ktravula – a travelogue!

Fueling Poverty – The Video!

This short documentary on Nigeria, said to “address the serious issue of corruption in governance” just made news by being banned by the Nigerian Film and Censors Board. I’d never heard of it until today, but since it concerned the government so much as to attempt to put a muzzle on it, then it must have some value for the enlightenment of the citizenry. According to news reports, the documentary was “released late in 2012, was produced by young filmmaker, Ishaya Bako, in partnership with the Open Society for West Africa [OSIWA].“

Watch with me!

What do you think after watching it?

Visiting Ikogosi

Ikogosi Ekiti is the home of the nation’s only and most famous warm springs, situated on the hills in Ikogosi Ekiti in Ekiti State of Nigeria. The spring itself originates from the top of a rock formation now situated in what the state government calls the Ikogosi Warm Spring Resort. It is a stretch of land fenced and developed with lodgings, entertainment, halls for events, an amphitheatre, and a beautiful view of nature and the famous spring itself. (It never used to be like this, we’re told. The new government has been working).

I had gone visiting, along with my wife, as a guest of the Future Awards Project who had organized a nationwide gathering of Nigerian youths (described as those between 18 and 35) to brainstorm on the nature of their participation in government and in the shaping of their future. She was a panelist on one of the sessions. The three-day symposium that was well attended by young people from all around Ekiti and Lagos (with a few more jetting in from as far away as Kano) had as invited guests former Vice-President of the World Bank (and current Finance Minister) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, governors of Ekiti State (the host, Dr. Kayode Fayemi), Rivers (Rotimi Amechi, who already made news with some of his comments), and a representative of the governor of Delta State. There was also Professor Pat Utomi (one-time presidential aspirant), Tonye Cole, Odia Ofiemun (past president of the Association of Nigerian Authors), and many others in government and in business.

SAM_2104 The symposium turned out a lot of ideas, and bile, and fun, and anger. Peculiar to a gathering of young people, it brimmed with idealism, and questions, and challenges for the present and for the future. I enjoyed it all, the interaction, the camaraderie, the environment, and the food. (I’d never eaten so much yam in three days). The resort was also a fantastic discovery, a treasure hiding in the hills of a faraway city. The cottage we slept in sat on top of the hill, overlooking the source of the warm spring down below. About half of the new lodgings are just recently built while the rest were renovated from their previous deteriorating states. They had been built a long time ago.

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Speaking of architecture, one thought that occupied my mind throughout the event (and which I had so desperately tried to ask the host governor of Ekiti State, without success), was why in this 21st century Nigeria, public facilities like this resort built with state money should not have adequate access for disabled citizens. One of the participants, a young dignified lady on a wheelchair, had to be lifted into the venue over a flight of stairs because of the absence of any other means. It is a terrible, disappointing oversight. (This is not peculiar to Ekiti, however, but it deserves to be part of the conversation going forward).

There were also a number of prominent youth leaders of thought and young professionals around the country present, from IT professional Gbenga Sesan to activist/politician Japhet Omojuwa. Needless to say, I was meeting many of these folks for the very first time. A few of them, I was hearing about for the first time as well. The organizers of the program include the EIE (Enough is Enough) Nigeria group who came into limelight after a successful walk on Abuja in March 2010 to protest the state of things in Nigeria. I blogged about that here. By the end of the third day, I had made new friends, met a few old ones, and connected with those I’d known on twitter, but never met in person. It was a warm, happy – if short – respite to the quotidian rote of the Lagos life.

I returned to Lagos through the same hills that led us to Ikogosi, seven hours later, through the many Ekitis, Ilesha, Ikire, and Ibadan. It was my first time of visiting that part of Ekiti. An accidental admission to one of the young men seated beside me at the newly furnished swimming pool and bar on Saturday night that my immediate ancestors had migrated to Ibadan from Ekiti a few generations ago, and that my father was an Ekiti title-holding chief, has now landed me in hot water of a constant barrage of request to pack my bags away from Lagos as soon as possible, and come back “home”. After all, “a river that forgets its source is in danger of eventual, inevitable drying up.” It’s true.

It was an apt metaphor anyway, since he had said it while we were sitting just a few metres away from the source of the spring that gave the town, and the state, one of its enduring prestigious images.

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A Week in Ignorance

It surprised one of my co-workers when, during lunch sometime during the week, I’d mentioned that one of my grouses with the Goodluck Jonathan presidency was his condonement of corruption, citing the example of his appointment of a convicted certificate forger onto the board of a university.

“This really happened?” My co-worker asked, unbelieving of something that would otherwise sound like something copied out of a satire written by Wole Soyinka.

“Yes, he did.” I replied, and the conversation went on and on about a few other ills that paints the administration as one of the most permissive of corruption in the history of the nation’s democratic experiments. “He also pardoned Alamayesiegha, among others.”

Why the conversation surprised me a lot was because I had assumed that everyone, like me, was interested in what was going on in government, and thus fully aware of the misgovernance taking place in our name. I am wrong, obviously. Nobody really cares. As long as the routine of our daily lives are not affected in any way by the corrupt dealings of the “top bosses”, we are fine. This is not a typically Nigerian problem, but as I am here, it is one that I have given a lot of thought. A few weeks ago in Ikogosi Ekiti, during the session on what young people can do to get proper representation in power to be able to effect the changes they want, the chairman of the governors’ forum, Rotimi Amaechi, had suggested to the faces of those present that no change would come as long as people sat pretty and gave the leaders a free hand to do whatever they wanted. How else could it be any different now, I thought, when we don’t even know, or care, about what is going on in the first place? A number of young people have twitter and Facebook accounts. But how many are relevant enough to effect change? When next an “Occupy” protest comes on and locks down the streets, preventing people from going to work in order to demand for one change or the other, the very first people to complain that the protests have gone on long enough are going to be these ones who (though are very hardworking and well-meaning citizens) have no idea what the heck anyone of us should be worried about. After all, salaries get paid on time, and the road to and from Lekki are good enough in the morning on the way to work, and during evenings on the way back home.

This is the problem, and I can think of millions more who are merely content to go on with their lives without a worry in the world about anything else.

I don’t have a solution.

It just makes for a rather curious study in citizen revolt and participatory democracy.

Check Yourself! Introducing a Homophone Checker

My friend, Jason Braun, has launched the world’s first free Homophone Checker app at Homophonecheck.com!

According to the press release, it is a free web app that allows writers to quickly proofread for errors that word-processing software typically skips over.

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“Writers copy text and paste it into the homophone checker. Then 40 of the most commonly confused homophones–words that sound the same but are spelled differently– are highlighted automatically. When writers move their cursor over the highlighted homophones, a box pops up showing each possible word, its part of speech, and a grammatically correct example sentence.”

Blogger’s comment: So far, the software only checks 40 commonly misspelt English homophones, which makes the app targeted mostly at a specific level of writing. It is a wonderful start. Also, rather than bemoan the problems of English language usage nowadays that makes this software inevitable and invaluable, I’ll celebrate its presence and its ability to makes essay writing easier (especially for high school or undergraduate students too distracted by other things to proofread their work right). Of course it will eventually take a smart writer to properly use a software that merely points one to where one might want to take a second look in an essay. Like every spell-checker, the work will still come back to the writer to be sure of exactly what they intend to write. As a piece of utility however, it is a brilliant invention and a good start. I love it.

Jason Braun currently teaches English and is the Associate Editor of Sou’wester at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He hosts “Literature for the Halibut” a weekly hour-long literary program on KDHX 88.1. He has published fiction, poetry, reported or been featured in The Riverfont Times, Prime Number, ESPN.com, Big Bridge, Sou’wester, The Evergreen Review, SOFTBLOW, The Nashville City Paper, Jane Freidman’s blog, and many more. His Paradise Lost Office App contextualizes John Milton’s epic poem for the cubicle crowd and is available at iTunes. He releases music under the moniker Jason and the Beast. He is a member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Learning Disability Association of America (LDA).

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

If what has been reported in various places online, and comments from close family members and colleagues are anything to go by, Africa’s foremost novelist and author of the famous Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, has passed on, at 82.

Chinua Achebe 2002

The author whose magnum opus, a novel detailing a class of the Igbo traditional culture with an invading European one, has been translated into 50 languages, selling about 8 million copies to become “the most widely read book in modern African literature” (Wikipedia), was a distinguished professor at Brown University. His famous intervention in the debate on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a stuff of legends and has spawned essays after essay about the portrayal of Africa, the rise of African literature and outlook, and the need of more than just a single story. He was often called “The Father of African Literature.”

Achebe’s latest book, There Was a Country, describes in his characteristic lucid prose a flattering ideal country in Nigeria and Biafra before and during the Nigerian Civil War of the 60s. Its characteristically blunt references to political players in Nigeria from the different sides of the warring divide made the book an instant classic and one that generated conversations and re-opened old wounds about the civil war and the pogroms that came with it.

I read his children’s book Chike and the River as a young boy in Ibadan, and a number of scenes in it have remained with me since. His famous work is, of course, Things Fall Apart, which is beyond the scope of my words to describe. Reading the killing of Ikemefuna was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my childhood. The image remained for very many years, raising questions in my young man’s mind about the real cost of becoming an adult.

I never met him. The closest I got was the about four weeks interval that separated my leaving Brown University for Southern Illinois University in September 2009 when it was announced that the legendary author had in fact taken up a position there. I blogged about my disappointment here. His words however, and stature, work, and engagement in public life has been a shining example. If he truly is gone as being reported, it is a terrible loss, but a glorious exit for a man who held our attention and admiration for so long, kept it focused on what is important and noble, and whose example of dignity and grace is one that will be remembered for a long time to come.

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