https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelchimaeyerengozi
Do you know that Nigeria has never known 10 years of peace since Independence Day of October 1 to date?
There were two of the bloodiest coups in the 1960s and flung Nigeria into a civil war from 1967-1970.
Coups in 1975 and 1976.
Coups in 1983, 1984 and 1985.
Coup attempt in 1990 and June 12 crisis in 1993 and Gen. Sani Abacha seized power on 17 November 1993 in the last successful coup d'etat in the military history of Nigeria.
Niger Delta crisis from 2003 and overtaken by the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009 to date.
Nigeria is still under construction for the nation building of a New Nigeria.
- By EKENYERENGOZI Michael Chima,
https://www.amazon.com/author/ekenyerengozimichaelchima.
Author of "The Victory of Muhammadu Buhari and the Nigerian Dream", "The Prophet Lied", "Diary of the Memory Keeper", "Scarlet Tears of London" and other books distributed by Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers worldwide.
Do Events in Our Life Shape Us?
"It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean."
-Tony Robbins'
How do events shape our narratives and perspectives on life as artists, filmmakers and writers?
I don't totally agree with Tony Robbins' opinion, because the events of unforeseen circumstances in human lives have shaped the characters and attitudes of many people, especially the innocent children who don't have beliefs to define or determine their reactions to the events in their lives.
They simply react by their human nature as an earthworm reacts when you drop a pinch of salt on it.
What beliefs do children have?
They just want to survive and live happily.
Boko Haram terrorists strapped bombs to the waists of two innocent little girls who were totally clueless about bombs. They took them to a crowded market and pushed them to go into the midst of the crowd. Then left them. Minutes later, the bomb on one of the girls exploded and blew up the girl and killed those surrounding her. The second girl screamed in fear and shock; and trembling, she ran away from the crowd helplessly trying to remove the bomb strapped to her waist. Everyone was running away from her whilst she was crying and screaming for help. The bomb exploded and left her in pieces. People were crying, screaming, yelling and wailing at the horrifying suicide bombings. The innocent girls, daughters of the victims of the Boko Haram terrorists had been used as suicide bombers without their knowledge. The horrors of the tragedies of terrorism have altered the beliefs of many people in northern Nigeria to hate the Islamic religion, to hate their political leaders or to lose faith in Almighty God.
The loss of a beloved younger sister made one of the foremost educationists in south western Nigeria to become an atheist, because his cries, prayers and tears did not save the life of his sister. If God really existed, He would have been moved by his cries, prayers and tears. I could understand his unbelief shaped by the harrowing event of the loss of his beloved sister. I reached out to him before he passed on. Because, in our mortality, we cannot comprehend Immortality.
The catastrophic event of the internecine Nigerian civil war from 1967-1970 affected the psyches and shaped the lives of millions of Igbo children who were the worst victims of the war and actually has been more critical to my existential attitude to life and my faith into what is called Christian Existentialism.
And I agree with Jean Paul Sartre’s maxim that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself”. But what he called the first principle of existentialism, another writer said, "flies in the face of a belief in a God greater than all of us.". What Sartre meant is, our choices in different circumstances of life will either make us succeed or make us fail in the world.
St. Augustine, the famous Catholic Philosopher and author of the classic, "The City of God" and other books was a Christian existentialist.
The critical events in our formative years shape the characters of most of us before the development of our beliefs.
I would not have been an artist and writer if my parents did not relocate our family from Obalende on the Lagos Island to Shomolu on the mainland of Lagos. I was only 13 when it happened and that disrupted my growing up, because I was separated from my childhood sweethearts and playmates in Obalende and in the St. Michael's Catholic Church in Lafiaji. To me, moving to Shomolu was a nightmare and I suddenly became an introvert and being called the "Monk of Morocco Ville", because I preferred to stay indoors after returning from school. Morocco Ville was the name of the bungalow where we resided at the Morocco Bus Stop on the Bajulaiye Road in Shomolu. I did not like the other children in the neighborhood. And I became engrossed in reading books and daydreaming and started drawing, painting and writing.
Parents don't know that relocations can affect and alter the development of the characters of their children. Relocations can cause depressions in children if you don't discuss with them before relocating your family to another environment.
Children are innocent of our beliefs and choices in life.
No child asked to be a victim of circumstances in the existential realities of life.
No child asked to be born poor or rich.
Before we take decisions on the affairs and situations in our lives, please let us think of how the consequences will affect our innocent children and their future in the world.
SOYINKA and the Quest for the Ori Olokun
The first African Nobel Laureate in Literature Prof. Wole Soyinka is 80 years old today, born on July 13, 1934. And the enigmatic and phenomenal genius is famous for his dare devil exploits including the one that landed him in jail.
In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years after he secretly and unofficially met with the military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the Southeastern town of Enugu (August 1967), to try to avert civil war. Go and read his "The Man Died" for his prison notes.
In 1978, Wole Soyinka was made aware of the existence of a bronze head in a private collection in Brazil – similar to the disputed one discovered by the famous German archaeologist Leo Frobenius (29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938) in 1910, which now stood in the Ife Museum, but of far greater quality. In his memoir "You Must Set Forth at Dawn" (2007), Soyinka recalls how, in a spirit of cultural duty, and with the knowledge of the Nigerian authorities, he mounted a kind of guerrilla raid with a group of friends, stealing the object from the apartment in question in near-farcical circumstances, and removing it to the Senegalese capital Dakar, where experts proclaimed it genuine. Suspicious, however, of the lightness of the object, Soyinka examined it further to find the letters “BM” stamped on the back: it was a British Museum replica, once sold in the museum’s shop. Soyinka then declared the British Museum’s head to be the real 'Ori Olokun", even though it was excavated 18 years after Frobenius’s original discovery.
~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima, aka Orikinla Osinachi, prize winning Nigerian writer since age 13, author of Children of Heaven, Sleepless Night, Scarlet Tears of London, Bye, Bye Mugabe (now being revised with the new title of Bye, Bye Zimbabwe and other books.
#KKK#racism #Bigotry#BlackLivesMatter @TIME @TheAcademy @AmericanFilm @BFI @Festival_Cannes @BarackObama @SamuelLJackson @Oprah @ava @badassboz
— 247 Nigeria (@247nigeria) March 25, 2021
A Tarnished Silver Screen
How a #Racist Film Helped the Klu Klux Klan Grow for Generationshttps://t.co/Dr0NK14fTA pic.twitter.com/nkLnolNF7l
USA Today - 13 minutes ago By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY Libya is entering a dangerous period of creating a new democracy, but the six-month duration of the rebels' campaign against ... 10961 related articlesVanguard - 14 related articles New York Times - 1261 related articles |
Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr. Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.
Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%. Why this happened is complex and furiously debated. The era of mass imprisonment began as traditional mores were already crumbling, following the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the invention of the contraceptive pill. It also coincided with greater opportunities for women in the workplace. These factors must surely have had something to do with the decline of marriage.
But jail is a big part of the problem; argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr. Charles and Mr. Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”
http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15867956
Submitted by MichaelChima on Fri, 2007-04-20 02:27. I actually thought that the so called "Mr. Integrity" Umaru Yar' Adua would be honest ... www.huliq.com/19100/nigeria-umaru-yar-adua-pdp-and-the-presidential- |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Fri, 2007-04-27 14:18. Duplicate post removed by the poster. Login or register to post comments ... www.huliq.com/19952/gere-apologizes-for-kissing |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Sun, 2007-02-25 20:52. I have watched the highlights of the preparations and the nominees and I have seen that ... www.huliq.com/12461/oscars-79th-academy-awards-announces-presenters |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Sun, 2007-02-25 18:22. Iran cannot deny her nuclear ambitions. Because, Iran wants to be a Nuclear Power to balance the ... www.huliq.com/12498/iran-denies-nuclear-ambitions-as-un-security-council- |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Thu, 2007-03-22 08:53. $4000 is just petty cash for lunch to the richest woman in Russia. One God, one faith. ... www.huliq.com/15925/russias-richest-woman-wins-lawuit-against-forbes |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Thu, 2007-04-26 00:59. I have been a fan of U2 and Bono has been their arrowhead since the 1980s to date. ... www.huliq.com/19760/bono-joins-many-other-celebs-in-american-idol-gives |
Submitted by MichaelChima on Mon, 2007-04-16 13:35. Gay men have high rates of eating disorders, because of depression. ... www.huliq.com/18538/gay-men-have-higher-prevalence-of-eating-disorders |
... Nigeria · PDP · presidential elections · Taliban insurgents · Umaru Yar'Adua · MichaelChima's picture. Posted April 24th, 2007 by MichaelChima ... www.huliq.com/19456/nigeria-anarchy-looms-after-yar-adua-wins-bloody- |
... Rutgers University Press and other leading book publishers in America and Europe. MichaelChima's picture. Posted March 13th, 2007 by MichaelChima ... www.huliq.com/14716/lightning-source-takes-up-scarlet-tears-of-london |
MichaelChima's picture. Posted September 10th, 2007 by MichaelChima. Similar News Stories. Nigeria: Two More Nigerian Soldiers Killed in Darfur, ... www.huliq.com/33706/nigeria-nigerian-writer-dedicates-new-novel-to-dr-mo |