Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Indispensability of Social Media to Following Elections in Nigeria and Beyond in All Real Time Public Events

There are various things you can do.

You can help those in need in various ways.

Writing itself is significant because it plants seeds in people's minds.

You can provide on the ground assistance, by coming and going,  or help within a digital context, such as the information sharing and advisory assistance of Pius Adesanmi's Facebook Doctoral Lounge and Toyin Falola's continuous stream of collaborative book projects, among other possibilities. Moyo Okediji's Facebook University of African Art is also priceless in developing cutting edge text in a collaborative, open access context. 

You dont have to live  in Nigeria to contribute, even decisively.

toyin

On Mon, 25 Feb 2019 at 10:54, Samuel Zalanga <szalanga@gmail.com> wrote:

Lamentation! For how long? We cannot continue deceiving ourselves. Can we continue to blame outsiders for this? It pains to see those situations on social media even though sometimes the social media can be misleading. I just felt depressed in the past two days as though someone very close that I know died? Why? 

Because at my age now, I have been deceived so many times. Frankly when I see well-dressed Nigerian politicians, my heartbeat goes faster because since I was  young, I have seen those same type of people claiming to be leaders committed to improving the lives of ordinary people, a group I identify with without apology. This inspired me to study development studies and social change, which exposed me more to the variety of struggles in different human societies aimed at elevating their lives.  But it appears those elites have not internalized social constraints mechanisms. One out of the many important requirements for all well-functioning societies is devising effective means and mechanisms for regulating people's aspirations, since there is a tendency for humans to have insatiable desires, or to allow their aspirations go wild while the means for achieving them is not there. The gap between the two leads to anomie among other things. 

Given the way things are, I will probably finish my time on earth without seeing Nigeria reach what I was hoping for when I was younger. While I have a better opportunity to thrive and flourish in the United States, part of me feels that from the point of view of economics of education,  the people's money in Nigeria was used to educate me with the hope that when I graduate I will contribute to national development. In the first place, this was the justification and reason why such money was denied to rural women and peasants (among other social groups), who surely needed it for the provision of healthy drinking water, medical facilities for the sick, especially pregnant women, and for the poor to improve their productivity and livelihood. A huge amount of that money was invested in me and others, and the question is what have I done to those masses who it seems have been swindled? 

But even back in Nigeria, many scholars have either been reduced or they have reduced themselves to the role of a resource person rather than social agents for bringing about civil repair and social transformation so that as John Rawls said, it must benefit first and foremost "the least advantaged people" in society. And the greatest frustration is that when one understands what is happening at the bottom of the pyramid of the Nigerian society, it is hard to persuade oneself that one can change the situation from here by metaphorically "firing missiles" from far away.

Samuel

Samuel Zalanga, Ph.D.

Bethel University

Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,

Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.

Office Phone: 651-638-6023

On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 4:24 AM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Instagram, Facebook and possibly Twitter and others are crucial for following developments in the ongoing Nigerian elections

Violence, destruction of voting materials,  murder of a youth corper and a young voter, stoning to death and burning  of an alleged political party thug disrupting voting, voters in line, a politician moving around with bullion vans, dancing to celebrate defiance of mediocrity and agents of death, disruptions of voters by thugs spraying machine gun fire...all these and more await you on these platforms which are indispensable to a bird's eye view of what should be a normal, peaceful  process but which has made parts of Nigeria a theatre of war 

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