To be a man is not a day’s job, many men say. But what about being a woman? I just hope that the claim that to be a man is not a day’s job does not in any way suggest that to be a woman is a day’s job. In fact, methinks that to be a woman is something out of earth. I’m probably not a woman now because God always knew I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I arrived at this conclusion after realizing the following:

1. “It is difficult being a woman; don’t you get it!”
It’s oftentimes said that the cost of training up the girlchild can comfortably do for two or more boys. Even commonsense suggests this is true: the health concerns, the clothing, the aesthetics, the comfort, and the etcetera. It is way difficult to be a woman; don’t you get it?

2. “Were special; treat us as such”
Who doesn’t know that women are special? If you don’t, then you’re alone in that class. For more than one reason, women are pretty special. God made them so; their indispensable natural and social roles affirm this. And so, it behooves on you to treat them as such. Of course, you should never raise a fist in her direction; there are better and constructive ways to settle disputes and resolve differences. Treat them special; all of them!

3. “We always forget; always remind us”
On the average, a fair lady receives as many I love yous as needed to forget a particular I love you. And so, never leave her in doubt as to whether you love her or not. Truth be told, everything you can possibly get from her depends on her full knowledge of your love for her; loving you back is the least of her problems; its as simple as returning x10 of your love for her. Always remind her you love her, always do, always do, never leave her in doubt.

4. “We care; more than you know”
Are you doubting that your woman cares about you? Then you definitely don’t know that she cares about you far more than you can possibly know. Yes, a woman’s heart is more about caring for her significant other than for other things of seeming importance. And whenever you accuse women of being too jealous or overly sentimental, you’re saying the same thing in another way. However, some of them already know that making that care pretty obvious leaves them vulnerable, and so may not be ‘card-carrying’ about it. Therefore, if you already know that she loves you, then this is time to know that she always care – more than you can imagine. Aren’t you her baby anymore? I don’t mean your mother, please.

5. “Were always under pressure; don’t add to it”
“Because you’re a woman.” That’s the pressure pot inside which every woman is cooking; just too many social roles to fill in. Mainstream society insists that to truly be woman calls for a particular behavioral set, manner of: speaking, body carriage, dressing, curtseying, relationships, sexuality, etc. Truth be told, this is not is! When the expectations are way too high, pressure sets in and fun is kicked out. And what is life without fun? Boring. Indeed.
And so, every woman expects every man to understand that the natural and social demands on her are enormous; she’s always expected to think and act in a particular way, and all she does from dawn to dusk is try to fit in. If men knew this, they wouldn’t complicate the situation further by making more demands.

6. “We try really hard; try to understand”
Before you complain about a woman’s performance, first understand that she’s given it the entire try she could. In fact, she feels terrible already that she didn’t do great, given that she’s expected to always do great. Of course, if a guy understands that his woman try really hard, he will always understand.

To say that Nigeria is a peculiar and particularly fascinating country is to say it light. Happy people; suffering people. But in spite of the difficulties and challenges of the moment, there is hope; there is always hope. And it is in the very nature of hope to be indomitable. Writing about hope, Nnamdi Azikiwe has it that:

it is the principal antidote which keeps our heart from bursting under the pressures of evils, corruption and oppression. Hope is the manna from heaven that comforts us in all our extremities, the unfailing friend that caresses us in the worst of times, with the expectation of better times in the bosom of futurity. Hope is the last thing that dies in a person.

If done, the following should move us to the next level:

1. We must smack down ethnicism and promote meritocracy. If multi-ethnicity is a curse, then Nigeria is a very cursed land. But ethnicity is a blessing, which is one of the reasons why we can be really proud of who we are as a commonwealth of nations. Having to be a country credited with over 250 diverse peoples is a gift. Variety is the spice of life, remember. However, ethnicism is the evil that ethnicity can bring to the table, thus making ethnicity a potential cog in the wheel of national progress. We are obviously off the track whenever we conduct matters of state along ethnic lines or appeal to ethnic sentiments for validation. The federal character arrangement is a child of circumstance. It became necessary to seeing that everyone is carried along at the same time, thus checkmating the tendency of naturally dominant groups hijacking the entire cake. But federal character could be exaggerated to a fault; meritocracy should always retain its place as a core value that it is.   

2. We must empower the Nigerian citizenry, especially the youths. It is fatalistic to think that empowerment of the citizenry should always bother around economic empowerment. Whenever governments and her agencies think empowerment, they think of skill acquisition and distribution of machines to the unemployed. Whenever they think of gender empowerment, they come up with something similar. The Obasanjo administration, for instance, initiated the Keke NAPEP in its poverty eradication bid. These are welcome developments, but misdirected, to say the least. The root of every empowerment, and empowerment means ‘giving power’, is knowledge. The thinking of the English philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon, has remained true: knowledge is power. And so, the empowerment of the Nigerian citizenry must begin from education. It is a national embarrassment to designate any single Nigerian graduate as unemployable. How did he graduate in the first place? By the authority of the senate of that university, and by the Act of the National Assembly establishing that university, that fellow was certified worthy in character and learning. How then should the President or a high ranking public office holder dare say he is unemployable? That he is unemployable could be a fact; that something is very wrong with the system that produced him is a fact.

3. We must beef up security. This is exactly the very first job of every government; to secure the lives and properties of her citizenry. Beyond this, the function of government is little. The most awful feeling comes from leaving the house in the morning with coming back later in the day left to chance; not because God will call one home but because the borders are so dysfunctional that someone could come in from Yemen to detonate a bomb in Abuja. How on earth! With all due respect, the impact of the Nigeria Police remains below expectation. No matter what the boss brags about from his Abuja posh office, I see his men pick N50 from bus drivers on my way home every single night.

4. We must diversify. And diversify. And diversify. The economy keeps crying for help. It used to be agriculture, and then when oil showed up, we parted ways with agriculture. What if we explored the huge economic potentials of both fronts? And we have the human resources to make that happen. What if we made our educational sector good enough to attract foreigners? You might want to call that ‘exportation of education’. You might as well want to inquire from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia how much they rake into the national coffers for educating foreigners. We might also want to consider ‘exportation of expatriate’, to at least other African countries and rake in foreign exchange in the process. As a nation, amassing as much wealth as possible is not an option, as it appears to be the only way of securing the ‘good life’ for the Nigerian citizenry.

5. We must task our intellectuals to produce. The powerhouse of every civilization is its academia; the various world cultural and scientific revolutions kick-started from the ivory towers. America did not take over from Great Britain just like that. That take over was powered by intellectual capacity. At least, more than five of the topmost ten universities on the planet are in America.  We must end the culture of incessant strikes and entitlement claims and get into the era of churning out relevant and transforming researches that will drive national progress.

6. We must get our regulatory agencies on their feet. The roles of regulatory agencies like NAFDAC, EFCC/ICPC, NUC, SON, etc. are critical to national progress. At a time when universities are springing up from all corners of the country and in all shapes and sizes, one begins to wonder what the NUC is up to. Given loose hands, we know that capitalists, and even simple human nature, have a way of taking advantage of the situation. When products and processes conform to minimum standards, progress is in sight. Of course, we already know what mess the ‘former NNPC’ made of the oil sector.

7. Government at all levels must deliver. Before JFK tasked Americans to utmost patriotism, America had already fulfilled a large part of its end of the social contract bargain. When Nigeria asks her citizens to be patriotic, to what would Nigerians owe that huge favor? Most Nigerians will say that Nigeria doesn’t deserve their patriotism, and they may have a point there. The federal, state and local governments must be performance-driven, so as to occupy the moral ground on which patriotism can be requested.

Our nationbuilding is a peculiar project, and for the singular reason that Nigeria is the only place on the planet we can proudly call home, all hands must be on deck to get that project done. And what is worth doing, they say, is worth doing well.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart lends us a fitting way out of the blame-game. By ‘blame-game’ is meant the tendency to shift responsibility from ourselves to others. The dialogue between Unoka, Okonkwo’s father, and the priestess of Agbala, Oracle of the Hills and the Caves, is as revealing as it is instructive. To say the least, Unoka was as poor as the proverbial church rat. However, he didn’t think he deserved poverty, given the following claims he boldly makes, indicting the gods, as it were:

Every year, before I put any crop in the earth, I sacrifice a cock to Ani, the owner of all land. It is the law of our fathers. I also kill a cock at the shrine of Ifejioku, the god of yams. I clear the bush and set fire to it when it is dry. I sow the yams when the first rain has fallen, and stake them when the young tendrils appear. I weed…

I feel for him. From his end of the story, the gods were not only unjust to him but wicked. Else, why would they deny such a ‘hard working’ Unoka the just fruits of his labour and the reward for his sacrifices? Most of us can already identify with him in our fervent prayers, fasting, prayer meetings, evangelism, ‘sowing of seed’, bible study, moral instructions, hospital visitation, and one spiritual or corporal work of mercy or another. Why are we suffering, why are we feeding from hand to mouth, why are our children not in the best of schools, why can’t we afford a bicycle, motorcycle, or car, why, why, why? Most of us can already identify with Unoka’s predicament.

However, given that he was, more or less, laying accusations on the gods, reaching a conclusion without listening to the gods’ own side of the story will be unjust. And this was their side of the story

Hold your peace! You have offended neither the gods nor your fathers. And when a man is at peace with his gods and his ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm. You, Unoka, are known in all the clan for the weakness of your machete and your hoe. When your neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests, you sow your yams on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear. They cross seven rivers to make their farms, you stay at home and offer sacrifices to a reluctant soil. Go home and work like a man.

Wow! Wow! Wow! Now we see a great reason why we shouldn’t pass judgment without listening to the other side of the story. Who is at fault now? The gods or Unoka? God or you? You forget that you became a child of God at the waters of Baptism. You forget that it is whatever you sow that you will reap (cf. Gal 6:7). You forget that the rule is pray and work (with all the spiritual activities grouped under prayer), and not just pray and pray and pray. You forget that you will perish for lack of knowledge (cf. Hosea 4:6). When unbelievers, for instance, open their shops at 7am and close at 10pm, you open at 12 noon because you were ‘watching and praying’ at home, and then you close at 5pm because you want to go adore the Lord from 5.30pm to 8pm – and you do this like two or three times a week. You go to your shop in tattered clothes, unkempt hair, unwashed mouth, gloomy looks, and yet wonder why all the customers are trooping to the other shop belonging to a popular troublemaker who barely goes to church. This equally applies to civil servants, students, lawyers, doctors, contractors, menial workers, farmers – like Unoka, etc.

Go home, and work like a man.

Here’s a piece of advice given to one late Chief (Dr.) Matthias Offoboche (Obstetrician, Gynecologist, Administrator, Politician) by his father on the eve of his travel to Dublin, the Irish capital, for further studies. I found this in Rev. Fr. (Dr.) Nicholas Obi’s Our Legacy. To say the least, this piece of advice is eternal:

Son, God will protect and guide you. Be yourself and be fair and honest with all you meet. Remember that the spoken word is not like a spear: once spoken it cannot be withdrawn. The written word is worse. So be careful what you say to people or write about them.

Above all, know that a father can give everything he has to his son; but there is only one thing he cannot give him, that is, his women! You must not take another’s woman! That way lies trouble. If your father cannot give you his woman, how much less other people. Neither take nor accept other people’s wives or even girlfriends. If a woman turns down your advances do not blame her or the successful guy; she is obviously not meant for you. There are many fruits on a tree, pluck the one you can; if you insist on plucking a particular fruit you may need to climb the tree and fall and break your neck.

You are going to white-man’s country for a purpose. You must achieve your goal and whatever else you do must contribute to the achievement of that goal. Regard all people who divert your attention from that goal as your devils and all who help you as your true friends. Be grateful to those friends but know that you alone can achieve your goal.
Share your successes, but blame yourself for your failures.

How to live your life — Chief Tecumseh

I came across this in a movie I’d seen a long time ago, Act of Valor. Before he traded his life for the survival of his men, the commander insisted that this piece be etched on the mind of his ‘baby-son’ when he grows up, a piece he himself recited many times every day:

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.

Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Our Deepest Fear — Marianne Williamson

Wherever you find this quote, especially on the internet, the first thing you get to be told is that people credit it to the South African demigod, Nelson Mandela. It was, however, the brainchild of Marianne Williamson. Our deepest fear is usually ourselves, but she tells us that were meant to shine out, as bright as a diamond. Check it out!

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.