Tinubu's 7-Point Agenda: Matters Arising By Pius Adesanmi.

Here is a summary of Tinubu's 7-point agenda:

1) national industrial policy

2) infrastructure plan

3) tax credits and subsidies

4) credit-based economy

5) more electricity generation

6) government-backed home mortgage system

7) investment in agriculture

I find this amusing in Tinubu's address:

“We must realize that no populous nation has ever attained broadly- shared prosperity without first creating an industrial capacity that employs large numbers of people and manufactures a significant quantity of goods for domestic consumption or export”

I find it amusing because it is a careful rewording of an axiom that is generally applied to education - specifically public education - in the developed parts of the world.

We say that no nation has ever attained modernity, prosperity, development, etc, without laying a solid foundation in public education. The quality of your growth and development is proportional to the quality of your public education.

In a seven-point agenda (Yar'Adua is not even acknowledged) that is totally silent on education, a popular axiom commonly applied to public education in civilization is reworked and repackaged for industrialization.

Who does not know that an under-educated or diseducated citizenry will make everything in this 7-point agenda a non-starter? They will start by selling off the paper on which Tinubu's agenda is written and use the money to buy gala and lacasera in order to have enough strength to scream for 24 hours in support Asiwaju and his ilk in the political leadership of Nigeria. The ignorance of the people is the greatest wealth and the greatest asset of the Nigerian political elite.

Ask a Nigerian leader to choose between ten oil wells and mass ignorance of the people and you'll be surprised by his choice - if confidentiality were guaranteed. That is why everything that has happened to the Nigerian education sector is by design. The rot is purposed and deliberate. Too many of our citizens exposed to what we teach their own kids that they send to us here in Euro-America is not in their interest.

I have a five-year-old in Grade One. The civics assignments she brings home every day from school are a constant source of considerable sadness for me. Assessing how they are shaping her mind, the sort of latitude for critical thought and citizenship sentience they are opening up to her at 5 is often too much for me to swallow. I wince and gnash my teeth in agony every time because I understand what they are building and preparing her mind for the 21st-century world of the global knowledge economy and the future after that.

At five, she is already owning the global knowledge economy in a philosophized system that is preparing her for competition from Chinese kids and kids from Dubai and Japan in the race for the future. What they are pouring into this young mind is what will provide the genius and innovation to instrumentalize this 7-point agenda and deploy it for a holistic vision of a society of mutually-beneficial commonwealth. The democratization of that commonwealth is at the centre of the philosophy she is being introduced to.

You destroy public education, normalize the concentration of 180 million people's wealth in your minuscule elitist class, groom a vast national confederacy of ignorance to defend the concentration of the commonwealth in your 1% percent rank of political elitism at their own expense, and then turn around to market agendas that can only work on a foundation of massive investment in public education for the next 30 years.

Woin!

Pius Adesanmi, an acclaimed literary and cultural critic, was born in Nigeria and now lives in Ottawa, Canada, where he teaches literature and African studies at Carleton University. He is one of Nigeria's major intellectuals and writes two weekly columns for the influential Sahara Reporters and NEXT newspaper. His first book, The Wayfarer and Other Poems, won the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize in 2001.

CBN’s Aisha Ahmad and Religious Hypocrisy in Northern Nigeria By Farooq Kperogi.

Religion in the Muslim north revolves around (1.) a sick, prurient obsession with the female body under the cover of religious morality, (2.) exhibitionist displays of the rituals of religiosity, and (3.) identity politics without a care for ethical virtues, truth, honesty, and kindness. 

You can lie, cheat, murder, rape, steal and generally be a monster of moral perversion and you won‘t attract the condemnation of self-appointed guardians of public religious morality as long as you observe the public rituals of religiosity and mouth off familiar, stereotyped religious idioms. And you can be the very apotheosis of justice, truth, probity, compassion, etc., but if you don’t “perform” religiosity through your sartorial choices and through your public utterances, you’re the devil himself. In other words, religion is more about form than content, more about appearance than substance, more about cold structures than essence, and more about public performance of group identity than about the internalization and performance of genuine morality and piety.

Every Muslim woman who falls short of the standards of sartorial modesty enshrined in Islam is invariably described as being “naked” and condemned as a “prostitute.” Such a woman’s moral character is irrelevant as long as she violates—or is thought to violate— this sacred sartorial code. But she can be morally debauched and be the proverb for cruelty, and she would be celebrated (or at least be allowed to live in peace) as long as she wears a hijab, knows her “place,” performs the identity rituals expected of her, and doesn’t make a public show of her debauchery. In other words, a Muslim woman’s entire worth is measured by her dressing.

The self-proclaimed male moral police who are fixated with what Muslim women wear and don’t wear won’t admit that if they, too, are judged by the standards and requirements of the religion they purport to defend they’d all come up short. All of us would. Most of them don’t lower their gaze when they encounter women, they patronize banks that traffic in riba, have pre- and extra-marital sexual liaisons, etc. What animates the sentiment that their own transgressions are more tolerable and more defensible than a Muslim woman's choice not to wear a hijab?

In fact, a two-term governor and serving senator from Yobe State was recently caught almost literally pants down—and with irrefutable video graphics corroboration, too— in a threesome with two “un-hijabed” girls in a cheap, grubby brothel. There was no outrage from the self-anointed moral police. On the contrary, most of them defended the senator’s right to privacy and cautioned against exposing a fellow Muslim to ridicule. Between being unclad in a hijab and engaging in adultery and being impenitent about it when caught, which is worthier of moral outrage?

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. View complete profile.