₦airaland Forum

I don't know if it is political correctness or naivety on the part of some of you.

But for me, as an empiricist, given that I know that the vast majority of terrorist organizations in the world today are Muslim, then it seems absurd to then think that there is not something about the religion that encourages behavior that makes society-building difficult.

abacus: All I have to say is you are gullible, you readily accept the error of state of origin but the arrest.

Until we exclude religion and tribe from our politics, we head no where as a country.

Eh.

The man is part of an Islamic terrorist organization, no?

So I should ignore that his actions are motivated by his religious beliefs?

Why do you all enjoy hiding your heads in the sand?

It is impossible to defeat problems unless you are willing to admit that you have them.

So Boko Haram has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, I take it?

If a new terrorist organization springs up today somewhere in the world and you are only told that they are religious, you will believe that there is a 15% chance of them being catholic, 15% chance protestant, 15% muslim, 15% hindu, 15% Chinese traditional religion, etc?

Or won't it be a pretty good bet to think that 95%+ of the time this is going to be a Muslim terrorist organization?

Let us be honest with ourselves.

Lying to yourself makes life harder and more complicated than it has to be.

wesley80: That is always going to be an unfair statement. A gun is only dangerous in the hand of a foool.

It is an imprecise statement, but not an unfair one.

If I wanted to be more precise, perhaps I should say, "characteristics and beliefs X, Y and Z that are inimical to building a free, prosperous and happy society seem to be more prevalent among practitioners of Islam."

However, the general idea behind the original statement is correct.

Employers offering free housing just makes things messier, imo.

Harder to fire employees, harder for employees to quit and find a new job.

Lose-lose situation.

As an employee, I'd prefer the cash (assuming I'd get equal value).

As an employer, I'd prefer paying cash too.

queensmith: Well i'm no lawyer, but if the home is being subject to your employment then I understand if the government is at no obligation to make provision for that.

It's probably only doctors with families that have housing, we will see anyways. Haven't lived in subsidized housing esp in Nigeria so I'm also clueless to how it works. But it makes perfect sense to me for the doctors to be stripped of all benefits especially since they were fired for misconduct.

So I understand your point.

If free housing is one of the perks of your job, if you are fired or go on strike, presumably you shouldn't be able to get this benefit any more. (This is why imo employers shouldn't offer perks like this. Just pay your workers a higher salary in lieu of free housing, and let them find their own accomodations.)

So one way to handle this is to kick them out of their house immediately.

But an easier, more humane way is just to make them pay rent until their 6 months is up.

Well, what is more plausible.

Somebody doing a hatchet job and trying to associate Aregbe with terrorism, and making a rookie mistake like making the man's town of origin Ogbomosho?

Or a typo by the writer of the article.

Which is the more likely explanation, in your opinion?

These journalists make a lot of mistakes when writing articles. The Osun State part, like I said, was probably an error made entirely by the writer of the article.

The town of origin is what is important anyways, not the state.

Ogbomosho is Ogbomosho.

queensmith: It will be conditional on being employed by the state. If it's not free it must be subsidized. If they are no longer working they cannot live in the houses. Normal tenancy rules will not apply. i'm guessing sha- that only makes sense. The houses technically doesnt belong to them, it belongs to the state.

It doesn't belong to them. But you can't kick people out of their homes on short notice.

They should be forced to pay NORMAL RENT upon being fired. But they should still be given 6 months notice.

Imagine, some of these doctors will have families. Children in school. You cannot uproot a family just like that.

[quote author=Rhino.5dm]^
but they are quick to mention OSUN STATE? ?[/quote]If they wanted to do a hatchet job, they wouldn't have mentioned Ogbomosho.

Though...actually this article is short on details.

How long has the dude been in Kano for?

We know Ogbmosho people travel a lot and have been doing so for a long time.

For all we know his family has lived in Kano for 70+ years.

He may be Yoruba by ethnicity and in origin, but orientation and mentality-wise not.

I need more details on the man's background.

If he is a guy who grew up in the SW, then I'd be concerned. But perhaps this is not the case.

The article isn't really about aregbe anyways.

Probably just a dumb typo by the author of the article.

The larger issue (at least to me) is that it seems that at least one prominent leader of BH is a Yoruba Muslim.

Well, let's wait and see.

Regarding Osun state, was probably just a typo by the author of the article.

Toaskarity: you dont have to? remember yoruba have 50/50 islam/christian

if an hausa can behave like an arab cos of islam, do you think yoruba
is immune to it?

Well I always had this belief in:

a) "good Muslims" and
b) "bad Muslims" (Arabs and Arab wanna-bes for the most part, like Somalis, Fulanis, Hausa, etc).

However, it seems that I was mistaken

Grand plot ke

What type of grand plot will make a yoruba man stupid enough to join an Islamic terrorist organization?

What profit is there in that? What can be gained from it? The man is a fool, all by himself

yoruba boko haram.

i am ... surprised

RICHIE BOI: It was also gathered that the affected doctors had been given until 5a.m. today to vacate the staff quarters.

But the State Tenancy Law states that tenants should be given six months’ eviction notice.

Yeah. Doesn't seem as if you can kick someone out of their house on such short notice.

Poor form on the part of the Lagos State government.

btw, do doctors pay rent? Or was this free housing?

If the latter...so during this time they were striking they were still enjoying the benefit of their job

Ngwakwe: Mysterious!
When Africans claim to be cheated on mining of a natural resources that forever would have eluded them without outside help. To be fair I am against degrading of environment and any effect of the environs including uneven sharing of profits from the deal.

Most Muslims hate the West, let them get the Gold while sacrificing the Children. It is Muslim Gold.

Let allow experts to do their job and lets share for the benefit of mankind

Err, what? Outside help? West?

They are poisoning their kids themselves...nobody else is involved but them.

i no gree with aregbe

governors need to do their jobs

“We are all one and anybody who feels he is indifferent to the problems of Boko Haram or the problem of the North is just engaging himself in delusion. We are all one, we are one nation and what binds us together cannot be easily dismantled, or severed. I believe we can work as a people to find solutions to our common problem."

No, my dear Shettima. We are not one. You and I are not the same. We are different ideologically, in religion, in ethnicity, in way of life, in aspirations for the future.

By Maram Mazen - May 10, 2012
A gold rush in northern Nigeria risks exposing tens of thousands of children to lead poisoning in what may already be the worst such crisis in history, Medecins Sans Frontieres said.

Residents of the northern Zamfara state started artisanal gold-mining in lead-rich ore around 2009 as the price of gold increased. When miners return to their villages, or grind ore near their homes, they spread lead-rich dust into households and the ground on which children crawl, resulting in them eating the lead as they have more hand-to-mouth activity than adults, the Geneva-based aid group said.

“We’re looking at the possibility of eventually more of the lead working its way into the aquifers, into the wells, into the water systems,” Ivan Gayton, a country director for MSF, told reporters yesterday in Abuja, the capital. “We haven’t even gotten there yet. Right now, we’re just looking at the effects of one or two years’ worth of dust.”

The outbreak has led to the deaths of 460 children, while 4,000 have been contaminated, he said. MSF has treated 2,500, some of whom will need as many as 20 years of follow-up therapy. Another 1,500 children in the village of Bagega haven’t been treated because the government hasn’t cleaned up the area, making treatment futile, he said. In seven villages where a clean-up has been carried out, recontamination has occurred and is now accelerating, he said.

Safety Culture

Mohammed Kabir Janyau, the commissioner of Zamfara state’s Health Ministry, said by phone from Abuja today that the local authority is “trying to enlighten people to understand the culture of safe mining practice” as well as providing miners with safety equipment such as masks, gloves and respirators. An official who answered the phone at the Federal Mining Ministry declined to comment and said the minister wasn’t immediately available to comment.

Gayton spoke at a two-day meeting of Nigeria’s ministries of health, environment and mining on the crisis. The federal government should help the miners find a safer way to extract the gold while cleaning the lead from households and villages to prevent further contamination, he said.

“We were hoping at this conference we would hear a real concrete response, that there would be a time-line and a real commitment of resources,” Jane Cohen, an environmental health researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, said today in Abuja.

‘Political Will’

The lack of high-level government participation suggests that may not be the case, she said. “The role that the federal government can play is clear right now, and by not playing that they are preventing the situation from being resolved.”

“The decision makers aren’t here today,” Gayton said at the closing session of the conference. “So those people who can actually make the decisions to begin these programs, sent representatives but they aren’t here to announce these decisions.”

The government announced in November that it would fund a clean-up with 850 million naira ($5.4 million). That would “go a long way” to resolving the issue, though authorities have yet to display “the political will to get that money released,” Gayton said. MSF is spending $5 million of its own money a year to treat the children, and lacks the resources to provide more treatment if the crisis worsens, he said.

Fund Release

“Even if the ministers were here themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to say when it’s going to be released,” Abdulsalami Nasidi, a project director for Nigeria Center for Disease Control, who was representing the health minister at the conference, said at the closing session when asked when the funds would be provided. “We pledge to follow up.”

Long-term consequences for the children who have been treated include mental deficiency, loss of IQ, damaged organs and developmental difficulties, Gayton said. “Even those children who we’ve saved are likely to be in rough shape, and probably for the rest of their lives.”

Located in the poverty-stricken north of Nigeria, 71 percent of Zamfara’s population lives on less than $1 a day, compared with the national average of 61 percent. Children there have been found with levels of lead that are dozens of times higher than the internationally accepted threshold, Gayton said.

“It’s accurate to say that this is one of the worst, if not the worst, lead-poisoning crises ever,” he said. He predicts it may get worse, driven by a near-quadrupling of gold prices in the last seven years, to about $1,600 an ounce.

“With the price of gold anywhere near where it is right now, it’s going to continue expanding,” he said of the artisanal mining. “People will find the limits of these gold deposits, no matter how far they go.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2012-05-10/nigeria-gold-rush-exposes-thousands-of-children-to-lead-poison.html

Put up a poll

pac > biggie for me.

Dunno why you are comparing either with Jesus tho

It depends on what your objectives are.

Obviously if you want to be successful in some career where your competitors are brainy, then you need to be intelligent.

However, if success at your career choice depends on some other ability (physical strength/speed for a professional athlete, attractiveness for a model, etc), then indeed intelligence probably isn't that important.

It honestly depends on what you are trying to do.

kettykin: what really do they people of ogoni want ? They cant survive as an independent african country

Why not?

phantom: this fashola man is just power drunk but very soon the drink go clear for im eye....siddon,look,laugh na im i dey...

Power drunk

You usually are a fairly rational man.

What would you do in the same situation, then?

Eko Ile: No they are not.

Ah, thanks.

lmao

alienYOUTH...a deeply cynical and critical man.

A man after my own heart

Look dude, like I said. Rather than dwelling on our failures of the past, let's spend the next 1000 years kicking azz and taking names.

Bad stuff happened. But forget about it and don't let the past be a burden.

Human beings will be on this planet for a very long time (well, assuming we don't do something dumb like nuclear war ).

Just because you are behind now doesn't mean you will always be behind.