By Biko Agozino
Ruben Abati made very insightful observations in his analysis of the failure of the Nigerian national football team to inspire enthusiasm from supporters at home and abroad during the World Cup in South Africa. He concluded that the outing has brought more shame than pride to Nigerians given that the Nigerian preparations for the competition were characteristically shoddy, while the South Africans distinguished themselves by organizing an efficient competition at a level that Nigeria could not manage, the way they effortlessly introduced a new equipment to the game, the vuvuzela, while Nigeria has yet to bring an innovation to the game we love so much, and how their national team played well even when they lost or drew while the Super Eagles are praying that some other team should suffer misfortune at the hands of some other team in order for us to qualify by default the way we managed to qualify for the finals.
Nigeria’s only innovation appears to be in the unprecedented image of the hustler with 30 stolen tickets who was sentenced to jail by a FIFA special court that must be the first of its kind. The other disgraceful image was that of the most unprofessional player ever whose name, Kaita, supposedly means disaster, who kicked a player outside the sidelines because he allegedly shoved the ball at him and called him unprintable names to get him out of his face so he could throw-in the ball. His red card caused the Nigerian team to collapse from an early lead to a 2-1 loss as they all trooped to the defense and gave up the mid-field to Greece without any imagination that they could still win a game with one man down the way Ghana’s Black Stars beat the Nigerian Super Eagles during the nation’s Cup in Ghana and again in Egypt with just ten men each time. Next time, Kaita should play hurt and see if he could send off an opponent instead of lashing out with the typical Nigerian gra-gra or bolekaja (Yoruba for come down and let us fight) mentality and if he gets sent off for acting hurt, the team should play on and try to win with an attacking game – the best type of defense. Apologies to Abati, I was wearing my coaching cap there, every Nigerian is a coach, says Abati, and yet we believe in the Cargo Cult mentality that the best coach must be imported from Europe.
Abati’s observation about national branding by Argentina which distributed free jerseys of their stars, free national flags and free vuvuzelas with their national colours to the international fans is a teachable moment for Nigerian officials. The Nigerian memorabilia were put up for sales even though the national sports commission may have already paid for the items to be distributed and in any case, there is not likely to be any accountability for the miserly sale of unpopular jerseys with names like Kaita on them. Typical of Nigerians, some official probably saw it as an opportunity to make quick bucks with the result that some Nigerian fans had no choice but to accept the free Argentina jerseys and wear them proudly without fear of losing their citizenship as punishment given that many Nigerians throw lavish parties to celebrate whenever they give up their citizenship and naturalize in some other country with regular electricity supply as one fan told Abati when threatened with denationalization for wearing the colours of Nigeria’s opponents.
I completely agree with Abati that we need to use this opportunity to re-examine our sports institutions from the local leagues that Nigerians do not seem to care about while they appear ready to kill and die for English Premiership clubs, to the training of coaches with the knowledge that mercenary foreign coaches will never teach us all they know for fear that some day we will face their own national teams, to the organization of supporters’ clubs and to private-public partnerships in the sponsorship of sporting events as is the case all over the world. Bringing in Tokunbo coaches from abroad at the last minute to disrespect the Nigerian coach who struggled to win qualification and demonstrating Pharisees-like prayers on the field of play will not cut it for us.
Where I disagree with Abati is on his observation that the National Stadium is being used by sex workers and fast food hawkers instead of being used for sports development. I would like Abati to visit the stadium early on any Saturday morning and he would be stunned. I recently visited a nephew in Lagos and he told me to get ready for a treat because early on Saturday morning, he wanted me to go running with him at the national stadium. I was intrigued and sure enough, he woke me up about 7:00 AM and off we went with Okada, then changed to a bus, then got another Okada before reaching the distant stadium.
I could not believe my eyes as the whole area surrounding the stadium was filled with amateur sports enthusiasts and fitness gurus and freaks alike jumping, boxing, doing martial arts, weight-lifting, dancing, running, skipping, doing yoga and aerobics, sweating and smiling. Sure, there were food and drinks vendors around but the people needed such refreshments after running non-stop for two hours. We joined one popular group that was led in song by a tireless young man and we chorused with the growing crowd of followers. It was as if we were back in high school and many of the songs were Igbo songs like ‘Obi Kererenke’ - ‘Obi’, to which the lead singer added popular Christian chants like ‘Anyi Ga Ebulia Aha Yaa’ to the chorus, ‘Enuuu’ (or let us raise His name, High!) which served as a notice that he was about to change to a different song. He would chant about the end of diabetes, the end of smoking, the end of alcoholism and his followers provided the ‘End’ chorus faithfully but when he chanted about the end of Igbo or marijuana many protested and shouted nooo! Some who did not understood the exchange in Igbo language asked for translations. I was soon exhausted as I had not done such hectic running in a long time and thankfully, the pure water vendor was on hand to rehydrate me with four sachets of water while I sweated buckets with a big smile on my face.
There and then I began to understand something that I had observed on the faces of many Nigerians: They looked more healthy than I had imagined from the sad stories of poverty and hunger we hear abroad. This must be one of their survival strategies – keeping fit for the fun of it. I asked when this revolution happened in Nigeria and they said that it was started by Sam Oparaji, the Nigerian football player who died tragically on the pitch from a heart condition at the national stadium where his statue stands. It was said that he used to run at the stadium in the 1980s and gradually, his fans joined him every Saturday morning. It felt as if I was witnessing something that happens only abroad and not at home and I was highly impressed.
I was surprised to know that such a popular lifestyle activity was going on for years and none of the newspapers had covered it. If Abati visits Surulere any Saturday morning, then he will realize that his dismissal of the national stadium is premature. Where Abati may not be surprised is that neither the government nor corporate sponsors have absolutely any role to play in all this. There is no budget to train the fitness coaches on safety precautions, there are no ambulances or health workers trained to attend to any emergencies, there are no freely distributed running shoes and jerseys to promote any company products and wait for this, there was no toilet for the athletes who had to enter the nearby bushes to do number one or number two.
The gates of the stadium were firmly shut against the enthusiastic sporting citizens from whose ranks would emerge the next sporting superstars. Only national sporting stars were allowed to train inside the stadium, I was told. There is no doubt that talents abound in Nigeria in all fields but the government and private investors are yet to tap in adequately towards the development of these talents in all fields to win national honours, create wealth for the sports players and create fair employment opportunities for others. For instance, the young man who led the jogging songs was not paid by anyone but I understood that some of the fellow runners settled him occasionally. Here is an opportunity for sporting clubs to emerge and train the Usain Bolts, Tiger Woods, goalie Enyeama and the Williams sisters of the world to break new world records in sprinting, golf, football, tennis and many other sporting areas but greedy leaders are more interested in scrambling for oil blocks that they always auction off to foreign coaches (sorry, companies) and pocket billions of dollars in commissions that they claim they do not know how to spend. What a crying shame!
Monday, June 21, 2010
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Any Cook Can Coach
By Biko Agozino
This title was suggested by the title of an essay by CLR James on politics in the Caribbean in which he argued, following Athenian democracy, that ‘Every Cook Can Govern’. However, the institution of slavery in Athens, the fact that Athens had a war-mongering monarchy that oppressed philosophers, and the fact that women and children did not have the rights of citizenship meant that Athens was deeply flawed as a model of participatory democracy. The unfitness of Athens as a role model is particularly so for people of African descent who suffered centuries of chattel slavery, colonization and disenfranchisement, and who have also retained radically republican democratic traditions of the sort that anthropologists dubbed headless or acephalous societies. In his recent Nyerere Lecture, Wole Soyinka concluded that one such society, the Igbo, is a good model for the rest of Africa.
Walter Rodney identified such village democracy types of society in his Groundings with My Brethren as true of the majority of cultures in Africa and warned against using the few monarchical traditions, just like monarchical Athens, as a model amplified and made the hegemonic representation of a supposedly monolithic African culture. This is not only in Africa but also in the Diaspora where music genres created by Africans tend to have Kings and Queens of each genre despite the tendency towards democracy in the African worldview and struggles.
Nevertheless, the historical-material ist critique of elitism in politics by James could be extended to the colonial mentality in sports by which we are made to believe that only elite coaches from elite countries with elite pay could coach the teams of poor countries. The Wall Street Journal recently asked whether African teams could not be coached by African coaches given that all but one of the African teams participating in the World Cup in South Africa have foreign coaches, including some that never coached a world cup squad or failed to qualify for the competition as their own nations’ football coach? The answer to the question is that any cook can coach although the journal quoted some Nigerians as saying that the players will respect a white coach more than a Nigerian coach. The fact remains that even European national teams also hire foreign coaches and maybe someday, an African would coach a European team.
What are the lessons that we could learn from the poor performance of our teams that are full of talents and what is the way forward for sports and the nation for the national team could be a metaphor for the nation with enormous resources largely controlled by good ‘coaches’ but with mediocre results to show for it all? My twelve year old nephew once asked me, ‘Uncle, I am happy that Essien scored one of the goals at the African Nations Cup because I am a Chelsea fan but I cannot believe that the Super Eagles were beaten by a ten-man Black Stars team. What happened?’ Here he was demonstrating what James would see as the Athenian democratic principle by which the audience voted on the plays to select winners during festivals even if some of the winning poems openly mocked the then rulers like King Pericles. I explained to the young boy who already plays in a junior football club in London that it could be that our talented players played like individuals and not like a team. He asked me to explain that to him.
I explained that although I am not good at football, I have had the experience of coaching children in league tournaments when my two sons were involved in youth soccer in the US. I asked my nephew to watch all the goals scored in the English Premier League and tell me what he learned from the skills. He simply told me that they were great goals. I told him to look more closely and he gave up, asking me to explain the skills necessary for scoring goals to him.
The skills are very simple. Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea use these skills all the time to dominate the top league. The teams that do not use the skills are the ones that struggle in the league. Steven Garrald ignores this principle frequently as he tries individual play to the disadvantage of Liverpool FC. Ghana used the skill to score the winning goal in the quarter finals match during the Nations Cup when Agogo tapped in that square cross with eight minutes to go. It is called team work as opposed to talented but selfish waste of energy. This is how it goes:
A player runs at the goal with the ball and pretends that he is about to strike at goal. The goalkeeper and the defense all focus on blocking his shot but at the last second, he dummies and passes the ball to an unmarked team mate who stabs the ball into the net. That is simple and it works most of the time. The inadequacy of it explains the weakness of our Super Falcons and Super Eagles but also super corporations and super states alike.
The struggling teams are those in which the attackers are so full of confidence that they think that they could dribble past every opponent but they almost always lose the ball after skipping past a few defenders. If they manage to bulldoze through the defense repeatedly, they suffer recurrent injuries as a result, like Ronaldo, Rooney, Yorke, Gerrald and Maradona. England was dominating the USA until the introduction of Wright-Phillips who dribbled and dribbled instead of crossing the ball in as expected from the wings.
My nephew nodded in agreement and told me that his coach never told him that. He wanted to learn more skills from me. He stood up and started dancing around an imaginary football to show off his own youthful skill as if imitating one of his heroes, JJ Okocha. Forget Okocha, I told him. You want your team to win games not just to show off your personal entertainment skills. Argentina dominated the opening match against Nigeria with short passes while the Super Eagles tried long shots, possessive dribbling and weak shots that were nowhere near the goal when they could have touched the ball once to control it and then pass it to a team-mate in an open position to score!
The skill that is applied at the goal mouth to score goals is also the skill that is applied in the midfield to keep control of the ball. The top teams have perfected this skill. It is called one-two touch football. The first touch is to control the ball and the second touch is to pass it to a teammate in a better position. As soon as you pass the ball, you run into an open position ready to receive it back. That is called teamwork, I told the young man. If you play selfishly in any successful team, you will be lucky if you sit on the reserve bench at all, you would be soon dropped, sold or traded before you know it. Tarves is still wondering why Manchester Untied sold him but he tends to keep the ball to himself for too long whereas Messi has mastered the solo run that is intended to end in a one-two with a team mate. Many politicians ignore this rule of teamwork by seeking tenure elongation and sitting tight when they should be passing the ball in the interest of the national team or even take a recovering position after they have lost the ball to the other team.
France took this team skill to a higher level during the World Cup in Germany by using a one-touch method that made the games much faster. That is, the first touch was to pass the ball or strike at goal. Unfortunately for them, this led to too many inaccurate passes or shots wide off the mark although it helped Henry to stab in the winning goal against Brazil in the semi final but ultimately failed against Italy in the final match. France used the same tactic of fast-paced one-touch French-kicks in their opening match against Uruguay and were lucky to get a goalless draw. So I would still recommend the one-two method any day because by the third touch, you have given the opponents time to anticipate your move and block it and with only one touch you do not give your teammates enough time to anticipate your move and position themselves. Argentina used this a lot especially in the midfield and Nigeria appeared clueless a lot during that opening match in Johannesburg.
My fascinated young nephew told me that sometimes it is necessary to run at the goal and try to score when you see an opening like Drogba, Adebayor, Messi, Henry or Ronaldo or simply send a salvo at goal with your first touch like Kanu’s trickish surprise shots that sometimes zip out from behind him with a flick of the leg or Gerrald’s long distance shots for Liverpool and for England. I agreed with him but insisted that such moments are rare and that teamwork is the best guarantee of success as both Kanu and Gerrald prove by also being selfless playmakers of note with records of many assists, earning them captaincies. The goal by Argentina from a corner kick was a sign of teamwork as the attackers distracted the Nigerian defence and pushed them back towards goal to allow a free header to the scorer, prompting Efan Ekoku, the commentator and former Nigerian international to criticize the Nigerian players for ball watching and failure at school yard defense principles that frown at free headers.
‘Uncle, teach me more skills please’, he pleaded. Well, this one is an elementary skill, I told him. I told him to touch the ball, kiss the ball, hug the ball and tell me what it felt like. He said that it felt normal. Exactly my point. The ball does not bite, it has no claws like a lion and it is not hot like coal. So when next you are in a wall defending a free kick from the likes of Bekham or Messi, keep your eyes on the ball and do not get scared of the ball the way most defenders instinctively do. If you keep your eyes on the ball, you improve your chances of stopping the free kick successfully but jumping aimlessly just allows the free kick to be bended over the wall and into the net before the goalkeeper sees it, blinded by the unnecessarily scared-like- hell wall.
The young boy protested that he would never stand in the way of a shot from some of the top scorers because such scorchers could maim a man or a woman for that matter. Wrong, I told him, it is always a lump of leather filled with air and if you keep your eyes on it, you stand a better chance of avoiding having it slammed into your closed eyes to knock you down or having it slammed into your pants, causing clutching pain.
‘Oh uncle, tell me more because I want to play for the Eagles when I grow up, I will be too ashamed to play for England because I see myself as a Nigerian,’ he stated. Well, I told him, if you play for Nigeria, you will become a national hero and the country would reward you with cash and give you houses in choice plots. He licked his lips in anticipation. But you must start practicing teamwork now by helping more around the house, ironing your own clothes, clearing the table and sweeping the house as a team player, I told him. He said that he already ironed his own clothes.
My final tip for success is related to the previous one but it is mainly for the goal-keeper. The goalie must not panic at the sight of a striker because the shot is never going to be a thunderbolt or a bullet, just a lump of leather filled with air although most goalkeepers who panic are less scared of the ball and more anxious not to mess up. We saw this in the courage of Enyeama who single-handedly denied Argentina the chance to humiliate Nigeria with more goals. The Under 17 Nigerian goalkeeper who helped to win the World Cup for Nigeria by saving more penalty kicks than the French goal-keeper also practiced this. He said back then that what helped him was the secret verses from the Koran that he was chanting. This is an indication that he had such strong faith that nothing the attackers could throw at him would hurt him because, they could not shoot cannons, only balls of leather, Insha Allah. So the young man did not dive blindly, hoping to gamble correctly as most goal-keepers do. He waited for them to kick the penalty and then he dived to stop it! That was how Ghana scored from the spot against the Serbian goalie who dived first in Pretoria, to give Africa the first win in the first World Cup on African soil.
To inculcate these simple teamwork skills, we need to watch what other footballing nations are doing. They start training teams from age four and keep exposing them to team competitions from that age on. Mikel Obi was probably referring to the lack of team spirit when he said that there was no love among the Eagles players in Ghana. Everyone wanted to be the hero that saved the nation, it seemed. The answer is not in a foreign coach because no coach can teach the team spirit if you have been brought up all your life to hustle selfishly for everything as many children grow up to be due to poverty-induced hoarding tendencies or due to undeserved sense of a privileged right to greed born of unearned affluence.
The team spirit goes with sportsmanship such that when you lose, you do not lose the lesson. We need to congratulate the successful teams that beat us and wish them all the best because the better teams won the matches instead of trying to use bribery or intimidation the way some of our politicians do after losing elections. The Trinidadian social theorist, CLR James, in Beyond a Boundary, credited the game of cricket with his moral upbringing in the sense that he never tried to cheat or whine or complain, saying well played to the winners but did his best and did not gloat even in victory, telling the losers better luck next time.
He may have been exaggerating his obedience to the rules of game theory given that he was an activist transgressional radical who overstayed his visa in America by many years and had to be detained and deported after he appealed unsuccessfully. However, I have always thought that James’ moral and intellectual character could be attributed more to his African cultural background of radical republican democracy but proof of that is disappearing due to the legacies of slavery and colonialism which have sadly eroded much of our cultural values and replaced them with dog-eat-dog dodgy capitalist perversions by those that Fanon called the phantom bourgeoisie in The Wretched of the Earth that mimics the bullishness of the metropolitan bourgeoisie with little of its fanatical patriotism.
As Nyerere would recommend with the Ujamaa philosophy of familihood that he found common in Africa, we need to recover our sense of communal morality and rejoice and celebrate the fact that West Africa has produced some of the best teams consistently in the continent. If we have been doing so without any organized training from an early age, imagine what would happen if all over Africa, the 54 states start youth sports programs in football, baseball, lawn tennis, basket ball, cricket, tracks and all manner of sports and games with annual leagues. Our raw talents would be polished and we will shine again and again in all sporting activities and sooner win the World Cup or Wimbledon and still allow individual talents to emerge and flourish.
Such programs could also contribute to poverty eradication in Africa when the individual players become big on the world stage and earn enough to uplift their extended families at least. But beyond monetary gains, the training in team spirits could contribute to nation building and entrepreneurial success as we begin to see the bigger picture of ourselves as members of one family, club, national and international teams as players but sometimes even as supporters. Together Each Achieves More = TEAM
We can apply the same team principles to all athletics by sponsoring athletics clubs across the country with private companies partnering the government. The shame of returning from the World Athletics Championships empty-handed must come to an end. The aim of winning four medals at the next Olympics is too criminal for contemplation when a small country like Jamaica hauls in medals in double digits. Let us aim for 100 medals and start training teams of individuals with targets of breaking existing world records in every sport. Let us aim at going to the Tennis Grand slams to challenge the Russians and the Americans for the championships in ladies and men’s events. This way, we will give our restless youth something positive to focus on. When they know that Kenyans and Ethiopians win up to a million US dollars just for running a marathon, no one would be able to stop them from dominating that sport if we train them.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Reparations demand never a blame-game
Biko Agozino
The announcement of 'reparative actions' funds for slavery by Harvard University raises questions for Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. whether he supports the symbolic 'reparative actions' funds being set up by some universities and whether he would support awarding some of those funds to African universities or African students? I raised this question for Brown University in a written question when the draft report on slavery and the founding of the university was being discussed in 2006 but the response was that they were not interested in reparations because some people regard the demand as 'foolish' or unworkable. However, in the published version or the report, they critiqued my concept of reparative justice a lot (without attribution to me) especially in the 2021 second edition, showing the campaign by students at Brown in support of reparative justice. The University of Glasgow later adopted the concept of reparative justice when they endowed a fund for The University of the West Indies. Harvard comes close by adopting the term, 'reparative actions'. Do you support or oppose reparative justice and why?
Let me start by saying that the 2010 opinion by Gates represents an advancement on his PBS series in the sense that he did not say a single word about reparations in his six hours of documentary and he was called out on that. Now that he has commented on the issue, he has taken another step forward by limiting his conspiracy theory of slavery to the elites and not to all Africans as appeared to be the case in the Wonders of the African World where he asked ordinary Africans what it felt like to see a descendant of one of those that they supposedly sold long ago. These baby steps forward appear to be too little too late especially because he also took massive leaps backward by blaming Africans while calling for an end to the blame-game.
What Gates left out and what the discussion is ignoring is that Africans fought against slavery as much as they could, a fact that historians narrate with indications that women fought as bravely as the men to prevent our people from being captured during the raids. Once we give credit to African masses as the warriors against slavery that they were, then we realize that the demand for reparations is neither a game nor a blame-game as Gates and his critics seem to imply.
I disagree with Henry Louis Gates Jr. because his title implies that the demand for reparations is a ‘blame-game’: it is not a game at all, it is a struggle for justice which every other racial group that suffered historic wrongs has waged with relative success except people of African descent, due mainly to racism. Secondly, it is not about apportioning blame because Africans are not interested in punishing those who enslaved our people, we are more interested in healing the festering wounds of slavery that people of African descent continue to suffer worldwide.
I also disagree with Gates when he suggests that Africans sold their own people into slavery. On the contrary, the Trans Atlantic Slavery was not a trade but a plunder in which a few members of the elite joined their European allies to terrorize fellow Africans. The majority of Africans fought against slavery in wars that were documented by even European historians, according to Walter Rodney.
Many of us were raised in Africa by parents who were never enslaved because their parents fought fiercely to prevent them from being captured and enslaved. So just like African-Americans, those of us whom Ali Mazrui called African-Africans are also survivors of the African holocaust. Today, a few elite Africans still rob fellow Africans blind and stash the loot in Europe and North America and just as in the past, the vast majority of Africans are activists against the modern slavery that our people still suffer while those of us fortunate to be abroad try to cushion the pain with the remittances that outpace foreign aid by miles.
But as a highly privileged scholar, Gates should help the Arab, European, and American regions that benefitted from the African holocaust to see that they owe reparations to people of African descent. Obama must not leave office without initiating the Fund for Africana Reparations (FAR) with emphasis on what I theorized elsewhere as ‘Reparative Justice’ with the acronym, DREAM: democracy (unity government for Africans at home and abroad and the abolition of racist laws that cause the disproportionate incarceration of Africans), reparations (obligated funding, not just optional aid), education (admission and funding set-asides, not just affirmative action that women and other minorities also enjoy), apology (more like the one from Congress will not hurt, but a global commemoration of Slavery Emancipation Day as a public holiday will be in order), and (visa-free) movement for Africans (other groups appear to enjoy this without earning the right the way Africans did).
No individual American, European or Arab will have to lose anything or pay any extra tax to make slavery reparations happen and the healing of Africans would benefit the whole world. No government on earth is returning money to taxpayers in these responsible regions and announcing that it is money saved from refusing to pay reparations to Africans.
Gates is not the first to admit that African states also owe reparations to Africans (but not just for slavery) and they could start making such reparations by abolishing the colonial boundaries and constituting the People's Republic of Africa to help us start healing the wounds of slavery, racist colonialism, neo-colonialism and patriarchal imperialism.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
The Debt Penalty: A Play
By Biko Agozino
The Debt Penalty is a fictional drama based on the Third World
debt crisis, using the metaphor of a heavily indebted but highly
profitable trading company to represent a Third World country.
The drama opens with the Directors of the company fighting over
the formula for the sharing of the company’s profits while the
workers protest about job losses and starvation wages. The
struggle among the Directors was used as an excuse by the Chief
Security Officer of the company to seize the administration of the
company and run it as the Sole Administrator. He offers the
workers and directors of the company an opportunity to debate whether the
company should accept more foreign loans but the workers win
the debate by rejecting conditions attached to such loans. This
change in administration did not bring any relief to the workers
and the unemployed who suffered even more deprivation under
the security administration and who were jailed for daring to
protest the hardship. The poor workers of the company also
owed rents to landlords, school fees for their children and loans
from the bank but only a Robin Hood type of character tried to
steal from the rich and give to the poor. He and his gang were
eventually arrested and sentenced to death but students freed
them just before they were executed by firing squad. They all
march to the company boardroom where the Sole Administrator
was about to hand over the company back to the disgraced
directors. They struggle and win over the control of the company
and promise to recover the loot stolen from the company by
previous administrations.
debt crisis, using the metaphor of a heavily indebted but highly
profitable trading company to represent a Third World country.
The drama opens with the Directors of the company fighting over
the formula for the sharing of the company’s profits while the
workers protest about job losses and starvation wages. The
struggle among the Directors was used as an excuse by the Chief
Security Officer of the company to seize the administration of the
company and run it as the Sole Administrator. He offers the
workers and directors of the company an opportunity to debate whether the
company should accept more foreign loans but the workers win
the debate by rejecting conditions attached to such loans. This
change in administration did not bring any relief to the workers
and the unemployed who suffered even more deprivation under
the security administration and who were jailed for daring to
protest the hardship. The poor workers of the company also
owed rents to landlords, school fees for their children and loans
from the bank but only a Robin Hood type of character tried to
steal from the rich and give to the poor. He and his gang were
eventually arrested and sentenced to death but students freed
them just before they were executed by firing squad. They all
march to the company boardroom where the Sole Administrator
was about to hand over the company back to the disgraced
directors. They struggle and win over the control of the company
and promise to recover the loot stolen from the company by
previous administrations.
Copies are available through Amazon, major bookstores and through www.lulu.com
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Anambra as Litmus Test
ANAMBRA STATE AS LITMUS TEST
By Biko Agozino
"But my fear is that the furore that has grown around the Anambra voters register may become a battle ground, with the corpses that we did not see on February 6 showing up on the streets soon enough when the Obi administration chooses to organise the pending local government council elections in the state." This was the conclusion to Ruben Abati's 'Hope Deferred' assessment of the governorship election in Anambra State but where is Dr. Abati expecting those corpses to come from, his own village?
Let me start with a confession of a personal momentary dilemma on December 11, 2009, after the Africana Studies Program at Brown University-hosted Achebe Colloquium on Africa. The event gave me the opportunity of shaking hands on the same day and in the same hall with some of the greatest heroes of Nigeria - Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Emeka Ojukwu, and Peter Obi. My dilemma was similar to that of one of the characters in Ngugi’s latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow. In the novel, a business man, Titus Tajrika, refused to wash his subsequently smelly and gloved hand after shaking hands with the corrupt head of state. Oh yes, I have been washing my hands since the hands that I shook were clean hands while Tajrika may have stopped washing his hand to retain the odour of contamination because he shook an unclean hand.
Anambra State of Nigeria was pronounced the litmus test for the wobbly Nigerian democracy at that first Achebe Colloquium at Brown University, Rhode Island and Anambra people have managed to pass the test to the delight of many Nigerians. The election of February 6, 2010, was not perfect but the results reflected the wishes of the majority of the voters to see Governor Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) continue in office for a second term. Based on his track records, this was a deserved victory for which I join many Nigerians in congratulating him.
During the Achebe Colloquium, I was surprised that no Nigerian present could challenge the views of presenters like the former US Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr Lyman (pronounced Lie-man) that Nigeria was becoming ‘worthless and irrelevant ‘to the outside world. Only after the moderator of that first panel, Professor Obiora Udechukwu, tried to prod the panel by asking if they could name any exemplary leader in present day Nigeria, did Professors Abiola Irele of Harvard and Richard Joseph of Northwestern suggest that Governor Tunde Fashola of Lagos State was their model leader.
I was surprised that no one mentioned Peter Obi, the governor whose state was the topic of the symposium, as an exemplary leader. So during question and comments, I told the colloquium that we should give credit to the people of Anambra state for producing some of the greatest achievers in Nigerian history. Without itemizing the giants that have emerged from that small geographical space called Anambra, I reminded the audience that the state has been offering a model of democratic leadership that the rest of the country should learn from.
Here was a state in which the mandate of the people was stolen and awarded to a medical doctor, Chris Ngige, mistaken for a stooge but who was later sabotaged when it turned out that he was out to satisfy such basic expectations as paying salaries on time and building roads rather than surrender the treasury to the self-styled godfather, Chris Ubah. He was kidnapped and the police withdrew security details from him but amazingly, he was not killed despite the destruction of government-owned properties valued at millions by those that Achebe called a clique formed for the destabilization of the state.
Meanwhile the actual winner of the 2003 election went to court rather than rent a crowd of thugs to kill and maim as is the practice in many parts of the country where elections are called do-or-die affairs and candidates are challenged to prove that they are ready to die for the positions that they seek. After one year of litigation, he won his mandate back through the rule of law and became the only minority party governor in the country with a State House of Assembly in which his party did not have a single member.
The question on many minds was how long he was going to last in office before the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) dominated house would impeach him. And right on cue, they impeached him and also tried to impeach his deputy apparently to make way for the PDP Speaker of the House to become the governor. They miscalculated because the deputy was not automatically impeached when a governor is impeached and so they inadvertently gave Nigerians our first ever female state governor in the person of Obi‘s deputy, Dame Virginia Etiaba. Once again, the elected governor Obi went back to court and once again won back his mandate without a single life being lost!
I told the colloquium that it did not end there. The PDP Federal Government was bent on taking over the state and so a former personal assistant to President Olusegun Obasanjo was dispatched to contest the governorship of the state under the flag of the ruling PDP in 2007. The incumbent governor went to court to challenge the election because his term in office started when he won his first court battle to reclaim his mandate and so there was no vacancy at the time of the 2007 election. The Independent National Election Commission (INEC) ignored the injunctions and conducted a fake election in which the candidate of the ruling PDP, Andy Ubah, was declared winner despite complaints that no election took place. The declared winner was sworn in as governor but the legitimate governor avoided a campaign of violence and went back to court and again won back his mandate through the rule of law and without any loss of blood.
Before the February 2010 re-election of the highly achieving governor for a second term, the PDP candidate in the non-election of 2007 had gone to court to ask that he be declared governor in waiting and allowed to complete his term of office that was terminated when he was forced to hand over to the properly elected governor. The Supreme Court threw out the suit on the ground that governorship was not hereditary. By then he had lost the opportunity to contest the primaries of his party, PDP, for the 2010 election and true to character, PDP did not hold any primary elections but simply imposed a candidate on the party members. Two dozen other candidates who had bought primary elections nomination forms for millions of naira each but were denied an opportunity to contest the primaries went to court and won but a higher court over-ruled and said that the party had every right to select its candidate as it saw fit. Again, no one was killed even though the father of the imposed candidate was briefly kidnapped for ransom.
In the end, about two dozen candidates contested the 2010 governorship election with the PDP support split among the still relatively popular former governor (Ngige) who was rigged into office by godfathers but who chose to serve the people, the former governor who won a non-election (Andy Ubah) and the imposed party candidate (Soludo, a past governor of the Nigerian Central Bank) who won no primary election, all representing three different parties, Action Congress, Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party, respectively. I knew then that by splitting any support that PDP may have had that way, not to mention that the other two dozen candidates who had intended to contest the PDP primaries took their grievances into other parties and became their flag-bearers, the incumbent governor (Obi) was guaranteed a re-election on the platform of the APGA, despite a long-running split in the APGA party.
Once again, there was no loss of life, the election was said to have gone off peacefully, according to most observers. Some thugs were said to have snatched a few ballot boxes and many voters could not find their names on the inaccurate voters lists but the results reflected the wishes of the majority of the voters who cast votes. Governor Peter Obi gained over 90,000 votes for the APGA; Chris Ngige came second with over 60,000 votes for the AC and Charles Soludo came third with over 50,000 votes for the PDP. Andy Ubah, the Labour Party candidate, placed 4th with over 20,000 votes. If these three PDP candidates had combined their support, they could have defeated the incumbent governor but that is only a hypothetical if given that the PDP would probably not have received more votes no matter who their candidate was due to the scandals that have dogged the party at the national and the state levels.
Congratulations to the people of Anambra State for showing us a good example in which the votes of the people actually was made to count in an important election. Never mind that many of the over one million registered voters (with suspicious names like Nelson Mandela on some of the lists) did not get the chance to vote due to inaccurate voters lists. Those who did not win should do the honourable thing and congratulate the winner or go to court to challenge the results if they still want to waste the huge wealth that they were using to influence the results to no avail without accounting for the sources of the funds.
Dr. Ngige was later reported as intending to challenge the results in court due to failure to understand that when the constitution said that the winner must receive 25% of the votes cast in two-thirds of the local governments, the correct meaning is the valid votes since invalid votes are null and void and of no effects. But even if the invalid votes are included in the calculations, then all that was needed was to round up from 24.7% in one of the local governments to give Mr Obi the victory that he deserves.
For a people who are stereotyped as loving money more than anything, the people of Anambra state have demonstrated that as one of the best educated states in the country, democratic rights are not for sale to the highest bidder and that is good news for the whole of Africa - education, education, and more education! The embattled Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Maurice Iwu, may have redeemed himself partially (after a court ruled that his organization was incompetent to run elections in a different state) with his innovation to announce the results at the polling stations to avoid the tendency for results to be inflated at the collation centers by electoral officers who may not be able to resist the inducement of large sums of money or just due to human error of the sort that reportedly gave Ngige additional 10,000 votes that he did not have which would place him third if deducted from his total.
All they needed to do was add the figure one in front of or a couple of zeroes behind the total votes for the rigging candidate to bring the total closer to the number of registered voters who may have been deliberately frustrated from voting to allow room for rigging. But such a plan, if that is what it was, failed this time partly due to the vigilance of the monitors and the people, the transparent service of National Youth Service Corps members as electoral officers, and the uneven efforts of the heavy police presence. The method of announcing results at source should be maintained while the voters lists should be cleaned and made more accurate as we wait for the big one next year. Meanwhile, all hands should be on deck to support Governor Peter Obi to consolidate his success during his well deserved second term.
By Biko Agozino
"But my fear is that the furore that has grown around the Anambra voters register may become a battle ground, with the corpses that we did not see on February 6 showing up on the streets soon enough when the Obi administration chooses to organise the pending local government council elections in the state." This was the conclusion to Ruben Abati's 'Hope Deferred' assessment of the governorship election in Anambra State but where is Dr. Abati expecting those corpses to come from, his own village?
Let me start with a confession of a personal momentary dilemma on December 11, 2009, after the Africana Studies Program at Brown University-hosted Achebe Colloquium on Africa. The event gave me the opportunity of shaking hands on the same day and in the same hall with some of the greatest heroes of Nigeria - Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Emeka Ojukwu, and Peter Obi. My dilemma was similar to that of one of the characters in Ngugi’s latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow. In the novel, a business man, Titus Tajrika, refused to wash his subsequently smelly and gloved hand after shaking hands with the corrupt head of state. Oh yes, I have been washing my hands since the hands that I shook were clean hands while Tajrika may have stopped washing his hand to retain the odour of contamination because he shook an unclean hand.
Anambra State of Nigeria was pronounced the litmus test for the wobbly Nigerian democracy at that first Achebe Colloquium at Brown University, Rhode Island and Anambra people have managed to pass the test to the delight of many Nigerians. The election of February 6, 2010, was not perfect but the results reflected the wishes of the majority of the voters to see Governor Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) continue in office for a second term. Based on his track records, this was a deserved victory for which I join many Nigerians in congratulating him.
During the Achebe Colloquium, I was surprised that no Nigerian present could challenge the views of presenters like the former US Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr Lyman (pronounced Lie-man) that Nigeria was becoming ‘worthless and irrelevant ‘to the outside world. Only after the moderator of that first panel, Professor Obiora Udechukwu, tried to prod the panel by asking if they could name any exemplary leader in present day Nigeria, did Professors Abiola Irele of Harvard and Richard Joseph of Northwestern suggest that Governor Tunde Fashola of Lagos State was their model leader.
I was surprised that no one mentioned Peter Obi, the governor whose state was the topic of the symposium, as an exemplary leader. So during question and comments, I told the colloquium that we should give credit to the people of Anambra state for producing some of the greatest achievers in Nigerian history. Without itemizing the giants that have emerged from that small geographical space called Anambra, I reminded the audience that the state has been offering a model of democratic leadership that the rest of the country should learn from.
Here was a state in which the mandate of the people was stolen and awarded to a medical doctor, Chris Ngige, mistaken for a stooge but who was later sabotaged when it turned out that he was out to satisfy such basic expectations as paying salaries on time and building roads rather than surrender the treasury to the self-styled godfather, Chris Ubah. He was kidnapped and the police withdrew security details from him but amazingly, he was not killed despite the destruction of government-owned properties valued at millions by those that Achebe called a clique formed for the destabilization of the state.
Meanwhile the actual winner of the 2003 election went to court rather than rent a crowd of thugs to kill and maim as is the practice in many parts of the country where elections are called do-or-die affairs and candidates are challenged to prove that they are ready to die for the positions that they seek. After one year of litigation, he won his mandate back through the rule of law and became the only minority party governor in the country with a State House of Assembly in which his party did not have a single member.
The question on many minds was how long he was going to last in office before the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) dominated house would impeach him. And right on cue, they impeached him and also tried to impeach his deputy apparently to make way for the PDP Speaker of the House to become the governor. They miscalculated because the deputy was not automatically impeached when a governor is impeached and so they inadvertently gave Nigerians our first ever female state governor in the person of Obi‘s deputy, Dame Virginia Etiaba. Once again, the elected governor Obi went back to court and once again won back his mandate without a single life being lost!
I told the colloquium that it did not end there. The PDP Federal Government was bent on taking over the state and so a former personal assistant to President Olusegun Obasanjo was dispatched to contest the governorship of the state under the flag of the ruling PDP in 2007. The incumbent governor went to court to challenge the election because his term in office started when he won his first court battle to reclaim his mandate and so there was no vacancy at the time of the 2007 election. The Independent National Election Commission (INEC) ignored the injunctions and conducted a fake election in which the candidate of the ruling PDP, Andy Ubah, was declared winner despite complaints that no election took place. The declared winner was sworn in as governor but the legitimate governor avoided a campaign of violence and went back to court and again won back his mandate through the rule of law and without any loss of blood.
Before the February 2010 re-election of the highly achieving governor for a second term, the PDP candidate in the non-election of 2007 had gone to court to ask that he be declared governor in waiting and allowed to complete his term of office that was terminated when he was forced to hand over to the properly elected governor. The Supreme Court threw out the suit on the ground that governorship was not hereditary. By then he had lost the opportunity to contest the primaries of his party, PDP, for the 2010 election and true to character, PDP did not hold any primary elections but simply imposed a candidate on the party members. Two dozen other candidates who had bought primary elections nomination forms for millions of naira each but were denied an opportunity to contest the primaries went to court and won but a higher court over-ruled and said that the party had every right to select its candidate as it saw fit. Again, no one was killed even though the father of the imposed candidate was briefly kidnapped for ransom.
In the end, about two dozen candidates contested the 2010 governorship election with the PDP support split among the still relatively popular former governor (Ngige) who was rigged into office by godfathers but who chose to serve the people, the former governor who won a non-election (Andy Ubah) and the imposed party candidate (Soludo, a past governor of the Nigerian Central Bank) who won no primary election, all representing three different parties, Action Congress, Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party, respectively. I knew then that by splitting any support that PDP may have had that way, not to mention that the other two dozen candidates who had intended to contest the PDP primaries took their grievances into other parties and became their flag-bearers, the incumbent governor (Obi) was guaranteed a re-election on the platform of the APGA, despite a long-running split in the APGA party.
Once again, there was no loss of life, the election was said to have gone off peacefully, according to most observers. Some thugs were said to have snatched a few ballot boxes and many voters could not find their names on the inaccurate voters lists but the results reflected the wishes of the majority of the voters who cast votes. Governor Peter Obi gained over 90,000 votes for the APGA; Chris Ngige came second with over 60,000 votes for the AC and Charles Soludo came third with over 50,000 votes for the PDP. Andy Ubah, the Labour Party candidate, placed 4th with over 20,000 votes. If these three PDP candidates had combined their support, they could have defeated the incumbent governor but that is only a hypothetical if given that the PDP would probably not have received more votes no matter who their candidate was due to the scandals that have dogged the party at the national and the state levels.
Congratulations to the people of Anambra State for showing us a good example in which the votes of the people actually was made to count in an important election. Never mind that many of the over one million registered voters (with suspicious names like Nelson Mandela on some of the lists) did not get the chance to vote due to inaccurate voters lists. Those who did not win should do the honourable thing and congratulate the winner or go to court to challenge the results if they still want to waste the huge wealth that they were using to influence the results to no avail without accounting for the sources of the funds.
Dr. Ngige was later reported as intending to challenge the results in court due to failure to understand that when the constitution said that the winner must receive 25% of the votes cast in two-thirds of the local governments, the correct meaning is the valid votes since invalid votes are null and void and of no effects. But even if the invalid votes are included in the calculations, then all that was needed was to round up from 24.7% in one of the local governments to give Mr Obi the victory that he deserves.
For a people who are stereotyped as loving money more than anything, the people of Anambra state have demonstrated that as one of the best educated states in the country, democratic rights are not for sale to the highest bidder and that is good news for the whole of Africa - education, education, and more education! The embattled Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Maurice Iwu, may have redeemed himself partially (after a court ruled that his organization was incompetent to run elections in a different state) with his innovation to announce the results at the polling stations to avoid the tendency for results to be inflated at the collation centers by electoral officers who may not be able to resist the inducement of large sums of money or just due to human error of the sort that reportedly gave Ngige additional 10,000 votes that he did not have which would place him third if deducted from his total.
All they needed to do was add the figure one in front of or a couple of zeroes behind the total votes for the rigging candidate to bring the total closer to the number of registered voters who may have been deliberately frustrated from voting to allow room for rigging. But such a plan, if that is what it was, failed this time partly due to the vigilance of the monitors and the people, the transparent service of National Youth Service Corps members as electoral officers, and the uneven efforts of the heavy police presence. The method of announcing results at source should be maintained while the voters lists should be cleaned and made more accurate as we wait for the big one next year. Meanwhile, all hands should be on deck to support Governor Peter Obi to consolidate his success during his well deserved second term.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
What Does Success Mean to You?
Hi Dad,
I am participating in a program with my school called success for life where they take us to 5 different buisnesses over the course of 5 weeks and have recently completed the first day of it. They asked us to do some homework for the next session in a week's time and one of the assignments is to ask a successful adult the folowing questions:
What does success mean to you?
What three traits/skills are needed to be successful?
Could you arnswer those two questions for me please?
Dear Sons,
Thank you for asking me these important questions and for thinking of me as a successful adult. I am so proud to know that you think of me this way and I can tell you that you and your brothers and sisters will be even more successful than me because you are standing on the shoulders of successful giants, so you will see farther than your father can. Thanks sons.
SUCCESS:
Look at the spelling first. We cannot spell it without U. In fact, we cannot spell you without U. So the most important definition of success is that it means that YOU achieve the goals that YOU set for yourself, provided that the goal is good and not harmful. In short, success means good goal attainment.
I will add that a successful goal attainment implies that the goal is a positive one and not a negative one. For instance, Voldermot succeeded in killing the parents of Harry Porter but You-know-who cannot be said to be successful even as a wizard because little Harry could whip his ass with good magic. Harry is a hero but Voldermot is a villain.
Another villain was Hitler who killed millions of people but who remains a failure as far as political leadership is concerned. Nelson Mandela is a hero even though he lost more than 27 years of his adult life in prison for asking that everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. Mandela is a success because he set himself a progressive goal while Hitler is a failure because he set himself an evil goal.
In business, some companies set themselves the goal of making huge profits and refuse to treat their workers right or to take care of the environment. Such unethical businesses could make lots of money on the short run but before long, their dodgy business practices will catch up with them and their company would collapse. For example, in the US, there was a company called Enron that was very successful in making profits for the share-holders by using false accounting to inflate the value of the company stocks. They also tricked their workers to invest all their retirement savings in the company stocks to boost the value. At the same time, the directors of the company were selling their own shares and cashing out huge bonuses just in time before the shares of the company collapsed. The company was also an energy company that did not care about renewable energy to help save the earth from climate change. In the end, the directors of the company were sentenced to long terms in prison to show that they failed as business leaders.
A good example of successful business leaders would include Bill Gates and Younis, the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Winner. They both made a lot of money but use the money to pursue some good for the rest of humanity. For instance, the Bill Gates Foundation gives millions of dollars every year in grants to researchers to help to find cures for diseases in poor countries. Younis set up a micro-credit bank to give small loans to poor women and men in Bangladesh so that they could set up their own small businesses.
So what does it take to be successful? TEAM: Together Each Achieves More. None of the really successful people ever did it on their own without a team. Even Warren Buffet could claim that he did it all by himself but he had workers working for him and he had a wife who supported him and children who also gave him support. Anyone who claims to be a self-made person is not telling the truth because everyone is the product of elaborate team work.
Of course, some people do not know this secret of success and continue to try to do everything by themselves. They may have heard that what it takes to be successful is lots of hard work. I disagree. What it takes to succeed is smart work and team work is one of the smartest ways to work and achieve success.
You must remember when I used to coach your soccer team in Indiana. I taught you to touch the ball once to control it and the next touch would be to pass it to a team-mate in a better position to score. That way, we scored lots of goals but a few of the kids did not understand the method and tried to be the hero who beat everybody to score but they almost always lost the ball. You still see this error even in premier league except in clubs like Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal where the two-touch maximum strategy in team play makes for maximum success. Liverpool still has good players like Steven Gerald who believes that he alone can win matches for the team and so they are crap much of the time.
The same principle applies to academic success. Work smart and not hard. Your team for academic success includes your parents and teachers as your coaches, your brothers, sisters and classmates as your team mates. You share the home chores, you give each other support and advice, you want to see everyone succeed and together each achieves more.
Apart from teamwork, another key to success is time management. You have to spend your time wisely because a stitch in time saves nine. If you spend too much time watching television, hanging out on the street corner, drinking and chasing the opposite sex or doing drugs, fighting or simply playing computer games, then you will have less time to spend on your studies or on your business planning. The same way that your school has a time-table showing what activities must be engaged in every minute of the day, that is the way successful leaders parcel out their time showing how many hours they would spend studying English Language, then mathematics, then reading for pleasure, then cleaning the house, then speaking with friends, then playing a game with the family and so on. Plan to read for at least 45 minutes everyday and plan to write something every week to improve your skills and your critical thinking skills.
Also connected to time management is effective planning. In business, it is always important to have a business plan. The same goes in academic success - you need a research proposal before you start your research project; plan to go to university and study for a degree, plan to join a political party and participate in the formulation of policies for your country, volunteer in your community to help the less fortunate, learn useful skills, play in a team sport to learn team-building and team work skills, join a debating society to sharpen your critical thinking skills, start a business of your own. Learn how to save money for your business plans and investment.
Finally, some key skills necessary for success in any field is to learn to take good care of yourself. Always start the day by doing a poo, then stretch and exercise for 30 minutes, then breakfast and poo again (usually a bigger poo the second time) then brush your teeth and shower without soap and use soap only once in a while, have a light lunch or fruits snacks for lunch and drink lots of water (no soda and rarely juice) and do not eat a heavy dinner just before bedtime, and brush your teeth before bed. A heavy lunch will slow you down during the day and make you sleepy. Always plan to get at least 8 hours of sleep every night - early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!
Finally, sons, remember that the most successful people in the world are not always the richest people. For instance, who is the most successful Englishman of all time? William Shakespeare. Who is the most successful German of all time? Karl Marx. Who is the most successful Jew of all time? Albert Einstein. Who is the most successful Russian of all time? Lenin. Who is the most successful Ghanaian? Nkrumah. Who is the most successful Indian? Gandhi. Who is the most successful American? Martin Luther King Junior. Who is the most successful African? Mandela. None of them was the richest person in their era but they made important contributions to knowledge and to humanity and so thousands of years to come, people will still be reading about them when we may have forgotten about who was the richest person at any time.
So the best key to success is to aim to offer intellectual and moral leadership to make the world better in all your endeavours and in all the teams you build or work in.
Lots of love sons. I know you will be among the most successful men of your generation.
Dad
I am participating in a program with my school called success for life where they take us to 5 different buisnesses over the course of 5 weeks and have recently completed the first day of it. They asked us to do some homework for the next session in a week's time and one of the assignments is to ask a successful adult the folowing questions:
What does success mean to you?
What three traits/skills are needed to be successful?
Could you arnswer those two questions for me please?
Dear Sons,
Thank you for asking me these important questions and for thinking of me as a successful adult. I am so proud to know that you think of me this way and I can tell you that you and your brothers and sisters will be even more successful than me because you are standing on the shoulders of successful giants, so you will see farther than your father can. Thanks sons.
SUCCESS:
Look at the spelling first. We cannot spell it without U. In fact, we cannot spell you without U. So the most important definition of success is that it means that YOU achieve the goals that YOU set for yourself, provided that the goal is good and not harmful. In short, success means good goal attainment.
I will add that a successful goal attainment implies that the goal is a positive one and not a negative one. For instance, Voldermot succeeded in killing the parents of Harry Porter but You-know-who cannot be said to be successful even as a wizard because little Harry could whip his ass with good magic. Harry is a hero but Voldermot is a villain.
Another villain was Hitler who killed millions of people but who remains a failure as far as political leadership is concerned. Nelson Mandela is a hero even though he lost more than 27 years of his adult life in prison for asking that everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. Mandela is a success because he set himself a progressive goal while Hitler is a failure because he set himself an evil goal.
In business, some companies set themselves the goal of making huge profits and refuse to treat their workers right or to take care of the environment. Such unethical businesses could make lots of money on the short run but before long, their dodgy business practices will catch up with them and their company would collapse. For example, in the US, there was a company called Enron that was very successful in making profits for the share-holders by using false accounting to inflate the value of the company stocks. They also tricked their workers to invest all their retirement savings in the company stocks to boost the value. At the same time, the directors of the company were selling their own shares and cashing out huge bonuses just in time before the shares of the company collapsed. The company was also an energy company that did not care about renewable energy to help save the earth from climate change. In the end, the directors of the company were sentenced to long terms in prison to show that they failed as business leaders.
A good example of successful business leaders would include Bill Gates and Younis, the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Winner. They both made a lot of money but use the money to pursue some good for the rest of humanity. For instance, the Bill Gates Foundation gives millions of dollars every year in grants to researchers to help to find cures for diseases in poor countries. Younis set up a micro-credit bank to give small loans to poor women and men in Bangladesh so that they could set up their own small businesses.
So what does it take to be successful? TEAM: Together Each Achieves More. None of the really successful people ever did it on their own without a team. Even Warren Buffet could claim that he did it all by himself but he had workers working for him and he had a wife who supported him and children who also gave him support. Anyone who claims to be a self-made person is not telling the truth because everyone is the product of elaborate team work.
Of course, some people do not know this secret of success and continue to try to do everything by themselves. They may have heard that what it takes to be successful is lots of hard work. I disagree. What it takes to succeed is smart work and team work is one of the smartest ways to work and achieve success.
You must remember when I used to coach your soccer team in Indiana. I taught you to touch the ball once to control it and the next touch would be to pass it to a team-mate in a better position to score. That way, we scored lots of goals but a few of the kids did not understand the method and tried to be the hero who beat everybody to score but they almost always lost the ball. You still see this error even in premier league except in clubs like Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal where the two-touch maximum strategy in team play makes for maximum success. Liverpool still has good players like Steven Gerald who believes that he alone can win matches for the team and so they are crap much of the time.
The same principle applies to academic success. Work smart and not hard. Your team for academic success includes your parents and teachers as your coaches, your brothers, sisters and classmates as your team mates. You share the home chores, you give each other support and advice, you want to see everyone succeed and together each achieves more.
Apart from teamwork, another key to success is time management. You have to spend your time wisely because a stitch in time saves nine. If you spend too much time watching television, hanging out on the street corner, drinking and chasing the opposite sex or doing drugs, fighting or simply playing computer games, then you will have less time to spend on your studies or on your business planning. The same way that your school has a time-table showing what activities must be engaged in every minute of the day, that is the way successful leaders parcel out their time showing how many hours they would spend studying English Language, then mathematics, then reading for pleasure, then cleaning the house, then speaking with friends, then playing a game with the family and so on. Plan to read for at least 45 minutes everyday and plan to write something every week to improve your skills and your critical thinking skills.
Also connected to time management is effective planning. In business, it is always important to have a business plan. The same goes in academic success - you need a research proposal before you start your research project; plan to go to university and study for a degree, plan to join a political party and participate in the formulation of policies for your country, volunteer in your community to help the less fortunate, learn useful skills, play in a team sport to learn team-building and team work skills, join a debating society to sharpen your critical thinking skills, start a business of your own. Learn how to save money for your business plans and investment.
Finally, some key skills necessary for success in any field is to learn to take good care of yourself. Always start the day by doing a poo, then stretch and exercise for 30 minutes, then breakfast and poo again (usually a bigger poo the second time) then brush your teeth and shower without soap and use soap only once in a while, have a light lunch or fruits snacks for lunch and drink lots of water (no soda and rarely juice) and do not eat a heavy dinner just before bedtime, and brush your teeth before bed. A heavy lunch will slow you down during the day and make you sleepy. Always plan to get at least 8 hours of sleep every night - early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!
Finally, sons, remember that the most successful people in the world are not always the richest people. For instance, who is the most successful Englishman of all time? William Shakespeare. Who is the most successful German of all time? Karl Marx. Who is the most successful Jew of all time? Albert Einstein. Who is the most successful Russian of all time? Lenin. Who is the most successful Ghanaian? Nkrumah. Who is the most successful Indian? Gandhi. Who is the most successful American? Martin Luther King Junior. Who is the most successful African? Mandela. None of them was the richest person in their era but they made important contributions to knowledge and to humanity and so thousands of years to come, people will still be reading about them when we may have forgotten about who was the richest person at any time.
So the best key to success is to aim to offer intellectual and moral leadership to make the world better in all your endeavours and in all the teams you build or work in.
Lots of love sons. I know you will be among the most successful men of your generation.
Dad
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