Saturday

Again, Nigeria must do away with Gernot Rohr as he is wasting away Nigeria's golden generation of players

Super Eagles Coach Gernot Rohr is not the future
CC™ Viewpoint - Editor-in-Chief

a) Gernot Rohr has been on the job going on five plus years and in that period, he has discovered zero viable Nigerian talent (at home or abroad).

b) Nigeria's talented players like Kelechi Iheanacho, Alex Iwobi, Leon Balogun and Ndidi among others, have not fully developed under Rohr and in fact, some of them have regressed, namely, Leon Balogun and Iheanacho.

c) Rohr is tactically inept and is a lousy talent evaluator and as such, he has been unable to discover gems from the local league (like Westerhoff, Bonfrere and Keshi did) and instead has resorted to introducing mediocre players from lower divisions in European and backwater leagues.

d) Nigeria has not been able to discover and groom a solid goalkeeper under Rohr despite giving him and his crew all the support to do just that. Now, rather than watch the local league and work hard for once, he (Rohr) sought to introduce an Under-18 goalkeeper from England and also brought in an equally unproven goalkeeper (at the time) from the fourth-tier of the German league to a team of Nigeria's caliber. Although Maduka Okoye has been somewhat adequate between the sticks, he is still not of the same caliber as the legendary goalkeepers Nigeria has been blessed with in the past.

e) The Super Eagles are a global brand and Rohr is a classic square peg in a round hole. Nigeria is simply too big for him and his ambitions do not match that of Nigeria's players or its teeming and football crazy supporters. Rohr has reached his pinnacle with Nigerian soccer and may we never have a coach that celebrates a bronze finish in the AFCON again! Can anyone tell me who finished third at the 2013 AFCON that was won by Nigeria? No Google search allowed please. 

f) Rohr is stupidly stubborn, rigid and bereft of the requisite man-management skills to handle our players. 

g) Rohr is almost 70 years old. Nigeria needs a young and dynamic coach, local or foreign (if foreign, must be Dutch as the Dutch style of total football fits us perfectly) that will work with local and talented (equally young and dynamic) coaches to inculcate the unique Nigerian way of playing from the U-17 all the way to the Super Eagles. Rohr is just after his pension and he has sucked us dry enough already.

h) This upcoming crop of Nigerian players is probably the best in a generation and Rohr has already wasted a critical portion of their development years.

i) Rohr will not change and expect him to continue calling up the likes of Daniel Akpeyi (who has zero upsides) et al to camp when the Super Eagles camp reopens.

j) Rohr is LAZY and is not a winner! Simply put, if you have never won before, Nigeria is not the team to coach with subdued expectations as Nigerians expect a lot from the Super Eagles. In a nutshell, the Captain of the Super Eagles is the single most important person in Nigeria; even the President of Nigeria barely sniffs a semblance of importance next to him. 

The recent loss to the Central African Republic in Lagos of all places, as well as the lackluster performance of the team in the following games against the same CAR, Liberia and Cape Verde respectively, are warning signs the NFF and all football stakeholders must heed.

There seemingly has to be something unholy and untoward between Rohr and the NFF leadership, as most Nigerians continue to wonder exactly what the journeyman has accomplished to justify his retention as the head coach of the Super Eagles.

Gernot Rohr has absolutely nothing to offer Nigeria and it should not take anyone with any semblance of intellect and football sense to see that. 

Rohr needs to go!

Sunday

Steve Jobs died 10 years ago but his ideas about the future endure


CC™ ViewPoint

By Nick Kolakowski

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs died 10 years ago. With a decade of hindsight, we have an even greater sense of how deeply he impacted the tech industry—but also how the tech industry is beginning to move beyond some of the paradigms he established and the battles he fought.

Unlike many other tech CEOs who rose to prominence in the early part of the 21st century and subsequently faded away, Jobs continues to hold the public’s attention. He’s elevated as an icon of creativity, the rare executive who could not only run a business, but also predict what consumers really wanted. Apple’s track record during his tenure—from the iMac to the iPod and the iPhone—certainly bears this out. 

“As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process,” Jony Ive, the former head of Apple’s design and a close friend of Jobs, wrote in a new piece in The Wall Street Journal. “He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.”

Ive added: “Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.”

Jobs’s focus on high quality and aesthetics helped transform Apple into a multi-trillion-dollar company. Whether Apple continues its stratospheric growth for yet another decade may hinge on whether it can successfully evolve into a provider of cloud services in addition to hardware—a shift that Jobs dimly saw before his deathIn an October 2010 email, he suggested that the tech industry was on the verge of a “post-PC era,” and that 2011 would not only be “Year of the Cloud” but also see the continuation of Apple’s “Holy War with Google.” Unless Apple moved beyond an “old paradigm,” it would eventually fall behind its rivals.

While Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android still compete for their respective slices of the mobile OS market, Apple’s opponents have multiplied over the past decade. For example, Apple’s dedication to user data privacy under current CEO Tim Cook has put it in direct conflict with Facebook, whose business model hinges on vacuuming up as much data as possible from users. Apple has also been locked in a fierce legal battle with Epic Games, creator of the ultra-popular “Fortnite” game, over the size of Apple’s App Store commission

In addition, Apple must ensure that it can continue to compete with its rivals in cutting-edge technologies including (but certainly not limited to) artificial intelligence (A.I.), machine learning, and the cloud. Although Apple was one of the first companies into the digital-assistant game when it rolled out Siri in October 2011, it has since lost ground to Amazon’s ultra-popular Alexa and Google’s voice-activated assistant. While most of the company’s hardware devices remain society-redefining hits, if there’s one thing that Jobs understood, it’s that the tech industry can shift very quickly under your feet.

DICE 

Friday

Amina Mohammed, the United Nations and the Butcher of Daura

President Muhammadu Buhari and UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed

CC™ ViewPoint

By the Editor-in-Chief

His name is Muhammadu Buhari. He is the current President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and supposedly hails from Daura in Katsina State. This would not be his first foray into the arena of governmental administration, as he was also the despotic and tyrannical head of a military dictatorship from 1983 - 1985. Her name is Amina Mohammed, current Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, and she is the Fulani parochialist who has made it her mission at the world body to sanitize a man whose hands drip with enough blood to fill oceans of water. This is why he has aptly been named the 'Butcher of Daura'

Muhammadu Buhari, much like he has never met a Fulani he did not like, regardless of what country they may be from (he even once supported a Fulani individual for a regional position at the expense of a well qualified Nigerian who was non-Muslim and from the Southern part of Nigeria), has also never seen a non-Muslim and non-Fulani blood he could not shed, so long as his Fulanization and Islamization agenda is enhanced in the process. 

Fast forward to September 24, 2021, President Muhammadu Buhari stood before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and in addressing that August gathering, he lied repeatedly and shamelessly from both sides of his mouth. What was even more disturbing was that the United Nations, a body whose credibility and global standing has been on shaky ground for at least two decades, welcomed a mass murderer and unabashed ethnic cleanser into its midst, and essentially sought to aid in the sanitization of a blood-thirsty dictator.

For the record, Muhammadu Buhari, after his tyrannical reign from 1983-1985 had been soundly rejected three times by Nigerians of all ethnic backgrounds when he ran for the Presidency of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the elections of 20032007, and 2011. As a testament to his predisposition to blood-letting, he (Buhari) once issued a threat during his campaign for the 2015 Presidential Elections that "If what happened in 2011 should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood".

In addition to his propensity for violence or inciting violence to achieve his objectives, there is nothing Muhammadu Buhari can do to extricate himself from the perception and indeed the reality, that not only is he an ethnic bigot, but he is also a jaundiced religious bigot. His credentials as a religious extremist is buttressed by his calls in 2001 for the comprehensive adoption of Sharia Law in Nigeria stating at the time, "God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of Sharia in the country."

His agenda of Islamization and Fulanization (putting his ethnic Fulani brethren who constitute a mere 5% of the Nigerian population in strategic positions of governance thus influencing key national policy agenda) has been evident since his second coming in 2015. The terrorist Fulani Herdsmen (designated by world bodies as being one of the five most deadly terrorist groups in the world) under the aegis of their benefactors, Miyetti Allah have been allowed to murder, usurp, rape and pillage at will. 

With the backing of the Buhari administration and the Fulani-born Attorney-General, Abubakar Malami, the Sultan of Sokoto, Mohamed Sa'ad Abubakar and the governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, the likes of Boko Haram, ISWAP and the Fulani Herdsmen have continued with their systematic killing of those opposed to the Islamization agenda of the Buhari administration and the Northern Nigeria oligarchy. 

The credibility of the United Nations and its Fulani-born Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed (the resident apologist for the Buhari tyranny being unleashed on Nigerians) has been further damaged by the charade of September 24, 2021. The optics both inside and outside that August Gathering were indeed bad for both the Nigerian government and the United Nations.

That the Buhari administration went to the extent of paying non-Nigerians in New York at the UNGA gathering of world leaders, to counter the demonstrations against his autocratic rule, was evidence of the fact that the UN was in bed with a tyrannical despot, desperate for international credibility and acceptance. 

It was indeed a disgrace and a black eye on an increasingly discredited global body that now officially has the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians on its hands.

The world is watching.