Ruyi's World of Books & Stories

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter:  @farooqkperogi Before COVID-19, we were told that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions and face-to-face instructional methods were museum-bound. That compelled me to enroll for online teaching certification 5 years ago. But the COVID-19-inspired transition to online-only pedagogy across the world this year has shown that the reports of the death of traditional ways of knowledge dissemination are greatly exaggerated, to paraphrase Mark Twain. The data that has emerged, at least in the US, shows that wholly online learning environments are too inadequate and too socially impoverished to stand in for the full "college experience." Students detest it, parents resent it, and teachers chafe at it. There're many reasons for this. I'll share only one personal example to make my point. A few years ago, a student I taught in an entirely online class and whom I'd never physically met requested me to write a recommendation letter for...

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter:  @farooqkperogi The novel coronavirus is not only devastating humankind, it is also disrupting the settled certainties and spiritual verities of religious fanatics for whom atavistic and superstitious frames of reference are the only ways to make sense of the world around them. I’ll start from fringe members of my own religious community. When the new coronavirus first emerged in China, a lunatic fringe of the Nigerian Muslim community celebrated it and said it was Allah’s punishment against China for mistreating its Muslim minority population. They said the clearest indication that it was divine pestilence to avenge the persecution of Chinese Muslims could be seen in the fact that all Chinese people were compelled to cover their whole bodies in ways that were reminiscent of the sartorial choices Allah enjoined Muslims, especially Muslim women, to make, which China denies its Muslim minority. I recall telling a religious crackpot who...

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi The  Wall Street Journal’s disturbing July 31 report  of the secret mass burial of at least a thousand Nigerian soldiers who were murdered by Boko Haram terrorists has, once again, brought to the fore the conscienceless villainy and duplicity  of the Buhari regime and its illegal service chiefs who have overstayed their statutorily mandated length of service by  several months. The regime never stops to claim that it has “defeated” Boko Haram even when indisputable evidence to the contrary stares it in the face. In late last year, for instance, it was reported that Boko Haram had murdered hundreds of Nigerian soldiers. Yet the federal government did not consider it fitting to acknowledge the tragedy, much less condole with the families of the deceased soldiers. In fact, on the day the fallen soldiers were given an undignified mass burial, Buhari met with APC senators who’d threatened to...