KWARARAFA UNIVERSITY WUKARI ACADEMIC STAFF SUSPENDS STRIKE

KWARARAFA UNIVERSITY WUKARI ACADEMIC STAFF SUSPENDS STRIKE

PETER AUDU KUW/U14/MCM/2024

The Academic Staff Forum of Kwararafa University, Wukari had on the 7^th July 2015 embarked on strike for non-payment over eight months salaries, the documented bill of staff salaries and pension details.

The Staff assumed work last week by suspending the strike after reaching agreement with the University management that some arrears would be settled before commencement of second semester examination on 27 July 2015.

The Vice chancellor, Kwararafa University Wukari Prof. Yakubu Ochefu who addressed the forum during meeting with the academic said the inability of the University to pay salaries for several months was because of dwindling resources in the institution.

Prof. Ochefu added that his administration is committed to improving revenue generation by collaborating with some organizations that are willing to come to their aid. According to him, the effort has been yielding positively.

Similarly, payment of fees by students has improved” he stated. After meeting with the executive members of the forum on 13 July 2015 following its meeting with the management, Mr. Thomas Uzah announced suspension of the strike.

 He however expressed the forum’s confidence in the management that it will live up to its promise. While urging his colleagues to continue to be hard working with show of loyalty to the University administration, Mr. Uzah thanked them for their understanding in fighting for their common course.

It could be recalled that, the forum earlier went on warning strike of four days to demand for payment of salary arrears and details of pension deposit but without positive response from the management before embarking on the indefinite strike.

WIDOWHOOD AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN AFRICAN

WIDOWHOOD AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN AFRICAN

By

ELAIKPI A. ABADA

KUW/U14/MCM/2015

Department of Mass Communication

Peace presupposes harmonious existence between the sexes. This is negated in the experiences of women especially widows in the African milieu due to the over-bearing influence of patriarchy, jealousy, greed, hatred and other forms of marginalization meted out on widows. Widowhood has thus generated conflicts in most African families and societies. This is largely due to the erroneous traditional African belief that no one dies a natural death. If a man pre-deceases his spouse, it is the woman that is held responsible, irrespective of the number of children he leaves behind for her to raise. It is against this back-drop that Florence Orabueze argues that “widowhood is a word that every woman dreads to mention. In Africa, it usually brings to a peak all the humiliation, subordination, degradation and oppression which an African woman goes through in her lifetime. From the time of her husband’s death to the time of her own death, his family and the society blame her for the passing away of the much-needed male. She is indirectly asked why she should survive the man” (115). Corroborating Orabueze, Rose Acholonu submits that widows in addition are “subjected to a whole gamut of obnoxious widowhood rites aimed at making her die within the mourning period of about one year. Most brothers-in-law are ever ready to disinherit her and in many cases, may drive her out of her marital home” (97).

Some widows who refuse to go through widowhood rites are severely punished. Helen Labeodan writes about one of these examples. The widow in question is kidnapped, locked up, badly fed and during her incarceration, she is raped by her brother-in-law. She is later thrown into the river as prescribed by the goddess to prove her innocence in her spouse’s death, luckily, she survives these ordeals and is exonerated. Others have been made to drink the bath water used for bathing their spouse’s corpse, while some have been made to swear to their innocence in ancestral shrines. Yet other widows have been made to spend the night/nights with the corpse of their late husband, sitting on bare floor in a corner of the room with shaved hair. The only clothing they are allowed to wear are rags. This self-effacing postures completely dehumanizes women and calls to question the attitude of society towards women who are generally viewed as the “weaker” sex.

Widows in Africa have told bizarre stories of their experiences in the hands of their in-laws, friends and society at large. These stories often border on victimization and betrayal. The experiences are traumatic and damaging to the feminine psyche. They are also gross examples of violation of women’s fundamental human rights and indictment on the society which view women as “other”. The African tabloids are awash with instances of violence and marginalization against women and widows in particular. A case in point is that of Virginia Akobundu recorded in Sunday Punch of March 14, 2010 in Nigeria, who suffers physical and psychological victimization from her brother-in-law, due to her refusal to relocate to her home village after her husband’s demise. Earlier she had been forced to live with her four children in their one-room tenement where her husband was buried in the name of tradition and because the latter did not own a house. This oddity raises concern especially in patriarchal Africa where several women-young, middle age and old are fast becoming widows. Dayo Olukemi-Kusa is of the contention that “both sexes need to cooperate in peace and conflict resolution. This is because without peace, the attainment of sustainable human development would come to naught” (206).

CHILDREN AS TRUE VICTIMS OF DIVORCE

CHILDREN AS TRUE VICTIMS OF DIVORCE

BY

ELAIKPI A. ABADA

KUW/U14/MCM/2015

Divorce is the termination of a marital union, the dissolution of marriage or in some instances the reorganization of the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage between a married couple under a particular culture, religion or laws of a particular country.

Divorce law varies considerably around the world, but in most countries it requires the sanction of a court or other authority in a legal process. The legal process of divorce involve issues from spousal support, child custody, child visitation/ access parenting time, child support, distribution of property, and division of debt.

Divorce can be a stressful experience affecting finances, living arrangement, household jobs, schedules, parenting and the outcomes of children of the marriage as they face each stage of development from childhood to adulthood. Where children are involved they naturally become the victims.

The true victims of divorce are indeed the children who suffer extremely in so many ways and forms. Psychologically, children and adult offspring of divorced parents, display greater unhappiness, less satisfaction with life, weaker sense of personal control, anxiety depression and greater use of mental health services. There are suggestions of evidences in researches around the world that shows that divorce has a causal effect that breeds these outcomes.

Children of divorced parents are also more likely to experience conflict in their own marriage and are more likely to experience divorce themselves. They are also more likely to be involved in short term cohabiting relationships, which often dissolve before marriage.

According to Nicholas wall, former president of the Family Division of the English High Court, “people think that post-separation parenting is easy in fact, it is exceedingly difficult and as a rule of thumb my experience is that the more intelligent the parent, the more intractable the dispute. There is nothing worse, for most children, than for their parent to denigrate each other. Parents simply do not realize the damage they do to their children by the battles they wage over them. Separating parent rarely behave reasonably, although they always believe that they are doing so and other party is behaving unreasonably.

Poorly managed conflict between parent increases children risk of behavior problems, depression, drugs abuse, poor social skills, and poor academic performance leading low self-esteem. Fortunately, there are approaches by which divorce professional can help parent reduce conflict. Option includes mediation, collaborative divorce, and parenting management.

Children who have experienced a divorce are more likely to have lower academic achievement than children from non-divorced families. In a review of family and school factors related to adolescents’ academic performance, it noted that a child from a divorced family is two times more to drop out of school than a child from a non-divorced family. These children from divorced families may also be less likely to attend college, resulting in the discontinuation of their academic career.

In view of this issues and many more that are not mentioned here, there is need to put the victims first, we need to understand more about victims of divorce, and the impact it has on their lives. Some of this is obvious but there are other perhaps more surprising results. We know that there are some people that are more likely to be victims: people living in villages, less affluent urban areas particularly.

The child is the future of tomorrow and we all are responsible directly and indirectly in shaping the views, hope and aspirations of our children. Marriage has to do with more than love for the couples but love for the children and humanity as a whole. Couples should know and always remember that; divorce is indeed an option but with grave consequences that should be handle with utmost caution especially when children are involved.

THE PLACE OF TRADIONAL MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN A MODERNIZING AFRICA.

THE PLACE OF TRADIONAL MODES OF COMMUNICATION IN A MODERNIZING AFRICA.

Communication, or the act of eliciting a response from one individual by another, is on great continuous activity among humanity today. It is process involving the transmission and reception of information, ideas and attitudes from one individual to another. What are actually transmitted are symbols representing these ideas, information and attitudes.

Every society has its own media of communication designed and operated te who make up that society. It is the people who determine the way such media should operate. The media, too, to a large extent, determine the way society is administered through their determination (or facilitation) of the operations of the other social institutions in the society. The place of the media, therefore, is paramount in the scheme of things in the socirty as whole.

In this connection, Africans, as a people, have their own media systems or modes of communcation which are traditional and have developed from their own experiences. These media systems continue to be in operation today and it will be naïve or irrational for anybody to wish that they be museumized as fossilized details of our acient past. The word tradtional relates to their being culture – based, as a result of their origin and situation. Thw word is not a consequence of their age or design.

The objective of this chapter is not so much the history of thses traditional modes of communication as the justification of their existence and actual relevance in the social milieu of presnet dday Africa. There is a present craze for modernization which, to many, invariable cannotes Westernization. This is characterized by technological advancement in virtually all spheres of life, including communication. But the pace of development in this sphere (communication) is much too slow to realize the goals of modenization which include socio-political development and integration into the mainstream of world affairs. The major focus, then, is the exposition of the obvious mendacity in the axiomatic d feeling  that Africa traditional modes of communication are old and should be regarded as mere evidence of the way our ancestors lived. The ultimate aim, therefore, is the exposition of the priomodial functions of these traditional modes as tools of development which ensure social balance in the society’s quest for intergration into the world socio-political system.

Africsn trational modes of communication were designed according to the dictates of tribal life. The way of life of the people determined the establishment of these modes of communication. The structure, form and content of the media were invariably determined by the various occupations of the people who made up the various communities (and, by extension, societies) at the time these communication modes were established. The people were homogenous in virtually everything, from occupation to soci0-political life. As a result, each mode of communication was not sharply separated. These processes conformed to the traditional media system, the face-to-face kind of relating to each other. This was, and still, is the pattern of life in traditional African codmology. These modes are still very relevant and they serve the communication needs of most African people.

It is necessary to stress here, that those who still rely on these tradtional modes for their information needs are the rural dweller who still experiences difficulty in their attempt to satisfy their information needs via the modern mass media. Thus, this traditional media system continues to sustain their information needs, as they trust and believe what they get from it, only supplementing it with whatever information they can get from other sources regarding events in other areas quite remote from their immediate environment. These rural dwellers make up over eighty per cent of the whole population Africa.

Traditional modes of communication were developed in Africa before the alphabet age of man. At that time the alphabet had not been developed and man was a creature in an acoustic space who knew and believed only what he could see, hear, touch, smell or taste, depending on the circumstances of the moment. Anything outside his environment was as good as non-existent. The world then, to man, was small and comunal, a world that was administered by the group or tribe. The tribe or group’s concern of the moment was usually predicated on natural changes and their consequences on man himself. There was no writing of any kind at the time, with man interacting with what was in his immediate vicinity. It was as if no one else existed and everything, every consideration, was centred around the tribe or group. It was a complex world governed through communal participation.

Everybody was closely knit. Everybody was involved in the affairs and decisions bothering on the concern of the society. The society was greater than the individual. Each man formed the daily reality of the others as everything was communally acquired, from very personal effects to the community’s property.

As result of this close relationship, nobody was separated from the tribe. It was a closely concatenated world in which whatever happened to any individual become public knowledge and, invariably, the concern of everyone else in a very short time.

The very nature of the environment, therefore, and the way the people related to themselves did not provide for the need to send information to far places. The longest distance information was required to travel was probably not more than a few kilometers.

The prevalent social and environmental factors, thus, compelled the African to evolve a way of communicating that best suited the circumstances in which he found himself. In response to the demands of these prevailing factors, these invented traditional modes of communiation, thus depended on the biological senses of man. The major demand of communication in the prevailing circumstance was for the sources to transmit his message or information in such a way that the receiver would see or hear it. In this way, the information needs of the African were fully served.

The rural communities of Africa today continues to operate their social system in this manner and the effective dissemination of information in these areas must obviously take cognizance of these factors, in which case the traditional modes of communication problems in progrmmes aimed at rural development stem from the failure to note the place of these traditional communication modes in the life of the rural people.

The place of traditional modes of communication in African cosmology can best be determined through the examination of the socio-cultural rerrain of present day Africa, vis-à-vis the world of communication. Perhaps it is necessary to state, at this point, that the purpose all mass communication activity in the rural areas is the response  of t people changes which threaten the established norms and values these societies.

But the ultimate aim of communication for development is the facilitation of the exchange of information for increase pruductivity and development (Goldhaber, 1983: p 426). This involves the facilitation of the exchange of information that engenders the cultivation of new attitudes, norms and values.

GARBA UAMAN

  KUW/U14/MCM/2016

The History of the Early Newspaper Press in Nigeria

The History of the Early Newspaper Press in Nigeria

I intend to trace the origin of the newspaper press in Nigeria, to survey the role which the newspaper played in policy formulation and implementation, to examine some of the influences that gave impetus to the development of newspapers, and how the ideas and attitudes of the newspaper developed in response to changing circumstances and changes in personnel, among other factors. It is our hope that the issues involved would provide useful parameters for the assessment of contemporary newspaper press in the country.

Between 1880 and 1935, a total of fifty-one newspaper were established. These were made up of eleven dailies, thirty-three weekly, three fortnightlies and four monthlies, most of which were located in Lagos. Newspaper did not begin to appear outside Lagos until the early 1920. For example, between 1921 and 1932, with the growth of urban centres, provincial newspapers were established at Onitsha, Aba, Enugu, Calabar, Port-Harcourt, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode and Osogbo.

Coleman (1960:72) attributed this accelerated growth of urban centre outside the Island to internal peace and  security, the growth of commerce, the spread of education, as well as the nation’s transformation from a restricted to a modern economy.

Apart from contributing to inculcating good reading habit in the readers and providing general enlightenment, the provincial newspapers, because of distribution, hardly contributed to the advancement of political ideas or to the resolution of political controversies.

Another important issue in our discussion of the history of the press in Nigeria is the motive of the publisher. Because of their limited resources and their relative accomplishment in spite of these limitations, one can conclude that they were inspired by considerations other than profit-making. Their dedication to the enlightenment and education of their people helped tremendously to create a great tradition of selfless services, sacrifice and philanthropy. The conclusions of the Royal Commission on the British Press to the effect that “the ambitions that inspire those who own newspapers are commonly varied purpose, are seldom single and motives seldom unmixed” provide a backdrop against which to assess the motive for the establishment of early newspapers.

The history of Nigeria’s indigenous press is traced to Robert Campbell who, in 1863, founded the Anglo-African. Though  it was abandoned two years later, it provide the much needed sourced of inspiration foe efforts in newspapering. Campbell’s objection was to explore the growing interest in Western education in Lagos in the 186s by making available to his readers materials which have potentials to educate, inform and entertain them.

          As a weekly, the Anglo-African appears as an assortment of scrapes culled from a variety of sources; books, novels magazines, and overseas newspaper (Omu, 1996:206-212), and sold for three pence. Its literary matter interested only a few subscriber, and since sales hardly exceeded about 30-50 copies a week, the paper eventually died in 1865. Despite is early demise, the establishment of the Anglo-African was no doubt a noteworthy development in the history of Nigeria.

          The real founding of the press occurred fifteen years later when socio-political and economic developments collaborated with local and external sources of inspiration to create conditions favourable to the emergence of popular newspapers.

The first newspaper to be established was Richard Beale Blaize’s Lagos Times and Gold Advertiser on 10 November, 1880. It appeared twice a month and sold for sixpence. Though forced to suspend publication because of financial problems in  November,1883, the newspaper’s initial success stimulated the rise of rival newspaper.

          One of such rival papers was the fortnightly Lagos Observer, established by J. Blackall Benjamin on 4 February, 1882 with the support of his doctor and literary expert friend, DR. N.T. King. When both King and Campbell died in 1884, Benjamin carried on single-handedly until July 1890 when the Lagos Observer eventually died. Going by its short life span, the Observer was adjudged the most successful newspaper in the 19^th century, and one which made appreciable contributions to the politics of the time. It emerged as one of the symbols of the intellectual aggression which characterised political development in the 19^th century.

          With the death of the observer, stage was set for the birth of other newspapers.

The Eagle and Lagos Critic, a monthly newspaper which sold for seven pennies, was inaugurated on 31^st March, 1883 under the editorship of Owen Emerik Macaulay, a grandson of Bishop Crowther and brother of Herbert Macaulay. Even though Owen Macaulay intended his paper to be marked by “the fearlessly and acute observation characteristic of an eagle”, it lacked the attributes of an eagle and the resources of a critic. It was perceived as pro-government in its approach even though Owen Macaulay intended it “to balance opinions when they are in opposition.” The Eagle was partially sustained by government advertisements until 31^st October, 1888 when it eventually disappeared.

With its disappearance, a weekly newspaper of two columns called Mirror was introduced by P. Adolphus Marke. Despite Marke’s remark that “small axes cut big trees”, he had modest aims for his newspaper which died with the issue of 24th November, 1888.

The campaign for cultural national typified by the call for newspapers in Nigeria languages would be heeded five years later with the birth of Iwe Irohin Eko and the Lagos Weekly Times between 1888 and 1890. The Eko was a Yoruba language fortnightly founded on 3^rd November, 1888 by the printer, Andrew Thomas, to exploit the growing interest in Yoruba language and literature. It was characterised by feature on Yoruba traditions and folklore. It finally expired in 1892.

The Lagos Weekly Times, which was established on 3^rd May 1890, was a new version of the defunct Lagos Times revived by John Payne Jackson, a Liberian – born business man. This was made possible by a special arrangement between John Jackson and Balizet. The agreement between the two allowed Jackson to revive the Lagos Times under the new name, enjoy autonomy in the management of the sales of the newspaper, advertisement and job – printing business and provide a statement of account at the end of three month to enable them determine Blaize’s share of the revenue which was fixed provisionally at five pounds (5) a month.   

    GARBA UAMAN

  KUW/U14/MCM/2016