SolomonSydelle started a meme about a Nigerian Revolution - well actually she posted on it and Omodudu did one as well. I wrote a long response to her revolution on her blog page as a comment. So I decided to repost it here as my contribution to the whole Nigerian Revolution idea - may it die a horrible and ignominous death :D

The problem with wishing for a revolution (non-violent or otherwise) is the same problem of wishing for quick solutions. Even if you waved a magic wand and made every Nigerian the living embodiment of altruism, and every policy mandate of the government a perfect one it will still take about ten to twenty years to half the poverty level and reduce it from some 70 million people to about 35 million people. Revolutions do not work, incremental change works. It is not glamorous, it doesn't come with slogans and fancy chants. It's not inspirational. It simply works. One year is better than the next, and those years add up over time. It's not marching to Abuja and then flying back to wherever you came from. It's not dropping trash in front of politicians houses or in related news kidnapping their fathers and mothers.

Let me give you an example of what i mean. So you come to power as this new enlightened leader in Nigeria after your revolution. One of your main planks is that you will fix the power situation immediately. The first thing someone tells you. Well we have 5,000 MW and we need 20,000 MW, what should we do? You say, build the power plants. (Notice it is about $1 million a MW and each will take about 2-3 years to build.) Then someone says, oh i forgot all these power plants need to be powered and since we are environmentally concious we cannot use coal. So we use gas. Then they tell you, there are no facilities for gas stripping in Nigeria in the quantities that we would need. Then you say lets build the gas strippers. Then someone says, there is no way to get the gas to the power plants. Then you say let them build pipes to transport the gas. There are no pipe manufacturers of sufficient quality. Then you say let us build the pipe manufacturer and import pipes to start. Finally you have fixed the generation problem. Wait someone then says, our transmission network is too small to carry all this new power we have. You say improve the transmission network. So you do that. Wait someone says, the distribution network is also horrible, we cannot transmit power to the people without losing 50% of it. You say, fix it.

Because the people love you they believe you when you say after this five year plan you will have constant power supply. Then you announce your new tarrifs to enable your electricity system to work properly with proper incentives for mainteneance and capital expenditure. Wait someone says, this price is to high for the common man. No one will pay it. We should pay the old price. But you say that if we do that no one will do the power in Nigeria. We don't care the price has to remain the same. Government has to subsidise. All your contractors melt away because they are not trusting the recovery of billions of dollars of capital expenditure to a government subsidy.

How does your revolution fix this problem, the biggest bane of the Nigerian economy?

Oh and I also forgot to mention that in Nigeria currently you don't have even close to a third of the skilled people that you would need to execute a project of this nature. However I didn't throw that in because it might make it a bit too difficult for your revolution.

I suppose I was not as civil as I could have been, but living here and seeing how much of a struggle it is to do the little that we are doing, any calls for disruption however well meaning drive me up the wall.

I'm done, but i must say that Nigeria is not an easy fix. There is no magic wand to solve our problems. In spite of goverment, sometimes despite their best efforts to hold us back, we are muddling in the right direction. People forget that with all his nonsense, Obasanjo actually reduced the poverty rate in this country from 70% to 50% (or rather it reduced in his 8 years in power). I'll rather muddle in the right direction than try to walk in the right direction and end up in a civil war.

I suppose that the various pastors and preachers I have encountered in my life will be pleased to know that I have imbibed one of the central tenets of Christianity. The tenet is that there is no objective standard of morality other than God. Basically there is no such thing as a moral man without God.

I realized that I really believed this, rather than believing I believed this a couple of days ago. I was reading an article (NY Times registration required) about there is a standard of morality common to man regardless of religion, color, sex, nation and every other divider one can care to use. As I was reading it, I kept trying to come up with justifications in my mind as to why none of the instances given actually proved the existence of a common morality. After a while I started wondering why I was thinking this way.

I realized that if I believed what the article was saying, then a belief I held about the nature of man would be weakened or proven to be wrong. So I chose the “logical” approach and decided to ignore (and in some cases try to invalidate) the instances provided in the article. Since my brain is a sneaky S.O.B. it provided the definition of what I was doing: cognitive dissonance.

Since I tend to be more logical than not, I realized I couldn’t really attack the evidence as it was pretty straight-forward. So I came to a new conclusion, there is an objective standard of morality for man. There is also an objective standard for God. God’s standard is higher than man’s standard and so from God’s perspective there is no such thing as a moral man without God.

Now I could be cognitive dissonancing again, but I think this works and takes into account all the available evidence. So check out the article and let me know what you think? Is my explanation within the rational bounds (well assuming belief in God is rational :D) or am I cognitive dissonancing?

I’ll be good from now on I promise. Honestly I was meaning to blog, I was planning to blog, I even started writing a post at least once, but two weeks passed with no post. Don’t worry it will not happen again :D

The thing I was most moved to blog about was this question I saw from the Edge. It’s a website that asks questions of academics and other smart folk. So this years question was:

What have you changed your mind about in the last year and Why?

Thinking about it, I realized that there aren’t that many things that came to mind. This brought to mind a study I remember reading about that said that most people never changed their minds. So I thought I’d ask you guys, is there anything you have changed your mind about in the last year? And why?

The second this is this article I saw on one of the economist blogs about an essay on the rise of the hedonic marriage. Relax guys it’s not about wife swapping and other such unsavory things :D

It’s about how marriage is no longer about shared production (the husband works and the wife stays at home) but about shared consumption – that modern marriage is about love and companionship. The paper, being an economics paper, puts this down to the fact that it is too costly for highly educated women to stay out of the workplace especially with increasing returns to skilled labour.

Trying not to generalize too much from the little I have seen since I moved back, I would believe that this type of marriage has become common amongst the upwardly mobile young professional set that seems to be getting married a lot these days. This probably means that it is only a matter of time before this type of marriage spills to the rest of the population.

However the attendant effect on patriarchy and gender equality would probably be less transformational in Nigeria (at least at first) due to the dual power of culture and religion, than it would be in Yanks or Western Europe.

I could be wrong, but I’d expect that in one way or another most Nigerian women expect to live their lives by Ephesians 5: 22- 24. However I would also expect that their interpretation of that has become more liberal over the years, and will become more liberal in years to come.

So what do you think? Is hedonic marriage here to stay in Nigeria, and if it is, what do you think it will mean for patriarchy in Nigeria?

Intro

Readers of my blog in the last few months of sporadic postings may indeed recall a promise of mine to produce a top ten list for the year. Distractions abounded, and so I never quite got around to it. However I got an even better idea from perusing a few of the blogs on my reader. Certain blogs did a top ten based on reader traffic, which is an even more interesting way of looking at the posts. After all what your readers thought were your best posts, in a way is even more important than what you think are your best posts.

Caveat 1

I started doing the recording from the middle of June, and so there will be a distortionary effect from that.

Caveat 2

These may not actually be the top ten popular posts because most people read my blog home page, and there may have been more popular posts. Still I think individual page views is a valid comparison because people choose to go to those pages.

Extras

Since it's me and I can't help myself, I will also give a brief commentary on your choice. I suppose I should mention that this post is brought to you courtesy of google analytics :D

Your Top Ten

1. Prelude To A Fraud

I liked this post, and for some reason it struck a chord with a lot of people who read it. It wasn't my most heavily commented on post (only 19 comments) but people seemed drawn to it. I guess it touched our frustration with the corruption in Nigeria

2. On The This Day Sophmore Effort

This post turning up as second baffles me, I think. I read it again and there is basically nothing in it. I mean it's not a bad post, but it doesn't strike me a post to make people visit the actual page. Then again it shows what I know

3. Why I Think They Think The New Naira Is A Good Idea

This one is expected, especially because at the time people were curious about the whole redenomination thing. I liked the post, but as Yardy and co nixed the plans there was no chance to find out whether my predictions were right.

4. Sunday Corper 1

I honestly thought that this would be number one since it is the only reason that I could think of that people would check back issues. The fact that this is in the top 5 after being published in November 2006, shows that I was a bit right. Still glad you liked, there was even a comment on the page that was posted in November 2007.

5. At Least They Didn't Rape Them Sha

Another post I'm glad you liked. I'm glad the events reported in it did not become a regular occurence, even though apparently it was repeated in the News Cafe robbery this Christmas, albeit with only one girl. The hurricane mentality is still intact, as a necessary Lagos survival theme.

6. Sunday Corper 2

Well this makes sense, seeing as it is the second one, and so people what to know what the deal was after the first one. It was also the first Sunday Corper that appeared on Monday. Kinda sad that my penchant for posting Sunday Corper on Monday started from the very second post. As a post, I suppose it was decent :D

7. Hot Girl Syndrome

The only relationship theory post that made it into the top ten, and it is not even a proper one. Still I think it was a very good one and I'm glad y'all thought so too.

8. Sunday Corper 6

So I couldn't figure out why SC 6, i mean it's not like it follows logically and so I went and had a look. Well I still can't figure it out. It's about a day in the lecture hall and it had no comments. Oh well as they say, the readers know best.

9. Three People Who Probably Should Not Reproduce

I guess this one was because people were still worried about Nospecto :D Well it took a few more months (January 2008) but they finally closed all the "finance houses" down. The Nigerian redenomination has been killed, and the guy who wrote the research report on Access Bank has driven off into the sunset. It was noted that I was a little vicious by one of the commenters, but apparently y'all were too since you liked it enough for it to make the top ten.

10. Sunday Corper 3

The fourth SC post in the top ten, fitting I suppose that it is the one rounding up the list. This post actually has some useful information about Lagos camp, which is more than I can say for most of my SC posts :D

Closing

Aiight guys, that's your 2007 on Aijuswanarite. Thanks for making it a great year. Hope y'all stick around for 2008. Laters.

Aiight so the holidays are over, exams are over and work is back in full swing. This also means that hopefully I am back to my frequently blogging ways, cos I know y’all missed me. Anyway I will continue on the schedule I set for myself when I came back the last time. Oh and I am also supposed to apologise for the last post because it was not only tres boring, but it was also kinda pointless. No matter, we mean to start 2008 with a bang. So with out further ado, here is On Girls Blocking Guys:

One fine December evening, in good ol Blighty, Snazzy and a number of other like minded individuals were seating in a Jamaican style restaurant celebrating Snazzy’s cousin’s 27th birthday. As expected the discussions amongst us Nigerian was sedate with nobody talking over anybody else, and everybody listening respectfully to everyone else.

At some point in the night I brought up one of my favorite topics – relationship theory. I always like to hear people’s opinions on the whole dating/blocking/chasing thing. I have found that people always surprise you in this regard. You tend to find that you can’t really read people in this area as well as you think. For some reason I think that knowing what people think in this area gives deeper insight into their personalities than almost any other area.

So we meandered around a few topics before we came to girls blocking guys. At first we just took a straw poll, whether people were for or against it. However we discovered that it wasn’t as clear cut. There were actually three categories – for it, against it, and for it in principle. For it in principle basically meant that if you were a girl believed that girls should be allowed to block guys, but you wouldn’t do it personally. If you were a guy it meant that while you allowed that girls could block guys, you personally would not want to be blocked by a girl. I think there may have been arguments surrounding whether that meant that you were indeed against it – If there weren’t that just meant that I thought it meant the same thing, but did not bother to bring it up.

The next focus was on why the people who were against it, were indeed against it. The first defense – men are naturally more suited to chasing women, and there are other ways that a woman can show interest. That was the whole if a woman is interested, she should do some signaling and let the guy do the rest. The second defense – regardless of political correctness, a girl who blocks guys comes across as a slut. The third defense (and my personal favorite) – blocking a guy gives all the advantage in the relationship to the guy because he will constantly be throwing up the phrase “who told you to chase me” – apparently that phrase is one of the strongest weapons in the female arsenal and they don’t want to share it with us guys.

The first defense is generally true, guys are indeed better at chasing girls than girls are at chasing guys – however that is simply a function of practice. You try doing something at least one a week from the time you were thirteen, I’m sure you would be good at it too. However the fact that guys are naturally more suited to doing something doesn’t mean that they are the only ones that should do it. After all, from what I heard in college women have better hand – eye coordination than men and as such are more naturally suited to activities like driving and piloting, but I don’t hear people say that only women should be drivers and pilots.

The second defense is also true as far as it goes. Girls who block guys are seen as easy. It is clearly an unfair indictment, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is true. Feminists will argue that it is a function of the patriarchal society in which we live in. It is a function of the society we live in. However the true nature of the statement doesn’t mean that it is correct. It’s like saying in the Jim Crow era that a black man shouldn’t want to be educated, because society believes that black men who wanted to be educated are troublemakers. So since you don't want to be seen as a trouble maker, you shouldn't want to be educated.

The third defense approaches it from the female perspective, and puts it in terms of power dynamics. The fact that the one being chased has the power in the relationship. At the start of the relationship this in true, but in the long run I think this power thing goes away. After all, all those marriages that you hear about that the husband does anyhow – he was the one that chased the wife. I think that this argument derives from the fact that girls see being chased as a perk. Look at it this way, how many girls in the name of equality will decide not to have an engagement ring? Everyone wants to fix the injustices that they are disadvantaged by and not the ones that they benefit from.

I think these are the ones that came up as to reasons why girls shouldn’t block guys, but I thought of one more courtesy of a Friends scene that just flashed through my head – the one where Phoebe proposed to her man on the jumbotron at the Knicks game. That showed the fact that guys can indeed feel emasculated by being blocked girls. I don’t know about all that, because I’ve been hit on by girls a few times in my life and I rather liked it. But I guess it takes all kinds. Anyway I’m kinda done, and I supposed the last thing left to do is ask – Do you think Girls should block Guys?

P.S. Happy New Year