The Christian Science Monitor - When Ebola reached Nigeria, health officials were worried about the populous country's ability to control the virus – particularly in Lagos, the nation’s coastal mega-city and transport hub. But this week, teams of American health officials are Lagos-bound to learn from Nigeria's experience in defying expectations and stopping the outbreak before it could wreak havoc. Since July 20, the day Nigeria’s so-called “Patient Zero” arrived in Lagos, officials have recorded a total of only 19 cases, with no new cases since Aug. 31. Last week, on the same day the US confirmed its first case of Ebola, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) proclaimed that Nigeria had stopped its outbreak. Meanwhile, Sierra Leone, one of three West African countries hard hit by Ebola, recorded 81 new cases in the past 24 hours. "Because of a rapid public health response, effectively tracking nearly 900 contacts, it appears they have] been able to stop the outbreak in Nigeria,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said Sunday. “Though we can't give the all clear yet, it does look like the outbreak is over there. I'm confident that wherever we apply the fundamental principles of infection control in public health, we can stop Ebola." Nigeria’s success appears to be rooted in "contact tracing" – determining every single person that Patrick Sawyer, or Patient Zero, had contact with, and then monitoring them for signs of the virus. “Contact tracing can stop the Ebola outbreak in its tracks,” a chart distributed by the CDC declares. Now contact tracers are at work in the US, setting out to track down as many as 100 people who may have been exposed to Thomas Duncan, who traveled from Liberia to Dallas, where he was eventually diagnosed with the virus, The New York Times reports. It is an immense task. The Washington Post outlines how it went in Nigeria:
From that single patient came a list of 281 people, [Gavin MacGregor-Skinner, who helped with the Ebola response in Nigeria] said. Every one of those individuals had to provide health authorities twice-a-day updates about their well-being, often through methods like text-messaging. Anyone who didn't feel well or failed to respond was checked on, either through a neighborhood network or health workers. ...In the end, contact tracers — trained professionals and volunteers — conducted 18,500 face-to-face visits to assess potential symptoms, according to the CDC, and the list of contacts throughout the country grew to 894. Two months later, Nigeria ended up with a total of 20 confirmed or probable cases and eight deaths.
Ethiopia, one of two countries recognized by the World Health Organization as prepared for a possible Ebola outbreak, also has a vigorous tracing process that applies to every visitor from West Africa.
In the past decade, Nollywood (a term used to describe Nigeria’s movie industry, coined by New York Times journalist Norimitsu Onishi in 2002) movies have generated millions of dollars in box office numbers and the popularity of Nigerian movies have reached global levels.
Unfortunately, as with many things in Nigeria, women have benefited the least from Nollywood’s success. Roles in front of, and behind the camera, are still heavily dominated by men while considerably more male-led productions are greenlit or able to secure funding relative to the female-led options.
Perhaps most egregious is the fact that Nigerian women are mostly portrayed in Nollywood movies through the lens of harmful and dangerous stereotypes such as subservience, dependence on male figures, and a lack of ambition.
It is common to see female characters in Nollywood films portayed as homemakers, child bearers, cooks, care givers, sex workers, and other background roles that only serve to reinforce traditional gender roles for women.
“Considering that women make up 60% of the Nollywood film audience, it is important that women are represented better in films, rather than telling the story from the male gaze: from characterization to story, costumes, and more,” actor and producer Eku Edewor told BusinessDay in April 2021.
These stereotypical portrayals of women impress on Nigerian society and are harmful to women in that they encourage the audience to continue to promote the same norms that have allowed gender inequality to flourish in Nigeria.
Fortunately, there are Nigerian movies that have not toed this line but rather the opposite: showcasing powerful, well-rounded, and more representative women-led characters. We’ve put together a summary of five of such movies and we can guarantee you that they are worth a watch!
Lionheart (2018)
Nigerian film legend Genevieve Nnaji’s directorial debut is the first Netflix original film to be produced in Nigeria. Lionheart was also selected as the Nigerian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020 — the first Nigerian movie to be submitted to the Oscars for award consideration.
The movie follows Adaeze Obiagu (played by Nnaji) as she steps up to the challenge of running her father’s business and saving it from debt and the threat of takeover after he has to retire due to health issues.
With support from her uncle Godswill (played by Nkem Owoh), she challenges the status quo in the male-dominated world that is Nigeria’s transportation industry.
Muna (2019)
Nollywood is not known for action thrillers and in the few movies where there are some action scenes, they are often poorly choreographed. So Muna was a breath of fresh air in that it attempted to do something thousands of Nollywood productions couldn’t. And it did well — taking second place on the Nigerian box office chart in its second week, only behind Disney’s Frozen 2.
Muna, a survivor of sexual abuse and trafficking on a revenge mission, is played by Adesua Etomi-Wellington who also plays the lead character in 2016’s The Wedding Party, which holds the record of Nigeria’s biggest box office opening to date.
Also starring Adesua Etomi-Wellington, alongside veteran actor Sola Sobowale, King of Boys is acclaimed director Kemi Adetiba’s second film and she wrote, co-produced, and directed it. The film is the sixth-highest grossing Nollywood movie of all time in Nigeria.
It tells the story of powerful businesswoman Eniola Salami (played by Sobowale, to critical acclaim), whose political ambitions are threatened by the underworld connections responsible for her wealth and prominence.
The power struggle that follows will cost her everything. Adetiba recently announced that the King of Boys sequel will be released as a seven-part limited series on Netflix on Aug. 27 — and we have a feeling it'll be a must-watch.
93 Days (2016)
One doctor’s action was critical to the containment of the Ebola virus outbreak in Nigeria in 2014: Dr. Stella Adadevoh, who unfortunately passed away from complications after being exposed to the virus.
93 Days is based on the incredible act of commitment and professionalism she gave her country, saving millions of lives in the process.
Acclaimed actor Bimbo Akintola plays Adadevoh and the film follows the actions and sacrifices made by men and women who risked their lives to ensure that the Ebola virus was contained.
The film also stars American legend Danny Glover and Alastair McKenzie, as well as Nigerian stars Somkele Iyamah-Idhalama and Keppy Ekpeyong Bassey (who plays Liberian diplomat Patrick Sawyer, the index patient who carried the virus into Nigeria).
93 Days was shown to sold out audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Chicago International Film Festival (the only Nigerian film to show there), Johannesburg Film Festival, and LA Film Festival.
Wives on Strike (2016)
Produced and directed by Omoni Oboli, Wives on Strike is a satirical film about a group of four market women who decide to deny their husbands sex (and other things) to push them to stand up for a young girl who was being forced by her father to marry a man against her will.
The cast includes some of Nollywood’s most prolific thespians like Ufuoma McDermott, Chioma Akpotha, and Kehinde Bankole.
Although it’s a comedy, Wives on Strike does a great job of highlighting cultural practices that are harmful to women and girls, and especially child marriage and sexual abuse of minors.
Prince Andrew (L) and Epstein - Jae Donnelly/News of the World
By Madeleine Aggeler
Wealthy financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested at an airport in New Jersey on Saturday for allegedlytrafficking dozens of underage girls between 2002 and 2005. Epstein, who received a lenient and widely criticized plea deal for similar charges back in 2007, is extremely well-connected.
His “little black book” included presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Courtney Love, and … 16 phone numbers forBritain’s Prince Andrew (Queen Elizabeth’s third child, and Prince Charles’s younger brother). Prince Andrew and Epstein have been friends for a while, and, according to court documents, Epstein allegedly forced a teenage girl to have sex with himon three separate occasions, including during what she described as an orgy with other underage girls.
Buckingham Palace has vehemently denied the allegations, but as Epstein is back under the spotlight, we’re likely to hear more about the prince’s relationship to him. Here’s everything we know so far.
Prince Andrew and Epstein’s relationship goes way back
Though it is not clear exactly when the prince and Epstein’s relationship began (according to the Guardian, probably sometime in the early ’90s), it certainly predates the abuse charges against the financier, and the prince was reportedly happy to join his friend in making light of them.
After Epstein accepted his extremely lenient plea deal negotiated with then-prosecutor and current Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, and served 13 of his 18-month sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution, he returned to his $50 million East 71st Street mansion, and “celebrated his release from a Florida jail with his close pal, Britain’s Prince Andrew,” the New YorkPost reported in 2011.
Epstein also joked to the Post at the time, “I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”
Epstein once gave Andrew’s ex-wife a big loan
In March 2011, shortly after he feted Epstein’s return, Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, told the Daily Telegraph that Andrew had helped arrange for Epstein to pay over $18,000 to one of the duchess’s former assistants to whom she owed nearly $100,000 in unpaid wages and other bills. Andrew was serving as Britain’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment at the time, and this connection to Epstein, who had been convicted four years earlier of soliciting prostitution from a minor, drew heavy criticism in the press.
“I personally, on behalf of myself, deeply regret that Jeffrey Epstein became involved in any way with me,” Ferguson told the Telegraph at the time. “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf.”
Andrew eventually stepped down from his role as trade representative in July 2011.
Epstein allegedly forced a teen girl to have sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions.
In a suit filed in 2015, Virginia Roberts Giuffre claimed that in 1999, when she was 15 years old, Epstein’s friend and alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, approached Giuffre at her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, and offered the teen professional training in massages. Giuffre says she was then brought to Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where she was repeatedly sexually abused by him, and that over the next few years, he “loaned her out to rich and influential men around the world,” as the Guardianreported in 2015.
Among these men, Prince Andrew, who Giuffre said she was forced to have sex with on three occasions while she was 17, once in London, at Maxwell’s home, once in New York, and once on Epstein’s private Caribbean island as part of an “orgy with numerous other under-aged girls.”
According to court filings submitted in 2015 as part of a long-running lawsuit challenging Epstein’s plea deal, Giuffre said Epstein ordered her at the time to “give the prince whatever he required” and report back to him with details of the abuse after. Per the filing, obtained by the Guardian:
“Epstein’s purposes in ‘lending’ Jane Doe (along with other young girls) to such powerful people were to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain,” the document alleged, “as well as to obtain potential blackmail information”.
Buckingham Palace strenuously denied the allegations after they were published in the Guardian, calling them “categorically untrue,” and denying “any form of sexual contact or relationship” between the prince and Giuffre.
Flight logs, however, appear to confirm that the prince was in the locations Giuffre claimed he was at the relevant times, the Telegraphreported in 2015.
In my preceding piece, I alluded to the fact that, it actually does not matter what aisle of the political spectrum you belong to, the problem with Nigeria is not one of ethnicity or a lack of resources, both human and natural to propel that great nation to its deserved lofty heights, Nigeria's problem remains the same - the rudderless, improvident and imprudent band of usurpers and brigands, masquerading as leaders since the inception of the 4th Republic in May, 1999.
For those who thought 2023 was going to be different, I must ask what they were smoking to have thought it possible for one to put old wine in a new bottle and expect a different taste. In what parallel or alternate universe would that have been possible giving the antecedents of Nigeria’s crass political class and the generality of its people? When you have Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi as the standard bearers of the three main Parties, was anything actually going to be different?
Most people conveniently forget that Peter Obi launched a third force as a form of ‘grievance’ against the PDP. Obi felt he was never going to win the nomination ticket to be the presidential candidate of the PDP. Obi was in fact the first protagonist of the spirit of Emilokan, or in his case, Awalokan, as he felt it was the turn of the Southeast to produce the next President of Nigeria. Peter Obi is not new to the political arena in Nigeria. He is in fact an integral part of the establishment and while many laud his purported achievements when he was the Chief Executive of Anambra State, one remains puzzled as to exactly what his signature accomplishments were, besides being a supposed egalitarian steward of the coffers of Anambra State, as governor.
For the record, Obi was Atiku Abubakar's running mate in 2019 under the auspices of the PDP, the Party that had held sway over Nigerian politics for 16 years from 1999 to 2015. He and Atiku lost the election to the then incumbent (and outgoing president) Muhammadu Buhari.
Obi was also named in the Pandora Papers controversy. The result of the Pandora Papers leaks, the Premium Timesreported on Obi's involvement in offshore companies in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands and Barbados. This was before he held any political office in Nigeria. Further reporting showed that in 2010 as well, Obi had Access International help him set up and manage Gabriella Investments Limited, a company in the British Virgin Islands named after Obi's daughter.
One of the directors was also the director of a Belize-based shell company that was issued 50,000 shares in Gabriella Investments. In 2017, Obi reorganized the company under the name PMGG Investments Limited and created a trust named The Gabriella Settlement which became the sole shareholder in PMGG Investments Limited. Obi was not holding any political position at this time.
The Premium Times report claimed that Obi had broken several laws due to his business dealings. The report claimed that firstly, Obi remained as director of Next International (UK) Limited while serving as Governor of Anambra State, which is in direct violation of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act. Obi described that claim as misleading and wrong in an interview with Arise Newsstating that he resigned from all companies before taking the office of Governor of Anambra State. Secondly, it claimed that Obi's non-declaration of his offshore companies broke the Nigerian Constitution's provision that requires public officers to declare all their properties, assets, and liabilities.
For the record, no criminal case has ever been filed against Obi.
To his credit, Obi's Labor Party (LP) galvanized a movement that threatened the very foundation of Nigeria's entrenched political establishment. He selected a charismatic running mate of Northern extraction, Senator Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, a Nigerian economist and politician who served as Senator for Kaduna North from 2011 to 2012 and member of the House of Representatives from 2003 to 2007.
The 'Obidient Movement', as it was aptly named, re-invigorated the youth of Nigeria and energized a political base that had been marginalized, oppressed and suppressed for far too long by the Kleptocrats who had run roughshod over the Nigerian populace for far too long. For the first time in the history of Nigerian politics, the entrenched political establishment had to reckon with a veritable third force, and Bola Ahmed Tinubu's All Progressives Congress (APC) ruling Party as well as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Atiku Abubakar, were left reeling in the face of a formidable display of organizational discipline and focused messaging by the Obi-Datti led LP.
While the Obi-Datti led LP sought to project a unity of purpose coupled with disciplined messaging, Tinubu's APC took the often travelled path of ethno-religious bigotry by presenting a Muslim-Muslim ticket with Tinubu's running-mate Kashim Shettima having a well-documented history of being in bed with the Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram, while the Atiku-led PDP again put forth someone with a well-documented record of not only losing major elections dating back to the early 1990s, but also being one of the most corrupt individuals in the history of Nigerian politics.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Nigeria's supervisory electoral body promised a free, fair and transparent election with a veritable voter authentication mechanism, as well as real time upload and transmission of election results. At the end of the day, the 2023 elections were at best a shamwith widespread issues of voter suppression through intimidation and in some cases, murder, including the blatant altering/falsification of results to favor the ruling APC.
Even more damming is that Tinubu’s own organization, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), which was formed on 15 May 1994 by a broad coalition of Nigerian democrats to challenge the then military junta of the sadistic dictator, Sani Abacha, challenged the transparency and legitimacyof the just concluded 2023 general elections.
Worse still is that barely a month after the elections, the Islamist terrorist groups have once again resumed their blood-letting, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the incoming administration of Bola Tinubu and his second-in-command, Kashim Shettima, will subtly acquiesce to their ethnic and religious killings, as the two (Tinubu and Shettima) are known sympathizers and benefactors of Boko Haram and its sister band of killers.
If President Buhari's goal was to leave a legacy beholden of the true tenets of democracy, he failed woefully, which is not surprising when one considers the rudderless leadership, he has subjected the country to over the last 8 years.
The legitimacy of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, if he is sworn-in will always be a viable conversation piece. He will be the first person chosen to lead Nigeria to get less than 50% of the votes. There are also doubts as to the veracity of his educational qualifications, as to date, his purported degree from Chicago State University in the United States of America, remains unsubstantiated.
Furthermore, there are serious legal questions surrounding his forfeiture of close to $500,000 to the United States government in 1993for his involvement in drug trafficking. The latter, as well as the specter of the fact that he may have presented fraudulent educational credentials may be enough to cast a shadow over his fitness for that exalted office.
There is a palpable air of illegitimacy hanging over Tinubu's hollow victory, and regardless of what the Supreme Court rules in response to the petitions filed by both the LP and the PDP, near irremediable damage has been done to the collective psyche of Nigerians, as well as the nation's nascent democratic institutions.
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