I’VE heard it said that we Nigerians are the happiest people on earth. We’re also accused of being passive about issues that would stir up revolutions in other countries. For instance, it’s been just over a week since ethno-religious violence left hundreds dead around Jos, a city in central Nigeria, but the slaughtering of our fellow citizens has already largely faded from our headlines and conversations. The general response to announcements by the police that they have apprehended some of the butchers is, “Oh, really?” Few people I know even care to hear what the brutes have to say for themselves.

Amnesia Nigeriana, someone called it: that tendency of Nigerians to blank out national trauma. As it happens, more than anything else, it is the reports that persist on the BBC and CNN that remind us that hundreds of innocent Nigerians, women and children, were slaughtered in their sleep that Sunday night. When I look up at the huge TV screen in the newsroom where I work, there’s usually a foreign reporter with a look of high seriousness, scenes of Jos in the background.

Every time Nigeria experiences an episode of violence, we seem to go quiet while the rest of the world becomes fixated. Perhaps it’s understandable that we begin to resent these foreign journalists and the constant focus on our disasters.

“These people just never carry any positive news about Nigeria,” a colleague says.

“All they ever see is the bad and the ugly.”

“It’s just malice. They have a particular image of Africa that they want to keep portraying to the world.”

My friend Ruona has a theory for why we don’t react more strongly: Nigerians have to stare the carnage in the face all the time — we become jaded about the violence because we’re used to it — while the Western news media see it with fresh eyes.

But even if we decided to make more of a big deal out of our calamities, Jos, terrible as what happened there was, would have to patiently wait its turn. While ethno-religious violence takes place in Jos, people in Ebonyi State, who speak the same language and share the same religion, are massacring one another over natural resources. Disgruntled militants in the Niger Delta are threatening to cripple the economy by vandalizing more petroleum pipelines. Politicians are assassinated regularly in the western states; the elderly fathers and mothers of prosperous children are kidnapped and held for ransom in the east. And we know it’s just a matter of time before riots between Muslims and Christians break out again up north.

Even everyday hazards turn deadly. We have electricity for only a few hours per week, and countless families have been blasted into oblivion or lulled to a permanent sleep when their generators have exploded or discharged fatal fumes. Our country is one of the largest producers of crude oil in the world, yet an excruciating fuel scarcity persists, with fuel queues that people joke stretch all the way to Calcutta.

And with whom do we register our grievances? Despite reports that President Umaru Yar’Adua, who hasn’t been seen in public since he left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia last November, is brain dead, his devoted wife and a loyal cabal of his tribesmen are quite happy to rule us in his place.

We mourn for those who died in Jos, and for the survivors. We are all dismayed at the series of disasters that have befallen them. But we are careful not to overdose on agony. Even the psychologists agree that amnesia can be a defense mechanism, useful for the preservation of sanity.

Columbia University’s SIPA Pan-African Network, African Business Club and African Law Students Association

Invite

The 7th Annual African Economic Forum

March 26th and 27th, 2010

Columbia University in the City of New York

Sessions:

African Hospitality: The Power Within| Infrastructure Development in Africa

African Fashion Going Global |China-Africa Trade and Investment

Aid vs. Investment| Brand Africa: Defining a Continent

Greasing the Wheel: Law, Corruption and the Economy

Niger Delta Investment Summit

Fashion Show | Movie Screening

Details: http://www.aef2010.com

Register: http://africaeconomicforum.com/aef2010/register

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnRPunzOZds

Meet Eyram Tawia of Leti Games: http://www.letigames.com as he discusses what it’s like being a game designer in Ghana.

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/v/eYRUJuacrMs

On Saturday Feb. 6, 52 people braved the winter to attend Solving Africa’s 2010 Kickoff event. Our vision is to have three or four events like this every year that follow this format:

1. Three Africans present their ideas for projects they’ve been thinking of launching in their communities in Africa. These ideas usually fall into education, health care, or the general pool of entrepreneurship.

2. Attendees choose a project to work on for the evening. They brainstorm, create project deliverables, and build a steering committee to get the idea up and running.

3. After the evening, participants meet offline and continue working on these projects, giving ongoing feedback to the larger group and asking for whatever help is necessary.

In this fashion, between 9 and 12 new small scale projects will be launched each year by people from the communities they want to serve.

By Tomi Lamikanra

Call it culture shock but I was in a daze here for the first few days of getting into the American classroom! It was not the blackboards or the nice seats, afterall we have those where I was coming from in some schools:), and who has not seen a blackboard before? Even children in Kewu classes have blackboards! It was the attitudes of students to the teachers and the teachers to the students that made me stare so much. Continue Reading

George Ayittey is a professor of economics at the American University in Washington D.C. He is from Ghana and champions the idea that since independence, Africa’s leaders have been deterrents of change whose main goal has been to maintain the status quo of the colonized countries handed to them as a way to keep money in their pockets. He calls them the hippo generation. Ayittey contrasts this group with the rising crop of young leaders today in Africa – the Cheetah generation – they are tired of the ineptitude of the hippos and are racing to transform the continent one initiative at a time.

I agree with you that our governments are a joke. What do people like you and I who may have very little by way of social or political capital do in the meantime? Continue Reading

I first met Ory Okolloh (photo courtesy TED.com) as a forwarded link in my email in mid-November 2008. My friend Jagila had sent me her 2007 presentation at the TED Conference in Arusha, Tanzania where she talked about her experience using the internet as a tool for activism.

The 33-year-old is a mother of two, who used to consult on legal matters for nonprofits. She has since left that to focus her energies full time on turning Ushahidi into a free open-source platform so that other activists are able to use the software to monitor everything from NGO aid delivery to elections. Ushahidi was used by Al Jazeera to monitor the war in Gaza when all media personnel were ordered out of the region. It was used again by the UN to monitor the War in Congo and is being used in monitoring relief efforts for the earthquake in Haiti.

She stands at about 5-feet 10-inches and wears her hair the only way a female African activist does – curly and natural. This is an excerpt of a longer interview in which she discusses where education in Africa is failing its people.