Most Nigerians, Kenyans and South Africans Believe Their Lives will Improve.

Most people in three African countries have an optimistic outlook despite continuing anger at corruption and economic woes, a survey has found. South Africans, Nigerians and Kenyans all say healthcare and education will be better for the next generation.

More than three-quarters also say that young people who want a good life should stay in their countries rather than emigrate, the Pew report found. The research agency interviewed 3,330 respondents for the study.

Political engagement: Respondents reported high levels of political engagement, with majorities saying that ordinary citizens could influence their governments if they make the effort. More than half said they had voted in the past year or at some point in the past - roughly the same level as in the US. 

Economy: About 70% of people in South Africa and Nigeria - sub-Saharan Africa's two largest economies - say their economies are in bad shape, along with just over half of Kenyans. Large majorities in all three countries also said a lack of jobs was a big problem. But despite this, most believed that the economic outlook would improve in the next year.

Corruption: Only a third of South Africans believe there will be less corruption when today's children are adults. Most South Africans, Nigerians and Kenyans believe that their countries are only run for the benefit of a few groups of people. The majority of respondents say inequality has become worse and about two-thirds say many jobs only go to people who have personal connections. 

Most expect this sorry state of affairs to continue - only a third of South Africans and Kenyans believe there will be less government corruption in their countries when today's generation of children are grown up. However, Nigerians are more optimistic, with almost two-thirds saying today's children will face less corruption.

Food and education: Beyond the general findings, Nigerians said food supply and energy shortages were their top priority. The charity Save the Children says up to half of all children under five are malnourished in some parts of north-eastern Nigeria, which has been wracked by an Islamist insurgency. 

In South Africa, where students have been staging the biggest student protests since the end of apartheid, education was a big issue. The number of people concerned about poor quality schools had increased sharply since the previous year's survey, Pew said. However two-thirds said they were confident things would be better for future generations.

Divided societies: The headline findings mask differing outlooks between the various groups of people making up South African, Nigerian and Kenyan society. In South Africa, black people were the most optimistic group, with 69% saying they thought the economy - and their own personal finances - would improve over the next year compared to just 46% of white people and 30% of mixed race people. 

Nigerian Muslims were more optimistic about the economy: They also had more confidence that healthcare and education would improve, were less cynical about how government was run and were more likely to believe staying in the country was the best route to a better future.

In Nigeria, Muslims were more upbeat about the economy while Christians were more likely to identify inequality as a major problem. More Christians and fewer Muslims said they thought government was run for the benefit of special interest groups after Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, replaced Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, as president.

In Kenya, people in the Kikuyu and Kalenjin ethnic groups had a more positive outlook than those in the Luhya and Luo ethnic groups. All Kenya's presidents since independence have been either Kikuyu or Kalenjin.

Where do Africans look for inspiration: Many Africans said they admired China's embrace of technology. When asked by Pew for models of economically developed countries to emulate, most respondents cited the US and China, but for different reasons. In Kenya, where concern about government corruption was particularly widespread, 36% of respondents said the US was the best model because of its mode of governance and low levels of corruption. Only 15% cited China as the best example to follow.

In South Africa, 27% of respondents said the US was the best example of an economically developed country, slightly more than the 22% who chose China. And in Nigeria 28% of people cited China as the best example against 25% choosing the US. Those looking to China said they admired the country's embrace of technology, manufacturing sector, level of exports and strong work ethic.

Courtesy BBC NEWS.

The Halloween as an American Irony.

It's such an irony how the United States keeps reminding me of certain things about my ancestral homeland...negative past traditions that have since been jettisoned in the 21st Century.  

Example: Every year, Americans of all races and religions (including my fellow "born-again" Nigerian-American Christian folks) celebrate Halloween...a day dedicated to the memory of idols, witches, monsters and horrors...things that our 21st Century people back home in Africa will frown at easily. Sometimes, I wonder if the situation were to be reversed…whereby the Halloween was celebrated only in an African country…what would be the reactions of Americans?

Of course, in righteous indignation, the Africans would have been seen as a bunch of cave-age, fetish and idol-worshipping “barbarians”. And, unlike the immigrant Africans who are joining in the Halloween celebration, Americans (even if they were resident in Africa) would never have joined such a celebration. 

The Motherland.

This Is How We Can Overcome The Serious Tension Between Black American Women & Black African Women. By Kovie Biakolo.

I have been Black under several constructs. Indeed if you live in the United States and have only lived in the United States, it is easy to forget that realizations and experiences of race are beyond these fifty states. I am an African and it is under my African realizations, perhaps coupled with a European gaze that my Blackness was first known to me. Moving to the United States for college was in many ways an experience of being in a new culture, a new nation. But it was also an experience of viewing my Blackness in a different light.

I remember for instance, the first time I was invited to a Coalition of Black Students meeting in college. I felt somewhat out of place. I was a Black African student in an 85 percent White American university. One would think I would at least find “home” in a space with other Black students, regardless of nationality. But it was one of the many moments in my life I would understand the importance of culture in a brand new way. Throughout college, there would be dialogues, formal and informal, about this unspoken tensions between Black Americans and non-American Blacks and especially Africans.

From my understanding, there is an impression that Africans apparently give to African-Americans of condescension; an aura of superiority. From my understanding, Africans do not like to be inflicted with the same stereotypes within the United States, that are confined to Black Americans. Participating and celebrating Black American culture as an African, while also maintaining my own identity, has taught me that above all else, there seems to be a miseducation of the other, going on.

The stereotypes African women have about Black American women are inflicted by the American imagination–loudness, rudeness, over-sexualization, etc. While the stereotypes of African women by Black American women is condescension, distancing of their Blackness in order to participate in American life and the typical caricatures all Africans face – of coming from places of poverty and disease. Stereotypes, as Chimamanda Adichie warned us, do not tell us the entire story.

Like many people who find themselves drifting between these two Black spaces by chance or by choice, it pains me that there seems to be these unspoken tensions. But we can overcome them and we do by actually having deep conversations about everything from our cultural differences, to our understanding of the differences that national and cultural identity play in participating in American life, to having the humility to recognize that we oftentimes don’t really know each other’s culture, yet are bound together in America’s racial constructions and its complex history.

We have much to learn from each other’s way of seeing the world and being in the world. And it would do us good to learn so directly from the horse’s mouth than from old and tired stereotypes. I firmly believe that if you are not actively ending stereotypes, you are most likely perpetuating them. Because when we uplift each other, we also uplift ourselves. And I choose to believe that we are sisters, separated by oceans. But while we’re here together at a time and in a space where we can be, we should be each other’s keepers.

Ebola as the New Instrument of Stereotype.

The Ebola crisis has begun to take its tolls on the private businesses of African immigrants from Ebola-afflicted countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In Harlem, cab drivers with origins from the affected African nations are losing customers at a very fast rate. One cab driver said one customer threatened to get out of his cab as soon as he discovered he was from Guinea. It was a most terrible stigma.

Similar fate is being suffered by African women who braid hairs in Harlem, New York. Unlike before the Ebola scare, a lot of the women are now often seen sitting idly every day as no one wants to patronize them for fear of contracting Ebola.

There have also been reports of Liberians in Washington who are being directed by their employers to get off their jobs temporarily. “If I’m on the metro, I don’t talk,” Liberian writer Alphonso Toweh told the Washington Post. “If I’m on the bus, I don’t talk. If people hear the accent, they think you are a Liberian and that you have Ebola.

This is not only ignorant but also pathetic!

Blessings for Sale to the Highest Bidders.

 



What's going on in Nigerian-oriented churches in America? It's now the vogue to auction off blessings to the highest bidders under the guise of "sowing seeds".

These days, all a "man of God" has to do is read a section of the Bible and ask the congregation to pay certain amounts for blessings. The chapter and verses quoted will determine the amounts to pay for the blessings.

For example, if the section of the Bible quoted is Isaiah Chapter 7 verse 20, the amounts required will be $720. Yet, you'll see some members of the church (all otherwise educated and born-again Christians) scrambling to pay for the advertised "blessings".

Is salvation no longer free? And are blessings not supposed to be received from God by grace any more?

Glory be to God for His abundant patience!

 

 

 

Glory Belongs Only to God.

 “Ojo wo leda yio simi ogun?

Igba wo leda yio simi ote?

Ote nile.

Ote lode.

Ote re,

nibi gbogbo…”

 (When will people stop waging wars?

When will people stop treachery?

Treachery at home.

Treachery outside.

There is treachery everywhere…)

• The movie theme of Opa Aje, a middle-1980s depiction of the 19^th Century internecine wars among the Yoruba people in the western part of Nigeria.

This was the most tragic period in the lives of the Yoruba people. It was a very sad moment when brothers were at each other’s throats and sisters were stabbing each other in the backs. Nothing was spared in the various war fronts, from the use of dangerous charms to other metaphysical powers. The brutal wars also led to the procurement of the most sophisticated military weapons of that era in the African continent. The Yoruba used all these lethal weapons against each other.

 And the consequences were legions, top among which were:

1. The internecine wars weakened the Yoruba in their opposition to the British military invasions. In fact, the military defeat (at Imagbon) of Ijebu forces by the British colonial Army was the platform used in the eventual annexation of the rest of Yorubaland. If the Yoruba were united, the British would have thought twice before going into that war.


2. The Uthman Dan Fodio’s Jihad campaign made serious incursion into Yoruba land at Ilorin through the treachery of Aare Afonja, the then Field Marshall of the Oyo Empire. If not for the great, valiant Ibadan warriors that defeated them, the whole of Southern Nigeria would have come under the Fulani hegemony.


3. The European slave traders also took advantage of the situation to forcibly cart away millions of Yoruba individuals to Cuba, Trinidad & Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Venezuela and other parts of the World.

The sad irony though was that the crazy wars were fought merely to prove a point over who deserved the glory for the greatness and sustenance of the Yoruba race! This problem is not restricted to a race of people. Too many of us as individuals within marriages, families, churches, mosques, corporate establishments, neighborhoods and communities do also engage in glory-seeking battles.

And as it happened in Yoruba land, every quest for glory always leave bitterness, divisions and pains in its wake. Why so? Because glory belongs only to God!

 

 

Wars, Terrorism, Religions and the Africans.

“The pre-colonial history of African societies - and I refer to both Euro-Christian and Arab-Islamic colonization - indicates very clearly that African societies never at any time of their existence went to war with another over the issue of their religion.

That is, at no time did the black race attempt to subjugate or forcibly convert others with any holier-than-thou evangelizing zeal. Economic and political motives, yes. But not religion.

Perhaps this unnatural fact was responsible for the conclusions of Hegel - we do not know. Certainly, the bloody histories of the world's major religions, localized skirmishes of which extend even to the present, lead to a sneaking suspicion that religion, as defined by these eminent philosophers, comes to self-knowledge only through the activity of war.”

-         Prof. Wole Soyinka (Excerpts of his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986).