Author Archives: Calabarboy

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Nigeria’s Goodluck: No Violence Over Presidential Bid

Nigeria will not fall into violence over his decision to stand for elections next year, President Goodluck Jonathan said in an exclusive interview with CNN. “I can tell you very clearly that violence will not break out because of my interests. I can tell you very clearly,” Jonathan said in a wide-ranging interview at the presidential palace in Abuja ahead of October 1 celebrations marking 50 years of independence.

In September, Jonathan declared his intention to run in the October presidential primaries for his party, the People’s Democratic Party. Under Nigerian “zoning” rules, power must rotate between the north and the south every eight years. Jonathan — a native of the Niger Delta region in the south — was vice president under President Umaru Yar’Adua, from the north, when he died in May three years into his first term. “In the first place if this country had agreed the presidency rotates between north and south I would not be the president today. I couldn’t have been if there is an agreement in this country that it rotates between north and south,” Goodluck reasoned. “I couldn’t have been the president the day Yar’Adua died — another northerner would have taken over and I could have continued as the vice president. Goodluck acknowledged that Nigeria is grappling with limited resources, corruption and high poverty, despite being a world leader in oil production.

However, he said, “one thing that I know and I feel Nigeria will celebrate is continuity and peace. Yes we experienced civil war that lasted 13 months. Some other countries experienced civil wars that lasted for years.”

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Patrick Awuah on Educating Leaders

Patrick Awuah left Ghana as a teenager to attend Swarthmore College in the United States, then stayed on to build a career at Microsoft in Seattle. In returning to his home country, he has made a commitment to educating young people in critical thinking and ethical service, values he believes are crucial for the nation-building that lies ahead. Patrick Awuah makes the case that a liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders.

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Moin-Moin Babble

Courtesy of http://www.avartsycooking.com

Last week my friend Chinwe decided she was going to make moin-moin and posted it on Facebook. This sparked a renewed longing to grind my kitchen and produce something of an American version, given the fact that I buy the local beans I find here. I haven’t worked at it yet, but this may well be the week I knock on my apron and get my wife laughing at my American moin-moin début. My Ijebu garri has been languishing and waiting for an appropriate companion for a while now 🙂

But this points me back to some thoughts of what made eating moin-moin exciting for me. As a child, my mum’s creation wrapped in nkong (what Efiks call the leaf used in wrapping the bean paste) was deservedly top-class. From the way she creatively separated the skin from the bean seeds using a mortar and pestle (although I soon became the point man for that part of the labour), to the blending with pepper and ground dried crayfish plus other ingredients to match, to the skilful apportioning of the paste into the leaves and finally to neatly wrapping the leaves, without a single drop of the paste leaking out, before placing into the pot. There was something near divine about the whole process and I usually observed it with strict attention.
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