₦airaland Forum

jessca048:
sometimes I feel for men the society we live have conditioned and program them by saying real men don't cry.sometimes crying reduces the tension you are feeling. little wonder the life span of an average man is shorter than a woman's own cos there are too many bottled emotions

Chrisrare:
He's brave. Life is sweet, if u r alive and not enjoying this life, better try the next life.

Archangel15:
Fight for her, women don't usually know what they want

She maybe waiting for you to come and get her

mfm04622:
This will expand the schools that focuses on technology without reducing conventional universities. This govt equated HND graduates with degree holders and you still say this govt demoralised HND holders?

mapet:
You alleged myopic reforms, yet you gave opinion that is just a concoction of flowery words. Reduce the number of conventional universities? how? Cancel or withdraw license? outright close-down? or what exactly? How exactly are Universities of Technology and Polytechnics going to empower middle class?

My tots are that you do not understand this intiative, what intent it was to serve and how it ties into aspiration to properly integrate polytechnic graduate correctly into the "system". What I see you do is an attempt to denigrate this initiative with a rather confusing/confused submission.

prettyirene:
Don't get me wrong...I'm not tribalistic...I believe in one Nigeria...But why do yorubas like to backstab and betray People ..I have discovered it's part of them...Here is my story...My best friend is yoruba of over 10years we practically do things together I could catch a grenade for
her�� .I introduced her to another close friend of mine who is also yoruba...who is based abroad.. now I don't know her motivation ... do you know that everything I tell this lady I mean my friend she will relay the message to her .... When I found out I honestly so heartbroken......And will never associate myself with an yoruba person again ���

Diamond23:
Chaiii!!!! ;Babe, u don caste us finish. Tot we v girls code abi na only guys get ‘em....... u deserved this

NeeKlaus:
Most girls don't know what they want. At times, they keep a guy waiting while searching for a better option - an upgrade of the waiting guy.

Alas! They end up losing both ways and blame it on the 'wickedness of men'. I sure do know that you can't eat your cake and have it.

three:
Even Oyinbo Newspaper remember Buhari, na Naija peepo no dey remember history,

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/01/nigerias-new-president-muhammadu-buhari-is-the-man-who-put-fela-kuti-in-jail


Plus this Nairaland thread that rehashed the issue...

https://www.nairaland.com/2116222/fela-kuti-charged-armed-robbery

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/4/1/1427909735051/ab8d0c6a-9551-4123-9045-539f83f4dd53-2060x1236.jpeg?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=00a6c137f650ccfacb0ee46b5233625a

Twoclans:
Go joor
The OP said money is not a problem, and I gave him a moderate list.

Ivorianaija:
Some of the most attractive people I've met were born in December.

Rickyuzzy:
This ‘culture’ – or better put, traditions – that we have forced upon us in the infancy of our consciousness by thoughtless trading Europeans is not ours any more than the iPhone is a Nigerian invention.

Unfortunately the network of our historical and contemporary realities as Nigerians – including religion, mores, norms, dominant attitudes, and of course our system of archaic laws – came out of this mishmash of confusion and oppression. We acquired a way of life that was not ours, inefficiently adopted it into a way of life we were still evolving, and have ended up with confusion as the norm for our legal system.

It is the reason why Nigeria’s ‘culture’ has often been a cooking pot of inane debates, like the ones we used to have conscientiously in the 90s: should women be allowed to wear trousers? Neither first lady Aisha Buhari nor first bank chairman Ibukun Awosika would seriously entertain this debate today of course. But such is our culture that many women were actually called prostitutes in the 80s and the 90s because they wore what some religious leaders – ignorant of the non-binary, constantly evolving category-boundary history of male and female attire – called ‘men’s clothing’.

When you mix a confused culture with an insecure and badly thought out system of laws, kept in place by clueless politicians and maintained in stone by religious leaders who have not read and understood enough of the world, what we have is the Nigeria of today: where minority rights are tramped upon, inane rules guide our conduct, and lawyers still wear ridiculous attire to represent clients in badly ventilated courtrooms.

It is from this same conundrum of ambiguity that we have that most oppressive of all Nigerian laws: that which stops two consenting adults from having a legitimate, non-criminalised relationship, simply because they have the same reproductive organs. For us as a country, we insist that for people to love each other in a romantic, sexual, intimate way, they must find someone with a different sexual organ than they, someone with a different gender construct than they. We are a society very obsessed with joysticks and vaginas.[/b]

[/b]When you ask people why they insist on this restrictive legal and cultural regime even though the global body of research across the world pinpoints homosexuality as a legitimate stop in the evolutionary epic, they say either of three things: a) it is not part of our culture; b) it is not natural; and c) our religions forbid it – by which mostly they mean the imported Christian and Muslim faiths, because there is nothing in the canon of Ifa, Ogun or any of the Igbo pantheon of gods that speaks against the freedom to love irrespective of gender and sexual organ.[/b]

I believe I have already addressed the question of culture, so let’s turn our minds to the question of nature.

Is it true that men having sex with men and women having sex with women is simply not natural? The preponderance of biological and anthropological evidence begs to disagree. And really it’s embarrassing that people are still making that argument in 2017.

“Sex-linked biology and gender relations, as well as the concepts of race and ethnicity, require conceptual clarity in order to determine the interactive influences of each in giving rise to health differentials. To narrowly focus on such concepts impedes an appreciation of the rich variety among humans.”

People of same gender have been having sex with each other for, as long as I know, the five thousand years of recorded history, everyone from Alexander the Great to Virginia Woolf. And, of course, everything from paintings of the San people of Zimbabwe to evidence from the Nzima people of Ghana shows proof of not just African homosexual sex, but also homosexual marriage. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing sensible about the accusation of unnatural as the Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari reminded the world in his spectacular book, Sapiens, last year. Anything that can happen is by definition natural. If two women can find a way to sexual pleasure, then by the obvious evidence nature already allows it. If a man can wear what we now call ‘female clothing’ and not fall down and die because of it, then it is by nature natural. Nature allows a massive spectrum of possibilities, he reminds us; it is us humans that limit the possibilities with our fears, taboos and phobias, not nature.

But let’s still investigate the word ‘natural’. Is there anything intrinsically positive about the Natural? In the first few centuries after Christ, it was very natural for a man to have 14 children and to lose more than a dozen of them to disease, and it was very natural for bacteria to wipe off millions of people because there was none of the medicines we have now. Those were very natural. And yet here we are now, as a race, having overcome those challenges, because we found ‘unnatural’ ways to fight nature through medicine. Indeed, humanity has spent the past two million years, since man discovered fire, fighting and running away from ‘nature’. We build houses to escape the rain. We buy shaving powder to get rid of the natural hair that grows on our chins and armpits. And we have unnatural caesarian operations because sometimes nature is careless, thoughtless and pointless.

Nothing about how we live our lives today is ‘natural’. Indeed, if a man from ancient Greece woke up today and saw a world with stock exchanges, female presidents, iPhones, and Twitter threads, he would scream and rave at the unnaturalness of it all. But that is how humanity advances. We move forward. We leave the past behind, not because there is anything intrinsically wrong with the past, but because the past is limited. We now know so much about our universe and ourselves than people of the past knew.

Indeed one of the most fascinating things about human nature is how many of us are here, free, today because of the ways that society has advanced beyond what was natural many decades and centuries ago, including slavery, segregation and female circumcision, and yet we want the world to stop moving because we have now arrived.

To excuse this dissonance, point often to ‘nature’. We then purport to speak for God, by claiming that what we deem natural today – even though it wasn’t ‘natural’ for people just a century ago – is what God says is natural for all people as well. We take God as our all purpose excuse to fight change, to fight difference, to insist on our own intrinsic superiority.

Ridiculous, isn’t it?

And this is where religion has played a villain’s role. As Ali A. Rizvi, author of The Atheist Muslim, presciently points out, “Culture is always evolving. But religion freezes culture in time. Religion dogmatizes culture and arrests its evolution.”

But as natural selection teaches us – and if you don’t believe in natural selection, a cursory reading of received history teaches us – there is no point in the past that was perfect and godly. I mean, have you read your bible lately? The entirety of the Old Testament is a long, repetitive record of sinful, reprobate cultures. Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, all these prophets moaned and bemoaned how deeply unrighteous people were. So when Christian warriors say they want to restore biblical morality, I say ‘huh’?

There was no perfect stasis of righteousness in the past. The world has only gotten better as it has progressed forward. We are a generation healthier, richer and more at peace with our neighbours than any generation in times past. Since the Second World War, however, rates of violent death have fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than ever before—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. If asked to choose between living in the times of Joshua and living in the times of Donald Trump, I assume you many of us should choose the much more peaceable times of today.

That doesn’t mean the past was wrong. It means the past was limited, and cannot be our standard for forging the future.

Moving away from the past has helped us discover that we have been unfair to those who are different from us, and has given us the tools and knowledge to treat them fairer, and with the love and acceptance that the divinity of Jesus – being the same, yesterday, today and forever, knowing the end of a thing even from the beginning – already preached those 2000 years ago Jerusalem that we must love our neighbours, even with their imperfections, as we love ourselves.

What makes us expend more energy asking for young gay men to be jailed and killed than for all our past leaders to be rounded up and jailed? How is Dino Melaye more ‘natural’ and ‘human’ than Ellen DeGeneres?

What kind of stupid ass system of mores and laws arrives at such a pointless, ridiculous conclusion?

We must rethink the ways we have used religion as an excuse to hold others back and in doing that, punish ourselves by holding ourselves back. Because where there are hateful laws like we have in Nigeria, societies have historically proven that their progress will be slow. You cannot advance forward if you hold your people back with hate.

Is it really a coincidence that Africa is both the least tolerant continent on earth as well as the poorest?

We live in a country where it is legal to be Senator Sani Yerima and illegal to be Apple CEO Tim Cook, and we want to make progress?

It is time to look inwards into the deplorable mess of cultural, religious and legal restrictions that we have tired ourselves in and open our hearts, minds and spirits to the joy, progress and advancement that truly equitable and fair laws can bring to a thirsty nation.

That is not a gay agenda. That is an equality agenda. It is not an equal debate if those who are against gay peoples have rights and freedoms that gay people don’t have. You are able to get married, walk about freely, speak openly about who you had a date with yesterday, but they can’t. How can you quarrel with them wanting that? How is that a ‘bad’ ‘agenda’?

Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot love a person if you deny the person rights and freedoms just because you don’t approve of how they live their lives.

That is not love. That is wickedness.


Chude Jideonwo, the Chief Executive Officer of Joy, Inc., delivered this keynote address – THE IMPACT OF CULTURAL, TRADITIONAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS ON FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF SEXUAL MINORITIES IN NIGERIA – at the annual Human Rights, Sexuality and the Law Symposium by The Initiative for Equal Rights on 13 December 2017, in Lagos, Nigeria in commemoration of the International Day for Human Rights.

yeyerolling:
U lot dont even know what feminism means. The average nigerian man is insecure . That is why most would not marry ladies in thier office doing well and getting promoted. They prefer Amara wey dey 400l or about to go for NYSC because they can control her without objection

KillaBeauty:
I wonder! Is it not better the rich father in law helps him by getting him a job than giving him money all the time? Nawa oh

joyberry:
Am an airwoman so am gonna talk about this issue, i think its fear from the guys part,thinking the lady would punish them if the relationship goes haywire. And most guys are insecure,always trying to intimidate ladies to boost their ego,so probably they can't really intimidate those ladies. Lastly, majority of military ladies are always unruly, saucy and having a low value of civilians .Ordinary admiration from civilians, they blow up,some even goes as far as punishing the guys fr it,forgetting that its not an order you must marry a military personnel as a female soilder .So my fellow military ladies abeg calm down if civilians toast you, if u fancy him, go on with the relationship, stop intimidating guys with your military presence. Alot of us are in the base old and unmarried, frustrated always putting undue pressure and trying to frustrate young ladies.As for civilian guys are my pick for relationship and marriage. A word is enough for the wise.And my fellow military ladies, Please always look good, simple and pretty, leave your military attitudes in the base,stop looking manly and unruly cos you are a military lady.if you are on mufti and unarmed, You are a civilian, stop intimidating people.

ibkayee:
Writeup is 100% on point

OvaSabi1:
I don't totally disagree with this. If you want people to remain celebate till marriage, it's only fair that you can grant assurance to the intending couples that everything is alright in za oza room. Some men know that they are impotent but will hide it. Some women have done risky things to jeopardise their fertility and they will hide it.
My reservations about this is if they use this as virginity checker of some sorts. They can only use this for women. How will you know for men? How about she goes for surgery to reconstruct "IT"? But I doubt that is the case here.