₦airaland Forum

you people are just so stupid, you have allowed your tribal prejudices to cloud your common sense. Look more states = less power to the states and more power to the federal government. For example if we only have let say 10 states it will be alot easier for the governors of those states to oppose the federal government and demand for more resource control, Nigeria is less than 10% the size of the USA and yet we have about 36 states. I know alot of idiots in these forum like to blame the northern states for everything while forgetting the biggest thieve, which is fg by the way. if more resources control is given to the states the biggest loser will be the federal government not the northern states because at its stand the federal government keeps more money than the entire states and local government council of the whole of Nigeria combine.
The biggest problem in Nigeria is the federal government, they insist on doing everything yet they have failed to deliver on anything at all. They have cornered the entire market from electricity to most area where government is able to make money thru tax yet they cannot even build and maintain simple highways. As it stands 80% of federal money goes into servicing the federal bureaucracy, which just happens to be the most inept bureaucracy in the history of the whole. The same thing is happening at all the other levels of government in Nigeria therefore common sense will tell you that if those new states are created money will go into servicing the states bureaucracy not into development.

what we need is less government and bureaucracy so that more of the country little resources can go into development

@Anubis
Thank you o jare, Mr. Ronald Reagan. At least we have some republicans in the house.

Like that great man used to say, "govt. is not the solution, govt. IS THE PROBLEM". The govt should only be meant to protect its citizens and not stifle us. The Nigerian govt wants to run everything and yet it has not been good at running anything.

If a small country like Britain has close to 200 councils, I dont know why Nigeria cannot have 200 states.

Ibime,
If you want more state creation, then the indigenes of those states should pay for them and not the federal government. The fed govt shouldn't be paying the salaries for the state officials and the cost of expenditures should strictly be on the taxpayer of that state and NOT THE FG.

Take a trip to Delta State and see the tension between Ijaw/Itsekiri or Rivers State with Ijaw/Ikwerre or Benue State to check the tension between Tiv/Jukun or Berom/Hausa in Jos. We must respect our differences, fullstop; and not put tribes in a situation where they have to compete against each other.

My good friend, the main reason for the tension in Nigeria is not tribalism or colonialism (although this do play certain roles). The problem is simple, POVERTY. In every poor country, you have interest groups (in this case various ethnicities) competing for few meager resources that is why there is always tension. Look at the problems in Alaba market in the 90's or the crisis in the North, the past couple of decades. The people who are always fighting each other are not the well to do's like the doctors, lawyers or engineers, they are the people from the underbelly of Nigerian society like the petty traders (hawkers, shoemakers, electronics traders) vs. the "abokis". When last did you see Igbo doctors and Yoruba engineers going on rampage across the cities burning each others clinics?

You gave an example of Spain, how come you don't here of Catalans burning up Galician businesses and beheading each other? Why its because these are developed countries and not countries with incredible poverty. Look at several countries with "tribes" like Belgium, switzerland or Holland, heck even in England, the scouse don't even regard themselves as English. The point i am trying to get out here is that all this racial or ethnic tensions rise to the surface when things go terribly wrong, for example if there was a great depression in England, and the country ended up a banana republic like Nigeria, wouldn't you see an explosion of animosity with society devolving into factions that cause chaos on the streets. You would see the skin heads fighting the minorities and the geordies fighting scouse, everybody would be fighting each other. But in a developed country where the standard of living is high, why would people want to go about killing each other in the streets. Do you see that here in yanki? If an Ijawman has food on the table and his children have access to a world class education, health system and he can grow up to be anything he wants, tell me why the heck would he want to go and burn a mosque down?



To add more thing, resource control is not the solution to our problems in Nigeria, everybody seems to think that it is. With all the money that the south south states have what have they done with it? Wasn't Alameseyigha the one who embezzled tons of money. What of Peter Odilli, Victor Attah, James Ibori and co? What did they do with the "little" money that they had. I remember when Peter Odilli got elected, he told us that we were going to get constant electricity from gas turbine. Geez, i wonder whatever happened to that? The bible says that he who hasn't been faithful in little, how can he be faithful with bigger things. That is why there arguements have not credibility, let them at least show that they can get the job done with the little they have so that they can at least there arguement would sound plausible. Donald Duke did a lottttt with less than this other states and what did they do with it? that's right, the money disappeared.

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Was he not aware of the culture of the girl he is marrying? stupid guy what will lying down on the floor to take change someone's name for life do him? Let him go and marry oyinbo where he will not do that but where he will have to share same responsibility with the wife in the house, yeye man

Dbisi,
Thank you o jare, if he didn't like the culture, why didn't he go and marry an oyinbo?

Fhemmy,
No mind dem jare, if we were talking about something extremely divisive like ethnic animosity or splitting the nation, everybody would be talking smack. Now that we are talking about something positive. Everybody is quiet, where are the becomrrich and co.?

Nigeria actually needs more states. It is still same amount of money that would be shared to all the state.

They only break it down into small teams(states) to be manageable and to have wider impact.

This will ensure that people otherwise neglected will be able to get a share.

back2back
No you don't get me, the operational expenditures of running these states would be huge. We have to pay senators, house of rep members, judges, ministers, hundreds of civil servants, local govt chairmen and secetaries. That is waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much, we should use this money on education and healthcare instead.

Did we not try the above system before?

Tippy top
We tried it before and it worked. In the western region we even had universal primary health care. The reason why it was stopped was because Gowon wanted to win the war and in order to do it, he had to split the biafra confedracy into several states so that they wouldn't be united.

WHY DO NIGERIANS THINK THAT THE SOLUTION TO THERE PROBLEM IS THE CREATIONS OF NEW STATES?!?!?.


Nigeria does not need any more states instead it needs to merge all its 36 states into 5 regions. This will make it more governable. Nigerians don't seem to understand the concept that smaller is better, when an institution becomes too big and inefficient, then it must be downsized and streamlined so that costs must be drastically cut and improve economies of scale. This applies to Nigeria, the republic is waaaaaaaaaaaaay too big. It is too small to have 36 states, it should only have 5 regions so that the country's resources would go round  and so that the country would be more governable.

It is estimated that Nigeria spends around 60% of its GNP to run the government. At the federal level, you have the executive (the president and his cabinet or ministers), at the legislature, you have all the senators and house of rep members, then you have the judiciary. Each state has the same branches of govt. and guess what? they are all paid by the fed govt. and that is why they are all clamoring for more states because everybody wants to be on the fed. govt. payroll from the local govt. chairman or permanent secretary of my LGA to the president of the republic.

Another problem is that everything is so centralized that's why nothing works, instead of leaving power generation to the private sector or to the individual states, the fed. govt insists that the country must have one central electrical company, NEPA or PHCN or whatever they call it these days that's why the company is so corrupt and over bloated.

Just to touch off another issue, resource control is not the solution to our problems. With all the money that the south south states have, what have they done with it? Wasn't Alameseyigha the one who embezzled tons of money. What of Peter Odilli, Victor Attah, James Ibori and co? What did they do with the "little" money that they had. The bible said that he who hasn't been faithful in little things, how can he be faithful with bigger things. That is why there arguements have not credibility, let them at least show that they can get the job done with the little they have so that they can at least there arguement would sound plausible. If we allow resource control it would mean more money for the corrupt politicians.

ah ah this is not fair now.

Resource control is not the solution, with all the money that the south south states have what have they done with it? Wasn't Alameseyigha the one who embezzled tons of money. What of Peter Odilli, Victor Attah, James Ibori and co? What did they do with the "little" money that they had. The bible said that he who hasn't been faithful in little things, how can he be faithful with bigger things. That is why there arguements have not credibility, let them at least show that they can get the job done with the little they have so that they can at least there arguement would sound plausible.

unfortunately, once a slowpoke always a slowpoke. Highlighting the complicity of the West in any problem they contribute to in Africa or elsewhere for that matter is not the same thing as blaming the West for all the problems but it is understandable when idiots like you cannot understand that simple fact.

Now i understand the problem of naija, you have people who can't carry a good intelligent conversation without resorting to childish and immature stunts, that is why whenever i come to this blog, i always notice a huuuuuuuuuge intellectual drop off.
I used to respect this kid but boy, oh boy, you just lost any form of credibility right there, i thought you were mature and intelligent but just like every other naija pseudo intellectual you just spew nonsense.
Have you ever met anybody from Zimbabwe?, i don't think so. My roommates and some of my friends are from Zimbabwe so you are the last person i need to be listening to.

The economist.com? Why don't you reference documents written by Britain, Australia and US so that you will have a complete reference? Do you brain a favor and use it to think, that is why God gave you one, it is not just for cap or head tie.

The economist is a very credible news source and it is as trust worthy as they come, so mr. man what are you talking about?

Finally, the president is getting some "balls".

Health care should be free for poor Nigerians especially in the rural areas. Free health coverage should also include vaccinations, and diseases like malaria, typhoid, cholera, and co. Also, pregnant women should have access to free healthcare.

You need to read this great article from The Economist.



The underworked American
Jun 11th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic
AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson
A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.



http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13825184

You need to read this great article from The Economist.



The underworked American
Jun 11th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic
AMERICANS like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys. At this time of the year they marvel at the laziness of their European cousins, particularly the French. Did you know that the French take the whole of August off to recover from their 35-hour work weeks? Have you heard that they are so addicted to their holidays that they leave the sick to die and the dead to moulder?

There is an element of exaggeration in this, of course, and not just about French burial habits; studies show that Americans are less Stakhanovite than they think. Still, the average American gets only four weeks of paid leave a year compared with seven for the French and eight for the Germans. In Paris many shops simply close down for August; in Washington, where the weather is sweltering, they remain open, some for 24 hours a day.

But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.

American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.

Americans also divide up their school time oddly. They cram the school day into the morning and early afternoon, and close their schools for three months in the summer. The country that tut-tuts at Europe’s mega-holidays thinks nothing of giving its children such a lazy summer. But the long summer vacation acts like a mental eraser, with the average child reportedly forgetting about a month’s-worth of instruction in many subjects and almost three times that in mathematics. American academics have even invented a term for this phenomenon, “summer learning loss”. This pedagogical understretch is exacerbating social inequalities. Poorer children frequently have no one to look after them in the long hours between the end of the school day and the end of the average working day. They are also particularly prone to learning loss. They fall behind by an average of over two months in their reading. Richer children actually improve their performance.

The understretch is also leaving American children ill-equipped to compete. They usually perform poorly in international educational tests, coming behind Asian countries that spend less on education but work their children harder. California’s state universities have to send over a third of their entering class to take remedial courses in English and maths. At least a third of successful PhD students come from abroad.

A growing number of politicians from both sides of the aisle are waking up to the problem. Barack Obama has urged school administrators to “rethink the school day”, arguing that “we can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home ploughing the land at the end of each day.” Newt Gingrich has trumpeted a documentary arguing that Chinese and Indian children are much more academic than American ones.

These politicians have no shortage of evidence that America’s poor educational performance is weakening its economy. A recent report from McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the lagging performance of the country’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, has wreaked more devastation on the economy than the current recession.

Learning the lesson
A growing number of schools are already doing what Mr Obama urges, and experimenting with lengthening the school day. About 1,000 of the country’s 90,000 schools have broken the shackles of the regular school day. In particular, charter schools in the Knowledge is Power Programme (KIPP) start the school day at 7.30am and end at 5pm, hold classes on some Saturdays and teach for a couple of weeks in the summer. All in all, KIPP students get about 60% more class time than their peers and routinely score better in tests.

Still, American schoolchildren are unlikely to end up working as hard as the French, let alone the South Koreans, any time soon. There are institutional reasons for this. The federal government has only a limited influence over the school system. Powerful interest groups, most notably the teachers’ unions, but also the summer-camp industry, have a vested interest in the status quo. But reformers are also up against powerful cultural forces.

One is sentimentality; the archetypical American child is Huckleberry Finn, who had little taste for formal education. Another is complacency. American parents have led grass-root protests against attempts to extend the school year into August or July, or to increase the amount of homework their little darlings have to do. They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children’s jobs. But Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. And brain work is going the way of manual work, to whoever will provide the best value for money. The next time Americans make a joke about the Europeans and their taste for la dolce vita, they ought to take a look a bit closer to home.



http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13825184

Make them hear me, the truth must be told, the man was a terrible ruler. He was an ideologue and not a pragmatic person. He squandered the surplus that the brits gave him after independence on building Airlines, Nuclear power plants, and other white elephant projects. In fact, it is said that when he was told that there was only 500,000 pounds left in the nation's reserves he sat stunned into silence for 15 minutes and he wept.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2009/07/why_ghana.cfm

jesoul,
Goodness, i haven't heard from you for a "good minute".

If u buy a car and park it in your house, the chances of u have any fender benders is like 1 in 1million

However if u take the car out for a spin everyday and try to see what the real speed limits are, ur chances of crashing increase exponentially.

So the drivers of the Nigerian economy have decided to park it at home and take rides in other economies (swiss, cayman islands, etc)

@ Fyneguy, tell me how e no go safe.

Omo, diggler you are toooooooooooooo much abeg, don't mind your detractors jare. Una dey listen to Merrill of all people. In order for one to grow you have to be willing to take risks after all this is what capitalism is all about, risks and reward. Besides, small businesses are the life blood of the economy over here and not the big businesses, that's why naija can't grow because it is run by huge conglomerates and monopolists. Yar'adua should call upon the justice department to set up anti-trust laws (laws against monopoly) so that at least the economy can grow, we can't continue to put all our eggs on one basket and hope that oil price volatility work in our favor.

No but i might soon.

Even though presence of pregnacy by class is correlated, I bet the rate of pregnancy in wealthier families in USA is multiple times higher than in wealthier families in Nigeria.

I also bet that will change in future, as there are a new breed of wealthy morons in Nigeria that think their profile is maximised by bringing up their kids like westerners, so I will expect them to get a western outcome in those kids.

Sagamite,
Boy you are toooooooo much.

Futhermore, he raised 9 kids, only one went wayward and I will associate the waywardness not only to corporal discipline, but to:
1) Lack of a childhood
2) Lack of a normal life at any stage
3) Inappropraite corporal punishment ( the father wanted them to be the best so he can get money)
4) Personality of MJ (he was one of those kids that you need to smack rarely, talkless of smacking like a slave to do a job that destroyed him

You are right on this point. Based on what i have seen about MJ, he looks like one of those children that you barely ever touch. In my family, my sister and my brother where like that but DEFINITELY NOT ME. This is where you need wisdom to be a parent.

I "verily, verily" support corporal punishment. Does it work in all cases? No, but detentions and time-outs don't work all the time either. I get the opportunity to work with kids and tweens once in a while and I can't tell you how much I wish I could give them a dirty slap,  or how willing I am to ship them to Nja for a day just so I can teach them a lesson or two (Ok, for financial reasons, that's not true), but still, I think kids should know the power of the belt/ cane/ hand at least once in their life time, as long as the crime warrants it.

On one hand, in one of my high schools, we got flogged for incomplete notes/ absence from Biology class, so we knew to always be in class with our notes and diagrams up to date. On the other hand, I had friends from a previous school who stopped attending classes in S.S.3 because of excessive punishment from the year tutor (Iya aje). The solution is to find the right blend between hard and soft discipline. I know people who've said that they'd rather have been caned than heard the words "You've disappointed me".

BTW, students weren't necessarily flogged for wearing the wrong socks or wrong belt,  they were flogged because they deliberately did something they knew they were not supposed to do, so they were being punished more for the rebellion than the belt/ socks.

Yawadongas,
Thank you o jare

I know people who've said that they'd rather have been caned than heard the words "You've disappointed me".

There are people like this, but i know that these kind of discipline would not have worked for me, because word's don't matter a lot to me like that, only action does (in this case flogging).

I will prefer my area boys.

N200 is enough to remove any threat and I will even get extras through praise singing with a deep voice (Alaye Baba, tiyin la she o. Ko ni da fun anybody to ba bosi wa ju yin, a ma gba emi e teba ti fun wa ni instructions). At least all they want is money for the next meal.

Crib will shoot me for looking them in the eyes as that is disrespect, no negotiations.

Omo, you don hit the jackpot once again. Naija gangsterism is mostly caused by poverty, Crips, bloods, Latin Kings and the others would shoot for no reason just to prove there manhood.

benelli,

It is your fault for not teaching your child to be proud of his heritage and his culture. Instead of telling what a great name he has, you simply succumbed to peer pressure just like others. If you cannot stand up for your identity, then you are not a man, sorry for being blunt but that is the truth.

Like someone said earlier, you would never see an oyinbo person EVER give there children a Nigerian.

They are soon about to start catching them.

https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-296443.0.html

Wow, this is going to be an amazing development.

By the way, mckracles, where is your source?

I thought this thing was only accurate to within a couple of months?

Liverpool just reject a 65m£ bid for torres from Real madrid. I dont think L'pool is as broke as you make it sound

He is there best player so they cannot afford to.

In the light of President Obama's health reform, does anyone believe in free healthcare for all Nigerians.

I used to think that i was a centrist (centre) like Bill Clinton but i am not an ideologue so i refused to be bound by any ideology, instead, i am a pragmatist, in other words, whatever works is fine by me.

ON THE Atlantic coast of Gabon, white sand beaches slope out into the ocean. That sand, in which few tourists leave their footprints, was Omar Bongo’s. Elephants and buffalo stroll down to the water, and leatherback turtles make their nests: his elephants, his buffalo, his turtles. Oil rigs and gas flares punctuate the horizon: his oil, 3.2 billion barrels in proven reserves. Eastwards, the silver carriages of the world’s most expensive railway rattle five times a week through his hardwood forests between Libreville, the capital, and Franceville, in his homeland, carrying loads of his manganese or piled high with his okoumé and ozigo logs, bound mostly for China.

Mr Bongo made no distinction between Gabon and his private property. He had ruled there so long, 42 years, that they had become one. It was therefore perfectly natural that an oil company, granted a large concession for coastal drilling, should slip him regular suitcases stuffed with cash. It was natural that $2.6m in aid money should be used to decorate his private jet, that government funds should pay for the Italian marble cladding his palace, and that his wife Edith’s sea-blue Maybach, in which she was driven round Paris, should be paid for with a cheque drawn on the Gabonese treasury. Of the $130m in his personal accounts at Citibank in New York, it was probable—though Citibank never asked, and nobody ever managed to pin a charge on him—that much of it was derived from the GDP of his country.

The suggestion of fiddling public finances flummoxed and infuriated him. Corruption, he once explained to a reporter, was not an African word. No more was nepotism: he simply looked after his family, supplying them with villas in Nice as well as the ministries of defence and foreign affairs. When French judges in 2009 froze nine of his 70 bank accounts, he was outraged. An attack on him was obviously an attempt to destabilise his country. He was equally indignant when in 2004, after a “Miss Humanity” pageant was held in Libreville, Miss Peru charged him with sexual harassment for summoning her to the palace and, he hoped, to his nifty behind-the-panelling bed. If something was in Gabon, by nature or chance, he évidemment had first dibs on it.

France, the ex-colonial power in Gabon, went along with this. Mr Bongo, though short, was every inch a Francophile, from his platform heels through the immaculate tailoring to his gravelly-but-grammatical French. Their bargain, too, was a neat one. He allowed the French to take his oil and wood; they subsidised and protected him. At various times through his long political career, when opposition elements got brash or multi-party democracy, which he allowed after 1993, became too lively, the French military base in Libreville would turn out the paratroopers for him. In France, to which he went as often as he could, he had his choice of 39 properties, four of them on the Avenue Foch in Paris, in which to hobnob with the cream of the Elysée. Swanning round as he did, paying for everything with crisp wads of notes, he naturally funnelled money to French politicians, right or left, who caught his eye. When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing complained about Gabonese funding of his rival, Jacques Chirac, Mr Bongo once again failed to grasp what he objected to.

Dirt roads and champagne
At home, since Gabon was his, he cosseted it one moment and ravaged it the next. In 2002 he created 13 national parks, but the trees and even the waterfalls could go for a consideration. His lordly airs were impressive for a farmer’s son from Lewai (now Bongoville), the youngest of at least nine children, born “without a cot or a nanny”, as he boasted on his website, and whose expectations under French rule had extended no further than working in the post office. Usefulness and scheming got him right to the top, to become President Léon M’ba’s right-hand man and, when M’ba died in 1967, president himself; as well as minister of defence, interior, information and planning.

Gabon’s riches eased his way at every turn. A timber concession here, a stretch of paved road or a Bongo stadium there, disarmed anyone who objected to his way of doing things. Even Pierre Mamboundou, his most diligent opponent, was soothed after many years with $21.5m spent on his constituency. Business visitors to the capital found it chic, feudal and hospitable, like an Arab emirate; in Mr Bongo’s time, Gabon’s consumption of champagne was said to be the highest in the world. Everyone could be suborned or sweetened except his first wife, Joséphine, who became a pop singer after the divorce and sang cutting songs about her young replacement.

Outside the glamour of Libreville, where the M’bolo hypermarché offered shining shelves of fine wines and best French cheese, a third of his people travelled on back-breaking roads between villages without clinics, subsisting on cassava and fishing. But Mr Bongo brought decades of tranquillity, a rare enough commodity in Central Africa; order, and prosperity for a close and favoured few. So on June 11th hundreds of Gabonese lined up, clutching his portrait, outside the presidential palace where, in a flower-filled chapel, he lay in state, rather small in his coffin, in the country that was his.

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13855223

bolorunfem

Thanks a lotttttttttt for that translation.


mzansigirl

Thanks a lot for that translation, man you language must be really broad. By the way, are you from botswana??

Is Homework A Waste Of Time For Primary School Children?

[size=18pt]OH GOODNESS ME!!!!! [/size]


I can't believe that somebody can even say this with a straight face!!! Unbelievable, how could homework not be necessary for primary school students? Children learn by repitition. If there is one thing about learning, it is that, it is one thing to learn something in class, it is another to be able to do it on your own, geez, this is common sense people, just because some oyinbo teachers (who are in the extreme minority in the academic community ) think it is useless does not mean that we should adopt there views. By the way, this teachers are lazy.