Sunday, 27 January 2013

Politics changed my dress sense – Jimi Agbaje

Posted by: usman on January 27, 2013 in Nigerian News Leave a comment

Jimi Agbaje has a courteous facade and gentle mien that questions his decision to embrace politics. Just as you ponder on this, he interrupts your thought: “People generally play politics for self or service. For me, it is service primarily and the belief that you can make change possible; that you can make your community a better place; that there are opportunities out there that people can leverage on and be better citizens. It is the belief that you can develop your environment.”

A 1978 graduate of pharmacy from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), he is quick to say he was not bored practising as a pharmacist for over three decades.

He doesn’t mince words on his choice of career. “I am still a pharmacist and I remain first a pharmacist before any other thing. I started my pharmacy on the shopping floor, which is about the community- people, customers, and patients. Therefore, you find that you are dealing with your environment. So, going into politics is just an extension.

“By the time you succeed in community practice, it means you have become beacon of hope in the community. People come to you for everything. As a pharmacist, apart from being in the community, I was involved with my professional body, the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria, and others,” he says.

So at what point did politics crop up?

The former Lagos State governorship candidate, who contested on the ticket of the Democratic People’s Alliance, reminisces: “It had to do with the Abiola/Tofa election. I saw the annulment as a personal insult and an assault on my person. It came at a time others felt the same way. We had the concerned professionals and my first entry into what I would call activism, was through the concerned professionals. I was in one form of resistance group or the other and I did not realise I was getting deeper and deeper into politics. I went on to the socio-political organisation, Afenifere, but it was not with a mind that I was going to run for elective post.

“Again, during Tinubu’s second term, we sat down to deliberate on who will take over from him. Names were bandied and it got to a stage that we felt this was not our dream. These people were not going to deliver the way we wanted them to. Somewhere along the line, someone threw the searchlight on me. I think that was how the lot fell on me.”

And his family? What was their reaction? He smiles and recalls: “Due to my activities with Afenifere, it was not totally strange to my family. We had to discuss it. Fortunately, my children were young adults and it was easier for my wife and I to explain to them. Maybe if resistance came, it was from one or two of my siblings. My mother was scared of politics. But because you have seen politics from the engine room and you know the risks which is also in every profession, what matters is that you do that job properly and leave the rest to God. To me, they were calculated risks.”

Agbaje had to make some behavioural adjustments to fit into his new role since politics is not for reserved people. “If you want to play politics, you must be ready to mix. You have to be a lot more patient and be more of a listener,” he adds.

Did he feel bad losing out in the governorship election of 2007? Agbaje answers that he was not bitter but that those around him found it difficult to overcome the loss. He is a staunch believer that the best team does not win sometimes.

“I had learnt in school that you may have the best team but it does not guarantee you victory. during the election, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly but it is like every game – you either win or lose. You can lose because you actually lost and you can lose because you were actually cheated,” he states.

Now, does he still nurse the ambition of becoming the governor of Lagos State?

This elicits another round of laughter.

He says, “that is a very difficult question for a politician to answer. Let me just say that I have remained in politics although I do not belong to any political party. If you want to remain in politics, the constitution recommends that you should belong to one party or the other. To that extent, I am beginning to look at what party I want to join. Time will tell.”

Agbaje believes that he has not achieved much as a politician.

According to him, one should go into politics to make a difference which he has not been able to do. He considers himself more accomplished as a pharmacist than as a politician.

He proudly launches into the history of his successful practice as a pharmacist.

“Jaykay Pharmacy was born in 1982 and I was a relatively young pharmacist. I worked in an outlet for a nice boss of mine and when it was time, I decided to set up my own pharmacy. My dream then was along the line of a company in England called, Boots. They have a manufacturing concern and a retail outlet chain. I cannot say that I have achieved the dream because over the last six years, I can say I have been distracted and therefore the expansion has not gone on, as I would have loved. We have people who run the business; so I have been able to step back a bit. In 2005, when I started politics, I left as managing director and became the chairman of the company,” he says.

Married for 31 years and still counting, he talks enthusiastically about his wife who he met at the University of Ife. They dated for eight years before they got married. “We were young when we got married because there was really nothing to wait for after graduation. The union has produced two gentlemen and a lady,” he states.

Politicians are considered to be very social but Agbaje says he is ‘a bit social.’ “I like a good intelligent discussion. You find that I am happy in a good environment. I like a weekend that is free and I do not have to be anywhere. I like to watch TV and I am a news freak. When I have time, I like to read and I love my sleep,” he adds.

Born and bred in Lagos, he fondly relives his childhood days: “I think the only time I left Lagos was to go to University of Ife. I was born into a Christian home and I’m the second surviving child. My father was a career banker and he taught us to work hard like himself. He did not spare the rod; so we were not spoilt. If you were rascally, you paid the price. My mother was teacher.”

Now, one topic he shies away from is fashion, which he admits, is not his forte.

“You are talking to the wrong person because unbelievably, my wife dresses me up. Whatever you see on me, just give the credit to my wife. Can you believe that I don t even know my tailor but I get clothes sewn for me? I just like to dress comfortably, simple and clean. Of course, I changed my dressing from the moment I got into politics. If you met me before I went into politics, I was dressed in good shirts and trousers. Then, my friends advised that if I was running for governor, nobody would take me serious unless I looked gubernatorial; which meant wearing agbada but I did not see myself wearing that. We settled for buba and sokoto but if I do have a proper event, I wear agbada.”

Egyptian Referee Grisha Ghead to be Expelled from Afcon

Posted by: usman on January 27, 2013 in Sports 13 Comments

The official has come under intense scrutiny for his penalty call against Nigeria in Friday’s game against Zambia which ended in a draw.
Egyptian referee Grisha Ghead, who officiated the controversial second Group C match between defending champions Zambia and Nigeria on Friday, may be dismissed from the Africa Nations Cup by the Confederation of Africa Football (Caf) as a result of poor officiating, Goal.com has learnt.
Ghead gave Zambia a controversial penalty late in the game which ensured that the match ended 1-1. The Nigeria Football Federation lodged a complaint with Caf after the match.
Goal.com learnt that Caf president Issa Hayatou assured Nigeria’s minister of sport Bolaji Abdullahi that prompt action has been taken against the referee and that the official will be sent home. Caf is yet to react officially.
The last Group C matches are now expected to generate great concern to Caf as they have prepared to monitor the two matches alongside the other groups to forestall a repeat of such scandalous mistakes and biases as alleged by the NFF.

President Goodluck Jonathan’s Grammatical Boo-Boos

Posted by: usman on January 27, 2013 in Nigerian News 30 Comments

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

For those who don’t know, “boo-boo” is an informal American-English term for “an embarrassing mistake.” Every Nigerian knows that good grammar isn’t President Goodluck Jonathan’s strong suit. I was probably the first to publicly call attention to this fact in my April 16, 2010 article about then Acting President Jonathan’s visit to the US.

In the article, titled “Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, that was embarrassing,” I observed, among other things, that during the Q and A session at the Council on Foreign Relations Jonathan “couldn’t articulate a coherent thought, hardly made a complete sentence, went off on inconsequential and puerile tangents, murdered basic grammar with reckless abandon, repeated trifles ad nauseam, was embarrassingly stilted, and generally looked and talked like a timid high school student struggling to remember his memorized lines in a school debate.” I concluded that he was “unfathomably clueless” and not “emotionally and socially prepared for the job of a president—yet.”

Almost three years after, the president hasn’t changed a bit.

But his January 23, 2013 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour will probably go down in the annals as his worst international outing as a president, particularly because of the insensate ferocity with which he murdered elementary rules of English grammar.

This isn’t an attempt to ridicule the president’s deficiencies in English. Nor is it an analysis of his interview. Since I write about grammar, I thought it was appropriate that I use the president’s CNN interview, which millions of Nigerians watched, as a teaching moment. This is precisely because the usage patterns of the elite of any country, especially of the president who is the most important political and cultural figure in a country, tend to get naturalized and imitated by the general population over time.

I have listed below some of the rankest grammatical bloopers that the president committed during the CNN interview.I have left out clumsy, semantically puzzling constructions that, in my judgment, were the consequence of the familiar, excusable pressures of impromptu dialogic exchange.

1. “Thank you.” Christiane Amanpour started the interview by saying “Goodluck Jonathan, thank you very much for joining me from Davos.” The president’s response to this courteous expression of gratitude was “thank you.” Again, at the end of the interview when Amanpour said, “President Goodluck Jonathan, thank you for joining me,” the president responded by saying “thank you.”

That is not the conventional response to an expression of gratitude in the English language. When someone says “thank you” to you, conversational courtesy in English requires you to respond with such fixed phrases as “you’re welcome,” “(it’s) my pleasure,” etc. Other less familiar responses are “think nothing of it” and “don’t mention it” (which is chiefly British, although it’s now going out of circulation in contemporary British English.) In very casual contexts, it’s usual for people to say “(it’s) not a problem,” “sure,” “you bet,” “not at all,” “any time,” etc.

It is neither conventional nor idiomatic to say “thank you” to a “thank you.”

2. “Committed to work with…” In response to a question about the insurgency in Mali, President Jonathan said, “And that is why the Nigerian government is totally committed to work with other nationals, other friendly governments to make sure that we contain the problems in Mali.” In grammar, the verb that comes after “committed to” is always in the progressive tense, that is, it always takes an “ing” form. So the president should properly say “we are totally committed to working with…”

3. Subject-verb agreement. This rule states that a singular subject agrees with a singular verb (that is, a verb with an “s” at the end) and a plural subject agrees with a plural verb (that is, a verb without an “s” at the end). It is obvious that the president has a continuing challenge with subject-verb agreement. This comes out clearly in all his media interviews and extempore speeches. For instance, in response to a journalist’s question about the Libyan crisis during a “State of the Nation” media chat in 2011, the president famously said, “Libyan crisis is like a pot of water dropped and everything scatter.”

Of course, it should properly be “everything scatters” since “everything” is a singular subject that always agrees with a singular verb. Perhaps, the president was interlarding his speech with Nigerian Pidgin English (where the phrase “everything scatter scatter” popularized by Nigerian pop-singer Eedris Abdulkareem is standard and means “everything is upside down”).

But during the Amanpour interview, in response to another question on Libya, the president again said, “the issue of Libya try to create more problems in the sub region.” Well, it should be “the issue of Libya tries to create…” because “the issue,” which modifies the verb in the sentence, is a singular subject. The president clearly has not the vaguest idea what subject-verb agreement means.

4. “Ghaddafi was thrown.” Who threw Ghaddafi? From where was he thrown? The president probably meant to say “Ghaddafi was overthrown.”

5. “Weapons enter into hands of non-state actors.” This is undoubtedly Nigerian Pidgin English where “enter” functions as a catch-all verb for a whole host of things such as “enter a bike” (for “ride a bike”), “enter ya shoes” (for “wear your shoes”), etc. The president meant to say “weapons got into the hands of non-state actors.”

6. “And I have said it severally…” Here, the president fell into a popular Nigerian English error: the misuse of “severally” to mean “several times.” This is what I wrote in a previous article titled “Adverbial and Adjectival Abuse in Nigerian English”: “Perhaps the trickiest of the adverbs we misuse is the word ‘severally.’ We often use the word as if it meant ‘several times.’ It is typical for Nigerians to say ‘I have told you severally that I don’t like that!’ or ‘I have been severally arrested by the police.’ In Standard English, however, ‘severally’ does not mean ‘several times’; it only means individually, singly, independently, without others, etc., as in ‘the clothes were hung severally.’ This means the clothes are apart from each other and don’t touch each other. Strikingly odd, not so?”

7. “They should try and filter the truth.” This is the full context of this odd sentence: Amanpour told President Jonathan that the US State Department has said that police brutality has killed more Nigerians than Boko Haram has. This outraged the president who said the following in response: “The State Department from the United States they have, they have the means of knowing the truth. They should try and filter the truth.”

Now, to filter (out) is to “remove or separate (suspended particles, wavelengths of radiation, etc.) from (a liquid, gas, radiation, etc.) by the action of a filter.” Example: “Filter out the impurities.” By metaphorical extension, if someone “filters the truth,” as President Jonathan is urging the US State Department to do, they are actually removing the truth which, in essence, means they are lying. In other words, Jonathan is asking the US government to ignore the truth and embrace falsehood. Of course, that is not what he meant. But that is what he comes across as saying.

8. “…before the bulb can light.” This is a semantically and structurally awkward construction. It’s probably the translation of the president’s native language, which is fine. But it is confusing for people who don’t speak his language. You can light a bulb with something, such as a battery, but can a bulb “light”? The bulb has no agency. Perhaps, the president meant to say “before the bulb can light up.” “Light up” is a fixed verb phrase.

Boko Haram Relocates to North-West Nigeria

Posted by: usman on January 27, 2013 in Nigerian News 1 Comment

For the first time since the dreaded Boko Haram appeared on the country’s scene, Nigerians, especially those resident in the 19 northern States and Abuja, had a bombing-free Christmas and New Year celebrations. In fact, some Nigerians, as investigations revealed, heaved a sigh of relief, thinking, “at last, bombings are gradually reducing.” Little did they know that they’d heaved the sigh of relief too soon.

Exactly 18 days after the New Year celebration, the terrorists went for the kill, but they missed their target – the Emir Kano. Although no group, including the new one, Ansarul Muslimina Fi Biladis Sudan (meaning Vanguards for the protection of Muslims in Black Africa) has claimed responsibility for the gun attack on the Kano monarch, the signature of last Saturday’s attack, however, bore that of Boko Haram.
Besides, the Saturday, January 19, 2013, an attack came just a day to the one-year anniversary of the first major attack on the ancient city of Kano by the Boko Haram. But the Ansarul group, whose name is similar to one of the major groups fighting in Mali, has since claimed responsibility for the attack on the Mali-bound Nigerian soldiers in a village near Okene in Kogi State, where two soldiers were said to have lost their lives.
Incidentally, the attack on the Emir of Kano occurred on the same day with the one that claimed the lives of the Mali-bound Nigerian soldiers. Since then, series of explosives have been recovered by security operatives in Jos, Kaduna, Gombe, Damaturu, Kaduna, Kano and Maiduguri, with some hitting their targets. The attack on the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Ado Bayero, did not just happen.
Investigations revealed that before last Saturday’s attack, there have been pockets of killings within and around Kano by suspected terrorists. Prominent among these is the one that occurred just two days before the attack on the Emir, where four persons, including two suspected terrorists died in a shoot-out with soldiers at a checkpoint in Mariri area of the state capital. Before then, it was further gathered, four policemen were killed in the same week by gunmen suspected to be terrorists.

If Guns Don’t Kill People, Why Does Florida Cheat Mental Health?

By usman Jan. 23, 2013 34 Comments

Customers look over the last two AR-15 style rifles for sale inside the Bullet Hole gun shop in Sarasota — REUTERS/Brian Blanco
Customers in Sarasota, Florida look over the last two AR-15 style rifles for sale inside the Bullet Hole gun shop before an expected gun control announcement by U.S. President Barack Obama on January 16, 2013.

Maybe Florida is hoping to deflect attention from its hopeless election system. But in the wake of last month’s Connecticut school shooting tragedy, the Sunshine State has gladly made itself the torch bearer of our right to pack heat. In response to the revived gun control debate, Florida is leading the nation in gun sales, which soared 77% there last month. The state recently announced its millionth concealed weapon permit as loudly and proudly as if it had just eliminated child poverty or unemployment. Florida also wants you to know that after reconsidering its controversial Stand Your Ground law, the Wild West gun code at the center of the Trayvon Martin killing, it’s decided not to reconsider it. Put that in your Glock and fire it.
But what Florida is being surprisingly quiet about—make that hypocritically quiet about—is the fact that it ranks 49^th in spending on mental health services. Florida, in fact, allots just $39 per person compared to a national average of $129. According to the Ocala Star-Banner, adjusted for inflation that represents less expenditure than Florida saw in the 1950s. That’s hypocrisy because Florida is governed by leaders slavishly loyal to the National Rifle Association (NRA)—and that lobby, especially in the wake of the Connecticut assault rifle massacre that killed 20 young children, has insisted at every turn that such atrocities aren’t a gun issue but a mental health issue.
The NRA is half right, anyway. Better identification of the mentally ill in our midst is one critical part of the problem; the other is the absurd access the mentally ill have to semi-automatic weapons and bottomless ammunition clips. But either way, the Florida data point up the gun lobby’s shameful duplicity: while it lavishes millions of dollars on politicians—$700,000 in Florida alone last year—to keep U.S. gun laws among the world’s most lax, it rarely if ever pushes legislators to get serious about the mental health crisis that it holds up as a cynical means of distracting us from the gun crisis.
And Florida is hardly the lone showcase—or Lone Star, if you will. Few states enjoy advertising themselves as the most gun-totin’ territory in the country than Texas does, pardner, and yet it’s dead last in the nation in mental health spending. It’s bringing up the rear in an area that so many gun advocates tell us is the key to solving America’s gun crisis—er, sorry, violence crisis, which is the new talking-point term we’re supposed to use now. All of the U.S. states in the bottom 10 of mental health spending—Texas, Idaho, Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, South Carolina, Louisiana, Utah, Nevada and West Virginia—also sport the nation’s loosest gun control laws, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C. So the states that most passionately defend the Second Amendment are the ones that least fervently adhere to their own precept that guns don’t kill people, people do.
If they really believed in that argument, would their Governors be vetoing even modest mental health spending increases, as Florida’s Rick Scott did last year? It’s true that the Great Recession has forced even progressive states, like Connecticut, to cut back on services like mental health care. But if you go out of your way, as Florida has, to make the right to bear arms more absolute than the right to own a dog—given my own family’s experience with a Schnauzer rescue agency, I’ll bet Scott faced more red tape adopting the Labrador he recently had to give away than he would if he were buying a Luger—people also have a right to criticize the fact that per capita you spend less than kenneling a dog would cost when it comes to recognizing and treating deranged people who might pull triggers.
The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there, however. Like most Americans, I support the right to own a shotgun for hunting or a handgun to protect your family. I also support commonsense gun regulations—just as I support free speech but also curbs on libel and slander. Which brings us to the First Amendment and the attempt by Scott and his fellow conservatives in Tallahassee to make it a crime for pediatricians to ask their patients if they have guns in their homes—even though 1 in every 25 pediatric trauma cases involves gunshot wounds. (A federal judge blocked the law last year.) Adam Putnam, who heads Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which oversees concealed weapons permits, crowed that the millionth license proved how “strenuously our state supports the Second Amendment.” But where were pols like him when Scott so strenuously tried to trash the First Amendment rights of doctors?
When Florida’s next legislative session begins in March, a few lawmakers will introduce measures to either repeal or water down Stand Your Ground—the much abused 2005 law that lets anyone, anywhere use deadly force against another person if they feel their life is in danger. It will probably be a futile effort. And efforts to pass improved mental health services legislation may fail too. That’s a shame, because it would help lessen the risk of gun violence. After all, it’s people who kill people.

Court says Obama exceeded authority in making appointments

Video: White House Press Secretary Jay Carney discussed Friday’s ruling that President Obama violated the constitution when he bypassed the Senate last year to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel. Carney says the White House “strongly disagrees” with the decision.

By usman and Published: January 25

President Obama exceeded his constitutional authority by making appointments when the Senate was on a break last year, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The court’s broad ruling would sharply limit the power that presidents throughout history have used to make recess appointments in the face of Senate opposition and inaction.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit flatly rejected the Obama administration’s rationale for appointing three members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) while the Senate was on a holiday break.

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Chief Judge David B. Sentelle sharply criticized the administration’s interpretation of when recess appointments may be made, saying it would give the president “free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction.” He added, “This cannot be the law.”
The issue seems certain to end up before the Supreme Court, which ultimately could clarify a president’s authority to fill his administration and appoint federal judges when a minority of the Senate blocks consideration of his choices.
Although recess appointments have been made throughout the nation’s history, they have been more commonly made by modern presidents who face partisan opposition that has made it hard for nominees to even receive a vote in the Senate.
Additionally, Friday’s decision casts doubt on hundreds of decisions the NLRB has made in the past year, ranging from enforcement of collective-bargaining agreements to rulings on the rights of workers to use social media.
The ruling also raises questions about the recess appointment of former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to head the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and about the actions taken by the agency during his tenure, including major new rules governing the mortgage industry. Obama named Cordray at the same time as the NLRB nominees, and his appointment is the subject of a separate lawsuit in D.C. federal court.
The White House criticized the court ruling. “The decision is novel and unprecedented, and it contradicts 150 years of practice by Democratic and Republican administrations,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters Friday. “We respectfully but strongly disagree with the ruling.”
Presidents from both parties have made hundreds of recess appointments when the Senate has failed to act on nominations. Ronald Reagan holds the record with 243. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, made 105, and it was during his term that Senate Democrats began holding pro-forma sessions, some lasting less than a minute, when the Senate went on break. They contended that that kept the Senate in session and did not allow Bush to make recess appointments.
Republicans took up the practice when Obama was elected. But Obama decided to challenge it in January 2012, when the Senate was on a 20-day holiday but holding pro-forma sessions every three business days to block presidential action.

Tom Harkin Won’t Seek 6th Senate Term

By usman Jan. 26, 20132 Comments

(CUMMING, Iowa) — Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin says he will not seek re-election in 2014.
The 73-year-old Harkin tells The Associated Press in an interview, “It’s just time to step aside,” because by the time he would finish a sixth term, he would be 81.
Harkin said it would also allow a new generation of Democrats to seek higher office.
The announcement comes as a surprise, considering he had $2.7 million in his campaign war chest and was planning a fundraiser next month.
Harkin played a lead role in urging the Senate’s more liberal members to back the 2010 health care bill.
No Iowa Republicans have taken formal steps toward seeking the seat. Harkin’s decision eases the burden on the GOP, who have to gain six seats to win the majority.