#BringBackOurGirls: Day 47

On 15th April 2014, over 200 school girls were kidnapped at night from the Chibok Government Secondary School in Borno State in Northern Nigeria.



Map of Nigeria showing Borno state and Chibok
Source: BBC article on the kidnapping on 15 April 2014

Although news of the kidnapping was reported by some international media outlets from the beginning,   the story somehow seemed to stay under the radar of mainstream media.

 

A few across the world followed this harrowing event from the beginning. In the early days of the crisis, the Nigerian government appeared to dither and was even unsure about the numbers of girls kidnapped. For example, the first report from the BBC captures the confusion: "Nigeria unrest: Gunmen abduct 'about 100 schoolgirls'"

 

When some onlookers expressed shock and outrage over the events, the official line was  that it was a delicate and complex situation that was hard for most outside Nigeria to understand.

It was only after a few weeks following the kidnapping that the story started to take centre stage in the international media arena. This was in part thanks to one of the most vocal voices on the kidnapping; Oby Ezekwesili. Ms Ezekwesili has been unflinching and resolute in her efforts to bring the school girls back home. The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag started by Nigerians on Twitter was just one of the ways people across the globe learnt about the kidnapping. Suddenly, the world was talking about it and the notorious kidnapping became a cause du jour that was trendy to talk about. There were marches, protests worldwide and the curious pictures of random African girls meant to represent the Chibok girls. World powers started pledging support to the Nigerian government.

 

As the kidnapping story moved from the internet to mainstream television media, some of us designated ambassadors for Africa in other parts of the world were expected to explain why the Nigerian government was completely incompetent when it came to dealing with the situation. While the Nigerian president was unable to visit 



A pensive President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria as seen via Twitter photos



the area where the girls were kidnapped in his own country, he was able to take a 7 hour flight to Paris to a summit where African leaders unanimously declared war on Boko Haram. President Jonathan was equally available for another 7 hour flight to Johannesburg for the all-important inauguration of President Jacob Zuma.  

 

It is now the 47th Day since the girls were kidnapped from their school. No concrete leads. No concrete actions. Sadly, just as quickly as the world gained interest in the kidnapping, interest is waning. In the meantime, families are still missing their girls.

 

 



Martha Mark, Mother of Monica Mark. Source: Thinkprogres

One of the most poignant pictures for me has been that of Martha Mark the mother of one of the girls, Monica Mark.

This picture captures the fact that the kidnapped girls are real individuals. Real daughters, sisters, cousins and friends. Real next door neighbours, church members and team-mates. Real girls who like typical girls their age around the world think about school, friends, music, the future and boys. Another powerful representation comes from a New York Times article: "Bringing the Nigerian Schoolgirls Into View" . The article is accompanied by a photo-story showing the items left behind by the school girls. School uniforms, notebooks, slippers, dresses, photos, earrings, doodles in notebooks. Little things that show that they are not a faceless collective but real girls.

 

"Hauwa Mutah wants to be a biochemist. Monica Enoch loves to sing. Dourcas Yakubu is a shy girl who exchanged hand-written notes with a boy who called her “the remote control of my life.”"

- Bringing the Nigerian Schoolgirls Into View

 

As the girls remain in captivity one cannot help but ask questions. Why should self-appointed purveyors of morality be  deciding the direction the lives of these girls should take? Why should someone else force any religion on them? Why should the girls aspire to be no more than dutiful wives? This all makes little sense to me. As little sense as the inactions of the government that was elected to protect the rights of these girls, their friends and families.

 

How the BBC Jailed the Former Tunisian President....in absentia

I trust the BBC. From the age of 7,  I can recall that every morning started with the Lilliburlero blaring from my father's Grundig radio which announced the start of the BBC World Service News at 7am. In those days, most of the news revolved around war games between the erstwhile USSR and  Reagan's USA. Although most of the content of the news was beyond my understanding at the time, my siblings and I played a game with my dad where we would guess the name of the presenter for the morning. 

Later on in the day, there was the almost ever-constant "This is Chris Bickerton with Focus on Africa" that marked our evenings and announced the start of the BBC flagship programme often presented by the late BBC journalist Chris Bickerton.

From the Cold War to the end of the Cold War, from apartheid South Africa to the end of apartheid South Africa, through famine and strive in the horn of Africa, the BBC was there. 

Aside from a commitment to journalistic integrity, I have  long-associated the BBC with impeccably spoken English language and grammar. That is why, a headline I first heard on the BBC and later saw on their website this past Monday, left me completely perplexed and befuddled:

"BBC News - Tunisia's Ben Ali jailed in absentia for 35 years". 

Former President Ben Ali and wife Leila....."jailed in absentia"
Source: myjoyonline.com

Former President Ben Ali is in exile and clearly not in Tunisia so how could he have been jailed? Also, what does being "jailed in absentia" mean anyway? This headline had me heading for the dictionary definition of jail from the Merriam-Oxford Dictionary online:

²jail

 verb

Definition of JAIL

transitive verb

: to confine in or as if in a jail

Still perturbed, I put the question to the wise people of the Twitterverse.The best response I got was:

elidot  

@ 

@abena_serwaa Perhaps they're speaking figuratively? Or in reference to his soul, which is already in captivity?

So perhaps they were speaking figuratively but the BBC online was sure to correct the headline later on in the day and also remove all traces of the original faux pas:

BBC New: Tunisia's Ben Ali sentenced to jail in absentia

Sadly for the BBC, due to its reputation as an authoritative and trusted news source, the original logic-defying headline has been reproduced on other sites world-wide including on Ghana's Joy FM online as you can see here. 

Nobody is infallible and we all make mistakes, grammatical ones included. But it is fascinating how this grammatical lapse gave the sentence a whole different meaning. Now...can someone tell Joy FM?  

The 100 Most Powerful Black Men on Twitter List: Heavy on sport and entertainment but Light on intellectuals

Last week I saw a tweet directing tweetheads to the list of The 100 Most Powerful Men on Twitter:

"These men have the ability to drive massive traffic with a single tweet of a link, are constantly retweeted by their loyal followers, and exist on thousands of lists created by their fans."

I scanned the list quickly and noticed a trend. Here are the first 5 entries on the list:

• LeBron James: High profile basketball player 

• IamDiddy Music mogul and artist

• Kanye West: Music mogul and artist

• BarackObama: 44th President of the United States. According to BarackObama's twitter profile, this is not President Obama's account but run by a grassroot organization  

• Tyga: I have no idea who this is but according to Wikipedia, he is a young rapper signed to Young Money entertainment.

The rest of the list is pretty similar; great representation from the world of sports, rap, R&B and entertainment but very little from academia, science, technology, health-care, business or even politics. Okay, I concede, Twitter is a social-network mainly associated with the entertainment industry. With the 140 characters limit, it is hardly the meeting place for deep intellectual discourse! However, Bill Gates and several other innovators from a plethora of other fields have accounts. Therefore, this list has really gotten me to think: are black men with the most impact on the planet likely to be rappers and sportsmen? Granted there are black men who have risen to the top of their respective fields outside of entertainment but are these people known or really recognized? Is the world learning to identify prominent black people with rap and sports rather than anything else? To me this is a troubling and very sad phenomenon.

P.S. I should add that philosopher and intellectual Professor Cornel West of Princeton University does feature on the list of 100  Black men on Twitter at Number 50. By the way, did you know that Cornel West was in The Matrix Reload and The Matrix Revolutions?  Hmm... maybe it is all about entertainment.

When everything has to be # -ed: Confessions of a Twitter Addict

How well do you know any of the following:

1. Twitter
2. Tweet
3. Followers/Following
4. Unfollow
5. Retweet
6. Trending Topics
7. @username
8. DMs 
9. Twitter is Overcapacity
10. Verified Account
11. Justin Bieber
12. Tweetphoto/Twitpic
13. Twitlonger
14. Snaptu/Hootsuite/Nimbuzz/Pixelpipe/Gravity/TweetDeck/UberTwitter/Twaitter
15. #nowplaying
16. #MusicMonday
17. FollowFriday (#FF)
18. Hope140
19. Jack Dorsey/Biz Stone
20. Who.unfollowed.me/Qwitter

So....how well did you fare?

Scores

0 : Clearly you are not into social media and have never heard of Twitter. Looks like I have to break it down. According to the folks over at Wikipedia; "Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers."

1- 5: So you have heard about Twitter? You probably had a peek at a friend's account but still do not see the use.You are convinced that people join Twitter to find out what Demi Moore (Kutcher) had for breakfast and so you think its pointless.

6-12: You have a Twitter account. You joined out of curiosity but  yet you still fail to see the use. You can't even remember your username and password.

13-18: You are on Twitter. You enjoy news updates or occasional words of wisdom from people you follow. You check your account from time to time but can go days or weeks without being on Twitter. You are in a good place.

more than 18:  You are a complete Tweethead; an absolute Twitter addict  who craves a Twitter fix morning, noon and night.

Symptoms of Twitter addiction may include:

• Panic at your inability to log on to Twitter either through phone network malfunctioning, internet downtime or the dreaded ""Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again" message

• Your number of Tweets exceeds 2000+ even though you have only been on Twitter for a few months

• You are on Twitter at odd times of the day: 1am, 3am or 5am 

• No one around you understands why you are on Twitter and is still hooked on Facebook or even (tragically) hi5

• You use Twitter to find directions to places or get recommendations for movies, restaurants or software

• You send messages to friends on Twitter instead of texting them

• You start to # everything on #Facebook. You refer to your friends in text messages, facebook or emails as @James and start to restrict your facebook status to 140 characters

What I'm desperately trying to understand is how I went from seeing Twitter as futile and useless to being a complete Tweethead. I  now have  4,485 Tweets to my credit and counting. Anyway, I have accepted it and I'm off to get my fix. If you are looking for me, you know where to find me! 

My Twitter homepage

Got Twitter ? : Confessions of a Social Network Addict

Let’s face it, the world is turning into one big social network. Being an ardent procrastinator, social networks are heaven-sent. They are the perfect way to while away time you do not have on the internet. Anyway, here is a quick tour of my social distractions:

1. hi5 = Well, I must confess I left this one a couple of years ago but in its heyday, hi5 was the best thing since sliced bread. Nowadays if you send someone a Hi5 request you may risk being accused of being "colo" (ancient/behind the times)

2. Friendster = I must have logged onto my friendster account like once. This is (or was??) similar to hi5 but seemed to be more popular among Americans.

3. Facebook = the undisputed ruler of the social networks..I just became friends with someone from primary school whom I have not seen in 20 years it is that cool.

4. MySpace = incessant references to MySpace especially in the media made me want to get my own space. Well, I got one and still don't know what it is all about!

5. LinkedIn = this is a supposed to be a social network for professionals…So if you feel you are too serious for any of the afore-mentionned networks. LinkedIn is the place to be. I find that it is the perfect let-me-show-off-my-CV social network!

6. Google Blogger = Home of Ramblings of a Procrastinator in Accra, need I say more..

7. Twitter = Finally, we arrive at my latest addiction. Well, I consider myself a semi-addict since I’m still not sure exactly how it works

I joined Twitter a couple of months ago. I think it was around the time that there was that plane that landed in the Hudson River in New York City. Apparently the news was all over Twitter but was yet to reach any mainstream media outlets. At first I felt I had to have an iphone or at least be able to get Twitter updates (known as “Tweets”) to my mobile phone to really participate . To some extent I still think that is still true.

What is Twitter anyway? It is basically a network that revolves around updating the question “what are you doing now” but you are restricted to 140 characters. Anyone on facebook would recognize that Twitter is like a social network entirely devoted to updating your status!

At first I used to update my Twitter status every couple of weeks and did not see the point. I also did not know that Twitter was open-access so the whole world could see that I was contemplating going to the beach, planning escape routes, craving fufu and groundnut soup . It was only last week that I discovered the SEARCH button and topic trends on Twitter and really became hooked!

The topic trends basically tells you the hottest topics on twitter. So I clicked on Grey’s Anatomy. Indeed, everybody was buzzing about the Season finale of my show. Unfortunately, some Twittering twit ruined everything for me by updating their status with the earth-shattering events that ended the season. @#$#@% B#$!

Of course the mainstream media has finally caught up with the Twitter craze and you can follow CNN, BBC programmes on Twitter. So lets say you are a fan of BBC World Have your say like me and have some sort of contribution, if it is less than 140 characters, you can tweet it. They are usually good about reading out tweets during live broadcasts. Early Monday morning this past week, there were quite a few people tweeting that the Tamil Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran was dead. I checked the BBC and there was no news there. Lo and behold, in a couple of hours it finally hit the BBC.

If you are a celebrity fanatic, you can follow Oprah, Richard Branson, Ashton Kutcher, Mitt Romney on Twitter and find out what they are doing. Still not sure why anyone would want to know what Mitt Romney is doing at any time of the day! User be warned, some of these celebrity profiles are fake.

One thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of Ghanaians on Twitter but it seems that there are very few people Twitter-ing out of Ghana. Of course if you happen to do a Ghana search on Twitter right now the topic on everybody’s lips appears to be:

“Obama's coming to Ghana!”