Decade Blogs - Ayo Sogunro - Gone Blogging, Back Soon

Decades Blogs

To the Nigerian Twitterverse, Ayo Sogunro probably needs no introduction as the cerebral and very reasonable legal brain who will tackle issues we so easily get emotive and sentimental about with passionate yet objective adherence to logical thinking.

I guess getting Ayo to write a blog for my #YourBlogOnMyBlog Series commemorating my Decade of Blogging is the equivalent of a scoop. Not only did he immediately respond to my request, he came back with reassurances that his promise would be delivered.

Blog - To Celebrate My Decade of Blogging

On Twitter Ayo exudes wit and his blogs are well-constructed persuasive legal arguments on thorny contemporary issues in Nigeria as child marriage and the outlier issue of gay marriage.

Why You Should Be Worried About Nigeria’s Anti-Gay Law which he wrote in June 2013.

Ayo Sogunro is the author of The Wonderful Life of Senator Boniface and other Sorry Tales. A lawyer by profession, he also indulges in socio-legal philosophy on www.ayosogunro.com. Interact with him on Twitter via @ayosogunro.

Here Ayo writes about how his desire for the impartation of knowledge has not changed but the theatre has been enhanced by the Internet. Quite a good read from a raconteur.

Gone Blogging, Back Soon

As a university student, I gained a reputation for being rather clever, and the satisfactory nature of this reputation encouraged me to develop an even more satisfactory habit of imparting some of my versatile knowledge to friends and colleagues in the form tutorials.

In the course of time, I had gained a wider reputation as a fine teacher, and I soon got used to hearing complimentary remarks such as: “You teach very well! You ought to become a lecturer, someday!”

Since humans are generally shaped by expectations of society just as much as by their own personal choices, it wasn’t long before the ambition of being a university lecturer gradually settled in my thoughts as though I myself had originated the idea. Also, it was an easy ambition to aspire to: in those days, the qualifications required to be a university lecturer in Nigeria were a fairly simple matter—all you had to do was complete a first degree and then obtain a Master’s degree.

As I was well on the way to finalizing the first requirement, and the second being no more than one more year of the same, I was fairly confident that I would join the ranks of the academia very soon. I was so sure of this that I had already begun to stake out my own office in the staff rooms.

I already had my class schedules figured out, my routine mapped mentally, and in keeping with my character as a young and naïve male—I could picture already the horde of admiring students of the feminine aspect. I was ready to be the archetypal Nigerian lecturer: lording it over enslaved students, my word would be law and my exam scores, final.

But the Nigerian Universities Commission was not so sympathetic to my career ambitions for, just before I left school, it became a requirement that university lecturers had to be possessed of a doctorate degree.

I was quite puzzled by this idea: the logical connection between the ability to educate students and the possession of a certificate for having pursued a research thesis was—and still is—lost on me. And even then, I knew a number of lecturers who bore plain “Mister”, but were absolutely brilliant and even more lecturers that had the now required “Doctor” and who, as the man on the street would put it, “couldn’t teach jack shit”.

But my armchair protest at this unnecessary requirement was in vain. And with that came the dampening realization that three to four more years of study would now be required before I was entitled to brandish my academic lecturing skills. It was quite clear that the NUC had no urgent need for my services.

It was also quite clear that I couldn’t afford to pursue a doctorate degree right after school. In the end, I quietly pushed aside the ambitions to become a career teacher and took up a financially rewarding job instead, and without much ado, the ivory tower and I parted ways.

But along came the Internet, and that has made all the difference.

You see, back in school, the Internet was simply what you called the 30 minute long stare at the rolling icon of Internet Explorer over what was often a dial-up connection that taught you the patience of the gods. Emails and chats were the most interactive form of Internet usage, “Facebook” was just a typographical error to be underlined by Microsoft Word, and blogs—if they existed back then—might as well have been located on the moons of Jupiter.

But, as my professional life budded, and I became more aware of the other world that is the Internet proper, blogs gradually became A THING and soon, I found myself in possession of one. My first blog was a rudimentary package from Blogger that allowed me delusions of grandeur after seeing my name spread out on the Internet browser address bar.

With great grandeur comes great responsibility: blogging was work, and I worked at it. The perseverance paid off. And before long, the readership trickled into the thousands and the lecturing ambitions of my younger years were transmuted into a stream of steady articles for my readers.

The Internet is a school, and the blog is my classroom—and I don’t even have to perform the gruelling task of marking examination scripts. Of course, one comes across comments that make you want to take a stick to the reader, but even with those, the blogging experience is generally exciting.

I might go back to a classroom someday and oppress young students as originally planned, but for now, all the teaching I need to do—all over the world—can be done from my corner. With a click.

  

The people are high on opium - IV

Usher in the lady engineers

And so continues my journey down the annals of the memory of Muslim encounters beyond home.

We usually do encounter ladies taking up engineering courses especially, mechanical and civil engineering which at times is considered physical and quite manly for the fairer sex.

In Nigeria where male chauvinism can be overbearing ladies might not just be the butt of nuisance and sexist jokes, but some men would scheme to cause serious embarrassment to the ladies just to make them both uncomfortable and unwanted.

As it happens, the ladies who take up engineering are usually made of sterner stuff than puny men can throw at them.

They not only excel in academic activity, but also beat the men in craft too.

Whilst I was down in the South for the entrance examinations to secondary school, the aunt who gave me lessons was a budding Electrical engineer.

Overalls without a manicure

In polytechnic, we had a lady who rolled up her sleeves in the mechanical engineering class as she would so soon be under a car, as she would have her overalls caked with precipitation of motor oils; hands that would have a manicurist hire industrial heavy duty tools, she was gutsy.

Then in my class, as I was studying Electrical engineering, there was a lady whose demeanour was such that no one called her by name.

Rather, she had the appellation Haja – inferring she had performed the Islamic pillar of visiting Mecca. What was striking beyond her manner was her mode of dress.

She was covered all over and even wore gloves, and had a scarf whose train was just probably a few inches short of Princess Diana’s wedding train.

Protocols for a handshake

That in particular had us musing to each other, quietly; the danger of the scarf getting caught in the moving parts of the lathe our curriculum including crafting bric-a-brac out of sheet steel like bottle openers.

She never shook hands with men, but I once had the honour of having my hand touched in greeting, a rarity that exuded mutual respect.

Both ladies were lovely Muslim girls, one a tomboy and the other as pious as Mother Theresa. The former mildly secular the latter rather devout and sometimes given to serious religious debate, but both utterly reasonable.

The might of the lecturer

Lecturers in higher educational institutions in Nigeria then could be quite interesting and megalomaniacal without sanction. They could as easily mark you down subjectively as they could score you well for devoting your every waking hour to excelling in their course.

To say they were prone to jealousy if they felt you were not committed to failing all else to barely passing their vocation would be an understatement.

Beyond our tuition fees, lecturers even produced cheap and poorly produced tutorials that they charged for and sometimes set their tests verbatim out of the tutorial.

Woe art thou – if your hard-earned and meagre resources did not augment the salaries of lecturers as they prey like vampire bats on their wards.

Qurani-Biblical Mentors

However, it was lecturers engaged in religious activity that exercised the worst type of abuse of power. Whilst we are used to Christian proselytising, the Islamic version was definitely a new development.

It was not more the Jihad, but a battle of the minds, the war for the will and the fear of failure; all colluding to convert you to other faiths.

Many at school sometimes suffered temporary apostasy as one who held the key of your success and failure called on your service with impunity and left you helpless that resistance meant instant failure; the reality of understanding futility in the face of lawlessness.

One such lecturer lead a Muslim group that met on Saturday evenings sharing the word of the holy book and debating with each other about the parallels with Christianity and the superiority of observed service to quiet faith.

Spiritual Islam – eyewitness account

The whole class was invited to a feast that celebrates the revelation of the Qu’ran; we all graced the occasion as we sat outside in rows listening to the preacher reveal the gems of paradise found in joining the group.

Suddenly, a young girl seemingly had seizures, convulsed and began to stutter as someone took the role of interpreting the “revelations” from god.

By the time we knew what was going on, a good few ‘virgins’ became convulsed in this mass hysteria as we all watched with incredulity.

Never had we seen people of an Islamic persuasion display the manifestation of some form of spiritual possession and activity reminiscent of the white garment traditional Nigerian churches.

Have no hand

We left soon enough as all the leaders of the meeting had to withdraw to receive and decode the message from afar – none said anything about the event – but when we next mentioned it amongst friends – we were in stitches for hours on end.

They would definitely have had our hands cut off from the wrist if we deigned to caricature the lecturer talk less of you know who.