Category: Opinion

Continuum in life is nature’s way of taking a huge risk and hoping it will pay off. Everything in life is a continuum. Things happen in perpetuity. Nothing in life ever really dies or comes to an end. Things only change forms. We learnt that in elementary science. That matter exists in different forms. Solid, Liquid and Gaseous and even more. All forms of matter transform but none is lost.

If a bush is gutted by fire for instance, all the flora and fauna including the minutest life forms may be consumed by the inferno and look all dead. But the drop of rain and the passage of time, will usually produce something better. Even if it were a nuclear disaster, it will only take rain and time for new life to blossom again. The new life is the ghost of the former. They only changed from flora and fauna to ashes, due to the application of heat, and then changed again from ashes to flora and fauna, due to the application of oxygen and hydrogen, (H²O) from rain, over time.

The farmer must also preserve and plant a seed that will ‘die’ in the soil and wait for rain, to spring up a new plant from the carcass of the old. Even the abandoned harvest will fall to the ground, get rotten and die in the soil and wait for rain, to blossom in new form. None of the forms is permitted to be permanent because that will usurp the order of things. So things have to be this today, and that tomorrow.

This sequence serves to remind us all that, even if you are a President, a Governor, a General, an MD, CEO, DG, PS, GMD, Minister, Senator, Rep, Union Leader, VC, GO, IGP, Monarch or any other such important person at the moment, take a nap and count how many persons have worn that crown, position, title, rank or privilege, before it got to your turn and how many more are on queue to get there as soon as your time elapse. It is because nature wanted to take a risk on someone else, that is why you got to that position and that risk taking doesn’t stop with you. The list after you is endless.

In fact, those who nature has favored with privileged positions in society have either attained or about to attain the end of their rising ladder, whether they rose through the rungs of the ladder slowly or suddenly. Privileges abound more at the top. And if you are already at the top, you are near the exit, so that mother nature can take the next risk on another person, like she took on you.

Finally, remember that the ladder has two ends; up and down. And like reggae legend, Lucky Dube sang, “Be good to the people on your way up the ladder, coz you will meet them on your way down.” That’s just the way it is.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

If you buy land or buy a house, you have only paid rent for the remaining years you have on Earth. None of them belong to you.

If you buy a car, you have only paid for your transport for the period the car will last or for the period you will last. It doesn’t belong to you.

If you marry a spouse, you have only got company until circumstances or death do you part. No one owns the other.

If you have children, you have only fulfilled the demand of continuity of life until death comes. You don’t own them. That’s why the State still dictates how you bring them up.

If you have money, you have only amassed value to purchase what you want, for your remaining number of years on Earth. The notes belong to the Central Bank.

If you work and retire, your pension is only for life. After your life, it stops.

Even if you eat and get filled, the food in your belly isn’t yours. You must defecate it back to Earth.

The body itself which you cherish so highly, doesn’t belong to you. The Earth will certainly reclaim its bits, when the loan is due.

Even the life we live is borrowed, and surely will be returned.

So let us not be afraid of losing anything in this life, because we do not own anything here. Two things will surely happen; we will either be taken away from everything we think we own or everything we think we own will be taken away from us someday. It is that day that none of us know.

We boast about our body, our houses, our lands, our money, our wives, our husbands, our children, our parents, our everything. But that’s where it ends. Boasting! Ruminate intensely and it won’t be difficult to find out that, we do not own any of those things. We are only availed of them to mitigate the necessary constraints of our sojourn here.

So never lose your head or your cool or your temper or your values or your vibrancy, whenever you think you have lost something because nothing was ever really yours. Not even….

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Is Feminism just about advocacy for the assimilation of western female taste or advocacy for women’s rights per culture?

Whether it is “genderized” or not, as far as the issues of rampant abuse and lack of equal opportunity for women and the girl child is concerned, it is clearly a human right issue. No human being, whether male or female, should be abused or denied any opportunity based on gender or culture. That is encompassing enough for me and should be in the front pew.

But the flagrant disregard for cultural variations and even personal taste of a section of women, in the pursuit of the broad feminism agenda is plaguing the movement. It appears that the Western feminist band, who also bank roll the advocacy, are more bent on assimilating their own feminist ethos on their playing field, to the isolation of the culturalist women who also desire feminist rights without losing their culture.

The persistence with which the western feminists present the taste of the western women as the preferred standard for every woman or what should be the ideal standard for every woman, is menacing. This particular hoard of feminists I am addressing are not mindful of the fact that, there are Yoruba women in Nigeria for instance, who want and fight for all the women’s rights but want to preserve their cultural value of women taking a knee to greet elders and men. That there are Igbo women in Nigeria who want and fight for all the women’s rights but still want to teach their female children that it is a wife that should cook for her husband. That there are Hausa women who want and fight all the women’s right but still want to be inside “Kule” and be pampered by their husbands.

That there are Banyankole women in Uganda who want and fight for all the women’s rights but still want to respect their age long cultural rights to have their aunties taste the sexual agility of their husbands on their marriage eve. That there are Zulu women in Southern Africa, who want and fight for all the women’s rights, but will want to preserve their cultural pride of chasity to flaunt their breasts bare and carry a rid. That there are Muslim women who want and fight for all the women’s rights but still admire and welcome their husbands into marrying four wives as their religion allows. That there are matrilineal Meghalaya women in India, who are in control of their communities and they love and want that system to remain the way it is. That there are tribal feminists around the world who still find it romantic to get their aging husbands a new maiden as their customs allow.

The insensitivity of the Western feminists to these cultural nuances and their straight line prescription of Western standards as an across-the-counter pill for global women’s rights is something that must be challenged. Why should these hoard try to make it look like, if western styled models are not embraced, it is not feminism? Are they fighting only for women who want to become like women from the Western world or they are fighting for women who want their rights within their cultural freedom? Are they perpetrating foreign culture on other people or they are suffering to liberate women from forces limiting their progress?

Everyone who believes in humanity and love will not tolerate abuse or injustice, whether it is perpetrated against a male, female, stranger, acquaintance, family member or even a pet. The abuse and denial of women’s right is a crime and all people of goodwill must seek redress wherever it is happening. But the substitute is certainly not an imposition and assimilation of western feminist taste. That is the lie that is now shoved down our throats and methinks it is pertinent to raise these concerns openly to safeguard the mental health of many young women who are being misguided into this venture in ignorance by bitter renegades who are on vengeance missions.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

The Eleven-Eleven roundabout in Calabar, Cross River State was named after the Armistice Day when World War I (1914-1918) ended at the 11th hour on the morning of the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918.

The Eleven Eleven Roundabout which was built by the Mr. Donald Duke administration and had on its sides, features which resemble Egyptian burials vaults, (mummies) was reworked in 2009 to remove those images which church leaders and most residents complained gave the impression that the State worships idols and replaced with a water fountain. But in November of 2012, it was torn apart again and reworked without much change to the previous one. Now Governor Otu has again, brought the roundabout down and replaced it with a statue carrying the Holy Bible with quotations from Psalms 27 and Psalms 127 with embedded fingers.

This is worrying for me and I will express my worries. I have never lived in Calabar since I was born, but I know Calabar well enough to understand that the continued remodeling of this roundabout isn’t born out of a desire to give the State capital any enduring aesthetic value but to draw attention to the parochial convictions of the remodellers.

The current statue now standing there, only depicts the religious persuasions and views of the current occupant of Peregrino House. No more, no less. But our people must be weary of governments that want to railroad religion as a State policy and there are historical reasons and empirical data to support this warning.

A century ago, Durkheim proposed that technological and socioeconomic advances come to displace the functions of religion: (É Durkheim, (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, K.E. Fields, Transl. (The Free Press, 1995). Whereas Weber contended the opposite, that monotheistic religion or the so-called ‘Protestant Ethic’, made the development of capitalism possible. (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons, Transl. (Routledge Classics, 2001).

But data generated from recent and continuing research is interestingly revealing that, the growth in irreligiousity in any country is linked to economic progress. There are several studies that espouse this conclusion. One such study comes from the University of Bristol, (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aar8680), where researchers studied the trends in secularization for 100 years and determined that growth in secularism came before economic development. The researchers sought to answer the question of whether a boost in a nation’s economic development leads to lesser religiosity or if it’s the other way around. They discovered that, secularization did account for 40% of global economic development in the 1990s. Additionally, they also disproved the commonly held belief that education also leads to secularism.

Another research from Mississippi State University and West Virginia University, (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/abs/religion-productive-or-unproductive/4E84A5F30B499BE751E478DFC1305B12), also looks at the link between irreligion and productive entrepreneurship. Stunningly, the researchers found that all metrics of religion that they had tracked ended up negatively correlating with productive entrepreneurship, while irreligious variables positively correlated with it.

Further expanding on this, and taking a look at the correlation of daily prayers with a nation’s gross domestic product per capita (GDP per capita), the data reveals that, in nearly every country (except Middle Eastern states that were not part of the sample), with a GDP per capita higher than $30,000, adults pray less. For instance, the People’s Republic of China’s religiously unaffiliated population is 51.8% but China is the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms.

This brings us back to my warning. Let us all be mindful of the fact that, the use of religion as a political tool to hoodwink Nigerians is legendary amongst our leaders. In the absence of meaningful economic development, our leaders have successfully waved religion as a succor to numb our collective thinking faculties and this has worked for them in the past decades. The duty of the State is to give us security and economic empowerment. Religion can be left for those who are meant to handle it. And I will tell you for free that the next Governor of Cross River State after Governor Otu, will still dismantle Eleven Eleven roundabout and waste more money to espouse his/her own belief.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.