Editorial: Mrs Adewole, Christianity is more than a pair of trousers

The bad example of Christians

Sometimes you wonder about how much Christians act to bring Christianity into disrepute and public ridicule.

Their conduct in trying to exercise rights of expression based on some obscure passage of scripture rarely does much for the message of the gospel and there can be no correlation with the meekness, selflessness and example that Christians are to demonstrate.

The real message of Christianity flows out of the gospels of the apostles which are in essence the narration of the life of Jesus Christ, a ministry that brought radical change to the way the religious and political systems were run at that time.

Looking out from the gospel

The need to display a Christian outlook that emanates first from the example of the gospels is pertinent because every other session of the bible is an image and reflection of the living example that Jesus Christ showed.

Whilst the Mosaic Laws prepared a people for the service of God, they are hardly the bedrock of Christian faith and a good deal of the prescriptive rules, creeds, laws, traditions and customs have been done away with as the new testament and covenant replaced the old.

Most important of all for any adherents of the Christian faith is to live peaceably with all mankind being an example of love, compassion, care, understanding, modesty, courage and goodness.

The clothes are still different

A midwife offers a great service of care and love to humanity in helping the delivery of babies, hospitals however do have codes of conduct and there are reasons why certain types of apparel make the working in a hospital more comfortable and manageable.

Culturally, there in some places there might be a strict separation between what menswear is and what womenswear is, there are other settings where apparel is more or less unisex, the matter of trousers in many societies is down to the cut and the fit; men’s trousers are rarely ever for women just as women’s trousers are rarely for men.

An ancient practice superseded

In the UK especially, you have to be so absorbed in the Levitical priesthood pulling off heads of pigeons and turtledoves, sacrificing scapegoats outside the camp and shedding blood over all sorts of religious paraphernalia as vividly depicted in Mosaic books to suddenly happen upon the literal instruction of Deuteronomy 22:5 which in the New International Version from the news story states that “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does.”

In those times and in that community, that was as prescriptive as it got including the admonition not to wear clothes of mixed material and other exacting minutiae needed to separate the Israelites from the other races and tribes that will eventually surround them when they arrived in the promised land.

A poor reflection of the mission

If Christianity has now been reduced to the externalisation of apparel to the point of wanting to look different and be a disruptive influence within the workplace, one would be left with the unfortunate needless death of Jesus Christ and the resurrection would have been a stunt without any particular spiritual significance; we might well follow the regime of a diet and be happy.

That I am afraid is where the recalcitrance and unreasonableness of one Mrs Hannah Adewole has brought us; a midwife whose sense of community service in the employ of Queen’s Hospital in Romford, Essex has been lost to a radically fundamentalist and irrational adherence to a single decontextualised verse of scripture on wearing trousers at work which she terms men’s clothes and she is taking her employers to court for religious discrimination and harassment.

There might well be a case for the idea that those of other religious persuasions are somewhat more favourably treated and it could well be that they have taken time to negotiate their concerns better than to take offence and go confrontational.

Laugh her out of court

Now, it is her prerogative to sue but I pray it must not be done in the name of Christianity and it is not that I failed to notice in her picture that appears to the whole wide world that through fundamentalist eyes, she has forgotten an essentially chaste and modest looking dowdy head scarf.

This a la carte selection of scriptures of convenience must stop and I would hope to all that is good, seemly, honest, true, just and fair, she is laughed out of court and really, if she hates her job, she should just quit and find some backwater hospital with Mosaic Law guidelines in which to ply her trade.

Acknowledgement

The Daily Telegraph under the Health News section runs the story - Christian midwife sues over order to wear trousers.

A selected comment

Going from the line of thinking she has adopted, the best rated comment posted by philantony goes thus and it puts this whole ruse into context.

• I do hope those outfits she wears are not of mixing wool and linen (Leviticus 19:19)?
• And that she avoid coming in to work during her period or indeed allows any women into the hospital who are menstruating as this would clearly be a health risk (""When a woman has a discharge of blood, which is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening." -- Leviticus 15:19-20
• And I hope she doesn't swear or joke... "Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place...." -- Ephesians 5:4
• And the same for gossiping. "Do not go around as a gossiper among your people..." -- Leviticus 19:16
• And of course hospitals should shut down on the Sabbath at risk of violating Exodus 20:8.
• Or does she believe in excluding children of unmarried parents from church? And for 10 generations thereafter!! "A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the lord." Deuteronomy 23:2
• And I do hope she doesn't eat oysters or prawns or shrimps or the like. (Leviticus 11:9-12 and Deuteronomy 14:9-10)

Editorial: The Single Term Imbroglio

The invitation

I was invited last week to contribute to the Experts Weekly section of the Think Africa Press online magazine on the topic - Goodluck Jonathan has proposed limiting Nigerian presidents to one, probably six year term in office to avoid pre and post poll violence. How do you interpret this proposal and what are your thoughts on it?

My contribution with that of 5 other experts was published yesterday here.

I reproduce my views here fleshing out some of the more concise opinions I proffered earlier.

Synonyms of one another

I have read the statement released by the Special Adviser to the President (Media and Publicity) as a Facebook Note and I am disappointed by the reasons proffered for the tenure extension.

There are two elements to this idea, one of the Single Term Tenure and the other of having that single term run for probably 6 years. In some ways, the Single Term Tenure could also be referred to as Tenure Extension depending on those who have legal opportunity to take advantage of the change if such persons are currently in their first term of office and no law bars them from seeking a second term.

Poor reasons for purpose

As we have seen in the presidential system of the Unites States, a President effectively has 2 to 3 years of effective government before their energies are directed to seeking a second term; it means the re-election process can distract focus on core responsibilities of governance.

The Facebook statement seems to suggest acrimony, unrest, squabbles and cost as the patriotic drivers for this bill.

This idea might have been allowed some acquiescence if the president had suggested he had embarked on some long-term projects to do with issues really affecting Nigerians as power, infrastructure, transport, health, education, development, economy or jobs that he wanted to see through to some conclusion but we have no evidence of such.

No confidence of the impetus

In the last 12 years, presidents and governors have had single or double terms of government without necessarily changing their domains noticeably for the better; there has been much politicking, wrangling, discord and unrest with incessant threats of carpet-crossing and apart from the case of two or three states, gubernatorial tenures have been abject failures.

The Presidency has fared no better, for almost a year in the last term, the country was held to ransom because of the failing health of the president and the cabal that constituted his so-called kitchen cabinet were a faceless set of unaccountable puppet-masters until the situation became untenable.

On that note, there can be no confidence in the idea that a tenure extension will suddenly be the catalyst for good government - as one writer on this matter has suggested, bad government will be bad government no matter the years spent in power with people losing the opportunity to be rid such rotten government earlier.

A short single term

Chile has a much more developed democracy, economy and society, they voted to reduce their presidential terms of office to a single term of four years without the automatic option for re-election. If any President were to want another opportunity to serve, such a person would have to succeed their successor or successors.

In the Nigeria we have today, I would rather we had presidents and governors for a single term of a maximum of 4 years and if such leaders are able, competent and visionary enough, they will have in place projects that are completed or near completion, ideas others can follow through to completion and succession plans that would ensure their legacies.

Misplaced priorities

What makes this whole idea unfortunate for all the electoral reform ideas that can be tabled and the priorities any right-thinking leader should have is that this is the first major bill from the president in a Nigeria that is in need of more progressive governance, it is ultimately a complete let-down.

There is no doubt that this will be a distraction and diversion from our concentrating on the things that matter, the legislative process will probably be suborned with corrupt inducements to spare the president any embarrassment and it shows that despite surrounding himself with so many advisers none including the president have really caught on what the real issues affecting Nigeria and Nigerians are.

Pick yourself up for this job

It is as Machiavellian and unconscionably a plan to divide every opposition forum within and outside the country and I dare say, this displays contrary to this statement the most unpatriotic zeal every expressed by a Nigerian leader in a long time; the protestations of the change not being to his advantage are moot; this is just not the kind of debate that Nigeria needs today.

Mr. President, I am disappointed in you and frankly, far from impressed – to whom much is bestowed a lot more is desired, it is time to rise to the responsibility of office and avoid letting your tenure of leadership which runs to 2015 be hijacked in endless jangling on unnecessary distractions pretending to altruistic purpose when there is serious work to be done.

Social Engineering: For the avoidance of Mrs Mary Williams

This is not for me

I just got an email with the subject Dear Customer: I would presume whoever is addressing me does not know my name; the email portends to be from MoneyGram with the email address of money326@msn.com which immediately indicates that it is really not from MoneyGram.

I will humour myself by reading the email and you will find my comments inline in parentheses, it will just pertain to the content of the email, I will not do much technical analysis to ascertain the genuineness of this email.

From Office Of The Money Gram Money Transfer. Accra-Ghana Republic / Address No 450 Ring Road Accra-Ghana.

[Now, I would have thought this would come from the office of the MoneyGram Money Transfer Bureau, emphasis on Bureau, which might be in Accra but is it not the Republic of Ghana?]

Appearances of deception

Website:WWW.money-gram.com/

[The genuine MoneyGram Money Transfer website is http://www.moneygram.com the one in this email does not exist.]

Phone:+233244841003.

[Yes, that is a Ghanaian phone number but I doubt I will be calling it.]

Email: mg179435@w.cn

[Now, I have a second email address and this is in a Chinese domain.]

Dear Customer:

[These people do not know me, here again I am being addressed as Dear Customer.]

The letter

Be inform[ed] that we have been giving [given] and [an] instruction by, Hon Ado Seth, DP Ministry of Finance Accra Ghana to start sending to you $5000usd everyday through money gram money transfer, Until your total amount sum ( $1.2 Million us Dollars, AID FUND) one million two hundred thousand united state dollars is completely transferred to your custody .

[I really cannot be bothered with correcting this, too many errors in this paragraph, I could do with a transfer of $5,000 into my custody and eventually my bank account everyday but I will settle for Paypal donations to made though clicking on the Donate button at the top right of this blog.

But read this, I am over a period of 240 days supposed to receive the sum of $1.2 million in daily deposits of $5,000; I suppose a vulture is a patient bird but I doubt it will wait for the egg to be laid, incubated, hatched and the full lifecycle of the bird to carcass before it feeds.

The poor Ghanaians whose aid pornography pictures have moved aid agencies to sympathy to donate to their plight are not going to get sight of the aid, it is about to be drip-fed $5,000 a time into the account of Dear Customer, Yours Truly.]

Affected by an avoidance

Today our department have affected [Why can’t they avoid affording the misuse of affected for effected?] your first transfer of $5000usd to your name, Transfer Reference below.

[Indeed, they need to be reminded of my name which they never knew before.]

Sender First Name=Dr Victor

Sender Second Name =Ike

Amount=$5000.00 USD

Question=Code

Answer=233.

[Who is Dr Victor Ike?]

Contact Dr Victor Ike, Foreign Operation Manager on the below address, to issue to you, your Fund Clearance Certificate and give to you your Money Gram Transfer Control Number to pick-up your first payment of $5000 us dollars.

[So, Hon Ado Seth (Don’t be deceived by titles, this man is hardly Honourable by any stretch of the imagination.) in corrupt enterprise with Dr Victor Ike are in this together and looking further down, the latter is the Foreign Operation(s) Manager at MoneyGram in Ghana – Interesting.]

Dr Victor Ike{Foreign Operation Manager Money Gram Accra Ghana}

E-mail {mg179435@w.cn}

[And though he works in Ghana he has a Chinese email address.]

Tell-+233244841003.

She’s a scammer

Cheers

Mrs Mary Williams.

[Mary Williams? Cheers? Maybe I am being pedantic here but you cannot without knowing me end up closing an apparently formal letter with Cheers. Who the heck is Mrs Mary Williams and to what do I owe this random windfall from three unknown people in Ghana?]

Like they say, if it is too good to be true, it probably isn’t worth your while. To close, I just attempted a search on Mrs Mary Williams and before I finished typing, the suggestion of “Mrs Mary Williams email” was offered by Google and well, she appears to have a reputation for scamming people.

Mrs Mary Williams, please go take a running jump off Fort Elmina, you’ll be doing yourself the greatest favour.

Thought Picnic: For Childlike One Must Again Be

Looking for my child

There is a lot I need to learn and I am putting myself in that teachable position whilst seeking that childhood spirit of curiosity and adventure to discover new things.

I have spent so much time growing up I have almost become “groan up” and yes, I have groaned, grumbled, been grumpy and been quite grouchy; going into reverse, one now has to ditch the elderly things and try a bit of kindergarten finger-painting exercises as the Message dares to paraphrase Hebrews 6:1 of the bible – the grand work of art one has lavished much brushstrokes on is looking more like Medusa than Mona Lisa.

I am not ready to turn to stone nor do I as Lot’s wife intend turn into a pillar of salt, I need to enter a flow of change and adapt to the new challenges that present themselves in these trying times.

Talk is essential

My fourth session of therapy was interesting, no notes, just talk, much talk and a feeling that my voice was about to crack but that element of English stoicism kept me from crying a river like I once did almost a decade ago.

It is good to talk and talking with the right people helps, not so much that they can be your immediate help but they can bring forth good ideas and pointers where you have been so ensconced in your world of turmoil, literally unable to see beyond yourself.

I also need to talk to myself and speak out some things that occupy my thoughts too much that my rest suffers. I considered I might have been struck dumb, I did not even know how to pray for myself.

Awakening the survivor in me

How is it that a drowning man cannot cry out for help and a man being beaten cannot vocalise the pain? It is really not healthy and the realisation dawning on me is that silence might just lead to a quiet disappearance from view and an end sadly unspoken.

With this professional, much of what I have shared previously was in total recall, the empathy was tangible and certain things I did not know to do before have been described, arranged and helped through but most of all, I need to be reminded, I am a survivor and I will do well.

Thought Picnic: A total loss looms for restart

The threads for this yarn

When this story gets told in some book where all the threads that reach the present are twined into a rope with some pulling power, you can only wonder what it would be used to moor to the docks of history.

Many narratives exist where it all seemed to be at a dead-end, hope appeared to be lost and there was nothing in the horizon but the darkest clouds of storms that have never once before been predicted.

Somewhere in the past the seeds were sown that have become wild orchards of poisonous fruit harvested to ills that do not take to medication, the cramps being more persistent, the pain without respite and end unimaginable approaches at speed too high to manage as one.

The losses accumulate

A day so close looms with the risk of losing everything but life and a slither of hope that the rebuilding from scratch would be merciful, swift and tolerable.

Whether one likes it or not, the survival of something as life threatening as cancer when it was a battle that could be lost in a month to almost two years after suddenly seems as one of the little battles raging to claim ones sanity and many other things.

There are basically no solutions that appear to be in sight, sometimes you just want to pack a bag and walk away from life leaving behind memories of the many lives of cat lost with probably just one or two lives left.

The house that Jack lost

Looking around you remember the old nursery rhyme; “This is the house that Jack built” with everything you can see of what is in the house that Jack built and then because of so many things, situations, circumstances, hardships and probably a run of not so good fortune, you wonder if the next day will end with; “This is the house that Jack lost.”

For all the external calm, the turmoil is great and tumultuous; sometimes you happen to live and at other times life just happens to you.

My blogs are at http://akinblog.nl

It is a long farewell

It is farewell to http://akin.blog-city.com from today as I have now posted the last blog there and decided to concentrate my blogging efforts at http://akinblog.nl.

A year ago, I was informed that the blogging service at Blog-City will close on the 1^st of January 2012 and it lead to a scramble to move all my material, over 1,500 blogs written in just under 7 years to a new location.

I had opened a blog at Blogger for the purposes of posting comments in early 2007 but from the end of 2009 as if I was prescient, I began publishing my blogs simultaneously on http://akin.blog-city.com and what became http://akinblog.nl.

The house move

There was no easy way of migrating my blogs that I really had to do it over about 7 months brick by heavy brick until all was done.

With my paid subscription running out at http://akin.blog-city.com I have decided to allow the blog to run in Read-Only mode, which means no new posts will published there until the blogging service expires on the 1^st of January 2012.

The statistics front, I have to-date had 3,828,382 hits since 8 Dec 2003 with 1,730 blogs, it is now time to drive my readership to http://akinblog.nl

Thank you everyone for reading my blogs.

Last blog on http://akin.blog-city.com

Dear Friend, Reader, Visitor, Fan, Inquirer & Search Engine,

I will not more be updating this site after almost 8 years of posting here, I started blogging here on the 8^th of December 2003; all new blogs will now be hosted on Google Blogger at http://akinblog.nl however, this blog whilst in read-only mode will remain active until the blogging service of Blog-City closes on the 1^st of January 2012.

Over the last few months, I have successfully copied all my blogs to Blogger and simultaneously published in both places.

Please ensure that all references made to http://akin.blog-city.com are now changed to http://akinblog.nl, the theme of my blogs remains Akin About Things Too Concerning to Ignore.

Thank you for visiting and following my blog and writings, though I am saddened that Blog-City is closing at a time that I have consistently exceeded 100,000 page views a month, the crew at Blog-City have always be responsive, helpful, considerate and kind – I wish them the very best in their future endeavours.

You can however still support my blogging efforts by clicking on the Donate button at the top right of the blog.

For my latest blog posting, please go to http://akinblog.nl

The RSS feed for my news blog is http://www.akinblog.nl/feeds/posts/default

With the kindest regards,

Akin Akintayo

FW75X885FRJ6

Editorial: Crying for justice against child cruelty

Blood money networks

Our propensity for the macabre, the grotesque and unconscionably evil is about to be sated when one of the American networks finally wins the bid to interview Casey Anthony, the mother of a Caylee Anthony [1] who was acquitted just about a month ago of all charges of culpability including murder despite all circumstantial evidence pointing to her possible guilt.

In what the non-mean-spirited would call blood money [2] and even so on the blood of an innocent child, the going rate is topping $1.5 million with the networks pretending to vie for every seemingly unassociated right to the interview itself which they protest is not being paid for.

The fact is, there is an audience for this kind of theatre of the absurd and one can be sure that since she is protected by the double jeopardy rule, she can sail as close to the wind on this matter as she can dare and the viewers will be fed their just portion of gasping with horror along with the entertainment of reality television, untouched, unaffected and barely outraged.

Another case of childhood cruelty

As if that is not saddening enough, the truth is many children still suffer atrocious abuse and unspeakable cruelty amongst the people we naturally assume they are to find some care, comfort, security and love with.

We are told that the family unit or extended family construct presents the best atmosphere for childhood development; by extension some will even say it takes a village or a community to raise a child.

Some children however see every day through like a living hell on earth with no respite, all hands and minds mechanised in the systematic dehumanisation of child that it were better the child had never been born or for salvation the situation is so dire that death is the only escape.

So, became the case of 10-year old, Ame Deal [3] who was found dead locked up in a box much smaller than her size as punishment for having taking a popsicle without permission.

Your heart just bleeds

She lived with her grandmother, her aunt, her elder cousin and the male cousin by marriage; the latter two being the ones most culpable for locking the girl in a storage container.

Their act as we learn from the story was not isolated but the pattern of treatment that they would have found examples of in the supposedly matronly matriarchs of the household.

They had before imprisoned her in the container, exacted physical and several corporal punishments on the child probably for their pleasure, she was made to sleep in the shower after bed-wetting and was found dirty wearing soiled clothes.

They showed her not one bit of affection and if they were so revolted by her presence, nothing on this earth could have justified the kind of suffering she endured until she drew her last breath.

A cry for justice

For having taken a popsicle without permission, she had already been forced to perform exercises, such as jumping jacks, running in circles and back bends, for over an hour before being padlocked in a cage like an animal.

Where any living soul gets to assume this level of despicable treatment that excoriation cannot begin to contemn in the strongest terms is just out of this world.

Justice will not be well served until all those responsible for the death of this innocent child are made to face the full force of the law. Sadly, Casey Anthony appears to set the precedent for people who might get away with the murder of their wards.

Is there a jury in the land with a conscience, maybe one with feeling and hopefully one that might just seek justice for that tortured soul that was caged like a dog for the sake of a measly popsicle, she, Ame Deal, was above all the victim of this heinous crime against every sinew of humanity we have?

Sources

[1] Death of Caylee Anthony - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Casey Anthony's Parents -- $250,000 Doesn't Cut It!!! | TMZ.com

[3] Girl found suffocated was locked in box as punishment | Reuters