Daily Archives: July 29, 2021

Three new plaques in Lafayette Square note the contributions of enslaved people to the building of the White House, the location of the park as a protest zone and former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's role in preserving the park and creating the White House Historical Association. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

WASHINGTON The unveiling ceremony on the north side of Lafayette Square on Wednesday wasnt large and it didnt last long, but history was made. Or rather, history was recognized. Finally.

Fifty or so people gathered in the late-morning swelter to watch as Stewart D. McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association (WHHA), and John Stanwich, the National Park Services liaison to the White House, removed black cloth draping three historic markers on the north side of the square.

Each marker told a different story about the park, but it was the first marker, the one that acknowledged the role slavery played in building the nearby White House, that felt monumental. To date there had been no other formal recognition, not a plaque or a memorial, noting that hundreds of enslaved people helped build and later maintain and staff the White House.

This new marker tells some of that story, noting that beginning in 1792, enslaved African Americans were hired out by their owners to work alongside English, Scottish and Irish wage laborers and craftsmen. During the eight-year project, hundreds of free and enslaved African Americans contributed to every aspect of the construction.

It concludes: The use of enslaved labor to build the home of the President of the United States often seen as a symbol of democracy illuminates our countrys conflicted relationship with the institution of slavery and the ideals of freedom and equality promised in Americas founding documents.

For Brandon A. Robinson, a Black attorney from North Carolina and a member of the WHHA who came to Washington for the unveiling, the message is an essential one.

It represents, he said, a microcosm of a larger conversation that America is trying to have about telling all stories as opposed to having just one story. And that narrative is important not just for sentimental reasons, but because its the more correct way to tell the story.

The impetus for the marker and a greater focus on the history of slavery at the White House came from a comment made by former first lady Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, according to McLaurin.

She said, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, McLaurin recalled in an interview Tuesday. And the next day we were inundated online with questions from people wanting information on the backstory of what she said and people who wanted to learn more.

McLaurin,who is White, helped launch a research effort to find out as much as possible about the role slavery played in the White House. Early last year, the WHHA launched Slavery in the Presidents Neighborhood, an online exhibit that examines and traces the lives of enslaved people at Americas most famous address.

John Stanwich of the National Park Service talks about the three new plaques unveiled Wednesday in Lafayette Square. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

To date it has chronicled information about more than 300 enslaved men, women and children who can be linked to the building and staffing at the White House beginning in 1792 and lasting through the first half of the 19th century. They served in the presidential households of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor.

McLaurin said the WHHA is continuing its research and hopes to be able to locate descendants of individuals who had been enslaved at the White House, though that can be difficult because in many cases only the first names are known. He also said he wants there to be some acknowledgment or marker inside the White House, too. In a normal year, before the coronavirus, 500,000 to 600,000 visitors tour the White House. Learning more about its complete history would benefit everyone, he said.

Dedrick Makle and his son Joseph stopped to read the marker soon after it was unveiled. Makle, 39, a D.C. native who moved to California a decade ago, said he was glad to see the role of slavery acknowledged.

Everyone knows the stories of the presidents who lived here, but no one knows how it was built, said Makle, who is Black. The comments about how slaves were pivotal and how much of a part they played in this presidential space is great to see after so many years.

Eula Adams, a retired executive who is on the national council of the WHHA and lives in Denver, said it was important to stress that the history is nonpartisan.

This is history for all Americans, said Adams, who is Black. So many of my friends and colleagues dont really know this part of the story, and its important that we all know it.

The two other markers unveiled Wednesday address the importance of Lafayette Square itself in the nations history and how that came to be.

One points to the significant role that former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy played in preserving the square and preventing the destruction of some of the historic buildings that surround it. Kennedy also helped found the White House Historical Association as a private organization that partnered with the Park Service to finance restoration and improvements to the White House and acquire art and furniture for its stately rooms.

Shes 31 years old when her husband becomes president of the United States. Due to tragic circumstances, she is first lady for less than three years, but what she accomplished in that short period of time is still in process and procedure, McLaurin said. The foundation that she built has grown and is still what supports and enables presidents and first ladies today to maintain that museum standard of the White House.

The final marker explains how the park has been the locus of protests over the past century, beginning with protests by female suffragists in 1917, after which a number of the participants were fined or arrested, and continuing to the present.

Protests are a regular feature in the square, from smaller daily demonstrations to much larger gatherings favoring or opposing presidents or their policies.

McLaurin describes it as Americas public square. Its a place where you can express your First Amendment views and you are literally within earshot of the president of the United States, he said. And thats pretty remarkable.

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New marker acknowledges role of slavery in building White House - Stars and Stripes

High school yearbooks are filled with the idyls of youthfootball games, proms, and notes from best friends forever. My 1980 high school yearbook was no different except for one picture.

The photography club snapped a shot of a massive billboard opposite the entrance to the home post of the 82nd Airborne Division. The message was the crowning glory of the Jimmy Carter yearsIRAN, LET OUR PEOPLE GO. That is what we had become, a nation reduced to begging Tehrans theocratic fanatics to release U.S. diplomats and soldiers.

In the 1970s, the world assumed that the United States was on an inevitable decline riven by problems at home and indecisiveness abroad. The crime was out of control.Oil prices had tripled, and gas lines were everywhere. Americans learned a new word: stagflation.

The defense budget tanked; there was no fuel for vehicles and no money for training. Overseas, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Cuban proxies were rampaging through southern Africa. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter apologized on behalf ofAmerica. Some academics assessed as they do nowthat America had entered the Thucydides trap. In this trap,America played the role of Athens and the Soviet Union played the role of Sparta.

>>>Why Joe Bidens China Strategy Is Destined for Failure

Then-Senator Joe Biden cut his political teeth in this decade of disco and malaise. He was on the wrong side of history then and was well on his way to being, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said years later,wrong about every major national security issue for 40 years.

It isa small wonder,that the Carter years have returned with a vengeance.Inflation is soaring. So, too, is the number of murders.Oil prices are climbing as thepresident strikes at the heart of American energy independence, all the while giving the green light for Putin to tie western Europe to a Russian gas pipeline.

Once more,theleader of the free worldfumbles opportunities to cooperate with allies and enables our adversaries in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was sentto Asia to reassure allies with memories of Obama-era indifferencetoward the Pacific region that Biden is cut from a different cloth.Yet even as Austin offeredthese assurances, the Biden administration was proposinga flat defense budget,one insufficient even to maintainpurchasing power.The incongruityhasnotbeenlost on nations looking to stand together with Washington to prevent Chinese military dominance of the Pacific region.

The same attitude applies to the Middle East where Arab statesin 2020buried age-old animosities toward Israel so as to stand together against the mullahs in Tehran. Throwing awaytheyears of progressencapsulated by the Abraham Accords, the Biden White House has returned to the Obama-era appeasement of Iran and its proxies.

Even in Europe,the message is one of retreat. The Trumpadministration halted Russian aggression in Ukraine by providing Kiev with weaponsable tokill Russian president Vladimir Putins tanks,helicopters and planes. The Biden-Harrisadministration unilaterallychoked offthe flow of military supplies to Ukraine, in the hope that Moscow would reciprocate.Instead,Putinhasmoved tens of thousands of troops to the border opposite Ukraineandcontinues to wage war on the cyber commons vital to American security.

People in London, whichis one of Americasmost important allies, wereleft flabbergasted by apresident who could not comprehend that Northern Ireland was a constituent part of the United Kingdom,not a province of the Irish Republic. The Canadians are reeling from the loss of thousands of oil and gas jobs as America relinquished its energypartnershipwith the stroke of apresidential pen.Thepresident of the French Republic declaredthat the wokepresidency of Joe Biden is a threat to the very soul of the French nation.

All of this means that America is now led by those who believe they exist to manage national decline,not lead the world.Secretary of State Antony Blinken has asked the United Nations Human Rights Council,a forum for world thuggery,to investigate racism in America. That means unleashingcouncilmembersChina, Russia,and Cubato vilify the United States with Foggy Bottoms blessing.

This is not new ground for Blinken. In March, the Chinese foreign minister hammeredhimby simply echoing Bidens own woke critique of America.TheWall Street Journalposited that the Chinese made clear that after the Trump years, Beijing wants a return to the policy of Obama accommodation to Chinas global advances. Blinkencould only respond with faculty lounge pieties about Americas imperfections.

In April, Bidens ambassador to the United Nations, Laura Thomas-Greenfield, embarrassed the United Statesbydenouncing her own nationbefore the UNHuman Rights Council, declaring that the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.

>>>Universal Periodic Review Reflects Deficiencies of Human Rights Council

Theinabilityof these top officialsto be anything but defensive abouttheirown country sets the tone forwhat to expectin the next four years. How can America cope with a rampant China when her own leaders do not believe that the country is worth defending, even rhetorically? If they will not stand for a nation grounded in the universal principles of human dignity and individual freedom, then where will they stand?

Let us be clearaboutwhat is at stake. China and itsjunior partners, Russia and Iran, seek nothing less than the overthrow of the United States as the worlds most powerful country with the Middle Kingdom being at the center of a new world order.

Carter famously said that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revealed what was at the heart of Moscows ambitions. He immediately putintoproductionthe B-1 bomber, theAbrams Tank and the Minuteman 3systems Ronald Reagan would build upon to confront the Kremlin.

At least the man from Plains was honest enough toreverse course when he realizedhe was wrong.Do notcount on a similar epiphany from the current occupant of the White House. One canonly pray that Americanswill not witnessmoregrovelingbillboards on Bragg Boulevard.

This piece originally appeared in the National Interest https://nationalinterest.org/feature/joe-biden-2021-version-jimmy-carter-190558

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Is Joe Biden the 2021 Version of Jimmy Carter? - Heritage.org

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On this day, July 29, in history:

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In 1588, the Spanish Armada was defeated in the English Channel by the British, led by Sir Francis Drake. Although Spain sent other fleets against England in the 1590s, none repeated the threat of the 1588 plan to invade England.

In 1858, the government of John A. Macdonald and George-Etienne Cartier resigned when the House of Commons voted against their motion to move the capital of the Province of Canada to Ottawa from York.

In 1873, the first Icelanders to migrate to Canada arrived. Their homes had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Numbering 285, they arrived in Quebec and headed for the Muskoka area of Ontario. They found it difficult to settle there, however, and moved on to Willow Point on Lake Winnipeg. They named it Gimli Icelandic for paradise.

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In 1874, social reformer J.S. Woodsworth was born. He helped form the Manitoba Independent Labour Party and was elected to the Commons in 1921. In 1926, he bargained his partys two votes for a promise by Prime Minister Mackenzie King to enact an old-age pension plan.

In 1890, artist Vincent van Gogh died in Auvers, France, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In 1899, the permanent international court of arbitration was established at The Hague, in the Netherlands.

In 1900, King Humbert I of Italy was assassinated at Monza, Italy.

In 1905, Dag Hammarskjold, Swedish diplomat and secretary general of the UN from 1953-61, was born. His spiritual journal Markings was published in 1964, three years after his death in a plane crash in Central Africa.

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In 1907, Sir Robert Baden-Powell formed the Boy Scout movement.

In 1911, the Canadian Northern Railway was completed between Montreal and Port Arthur, Ont.

In 1912, the British Privy Council upheld the provinces power to make marriage laws.

In 1914, the first transcontinental telephone line on the North American continent between New York and San Francisco was successfully tested.

In 1916, a bush fire swept through Matheson, Ont., killing 223 people.

In 1938, ABC anchor Peter Jennings was born in Toronto. He was the sole anchor of ABCs World News Tonight from 1983 until 2005. He died on Aug. 7, 2005 from complications of lung cancer.

In 1940, the German Luftwaffe began its all-out blitz against Britain during the Second World War.

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In 1958, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill creating the American space agency, NASA.

In 1967, an accidental rocket launch aboard the supercarrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin resulted in a fire and explosions that killed 134 servicemen.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that the Roman Catholic ban on artificial contraception would continue.

In 1971, the Oland family of Halifax presented the Bluenose II, a replica of the original Bluenose, to the Nova Scotia government as a floating museum.

In 1977, crude oil began flowing through the Alaska Pipeline into storage tanks at Valdez, Alaska.

In 1981, Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in Londons St. Pauls Cathedral. An estimated 750 million people worldwide watched the televised ceremony. The couple divorced in 1996, one year before Diana died in a Paris car crash.

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In 1984, Ottawa chef-caterer Linda Thom won Canadas first Summer Olympics gold medal in 16 years. Thom claimed the womens sport pistol title on the first day of competition in Los Angeles.

In 1988, External Affairs Minister Joe Clark announced that all people travelling on South African passports and seeking entry into Canada to participate in sports would be denied visas. The ban was lifted a few years later after South Africa abolished apartheid.

In 1992, Erich Honecker, the former communist leader of East Germany, returned to Berlin from Moscow and was immediately charged with manslaughter in the deaths of people shot by border guards while trying to flee East Germany.

In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court acquitted retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk of being Nazi death camp guard Ivan the Terrible and quashed his death sentence. Ivan was the sadistic gas-chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp in German-occupied Poland during 1942-43. (He returned to Ohio but U.S. immigration officials later ordered his deportation to Germany to face similar charges. In May 2011, he was again convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, but was released pending appeal but died on March 17, 2012.)

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In 1997, the Commission for Environmental Co-operation, a NAFTA agency, released a study that identified Ontario as the third biggest polluting jurisdiction in North America.

In 1998, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government underpaid 200,000 employees in six wage categories dominated by women, and ordered Ottawa to pay nearly $3 billion in compensation.

In 1999, an irate stockbroker opened fire at two Atlanta, Ga., brokerage offices, killing nine people and wounding 12 before committing suicide as police stopped his van. His wife and two children were also found dead in his home.

In 2003, Foday Sankoh, who led a bloody rebel movement in Sierra Leone that killed 75,000 people over 10 years, died in United Nations custody. He was charged with crimes against humanity, rape and sexual slavery.

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In 2003, the Canadian Football League terminated Sherwood Schwarzs ownership of the Toronto Argonauts and seized control of the club.

In 2008, the U.S. House issued an unprecedented apology to African Americans for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and segregation laws.

In 2009, the hottest day ever was recorded in Vancouver, as the temperature reached a high of 33.8 C, breaking the previous record of 33.3 C set in 1960.

In 2009, Microsoft reached a 10-year deal with Yahoo for an Internet search partnership, ending years of back and forth negotiations. The agreement gave Microsoft access to the Internets second-largest search engine audience.

In 2010, Ford Motor Co. of Canada announced nearly 400 employees would be laid off on Nov. 1 when the company cut one of two shifts at its Windsor, Ont. engine plant.

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In 2010, raging forest fires encircled Voronezh, Russia, and tore through provincial villages, forcing mass evacuations. In the coming weeks, over 600 fires had swept across western Russia causing close to $15 billion in damages and cloaked Moscow in suffocating smog.

In 2011, the Supreme Court of Canada denied an attempt by Big Tobacco companies to get the federal government named as a third-party defendant in a B.C. lawsuit seeking the recovery of health care costs linked to smoking-related diseases. Governments in Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador had all filed similar suits.

In 2011, Norway honoured the memory of 77 people killed in the nations worst peacetime massacre, with the prime minister calling on the nation to unite around its core values of democracy and peace. An 18-year-old Muslim girl, Bano Rashid, was the first victim to be laid to rest.

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In 2013, Canadian retailer Hudsons Bay Co. announced it would acquire U.S. luxury retailer Saks Inc. in a friendly deal worth US$2.9 billion, with plans to open seven full-line stores and about two dozen locations under a discount banner across Canada.

In 2018, Vladimir Guerrero, Chipper Jones, Trevor Hoffman, Jack Morris, Jim Thome and Alan Trammell were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

In 2019, Canadas chief electoral officer said voting day should not be moved. Election day could be no later than Oct. 21 under federal law, which this year fell on the Jewish holiday known as Shemini Atzeret, meaning Orthodox Jews are not permitted to work, vote or campaign. Elections Canada had been lobbied to change the date, but decided against it this close to an election, prompting a Federal Court challenge to the decision. The court ordered chief electoral officer Stephane Perrault to take a second look at the decision and balance the infringement on the charter rights of affected voters against the objectives of the election law. Perraults detailed decision said it is not in the public interest to move voting day.

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In 2019, Capital One said a hacker had gained access to the personal data of more than 100-million people, including as many as six-million Canadians. The hack exposed one million social insurance numbers making it one of the largest security breaches in Canadian history. Credit card, credit limit, and contact information was accessed but no credit card numbers or log-ins were released. A Seattle woman Paige A. Thompson a former systems engineer at Amazon Web Services, who uses the handle erratic was charged with a single count of computer fraud and abuse.

In 2020, WE Charity announced it had mutually agreed to suspend its partnerships after a flood of companies announced they were dropping their support for the embattled organization. Several companies, including Royal Bank of Canada, Loblaw Companies, GoodLife Fitness and KPMG already announced they had ended their partnerships with the charity.

In 2020, scientists said theyd figured out why some COVID-19 sufferers temporarily lose their sense of smell, something the doctors call anosmia. They said the virus attacks the cells that support neurons in the brain that control smell. There is good news, as researchers say once a patient recovers, those neurons recover as well and ultimately the ability to smell comes back.

The Canadian Press

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On this day in history .... - Calgary Herald

Dr. Chris Anyokwu

By Chris Anyokwu

One of the aliases of Nigeria in recent memory is good people, great nation. Of course, you can always expect our power-holders/wielders to seek to create alternate realities, a multiverse of phantom bliss for their hapless and beleaguered populace through the awesome propaganda machine at their disposal. Ours is what the Igbo call o mara mma na paint, o joro njo na engine/ outwardly beautiful but inwardly decadent. Thats the permanent state of our body politic. Beyond the glitz and glitter of temporal power, beyond the alluring sirens song about the gigantic infrastructure projects going on in our country for instance, the road-and-rail infrastructure, the ongoing airport renovation work, the rollicking anthem of the weekly federal executive council approval of humongous appropriations for one project after another the vast majority of our people are hungry. In fact, Nigerians are famished; they are starving, almost to death!

Hunger everywhere. Photo by Awareness Media Ng

The last time we checked, it was not clear how many states of the federation have begun implementing the new minimum wages for workers. By law, the new national minimum wages is 30,000 and, a few months back, it was reported in the media that the Trade Union Congress (TUC) president Quadri Olaleye said that sixteen states were yet to start implementing the new wage structure. Furthermore, owing in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic with its accompanying socio-economic hardships, many companies and factories have had to downsize their workforce, shedding a large chunk of hands thus swelling the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed, the underemployed and the jobless. On some occasions when government at the national level pretends to provide jobs for our teeming armies of unemployed youth, the whole shenanigan usually blows up in the faces of its officials, as the modus operandi for recruitment is flawed ab initio, mired as it is in ethnic politics.

Consider, for instance, the following governments agencies: the NDLEA recruitment exercise, Civil Defence recruitment exercise, Nigeria police and Nigerian Navy recruitment exercise, among others. The shortlisted candidates lists for the 2020/2021 period show signs of ethnic favouritism and marginalization in equal measure (see Google.com). By the same token, it is important to also highlight the egregious drawback of the constitutional principle of Federal Character which, at inception, was well-intentioned, but at present has only succeeded in freezing up our march towards modernity and progress. How does one explain a situation whereby the most educationally backward among us are the ones being rewarded with admission to Unity Schools, Federal universities, etc. while more qualified candidates from the southern parts of the country are denied admission into these institutions of learning? This established culture of skewed reward system has in the main spawned an unhelpful and retrograde attitude of despondency, of crippling insouciance among our youth. Hardly would you find a young boy or girl burning the midnight oil for an examination. They all want to cut corners go and enrol at special centres, parents also settle examination officials through what they call sorting, inducement, mobilisation, etc.

The culture of the glamorisation and equalisation of mediocrity now defines us as a people, thereby spreading like a poisonous pall across disciplinary and professional frontiers. No one is spared. Thus, whilst primary schools churn out sub-standard and half-baked pupils for secondary school admission, secondary schools in turn produce very poor, intellectually challenged students for our tertiary institutions of learning. At university, you realise that the freshmen are almost set in their ways, making tutelage and mentoring an uphill task. They say you dont teach an old monkey new tricks. In this connection, therefore, you cannot blood these semi-vacant minds and reconfigure them for the pursuit of the culture of excellence, hard work and integrity, when all they have known is the liberalisation of nascence and mediocrity. Small wonder, then, you hear the popular cry: Nigerian graduates are unemployable! To make matters worse, universities tend to prepare our graduates for blue-collar jobs, the traditional 9am to 5pm kind of work. They expect to draw salaries at the end of every month. Now these kind of jobs are not available any more. Although we hear people tout technical education, vocational training, skills acquisition centres, and so forth, it is doubtful if the products of these centres are able to self-employ in order to shrink the ever-widening and exploding labour market.

Thus across the land is a vast ocean of unemployed graduates, ill-equipped products of vocational/skills acquisition centres, institutions and mono-and polytechnics. Whats worse, there are hardly credit facilities or soft loans provided for start-ups for those blessed with entrepreneurial acumen. Please note that these armies of unemployed youth are supposed to constitute our middle-class, the buffer-zone between the hoi polloi who make up the largest chunk of the informal sector and the upper-middle class and the upper-class proper. With the virtual disappearance of the middle-class, what you have is a huge gulf between the nation of the wretched and the propertied/leisured class comprising captains of industry, employers of labour (i.e., CEOs, MDs, EDs, Directors, Chairmen/women, etc), military top-brass, the hedonistic ruling elite, among others. In the private sector, it is all about contract staffing and casualisation. In commercial or business circles, like banks and insurance companies, it is sheer slavery. And this kind of slavery in corporate Nigeria or Nigeria Inc. assumes many sinuous and complex forms, not least sexual or worse. In governments Ministries, Departments and Agencies(MDAs) there seems to be an embargo on employment, hence whenever government announces any form of recruitment exercise, people lose their lives trying to secure placement. Sadly, some of the poverty alleviation schemes like Trader Moni have only served to enrich those in charge, thus leaving the indigent citizens high and dry. According to the Global Terror Index (see Wikipedia) Nigeria occupies the second spot on the list of countries believed to be hot-beds of terrorists.

This is hardly surprising as most Nigerian youths, educated and illiterate, are out of work, idle and restive. This unsavoury state of affairs is what is fuelling insurgency, banditry, terrorism and sundry forms of criminality in the country. Whats more, the deleterious activities of these enemy nationals have made it almost impossible for our farmers to go to their farms. The logical consequence arising from this is food shortages, scarcities and mass hunger. Amid this scenario of food insecurity, the North-South resentment is not helping matters as northern business people recently threatened to stop bringing foodstuffs like onions, pepper, and tomatoes to the southern part of Nigeria. Besides, the free-fall of the exchange rate or value of the Naira has constituted a major source of economic hardship for Nigerians. For example, $100 equals 47,000, 100 = 57,000, 100 Scotland Pound Sterling equals 68,000, whereas 100 can only afford two dollops of fufu (cooked cassava dough), Nigerians staple food. A pack of sachet water popularly called pure water now costs 20. As of now, drinking water is out of the reach of millions of Nigerians. One would have thought that the warning signs given by Nigerian youth during the October 2020 EndSARS protests would have jolted the authorities into remedial action, but unfortunately, things have gone from bad to worse. The Socio-Economic Rights And Accountability Project (SERAP), a non-profit, non-partisan legal and advocacy organisation, has been in the forefront in the agitation for official transparency, accountability and respect for the socio-economic rights of Nigerians. It has consistently tackled government over issues of institutionalised and official graft and corruption and bad governance. Yet, it appears government officials cannot be bothered. Its still business as usual. In fact, the deep-seated feelings of marginalisation among some sections of the country the Igbo in particular has remained a sore thumb in our body politic. Again, the issue of parents selling their children for food is a most worrisome and tragic index of how bestial we have become as a people.

The uptick in prostitution, Yahoo-Yahoo scamming, One Chance, ritual killings, 419, human trafficking, and, of course, armed robbery are all caused and exacerbated by HUNGER. A hungry man is an angry man. Thus, a hungry people make an angry nation. Nigeria is now in the vice-grip of anger, of angst (i.e., anger and anxiety). Nigerians are now the hungriest people in the world. They now look back in anger at the road not taken; at the warning signs and signals not correctly read and consequently the wrong and ruinous choices made. As the saying goes, regrets come later in life. Nigerians now are in a situation of would have, could have, and should have. The democratisation and glorification of mediocrity coupled with the abhorrent corollary of carpeting merit are a major incentive to anger. The right people are cheated out of what they truly deserve and because of this, they tend to resort to all sorts of antisocial acts. The appalling vacuity of our policy-planners and government officials in relation to poverty alleviation is a serious cause for worry. Putting square pegs in round holes is a distinctly Nigerian habit, especially in official quarters. Going forward, it is suggested that government deliberately plan and implement youth-oriented programmes in sport, agriculture, skills acquisition, technical education, etc. Greater or better funding of education at all levels cannot be overemphasised. An educated citizenry is an empowered nation and an empowered nation is a happy and great nation. We have touted job creation for too long.

Now is the time to get down to brass tacks. The most qualified should get the job as well. Since the Federal Character principle seems to have outlived its usefulness, it is suggested that government consider expunging it from our public life. Let a thousand flowers bloom and reach for the sun. And those in public office should live by example: let them be frugal, disciplined and patriotic. Indeed, all citizens of Nigeria must be given a sense of belonging, and, in this regard, the National Orientation Agency (NOA) must redouble its efforts in value reorientation of the masses. To my compatriots, regarding our current sorrows, I say: this too, shall pass

Chris Anyokwu, PhD, writes from University of Lagos

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Hungry People, Angry Nation - The News