Showing posts with label Yar'Adua. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yar'Adua. Show all posts

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Healing The President

Healing Help for President Yar’Adua




By Biko Agozino


My book, ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine, has been recognized by the National Natural Medicine Development Agency for many months as the ‘Book of the Month’ in their digital library. I am pleased to say that the book has the solution to the health of President Yar’Adua. The solution would cost him absolutely nothing and also save our country from the contempt of the international com munity. Poor Nigerians will also benefit from my discoveries because my effective prescriptions cost absolutely nothing because they are based on drug-free and herb-free methods of healing!


They said that the man complained of chest pain and doctors diagnosed it as pericarditis with symptoms of cough and catarrh. None of our medical scientists in Nigeria and abroad is able to prescribe anything for the poor comrade and so we are enduring the shame of having our number one citizen being detained by common medical doctors who are dictating when he would be allowed to come back as our Servant Leader. What a shame!


We are not told details of what the illness is and so we can only speculate. It is important that we know exactly what the president is suffering from to avoid unnecessary panic whenever he is hospitalized. Nigerians have demonstrated their melodramatic Nollywood traits by organizing prayer carnivals or jockeying for his office rather offer a scientific response to what is a scientific problem in the age of the knowledge economy.


If it is common catarrh and chest pain, then we should be told so because there is nothing secret about the common cold. Millions of Nigerians catch it every year without having to rush to hospital. Many would just buy antibiotics (unnecessarily) from chemists and treat themselves but many more will just endure it and let it pass. What is shameful is that our number one citizen would go abroad for treatment when there could be effective remedies in the country. To put it bluntly, the president should save us the embarrassment of going abroad to be treated for the common cold because there is no known cure for the infection.


For the chest pain, the president should immediately check his posture. I read in one of the papers that he is sitting and watching football as he recovers in Saudi Arabia. Bad situation, if you ask me! Sitting on a couch or being propped up in bed to watch hours of television is exactly the kind of posture that would trigger chest pain. Snap out of it and do some gentle stretching for at least 30 minutes daily. As a powerful man, I am almost certain that the kind of couch he sits on at home and in the office is very soft. Wrong type if you have to sit there for hours and hours on end. Always sit with your back resting on a firm backrest and always sleep on your back for quick recovery from the chest pain without any medication!


If it was allergy to hay fever, the president should note that he may be catching it from his air conditioners. As a big man, he probably sleeps in an air-conditioned bedroom, drives everywhere in air-conditioned vehicles, works in air-conditioned offices and rarely gets to breathe fresh air. This could lead to something called air-conditioner fever which is caused by pores that the cold air blows into the enclosed environment. The air indoors is twice as polluted as the air outside. So for prevention, the president must make sure that he opens the windows in his bedroom, his office and his vehicles at least once a day. He should use fans more and air-conditioners less.


If the allergy is about to attack him by blocking his nose, he must not blow his nose. He should sniff it in and spit out to prevent the imminent attack from being full blown. If the cold is a full blown attack, all the president needed was to go off food, get plenty of bed rest, lots of fresh air, lots of fresh fruits and lots of water and he would be better within twenty-four hours. My 2006 book, ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine ISBN: 978-1-4116-6915- 4 (www.lulu.com) has a chapter on how to prevent the common cold and the president may benefit from reading the book for this and other ailments that could be treated or prevented without any medication.


It is an easy to read book about bio-feedbacks and how to listen to the body in order to learn how to prevent or how to heal the body without relying on drugs or herbs for the cases of ill health covered. In it I reveal to any person who suffers from many chronic illnesses, the secrets of how to listen to the body and to understand what the body is saying and how to respond to the feedback from the body in order to stay more healthy.

ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine is good news to the poor people of the world who lack adequate access to modern medical technologies because the methods revealed in the book are not only drug-free, they are also free of charge because you do not need to buy anything other than the book to help you follow the instructions and take better control of your health.


ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine is a humorous step-by-step guide to help individuals rediscover the ancient wisdom that must have been with us from the beginning of time when there were no doctors or drugs and yet people lived for centuries because they could tap into knowledge systems that the modern world may have lost as we chase after pills and disregard anything that could not be sold as a commodity.


I wrote ADAM: Africana Drug-Free Alternative Medicine to help my family, friends and colleagues to learn from my personal discoveries but they soon started urging me to publish it and share it with the world generally. My aim is to get the book to readers as quickly as possible without making the book too expensive, hence I used on-demand printing to publish it.


I propose to share the discoveries in the book with the Nigerian public as part of the struggle for better health for all but especially for the poor who do not have the kind of money that made it possible for our Comrade President to travel abroad for such a small thing. If the government would approve a research grant for the clinical trials, I would design an experiment in which thousands try my proven ADAM principles while a control group tries the conventional methods and we will compare to see which is more effective.


The newly founded national institute for alternative medicine is a step in the right direction and I would like to collaborate with the institute in the clinical trials if funded. Apart from the flu and the common cold, my book also has discoveries on how to prevent migraine without drugs, how to heal backache without drugs or surgery, how to cure bellyache without drugs, and many more tips that could benefit both the rich and the poor.


It is sad to read that the president keeps being rushed abroad where the authoritarian doctors keep holding him hostage in order to claim a bigger payment in defiance of our national interest to have our Servant Leader back! When will the human rights lawyers bring a law suit against the foreign hospitals for kidnapping our Comrade President? I wish the president quick recovery but I also hope that his handlers are alert to issues of national interest in how his health is being handled. I hope that the issues will be carefully analyzed to identify lessons for the country and for the president personally.


Dr Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Director of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. agozino@vt.edu

Thursday, July 16, 2009

G8 $20 BILLION QUESTION

By Biko Agozino

Analysts are slow to give credit to whom honor is due for a key decision of G8 leaders in Italy. I propose that we give the credit to our self-proclaimed ‘Servant Leader’, President Umaru Yar’Adua, who must have used quiet diplomacy to sway the G8 leaders in the desired direction. Some analysts were quick to point out that the $20 billion grants for agriculture agreed by the leaders was a little step in the right direction but complained that it was still too small to solve the huge problem especially in Africa. No one wondered where the idea came from in the first place.

Some wrongly suggest that brother Barak had to bully his G8 colleagues to get them to agree on the initial $15 billion and then he had to bully them some more to raise it to $20 billion shortly afterwards. This is unlikely because the likeable President Obama does not have it in his character to bully even an ant. Moreover, the way the initial sum was agreed only for the amount to be increased shortly was indicative of the fact that the leaders did not plan to make such a decision or they would have agreed on the target amount in advance.

So who done it? I wish to suggest that President Yar’Adua of Nigeria, was the only leader from the developing countries at the G8 meeting with an antecedent of having provided a similar policy in the form of a 200 billion naira credit facility for agriculture in Nigeria this year. As he reluctantly boasted to The Guardian Newspaper in an exclusive interview in April 2009, such a policy had never been implemented in Nigeria before.

It is true that Yar’Adua’s predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, had proposed a similar policy but on a smaller scale and no one is certain what became of it. I recall that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the then finance minister, had announced out of the blue that 50 billion naira would be made available as credit to cassava farmers for commercial export-focused production. Sister Ngozi also promised the innovation that 20% of the fund would be set aside for female farmers and I advised her immediately to make it 50-50 considering that women did the lioness’ share of the work on farms in Nigeria. I hope that both Yar’Adua and the G8 would observe gender equity in the disbursement of the huge investments that they have promised to the agricultural sector.

As I observed in newspaper opinions and interview responses at the time, the policy sounded very similar to proposals that I had announced barely weeks before the Federal Government adopted parts of it. In my preliminary campaign for office of Governor of Enugu state in the 2007 elections, I had proposed that one sure way to turbo-charge the economy of the state was to disburse billions of naira annually as grants, not credits, to the people of the state to invest productively as they saw fit. I pointed out that this was the trend in the industrialized countries and that we need to emulate such a policy if we hope to eradicate poverty from our lands. Of course, I was pleased to hear that the Federal Government was ready to adopt my policy option merely weeks after I made it public but I pointed out the errors in the interpretation of the policy – I called for grants and not credits, I called for such grants to be given to all sectors of the economy and not just to agriculture and surely not for one crop like cassava and definitely not just for export production, not a one-off but a systematic part of the annual budget with at least 10% of the budget to be set aside as grants to the people year after year!

In the past, as I have been arguing without fear of contradiction, the leaders of the developing countries routinely attempted to dictate agricultural policy to the leaders of the developed countries. They usually argued like this – ‘Boss, you know that we do not give a dime as subsidies to our farmers while you give hundreds of billions to yours as subsidies annually. Following the gospel of free market, we insist that you should eliminate farm subsidies to level the playing field.’ Nonsense, thought the leaders of the developed countries. Just because you neglect your farmers is no reason for you to wish to dictate that we neglect ours too.

I have always been convinced that the wiser policy was to support our own farmers and other investors in our economy to the best of our ability and watch our dynamic people take it and run with massive wealth creation despite the inevitable losses in some investments as is always the case. The fear of inflation is raised by critics of such a fiscal policy but my proposal is not for consumption but for production and the government would be able to recover the grants through taxation of the profits of the investors, income taxes on their employees and VAT on purchases.

I have argued repeatedly that this is part of my answer to the Niger Delta question and the question of predatory crimes of kidnapping and armed robbery across the country. If we guarantee that at least 10% of the budgets at the Federal, State, and Local Government levels would be reserved for disbursement to the people as individuals or cooperatives annually, a lot of the youth who are seduced into violent crimes for monetary gains or as protest against underdevelopment could have been empowered to create wealth, jobs and increased happiness in our country. Instead, what we have is brazen kleptocracy in which a few people raid the economy and horde the loot abroad, leaving many people with little option but to work in the devil’s workshop.

My humble hypothesis is that our servant leader, who bravely adopted this policy suggestion as part of his Seven Point Agenda, went to the G8 leaders and looked them straight in the eyes and pontificated: ‘There is an old African saying that if you give a man fura de nunu (fresh yogurt), you feed him for a while but if you give him a cow and teach him how to milk the cow, you feed him for life. For too long, you have acted as humanitarians who provided food aid to the many needy people especially in Africa. We commend you for this generosity without which millions could have died of starvation. But have you considered the option of providing grants to agriculture along the lines of your farm subsidies so that our farmers may be better able to feed our people and even have some to spare for export? Such grants might save you money on food aid and the saving could then be awarded to the poor unemployed youth in your cities to enable them to set up their own enterprises. It is a win-win option for all!’

The G8 leaders must have looked at each other and wondered why they never thought of that before. I hope that brother Barak Obama would take this insight further by announcing an Obama Plan for Africa and inviting a coalition of the willing to contribute to the fund annually to help Africa overcome centuries-old disadvantages. When Africa is empowered to release the immense economic potentials in the continent, the whole world would benefit because Africa would be able to buy more from and sell more to the rest of the world as China and India are beginning to do. I hope that African states will recognize the wisdom of this policy and continue it annually even if the G8 leaders fail to continue such grants. I hope that the Peoples Republic of Africa will soon emerge to continue this policy and end the humiliation that Africans continue to endure in the midst of plenty. Obviously, this extends to all the poor in the world if their governments adopt similar policies of investing 10% of the budgets in the people-initiated research and development or commercial ventures.

Monday, June 22, 2009

NIYI OSUNDARE: A RESPONSE

REPLY TO NIYI OSUNDARE’S LETTER TO PRESIDENT YARADUA
By Biko Agozino

Dear Prof.,

If to say na me be President Yar’Adua, I for reply your long letter like this: Thank you for your so long a letter in the tradition of Mariama Ba. How madam and pickin them dey? Na waa for you brother Niyi self. You done dey turn oyibo o! How you take write your brother so long a letter and you no even ask about family, unlike Mariama? Plus, na only oyibo man go write one letter put am for three envelopes say this one na part one, that one na part two and then this last one na part three. African man go put all the parts for one envelope to save money for stamp. Abi na lie? You sabi how much poor man go pay to buy The Guardian for three straight days (May 26-28) just to read your dogon turenchi? You know say your letter dey sweet like your poetry wey we no dey miss for Sunday Tribune in those days. I beg make you no stop o, make you keep on writing a column now. I beg now, e joor, biko nu, mbo, dualla.

Anyway sha, joke na joke and Joké na person name. The national problems that you bemoaned in your letter(s) also preoccupy yours truly, wallai tu lai. I thank you for adding your powerful voice to the task of seeking solutions. In the words of the young Nigerian Pan Africanist, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, who was killed in a tragic motor accident in Kenya on Africa Day and buried in Funtua recently; Do Not Agonize, Organize! Feel free to join us in doing what you can to help solve the problems.

But Prof, even you will admit that you were going over the top when you concluded by suggesting that the re-branding of our country could be represented with the metaphor of re-branding of a rotting corpse. Haba! Quite to the contrary, Insha Allah, our people dey kamkpe, we continue to be vibrant and very much alive, for as you said in one of your poems, ‘Our Earth Will Not Die’, and as you put it in your letter, our people remain dynamic. Our task is to tap the dynamism for the development of the people in a sound environment.

I was also surprised that you heaped all the bucks at my door mouth without a word of advice to the international community that created the financial meltdown that is affecting the local economy on how to lend a hand while they spend hundreds of billions to rescue their own firms. Nor did you have any words for local politicians and residents to please behave themselves in a democratic manner. Our people should learn to lose elections gracefully or go to court to challenge the results reasonably instead of all that magomago and gragra to intimidate voters or influence electoral officials. Four years time, you have a chance to try again, it no be by force. The same goes for militants who boast about kidnapping and killing workers in Nigeria – let them go to court if they have a genuine case.

My next surprise is that you did not mention anything positive that we are doing on the ground in Nigeria. I am pleased to tell you that I discuss our Seven Point Program with other African servant leaders and I hope that they will accept and implement the key principles. For instance, we are making available this year, a two hundred billion naira credit facility for commercial farmers. This has never happened in this country before whereas Europe and North America routinely give hundreds of billions annually to their farmers as farm subsidies alone.

In the past leaders of developing countries have tried to lobby that the developed countries should withdraw subsidies from their own farmers to level the playing field. None of them figured out that it was much more practical to provide as much help as they could to their own farmers on an annual basis as Professor Biko Agozino has been arguing for some time now. This has changed from this year in Nigeria. Do you advise that we continue to invest hundreds of billions annually to support farmers in this country? As I told The Guardian, agriculture contributes 60% to our GDP compared to 20% from petroleum and gas and 5% from industry. We need to build up our capacities in all areas with the state acting as an activist and catalyst for development in partnership with the private sector and the community at large. Shouldn’t we make similar grants to the arts, research and development, small businesses, inventions, sports, health, education, power-generation, transportation, annually?

Bros, let me end before my letter gets as long as yours. You know say I no sabi book reach you, Prof! Thanks again brother Niyi for writing. Please write again soon and keep the suggestions for innovative policy options coming. Make you greet your family for me. If na me be him, na so I for reply you. We go see now, Se gwo be, Ka e mesia nu, Alafia.

For those who missed Osundare's Letter(s), follow the link below:

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue/browse_thread/thread/f736e93bd351676f