abraka