MY FELLOW JUNGLE MEN BY @LANRE_OLAGUNJU

When you ponder on the recent cycle of madness epitomized by mad leadership and disordered followers in a jungle damned by its people such as ours, you just want to wish that the year 2012 be erased out of the history of this big jungle which never seems to be tired of constantly hearing the worst of itself.

When you look into the massacre of the over forty students in Mubi in Adamawa on Independence Day, and the heartless killing of the four young and ambitious UNIPORT undergraduates, you definitely want to agree with Shakespeare that “hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

Some who have condemned the sad Aluu killing have said our thieving politicians should be the ones Nigerians carry out jungle justice on. I can’t but disagree vehemently. We should rather advocate for law and order. If the law says anyone found guilty of stealing public funds be put to death by hanging. So be it! ‘cos that is the law. Our society can’t afford to operate like this; else we completely lose our human feeling and then birth more Hitlers than the world can bear.

Jungle justice is a prevalent occurrence in our jungle only that social media, at this time, has amplified our nakedness and brought the picture of ourselves and our failed system to us in a manner that we are finding hard to accept.

It’s evidently clear that we are not safe in this country and that we all are on our own. There’s a limit to which we can rely on “self-government” by that I mean the type of government whereby citizens virtually provide every amenity including security. It so sad that I sometimes, out of anger, feel that one day Nigerians would be able to do without the government. We provide our own water by drilling boreholes all over the place not being mindful of the environmental hazard it might bring. We provide our own power with our generators, despite that the fume they generate is hazardous to health. In many communities, people contribute money to fix roads so the roads might be quite motorable. We just can’t continue to wait for the inept government.  What a shame!

When you need the fire men to salvage a fire accident, you can be sure that they won’t show up, and when they do, they either don’t have water or don’t have enough of it. When we need the police to show up at crime scenes, they either don’t have a van to come with or they don’t have fuel in it. And when you expect that the police or law enforcement agents show up and salvage a case such as that of the senseless Aluu killing, they’d rather look on, laugh with the mob, and then approve that the mob burn the boys alive. Only to later release fabricated lies and annoying unguided statements like “we were overwhelmed by the crowd, we didn’t have sufficient bullets in our guns”.  Just to scare away a mob with sticks?! It was Chude Jideonwo, Chief Editor of Y! Magazine who said “we are living like animals in this country” while narrating the series of horrible experiences he had with the Nigerian system a couple of hours after the death of his father, not excluding the gruesome one with that of the ruthless members of the Nigerian police.

One would naturally expect that Mr President in his speech on Tuesday 9^th of October, would at least mention the Aluu killing and that of Mubi in Adamawa and then talk about strategies in place to bring about justice. Infact, if it we were in places where things work, the Commissioner of Police in Rivers State should have tendered his resignation by now while all the police officers who were present at the scene be charged to court.

We earnestly can’t afford to continue like this. To sit and patiently expect that God will come down to save us from many of our man made troubles including the act of carrying out jungle justice, is to wait till the anger of His judgment come upon us. Most especially when we later realize that many of those who are murdered in such acts are most times innocent of the crime they were accused of.

We can do a lot to ensure that this case is not swept under the carpet. Justice must be done. Else we approve of this and more of it in our society. I advocate that the statue of these guys be erected in Aluu community as a memorial, so generations to come will always be reminded of the wickedness and innocent blood that was shared on that land.

May the souls of #Aluu4 find true rest.

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PARENTING BROUHAHA: ARE PARENTS ALWAYS RIGHT? BY @LANRE_OLAGUNJU

Years back as a teenager, I could remember raising this issue at an interactive forum.  The topic, to my surprise, boiled beyond the boiling point I could have speculated.

“The task of raising kids can sometimes be overwhelming, essentially because parenting is technically self-thought and majority of the things learnt are through practice, experience, loads of sacrifice, then also trial and error” A single mother who was willing to be plain explained. I couldn’t have agreed more with her, after all there are no professional parents.

Even if there are courses in parenting, would they fit the distinctiveness of each child, considering that every child is unique and would apparently produce a different result to the same mode of parenting that worked out well for others?

Not all parents have subscribed to the philosophy of giving their wards a chance at expressing their individuality, while they help by guiding and curbing them from excesses and juvenile distractions. Some parents are still bent on forcing a career, course of study or in extreme cases, a particular lifestyle on their kids.

These days, young people get to discover their passion faster than it was with the older generation.
And to a large extent it shows in the involvement of young people in politics and governance and the wave of global happenings as nobody wan carry last.  The desire to be heard is getting stronger by the day. And with the help of social media the limits are limited.

Here, my bone of contention lies with young adults or kids who grow up way too fast. By that I mean young people who early enough know what exactly they want to achieve in life or practically what exactly they don’t want. I’m not in any way referring to folks who neither know their left from right or who are just wasting away in juvenile delinquencies or sheer youthful exuberant.

I read the Facebook’s missing millionaires’ article lately and I was quite stunned and irritated by the story of Joe Green, a friend, roommate and hacking buddy of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder. Green has helped Mark in creating “Facemash”, a web application that asks users to rate the attractiveness of Harvard coeds. Though this landed the two friends in trouble with the school administration, Green’s dad, a professor at UCLA, like many parents, won’t even give them a chance. Probably because he wasn’t seeing the bright side of the idea or simply because he was just trying to avoid his name being soiled. “I don’t think you should do any more of these Zuckerberg projects” he advised.

Unfortunately Green couldn’t intelligently or doggedly struggle it out with his father, rather he yielded to his father’s advice and refused to run the business side of what is now called Facebook, when Mark asked him to.

The opportunity cost of Green’s adherence in this case is the forfeiting of four to six percent of the company; a stake that would have been worth at least $3 billion today. Though Green has moved on to co-found Causes a profit oriented site that has raised $50 million in assets to help users donate to charity, yet he confessed that “every once in a while you can have a moment of bitterness,”. Anyway, he said he’s made peace with it. But what more can he actually do?!

Imagine that the sultan of software, Bill Gate wasn’t able to win his parent on the issue of his dropping out of college, despite his brilliance and the fact that his parents threatened to use up the saved money for his education for other purposes. If he did, probably I won’t be writing this article using Microsoft word.

While discussing this issue with a couple of friends, a friend with a large opinion who lamented how his mum wouldn’t allow him join the #OccupyNigeia protest in January said “if Christ had his kind of parents, out of sheer love, most likely, “pankere” (strokes of cane) would have deprived the world of having a messiah in Jesus, because at the pretty young age of twelve, when the entire family went for a festival in Jerusalem, without the knowledge of his parents, Jesus decided to stay back in Jerusalem with Jewish teachers, listening and asking them intelligent questions, which served as the starting point of his remarkable earthly mission. They searched for him for complete three days and you can imagine how devastated his parents were.”

Somehow, I’m deeply tempted to call this “holy disobedience”.

We really will never become the parent of our parents; and sincerely young people need to find intelligent ways to make them see reason. I also discovered that parents are likely to resist strongly if you take a “parent-like” stance with them on critical issues. And as a matter of fact any child who has a huge record of making series of irresponsible decisions can’t gain trust over-night. Like my friend also emphasized “trust is based on antecedent”.

You see, parents aren’t all-knowing. Sometimes they’re probably just as confused on their job as a parent as you are on your job as a kid. So it’s essential that you don’t give up your own opinions, yet, you respect theirs, even if you don’t fully agree. And in some cases you might want to review your own decisions as well.
The bottom line is that anyone who will be a world changer, will have to carry his own cross by making decisive decisions and must look out for intelligent ways that are out rightly outside the box to make parents see reasons or else….

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