A Reckoning With Remo Secondary School at 80

A Reluctant Beginning

It is a part of my history I cannot ignore: a ploy by my parents to move me from the privileged environment of international primary schooling to experience integration into their culture, norms, and values, in order to foster independence and resilience during secondary boarding school, within the context of their tribal roots.

In the 30th year of the founding of Remo Secondary School, Sagamu, I gained admission after sitting the common entrance examinations and arrived from the north, ill-prepared, ill-equipped, and scarcely excited by the prospect. At age 10, my only options were between this school and Odogbolu Grammar School.

A Blur of Survival

The five years of being a student are a blur; I do not retain any particular friendships or bonds from that time. The people I considered friends were probably just fellow survivors trying to cope in a hostile environment, as we have scarcely maintained those connections since graduating.

If my memories are to be recalled, they would be in the names of the teachers rather than my classmates. The principal during my admission was Mrs Adebambo, a stoic lady who seemed to have eyes everywhere; you could hardly hide when not in the designated student assembly.

Yet I do remember hiding in a cavity behind the shrubs backing Falode House hostel as she walked by. I broke that myth.

Houses and Early Years

I was in Adedoyin House, and for my first three years, we took the wooden spoon at the Inter-House Sports Day. I was never a sportsman, but we cheered just for participation. Mr Abiona, I remember him as a kind housemaster; one of his sons was my classmate. The other two houses were Igimisoje and Mellor.

Remo Secondary School (RSS) was founded 80 years ago today by a Methodist missionary and community leaders as the first coeducational secondary school. Reverend William Frederick Mellor died in my first year at RSS.

Teachers Remembered

Of all the people who taught me, I remember most fondly Pascal Housenone, my mathematics teacher from the neighbouring Benin Republic. He taught me in my third form. Mr Adekoya taught English; he tarnished my school report that year by remarking that I was a truant. No one wondered why I was bothered, disinterested, and distracted in class; I preferred being in the library.

Of the malevolent lot was Mr Okonji, who earned the nickname Study-Study but was never able to enthuse us with his French lessons. He failed at imparting knowledge, relying on the cane; a sadist whose gratification was inflicting pain. With Mrs Odutuyo, the Yoruba teacher; the only lesson I learnt from her tutelage was adding diacritical marks to Yoruba; they both personified wickedness and abuse without accountability.

Collective Punishment

In my final year, we attended summer classes, and some classmates, intent on meeting girls one night, ran amok and caused damage and injury in the girls' hostel. Instead of investigating who the real culprits were, the school decided on collective punishment, expelling us from the boarding arrangements for the final year.

I remember the vice principal coming to the hostel and saying loudly that she knew these boys were not involved, but the decision had been made. That shaped my view and experience of RSS since the summer of 1980. I graduated in the Class of 1981; I have not returned since.

A Distance Maintained

I have observed activities of the RSS Old Students' Association from afar but have never been persuaded to join, as some of the leadership in the UK are reliquaries of memories I’d rather forget. For the record, I post this note.

A Google NotebookLM AI Audio Overview Discussion of this blog

RSS Mischief V - The gods with no balls

Mayflower, our nemesis

Traditional school rivalries are inbred, there is rarely an alternative frame of reference that the negative ones so easily begin to define you. Up the road from our Methodist roots Remo Secondary School (RSS) was the humanist strong Mayflower School, Ikenne.

The competition for entry into Mayflower School was stiff that some who attended primary boarding school there did not make the cut and defaulted to RSS.

We seemed to always play the second fiddle to them, in academics and quite evidently in football games. I never knew of a time that we ever beat them, no matter how we tried and that called for extraordinary measures not predicated on our Methodist provenance or the motto of our school, For God and Fatherland.

Pleading to clueless gods

Apparently, the gods, animist, fetish and dreadful had the answer to the nagging big question: How do we defeat Mayflower School at football?

We were woken up by seniors who had consulted oracles and shamans at 1:00 AM and coerced at the threat of violence and severe punishment to contribute funds to procure kurubé (fetish) services of a medicine man to gain advantage of Mayflower School at our next scheduled match.

Why this urgent need could not wait until during the day escaped me, nor did I believe there was any way we could beat Mayflower School without both the luck and the skill, and I was just annoyed that someone was ready to take money from gullible and impressionable students promising something to us that was too farfetched and unreal. Besides, what is to say Mayflower School had not procured similar services and so cancelling the presumed advantage we had purchased?

Snitching for justice

All that together in my mind fired the sense of injustice that led to my writing an anonymous letter about this nonsense and dropping it in the front car seat of the vice principal’s car. They no doubt took it seriously because the principal talked about it the next morning at the school assembly and put out a notice for whoever wrote the letter to come forward without fear of exposure.

Thinking long about it, I visited the principal the next afternoon about the matter, he assured me nothing like this would happen again and the seniors involved will be told off. Then he gave me 5 Naira and send me on my way. For the rest of my time at school, we were no more harassed for fetish seeking contributions and we still lost to Mayflower School anytime we met at the game of football.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Blog - RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Blog - RSS Mischief III - Swimming like crabs

Blog - RSS Mischief IV - Post the pots

RSS Mischief IV - Post the pots

Double or starve

One morning, the vice principal came into the dining hall during breakfast when we had a bread bun and fish stew served in an aluminium dish. He asked one of the boys if the food was enough and the boy replied, “No sir.” That interaction led to the doubling of our bread rations, from then on we had two bread buns rather than one.

Our dinner ladies or cooks were of a different animal species, almost too well fed that they could have been a crossbreed of homo sapiens and hippopotamuses for the way the folds of skin at the elbows looked like armour cladding that you could not once suggest they were fat even as they were built like stout brick houses, their legs might have suggested elephantiasis, though none looked ill, and we were scrawny and skinny like Jack Sprat.

Weevils and vitamins

When we had beans that nearly passed for diarrheal effluent fully augmented with weevils, that became more of the protein content than the beans, you closed your eyes as you spooned in the sustenance, maybe mixed in with garri grains. That we never fell violently ill at what we were served was probably testament to a constitution borne of being shipped off to hostelry by our loving parents to toughen us up.

The dinner ladies had a side hustle of snacks and sweets that they sold to us, an escape from the witch’s gruel and puddings of three-square meals that would have made Oliver Twist think he was at the Ritz.

Gremlins of the dark

One night after everything had quietened down at the dining hall and the kitchen, I was invited by a classmate, and we found ourselves in the confines of the kitchen pilfering goods we should never have had access to. The doors and windows were bolted shut and yet we got in with ease.

The pots were placed over holes, there were heated from recesses for firewood on the outside and so whilst the food was cooked, the smoke was always outside. At the end of the day, the firewood was removed, and the recesses cleaned of ashes and soot for the next day.

Post the pots

We, the gremlins of the night could go into the recesses and lift the lighter pots and that was how we entered the kitchen, through the fireplace. How so criminal and soon the novelty of that enterprise wore out, for the pang of conscience and probably the realisation that too many gremlins were scavenging around the kitchen. Yet, I doubt Miss Marple would have determined how things were lost.

The thrill and the adrenalin rush of this naughtiness would have faded at the stroke of the first landing of the birch on one’s backside, you never wanted to suffer the humiliation of a morning assembly punishment and thankfully where one came a cropper, one was spared the lasting indignity of such.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Blog - RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

Blog - RSS Mischief III - Swimming like crabs

RSS Mischief III - Swimming like crabs

Water all around

Apart from the front gate and a side gate there were no walls around my boarding secondary school, Remo Secondary School that we all knew as RSS. On the outskirts of Sagamu to the east, over a river bridge called Májọ̀pa that came with its tales of intrigue and paranormal dread that we at times exaggerated into fabulously unbelievable tales fed by imagination.

Then to the right was a hotel complex and a standpipe where we sometimes came for to fetch water if the taps around the school or the water source called Odò gàrrí (Garri pond) was too dirty for any use. The hotel was a disorderly house of ladies we eventually made friends with as aunties and not for any untoward activity.

To the gate

Further on to the roundabout, with two exits, the one to the right towards Ìkẹ́nnẹ́ and ahead over it to Ìpẹru, that part of the roundabout forming the northwest boundary of the school before a wall was built from the west round to the north and then to the east, leaving the south exposed to Odò gàrrí, farmlands, the rain forest that harboured a laughing jackal that for the best part of the first year at night howled the peace away. A path was later cleared for electricity pylons which opened parts of the unnavigable forest to exploration.

Soon after the roundabout was on the road to Ìpẹru was the main gate to Remo Secondary School on the right, facing onto the main staffroom. The wall was just a demarcation not a barrier, as no intrusion deterrents were placed on the tops of the wall, like broken glass or spikes, they were easily scalable to escape the confines or regimentation of hostelry and pathologically sadistic seniors.

Crabs swim better

Crossing the road after scaling the wall just before the roundabout from the school end, we plied a footpath through cocoyam farms then bearing left many pathways presented but one after about 1,500 metres of walking came to a river upstream of Májọ̀pa we called Ibù from which water was extracted for the waterworks and mains.

That part was deep, and no one ventured there because we were told someone drowned having been sucked up by one of the pipes, that was to the right. Ahead of us was a rickety wooden bridge and to the left shallow water where we went for a dip and pretended to swim, moving underwater like crabs.

We ran for dear life

This became a draw, for as many as 10 of us set out for this apparently illegal escape from authority to play. Though, without really witnessing it but following the stampede back to school that ensued. There was a fetish priestess in white who arrived from the other side through the bushes between the river and Sagamu probably to do some ritual to the river goddess.

When she arrived, whether it was a tall tale or not, one can not tell, but apparently, she got to the bank of the river and began to walk on water. We all jumped out of water hardly remembering to pick up our clothes as we broke sprinting world records literally unable to catch our breath and another fantastic yarn on our lips ready for any listening ear.

I cannot remember when the novelty of Ibù wore off, but it was not due to any official action of the school, I guess we found other distractions apart from where a river runs through it.

Blog - RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Blog - RSS Mischief II - The fundamentals of fluid mechanics

RSS Mischief I - Yikes! A snake

Idle hands and fiery minds

I had a box of matches, and I was ready for mischief in one of those sinister acts of naughtiness invisibly perpetrated out of boredom and a sense of adventure in secondary school. I went to Remo Secondary School (RSS), Sagamu, Ogun State, the Class of 1981.

Much as I do not retain enduring friendships or associations with alumni from my secondary school, it does not suggest that my time there was not memorable. We were up to a lot of stuff, some probably unprintable because that could span the spectrum of the dastardly to just downright criminal. The tall prepubescent innocent-looking boy with a funny accent cannot be responsible for many things and there were things we did not do.

The long bamboo grasses

The annual inter-house sports day had us combing the dense jungle around the school for thick bamboo grass shoots like trunks and palm fronds to build the schoolhouse gazebos at the back of the sports field, that was part of the competition along with the field and track games for which in total points my schoolhouse, Adedoyin came last for 3 years.

Not far from my dormitory was a large bamboo grass bush that rarely yielded much but had grown from the cutting and extraction of bamboo stalks over the years. That we were rarely fearful of the possibility of dangerous elapine species lurking in bushes was probably one of innocence rather than bravery or daring.

Light it up and walk by

The grass beckoning to an arsonist’s urge in me was like tinder begging for the role of cinder and irresistibly, a lit match flew out of my hand to the inflammable grass, starting with a smouldering without rising into a conflagration, as I walked by my deed, it appeared it was going to be a slow burn. This was sometime around 5:00 PM.

After lights out, there was some commotion, someone had stepped out from the dormitory hall probably to take a leak and saw a snake, he raised alarm and a tumult resulted, sticks and clubs to hand they chased after the homeless reptile and send it to snake heaven. The principal, Mrs Adebambo, unaware of what caused the fracas came out of her home and nabbed some of the boys with the view to suspending them the next day.

Preserved from punishment

I was not part of the melee, how could any of that have been as a result of what I had done earlier even as it did occur to me that it might have been my deft handiwork?

The morning came and as the principal was about to unleash her fury, she was presented with yellowish-green cobra laid out in front of the staffroom. That was the end of her intentions; the snake was picked up by our motorbike riding Irish biology teacher and preserved in a large bottle of formaldehyde as an object of study, interest, and fascination.

Now, I dread the thought of what could have been if that snake had bitten anyone and at the same time one had indirectly acquired a biological objet d’art for the school.

Trying to forget Remo Secondary School at 75

Skipping around schools

Much as I would have liked to remember, it is also forgettable, and that is why I find myself writing about it two days after the event. I attended three primary schools in Kaduna and Jos, in the north of Nigeria in the early 1970s.

The first primary school, the Army Children’s School in Kaduna I barely remember apart from the fact that the headmistress was Indian, and she would walk through assembly in the morning checking our nails then striking our knuckles with the edge of a ruler if they hadn’t been cut. What a child can do about their nails when it is a parent’s responsibility, I don’t know, but that is how we all learnt to bite our nails.

The uneventful year was soon eclipsed by our move to Jos where I attended the Corona School, Shamrock House, Bukuru, and I do have many memories of my being there having jumped a class straight to class 3 through to class 5. We returned to Kaduna for my last year in primary school at the Sacred Heart Primary School where I was away for 4 months in early 1976 attending common entrance examinations for secondary school admission in the south-west of Nigeria.

Never forget the injustice

Remo Secondary School (RSS), Sagamu won my pupillage in September 1976, in it’s 30^th founder’s year. My 5 years in this school, though eventful and interesting remains somewhat forgettable, for I maintain the minimal ties with the place and the institution apart from memories tragic, sad, and unsettling besides the fact that my set in the last year of the Class of 1981 were unjustly punished collectively for what a few miscreants did because the Parents Teachers Association was too lazy to conduct a proper investigation of the issue.

Beyond that, life in the school whilst having thrills left me with hardly any enduring friendships, I have met a few of my class and school mates, even have social media connections with them, but I have shunned all old student association meetings or involvements, this is a part of my history that will be recorded but not necessarily cherished to any extent.

For the little matter

Yet, because dates hold some sort of significance to me, the 4^th of February 2021 was the 75^th Founders’ Anniversary of RSS as the 1^st co-educational secondary school in West Africa, or so it is reputed. We had the school motto of 'For God and Fatherland', the former stands strong, the latter is constantly under review.

That I have visited the grounds a few times in my dreams as it then means for all my misgivings it did have a significant impact on me, I had the nickname of Pastor for most of my time there. Anyway, I am just journaling a piece of my past, there are more stories to tell, in the 40^th year of my exiting that place.

Adolescence: Revisiting the RSS Class of 1981

Calling from the deep

This morning as I got to work, my phone rang and at the other end of the line was a voice I could not make out. A name and my memory went into a tailspin, I was trying to remember a quinquennial period of my life that ended just a few days over 36 years ago and my recall was not recalling much.

Apparently, one of the most enterprising of my secondary schoolmates, and I mean that in every way, he drove his own vehicle to school, but was not given a parking space within the school walls. He had set up a WhatsApp group and invited the class of 1981 to join. I was added to the group and very few could remember who I was.

Now, that I think of it, apart from my sadness at the way the Parents and Teachers Association of my secondary school treated my class in the summer of 1980, I have hardly written about my secondary school life. Yet, it is not without event and adventure.

More fiends than friends

One other thing is I have not necessarily kept contact with the closest friends I made in secondary school, from the scoundrel to the evasive, the fleeting contacts we made afterward only showed how divergent our lives had become. The common strain that brought us together was kids born abroad and with another bedwetters, but that did not beyond school materialise into friendships.

It is strange that in a conversation with my dad some time ago, he noted that I had not cultivated friendships with my secondary school mates. Then I think of friendships I have tried to rekindle from my primary school days and other friendships that have lasted a lifetime from my post-secondary school days.

There are issues that seem to set my secondary school relationships apart and I do believe the time has come to begin to document those parts of my history. Then again, I have acquaintances I made in secondary school who have indeed become friends, not only that, I have made friends with their relations too, who in some cases have married into relations of mine.

My large family of One

However, this collision of the shadows of the past with the intricate and delicate balance of my present brings some interesting areas of complex and somewhat strained conversation. We all make assumptions about the lives of others following a particular trajectory when in reality, that is rarely the case.

I have to tackle the very extant and pertinent question, “How are you and your family?”. Indeed, I have woken up in a jolt from the nightmare of dreaming I had a wife and two children. The thoughts even in the dreams questioning how all this happened to me without my involvement.

I was once integrated with a nuclear family until I was 10 before I was sent to boarding school, after that, the family was a nebulous mix of close and distant relations, many of whom I now hardly know, some have already passed on and others I relate to on Facebook. I have three half-brothers I have never met, one of whom is already a father.

In my bowels, I have reached the age of grandfatherhood, I know this because one of my very close friends who is much younger than I am has been a grandfather for at least 5 years. Yet, I cannot say I do not have a family, rather, I do have a family, it is a large family of one. I never married, I have never had kids. To enter into much more detail about that would challenge the seemingly conservative disposition of some of the entrants into the WhatsApp group.

Conserve on the detail

Suffused with religious supplication and the grandiosity of prayerful incantations, the more liberal matters of a life less ordinary may not be understood, neither would I want to impose any of my worldviews into the Remo Secondary School (RSS) Class of 1981.

My family is well, I am glad to reacquaint myself with you all, of all I can remember, we at least liked each other and there was rarely if ever, any hate or animosity between us. I look forward to recalling the wonderful memories of my early teenage years. I finished at 15, and I guess most if all are now over 50.

For God and Fatherland was the motto of the school, I guess, I am not doing much for either today, on reflection, there is much to be said and much more to be forgiven.

Naijalive: Apology accepted but ...

NBA down again?

As one writes this, the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) brings more grist to the mill of the Naijalive Project which goes by the name of The Nigerian Super Blog (TNSB), such is life in the cut and thrust of Internet businesses or services.

A click on the NBA link from my blog presents this error

Failed to execute the SQL query

update item set unread = unread & 30

Error 1194: Table 'item' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

It makes you wonder what is going on in the Web 2.0 world of NBA that in less than a month we have had two major failures that are taking days to clear up.

Given that the proprietors are busy, this has become a service that cannot be managed with levity anymore, it is a non-profit thing and it is time that the owner got other people involved in some voluntary and community service role to ensure the service continues to function lest these operational lapses contribute to ruining the reputation of otherwise resourceful minds.

Apology accepted

After my last blog on the Naijalive comments , I received another message from the Project Co-ordinator of Naijalive, which summarily was an apology along with an explanation as to why the quality of exchanges had developed into a kind of confrontation.

I accept the apology wholeheartedly, I also reserve the right to use my forum to address the concerns I still have with the Naijalive Project, I might yet ask to be registered in that service sometime in the future, but for now, I have serious concerns.

Cached material or stale material

First, I do not fully understand how their system of aggregation works because it is either caching or saving separately blogs published by others - inconclusive, but the permanent link does not return to source.

We are all aware of how the Web 2.0 phenomenon has exposed people to unfortunate circumstances like universities trawling the web to find ill-disciplined students, employers sanctioning staff for sailing close to the wind with their opinions and so on.

On the 23^rd of July 2007, Chxta posted an article on his blog titled Some UK varsities in critical condition? [Post now removed on TNSB but a link to the captured graphic appears below]. After a few comments, he decided to take it down with a notice Post Goes Down, we, his readers remonstrated strongly about this action and left it at that.

It would appear whilst the post is already down, at least not available for public viewing on Chxta's World , it is quite available on the TNSB but only without the comments that lead to Chxta taking down the blog in the first place, this really bothers me.

Relinquishing control

This presents serious issues of control and informs my concerns on the quality of aggregation, if an item disappears from public viewing at a source, should it not reflect at the aggregator after a refresh of feeds?

Now, I would not know if Chxta moved that post into a draft repository which hopefully is not set to publish feeds or deleted it entirely.

Google does have a feature for caching websites such that the data is viewable long after the source has completely disappeared, but that is a service that should be inherent in sophisticated search engines not aggregators.

Serious legal implications

The more serious implication of this observation is where a legal requirement arises for a post to be taken down completely from a blog site and the litigant still finds traces of the grievance matter linked to the source even though the originator has no control over that "duplicated" material.

Now, I am not sure of full technical scenario of this observation, but it means Chxta either has to do something about it or TNSB needs to introduce some sophisticated code to rid their site of material that has been archived when the source has withdrawn an article.

Now, archiving is another matter but it is important the originators retain control of their material, if we must publish, so be it, but definitely not be damned by the actions of others.

Addendum: Added after Naijalive comment

Naijalive have commented on this matter and this is what they say.

Chxta's post is still showing up because feeds imported into the SuperBlog are automatically cached and archived and unless we remove them manually, they remain there.

They are working on ensuring that posts removed at source are automatically removed on TNSB, I commend them for looking seriously into this, but would having symbolic links to the source not be better than the additional management of cached and archived material?

I worry, I really do worry, but would patiently wait for their solution, I suppose I would be addressing the interface, navigation and user-friendliness when i next touch the topic of Naijalive. They are learning and improving.

References

I love this website

The truncated part of the Chxta's article as it appeared on TNSB - Captured from viewing TNSB as evidence supporting my observation.

Naijalive: After all the comments

I was THINKING ALOUD

It would appear nobody saw the first two words in my blog about the advent of Naijalive's Nigeria Super Blog - it states; Thinking Aloud.

I am getting quite fed up of seeing references by the proprietors of this project trying to cast me as villain; excerpting for emotive aggrandisement elements of my posting and leaving out the fundamental principles I was raising.

After their lengthy apology and then unsavoury comments dotted around blogs about this matter, I have already requested and they have acceded in removing my blog from their forum.

I wrote that blog in the light and context of the deprecation or absence of service from the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) - I would note clearly that I specifically subscribed to NBA and by doing that I was accepting the way they were representing my information.

Consent is pre-eminent

My beef with Naijalive was based on the following:

They registered me in their forum without my consent, the first I heard of this service was when I received an email asking me to change the way my feeds are submitted.

When my blog appeared on that site, all the formatting I had for my blog had been subsumed into some bland nondescript format and then people posted comments that did not reflect back at my blog.

Whatever they might want to call their type of aggregation, that meant that my blog was being altered and duplicated somewhere else where I did not have any control.

Making an ASS of U and ME

From my experience, there was a particularly "Nigerian" attitude about this service, they automatically assumed everyone who is Nigerian or has a Nigerian affiliation would want to be a participant and hence no consent is required in some absurd sense of brotherhood.

No, that is not how it is done in polite society or Internet ethic circles, even when I register in more established forums, I have the option to opt in or opt out of their services, I control how they interact with me.

I took particular exception to them requiring I change my feeds for a service which they have lauded to my distraction as a beta and preview (That is just semantics, the site is live, public and under continuing development, see the definition of preview below), I have been blogging since December 2003, I have never had a request like that from established aggregators because they know the choice of how I want my blog syndicated is primarily MINE.

It begs the question how many people would take actionable suggestions from a business that has not had time to prove themselves who are in a trial phase of their project. It would be a completely different thing if I was asked to participate in some user acceptance testing or become a pilot user before the preview went live.

Amateur and pretender

I stand by my use of the words "amateur" and "pretender", they are words that can be read in the most wide-ranging contexts that you may care to have; that they have taken the most negative connotations of the words is their prerogative.

They are amateur because evidently, none of them are in any mainstream information technology occupation; the project is run by a petroleum engineer, a civil engineer and a microbiologist and a free site.

They might engage computer experts in this project, but it really did first look like a dabble, a "have a go" thing because everyone is into the stuff. By their admission their tasking careers give them little time to spend on the project amidst the protestations that they intend to make this project as professional as possible. It would be no surprise that essential blog management expertise might be missing in the flux of amazing ideas.

I employed the word pretender because we have already been used to other services which have provided us similar functionality regardless of how they try to differentiate their offering, many other knowledgeable people opined that their approach was suspect and suspicious.

Coming late into this business of blog management there fundamental things that would be expected of any new service and at my first review, it was not close on any account to services I was already familiar with.

Welcome to the harsh realities

There is no doubt that Naijalive is adapting to the harsh realities of starting up an Internet venture in the blog genre and changes have been made to accommodate many of the requests but the core principles still remains

• consent is required prior to registering a blog in your site

• the look and feel of the blog should be retained except where excerpts or quotations are extracted, if the whole blog is published, it should not be different from source material

• comments made to the blogs in the project, should and must reflect back in the comment areas of the source material

As usual, the proprietors would try to bluff their way through this matter, one could almost say that is also a typical Nigerian trait, by castigating dissent and criticism, having apologised their comments in  other forums about my original "thinking aloud" blog simply showed they were in no way contrite by trying to play victim when in fact they were wrong - ethically and professionally.

Even one comment by probably an "expert" in Internet Law wondered why some people could be so anal - has someone's Emotional Intelligence just taken a plummet or what? If only people would address the core principles and spare us the emotional trips.

I have nothing against what Naijalive is doing, it has its purposes, none of which serve mine; but I got involved because I was co-opted without consent, it does not mean I should lose my rights to criticise their actions constructively or otherwise, be the business Nigerian or Martian, I take no prisoners on matters of principle.

Flexibility would help

In terms of advice, there is one last thing Naijalive requires, flexibility - make the superblog a collapsible outline, present the full text of the blogs if you must, but provide a button that collapses the blogs into just the title and the summary so that people do not have to scroll through pages of text to get to the blogs they really want to read. [This feature seems to have been implemented similar to that of the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator, a duplication of an existing aggregator service, I would think].

There are people who write good summaries of their blogs too. By the way, it is Mr. Akintayo, not Mr. Akin, the effrontery of tyros is baffling, to say the least.

PS: For all who care to check, a preview according to the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary is to see beforehand; specifically: to view or to show in advance of public presentation - by definition and reality, the Nigeria Super Blog is NOT a preview, it is like I said earlier, online and available to the worldwide public, not a select audience of reviewers. I think that puts paid to that charade.

References

Aggregating the Nigerian blogosphere. Re: Naijalive.net - Oluniyi David Ajao » Blog Archive

About the Project | The NaijaLive Official Blog - No more as the original purpose.

Global Voices Online » Nigeria: Talking About Aggregation, Copyright and Professionalism

Open Apology to Oluniyi David Ajao | The NaijaLive Official Blog - Lost to a default landing page.

NaijaLive - PS. Aggregation not poor duplication

Amateurs aping professionals

Thinking aloud - I received an email/blog comment yesterday from someone who had decided to exploit an opportunity - the absence of the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA).

It would appear NBA is quite dead that the managers of the service would not be inclined to resolve the issues and bring it back up.

This is an unfortunate development because it reflects badly on the service-centred acumen that pioneers and entrepreneurs are supposed to have, I have seen too much self-aggrandisement from Nigerian webmasters who think running a website is a fiefdom in which they can exercise unreasonableness as power-trips.

With NBA some people already had problems with the professionalism of the managers where a "take it or leave it" attitude prevailed in some experiences - I was just happy to use the service because it was a microcosm of Nigerian blog thought.

Allowing something as benign as running out of space on the server to happen is rank unprofessionalism of the highest order and really beneath contempt, you really cannot do business with people like these and it is a shame - just because it was free does not mean it could be run with such levity.

Requires more than dabbling

So, I read this email and this young man had been dabbling with the dynamics of blog publication and aggregation. Now, I am no technology expert in this field, and I welcome competition that forces other services to improve on their fare.

In this case, there is no competition but a pretender replacement for once established NBA service.

Back to the email, it contained a request that I adjust my RSS feed to display the whole blog rather than my summaries because everyone has offered their blogs in that format.

I at first reacted positively to that request from a complete stranger offering a service similar to the one I was missing without really checking out what he was offering. However, I am disappointed that this replacement service is very much like re-inventing the wheel and it is in no way improving on the standard and quality of the service that went on before.

I have been blogging for over 3 and a half years, why should I suddenly change the way I offer my feeds to an untried, untested and fledgling service, considering there are other aggregators that use the same feeds without complaints? My blog has reverted to summaries.

Keep my stuff my way

Then I visited the site only to find that all my formatting and structure has been subsumed into a bland interface with no backlinks to the original.

Comments were left on that blog and those did not reflect back at the source - I am sorry, it is not my intention to have a backup of my blog on another site without agreeing on the quality and state of publication - the key should be aggregation and not sub-standard duplication.

Like more knowledgeable people have opined, there are better aggregators than the one implemented, another indicated it looked like an illegal scrapping of contents. In fact, I expect that any publication of my material in sites I do not exercise control over should include citations and acknowledgements.

Besides, I know full well how I want my blogs and material to be displayed, they are displayed as you can find on my blog, any aesthetic changes to the layout or formatting should and must only be done with my expressly granted permission. More so, it is really better to publish the headers and probably the summary, just like NBA did.

Confer with the experts

My candid advice is for the mover of NaijaLive to confer with the owners of AfricanLoft (now defunct) and AltNigeria (now non-existent), probably an email to a techie like Chxta would come in handy too - they all seem to know a good deal about the technology and the implementation, they are also developing the blogging environment into vibrant communities - then the mover can come up with a decent product; this well-intentioned but amateurish attempt just would not wash. No, not at all.

If I get proscribed from this new aggregator, that would be par for the course, but I hope I would be doing a sub-par round on this matter - I was thinking aloud about the new NaijaLive SuperBlog site.