Latest Nigeria News

Rotary in Action 

I found news about Rotary and Boko Harm in a Google alert I have set up. I’m so impressed with the work of Rotary in this country and around the world.

I always think of Dick Foot, CEO of the Westport YMCA, who hired me as their first Director of Development, when I read about Rotary. He loved the Rotary almost as much as he loved the YMCA!

This article is about the Rotary Club of Livonia, which as far as I can tell is near Detroit, and their assistance to people displaced by Boko Haram. The “Rotary Club is partnering with Healing Hands to distribute items in Nigeria. Its website is www.hhands.org/.”They are especially interested in soccer equipment. “Soccer leagues help the children keep occupied,” said Hart, “but many must play barefoot.”

Congratulations to them!

Phone Deactivation

I read an article in Leadership, which calls itself “Nigeria’s Most Influential Newspaper” that said about 38 million mobile phone lines had been deactivated in an effort to curtail Boko Haram’s network. All four major networks – MTN, Airtel, Glo and Etisalat – were involved.

So I called my son Sam in Lagos to see if his cell phone was working. It was; I was pleased when he answered. He had heard about the deactivation but was surprised when I said it was aimed at Boko Haram. He thought it was simply to get people to register.

For a second or two when I read the headline, I wondered if the writer was talking about landlines. Then I remembered that landlines are few and far between in Nigeria, so of course it was the mobile phones. SIM cards to buy minutes on cell phones, and cheap cell phones, are sold all over in the country; I can’t imagine that they are registered.

I suspect that the deactivation has hurt many innocent people who will be scrambling to find transport to the mobile phone offices to register their phones.

And Horses?

Another news agency, i24, has said that the miitary has declard a ban on the use of horses in all of Bornu State, again to hamper Boko Haram attacks. The military spokesman for Borno, Colonel Tukur Gusau, said, “the military surge in the region had thrown the Islamic State group-allied rebels into “disarray”, cutting off their supply lines, including for fuel.

“This has forced the terrorists to abandon their vehicles due to lack of fuel and resort to the use of horses in carrying out attacks in remote villages,” he added.”

Will this slow down or stop their attacks? Not yet, apparently.

Yet one more news source says an attack yesterday killed 26.

Three Months

Although President Buhari has said Boko Haram will be defeated in three months, a Nigerian man in London interviewed by the International Business Times, disputes this.

He believes more time and more effort must go into winning the hearts and minds of ‘the community’ to combat Boko Haram effectively. A military solution alone will not succeed.

African Mudcloth

I have a friend who is trying to find a source for African mudcloth to use in furnishings.

I contacted several people who I thought might know, but no one has a reliable source that could sell in the quantity she wants. Do you have any ideas?

Architecture of Segregation

The New York Times had an op-ed by contributing writer Thomas Edsell called Whose Neighborhood Is It? He asks what all the Supreme Court decisions and civil actions have done to ease the unwholesome housing segregation that exists in America today.

Quoting his article, I read, “We are witnessing a nationwide return of concentrated poverty that is racial in nature,” writes Paul A. Jargowsky, a fellow at the Century Foundation, in his Aug. 11 essay “Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy.” That’s a fascinating article with a lot of scholarly detail, long but worthwhile.

Edsell says, “There is wide agreement among scholars that these neighborhoods are harmful to the children who live in them, who suffer disproportionately from impaired cognitive abilities, increased behavioral problems and fragile family structures.”

Despite all the bad news and difficulties we face, he has hope.

“Government action has often been resisted but, over time, it has pulled millions of blacks into the mainstream of American life. From 1940 to2014, the percentage of African-Americans ages 25 to 29 with high school degrees rose from 6.9 percent to 91.9 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of blacks with college degrees grew from 1.4 percent to 22.4 percent. From 1963 (a year before enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to 2015, the percentage of blacks employed in management, professional and related occupations more than tripled, from 8.7 percent to 29.5 percent.

“Although progress toward racial and ethnic integration has been sporadic – frequently one step forward, two steps back – credible progress has been made over the last 75 years. We have not come to the end of the story, but there are grounds for optimism.”

TEAM Westport is planning for another conversation on race at our library next month. Will we be optimistic?

Sources

I hope you will help me develop a list of websites  where we can read and post information about race, racism, and Black Lives Matter.

Here is my first candidate: Code Switch, Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity, by an NPR team of reporters. What are yours?