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Women die in troubled marriages because we slay singles by Azu Ishiekwene

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A good number of those I have spoken with since the news of her tragic death broke on Friday night said Nigerian gospel artiste, Osinachi Nwachukwu, 42, should not have died. She was such a tremendous gift to millions of people and inspired even millions more through her songs, yet she had not even reached the peak of her potential.
During the COVID-19 lockdown when many struggled with anxiety, boredom and depression, a famous song in which she featured prominently, “Nara Ekele,” was repurposed by Tim Godfrey and Travis Greene and rendered in over 10 local and international languages, from English to Spanish and Mandarin, lifting millions from the edge.
That was not her only major effort; she also produced the hit solo, “Ekwueme.” In a world so used to greed, graft and getting, a song like “Nara Ekele” that celebrates gratitude, resonates in a special way.
“What a waste,” many have said. “How could such an extraordinary talent die in a needless, tragic way?”
That reaction to her death was after it emerged that Osinachi may not have died from throat cancer as was previously thought. She may have died, it is alleged, from circumstances linked to domestic violence. That information, still under investigation, but strongly suggested by friends and close members of her family, sparked outrage and raised the question: why?
Lawyer Deborah Enenche, a member of her church, Dunamis International Gospel Centre, and daughter of the pastor, said on her Facebook page: “The deceased was very isolated from her loved ones. Much of what happened could have been avoided if she hadn’t been marooned from the ones who cared for her most. I believe she not only passed due to the compendium of physical hurt and pain, she died of a broken heart.”
Did Deborah seriously think Osinachi enjoyed being marooned, dying alone day-by-day under the terror of a broken marriage? Or that Stockholm syndrome improved her creativity? That post obviously did not comment on suggestions that, at some point in Osinachi’s troubled marriage, she had confided in her pastor, Deborah’s father, that she had had enough, but was advised to endure.
The pastor has denied saying he only intervened to secure medical help when Osinachi complained of chest and respiratory problems, but her mother insists that unnamed pastors advised her daughter to return and rock her miserable marriage.
In hindsight, it’s easy to say Osinachi should have left. It is easy to blame her for indulging an abusive relationship and slam her for allegedly letting her husband run her life – and her career – as if she lived for him.
Why didn’t she see the writing on the wall much earlier? Why didn’t she speak up or ask for help? What good can come out of a relationship with a controlling spouse, more selfish than a raven, who is not only interested in hijacking your earnings, but also in telling you just how much of it you can spend and on what?
Surely, troubled marriages leave enough telltale signs, enough straw to clutch at just before things fall apart. Why didn’t Osinachi see the signs, seize the straw and escape? That appears to be what most people are now saying: she should have known better than to endure an abusive relationship to the point that it may have potentially led to her death. It was her fault.
The blame is coming thick and fast as truckloads of garbage pile up at the doorstep of the dead mother of four children. But there’s really no need to think long and hard, or to play the ostrich while the truth stares us in the face. How we treat single women, especially those forced to leave troubled marriages, is the reason many spouses, women in particular, will stay in troubled marriages until it kills them.
Single women generally, but particularly those who are divorced or separated, are often treated as plagues. They are ostracised and made the butt of vicious jokes. Sometimes, the attacks are subtle, such as when mothers point at divorcées in the neighbourhood as possibly the worst examples their female children could emulate. At other times, it is scathing and public, such as when the former First Lady of Anambra State, Ebele Obiano, called widow, Bianca Ojukwu, “a bitch,” and “Asewo!” (prostitute), an occupation which often requires talent and experience to spot.
Single women are stereotyped as loose, sex-hungry animals roaming the neighbourhood for men (read other people’s husbands) to devour and other people’s happy marriages to wreck. They are to be tolerated and humoured but essentially avoided at all costs. To put it straight, it’s not a secret that eternal shame is the price a woman must pay for leaving her marriage.
When quarrelling couples are told by parents who have had many years of successful marriage that it is the duty of husband and wife to make the marriage work, the wife is later summoned separately. She is then told, in no uncertain terms, by the same people who had just finished advising the couple, that it is in fact, the woman’s job to make the marriage work!
“What will people say?,” is the world’s largest prison of the unhappily married; the reason the parties won’t walk away even when they know it’s all well and truly over.
Osinachi, obviously a woman from that generation, tried to make her marriage work, and may have died trying. We kill single women with our mouths and then turn around to ask millions like Osinachi, traumatised in troubled marriages, why they didn’t jump off quick enough.
Osinachi patiently built her career and was happy to let her husband be her manager, her director, her accountant and her banker, just so people won’t talk. All she ever wanted, it seemed, was to have an inspiring career and a happy home. And she seems to have given everything to make it work; because as they say around here, if the marriage works, it is the woman that works it.
Men like to think that they’re victims as well, and maybe they are, to a far lesser degree. But until parents begin to raise their boy children differently and faith groups and cultural icons also make it clear that women don’t have to die to save a failing marriage, nothing is going to change.
The Global Gender Gap report 2020 said that 31 per cent of women had suffered from intimate partner physical and/or sexual assault; with Middle East/North Africa, South Asia, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa topping the abuse league in that order. In the US, a woman is being battered every nine seconds.
According to a UN report published last year, exposure to violence spiked significantly during the pandemic with countries like Kenya reporting up to 80 per cent, Jordan 49 percent, and Nigeria 48 per cent.
In case this sounds like mere statistics, what it means in Nigeria, for example, is that 48 million people, or a country with the population of Uganda, are in danger of physical violence and Osinachi was potentially the latest victim. A report by THISDAY newspapers in 2011, said out of 50 per cent of women being battered by their husbands, the majority were educated women. There could be more unreported cases.
I’m, of course, not suggesting that couples should break up at the least provocation or that troubled marriages are not worth saving. Among other things, financial pressures, poor modelling and poor impulse control, are probably some of the biggest challenges for many of today’s marriages.
These challenges require understanding and patience that have become scarce commodities in the modern world of instant gratification.
True, these problems, especially the financial one, are often easier to manage when the burden is shared. But it is not in every situation that two is better than one. Sometimes, it is better for one to walk alone to save two or more from greater misery. The dead or severely emotionally damaged are not only useless to the children (often cited as the reason to endure at all costs), they are also useless to themselves.
Gender-based groups have done considerable work in highlighting the dangers of domestic violence, creating support groups and encouraging victims to speak up. What Osinachi’s death reminds us of, however, is that we still have a very long way to go before we stop killing women in troubled marriages by insisting that it is better to die married than to live single.

Strictly Personal

Uganda’s expiration pandemic: Expired courses, drugs, brains…By Joachim Buwembo

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I swear, Ugandans on Twitter will not go to Heaven! And it is not just on account of the cruel comments they make when a prominent personality dies. It is about their views on everything and anything. They closed the month of May by dismissing everything as expired.

It started with an inadvertently ambiguous statement from the National Council of Higher Education, NCHE, which categorised many courses offered at both public and private universities as “expired”.

It transpires that courses are supposed to be assessed and periodically reassessed, but this has not been done for many courses by the relevant universities with approval of NCHE.

The clarification came quickly but not quickly enough. Whoever drafted that notice started regretting the minute it hit public media, as it became a feast of mincemeat on Twitter.

One of the earliest tweets was of resignation, saying that it was all obvious as expired courses had produced expired health workers who administered expired contraceptives to women, which led to the birth of expired babies, who are now offering expired services to the public.

You can say that this cruel diagnosis is itself logically expired. Unfortunately, there seems to be evidence around that expiry is the real malaise dogging our steps, whichever direction we want to take. With apparently expired experts directing the economy (locally pronounced enkonome), full national recovery from Covid-19 and Ukraine seems to be taking rather long.

The public debt has grown beyond 50 percent of GDP and the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) is not collecting enough. But how can it conceivably collect enough when the biggest taxable sources are themselves expired?

One of URA’s cash cows is importation of old cars that expired long ago in the countries of origin. The terribly fuel-inefficient contraptions thus guzzle sinful quantities of fuel — which is heavily taxed.

The fuel itself is expired, the type that was long abandoned by developed countries, with lots of sulphur, poisoning the poor Ugandan bodies, as it gets pumped into the air around us.

The other tax cash cow is beer, which is an expiry accelerator that makes humans age faster and the drinker’s brain to expire rapidly.

But a tax source even bigger than petrol, old cars or beer is expired mobile phone services. Although these services are the in-thing in a poor country, they are still rudimentary, as the digital capabilities are underutilised.

Things like 5G are more talk than reality and buying the best phone on the world market will not give you the experience it should when you use it here. But we cannot say much because many expired journalists are scared of criticising mobile service providers because they are big advertisers who, if annoyed, can hurt the journalists’ employers, it is often said.

With such expired sources of tax revenue, the country has little option but to rely on expired loan arrangements to finance its budget. The loans are designed in expired format by expired minds of the lenders. The lenders operate with the expired philosophy that the borrower is not supposed to think smartly, hence the skewed terms that are the cry of poor nations all over the globe.

They had started running away from major Western lenders, citing being given embarrassing “conditionalities” for the loans. They ran to new lenders whose mentality turned out to be even more expired, leaning more towards the Shakespearean Shylock from Merchant of Venice, whose method of loan recovery was to slice a pound (half kilo) of flesh off the borrower’s chest.

Now the borrowers are running back to the older expired lenders, as the expired debt pendulum swings back and forth ceaselessly. The borrowers themselves are exhausted with expiration and are even rumoured to be going to commercial money lenders next.

But, not to worry much, the NHE has clarified by rendering the expiry term itself expired. NHE now calls the courses “un-reassessed.”

So, expiry itself has expired.

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Strictly Personal

Telecommunications’ greenfield ventures conundrum, By Dilip Pal

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For most businesses, expansion, especially to a new geographical area is both an exciting but also expensive and nerve-wracking process.

As the global economy is shifting and changing, due to globalization, this is becoming a necessary move for most businesses. And it is no different in the dynamic and agile telecommunications sector which involves building operations from the ground up.

Establishing new networks or infrastructure from scratch in untapped markets requires significant upfront investments, extensive network rollout, regulatory compliance, and patience before profitability can be achieved. In economic terms, this foreign direct investment is known as greenfield operations.

From experience, though, I have learnt that most of the stakeholders lack patience, tolerance and understanding when it comes to these greenfield operations and their associated start-up costs.

Mobile Network operators must deal with the complex and resource-intensive infrastructure development. Building a robust network infrastructure requires substantial capital expenditure, meticulous planning, regulatory approvals, and optimal coverage. These factors contribute to a longer waiting period before positive cash flows materialize.

The most recent investment by Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia in Ethiopia is a recent showcase of greenfield operations. Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia has close to 3 million customers and built a distributor network of over 114 outlets, delivered an award-winning premium quality network in 22 cities and regions; with close to 1300 network sites and over 900 staff, 81% of whom are Ethiopians. All these are capital and resource-intensive greenfield operations.

The telecom sector operates in a highly regulated environment, requiring licenses and permits to operate in different regions. Navigating through some of these bureaucratic processes and securing necessary approvals adds delays and costs to the overall timeline of profitability. Fierce competition in the industry further complicates the landscape.

The nature of telecom services presents additional challenges. Operators face limitations in network capacity, spectrum availability, and geographical coverage. Expanding infrastructure to reach remote areas or densely populated regions requires time and substantial investments that may not yield immediate returns.

Investors and analysts must thus recognize that the telecom sector’s path to profitability is not linear. Expecting instant gratification and immediate profits can hinder the long-term growth and potential of greenfield operations. By focusing solely on short-term financial indicators, investors may overlook the underlying value and potential of telecom companies investing in expanding their networks and reaching untapped markets.

Telecom operators need time to build a solid foundation, establish a customer base, and optimize their operations before achieving sustainable profitability. Investors and analysts must have a long-term perspective and appreciate the intrinsic value of greenfield operations in the telecom sector.

The lack of new entrants in the industry and greenfield ventures limits understanding of evaluating the telecom sector’s prospects. Investors and analysts often rely on precedents and established metrics from mature companies, which may not capture the long-term potential of greenfield operations.

Way forward

When assessing greenfield operations in the telecom sector, it’s crucial to consider the balance between short-term and long-term prospects. Initial losses and the time required to reach profitability may impact stock prices in the short term. However, taking a longer-term perspective reveals the immense potential for growth and returns in untapped markets. Recognizing the strategic value of expanding into new regions, capturing market share, and establishing a solid customer base is essential.

Investors can make informed decisions that prioritize long-term gains over immediate financial indicators. It’s vital to look beyond present fluctuations and focus on the promising horizon that greenfield operations in the telecom sector offer.

Secondly, greenfield operations in the telecom sector demand innovation and adaptability. They involve introducing cutting-edge technologies and customized solutions tailored to target markets. Telecom operators must stay at the forefront of technological advancements, embracing trends such as 5G, IoT, and artificial intelligence. By fostering innovation and investing in research and development, greenfield ventures can position themselves as leaders in the telecom landscape, driving progress and shaping the future of connectivity in digital services, education, healthcare, and e-commerce.

Investing in these ventures contributes to bridging the digital divide and fostering inclusive development, aligning investments with positive societal impact.

In conclusion, to foster an environment that supports greenfield operations in the telecom sector, a shift in investor mindset is necessary. Recognizing the potential for long-term growth and profitability requires patience and a visionary approach. Emphasizing the transformative power of connectivity and its positive impact on societies and economies is essential. Greenfield investments are important, not as an end but as a means to create jobs, support the growth of the digital economy, bridge the digital divide, empower communities and contribute to a more connected and inclusive world.

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