Chioma is having troubles with her mother-in-law. I know because she made it headline news on her social media page. She does not share her concerns with the other party in the nuptial contract or with a trained counsellor, but with aliens on social media who are sweating on the treadmill of their own problems and who have no understanding of the situational context.

Hear Chioma: ‘’It has been uncomfortable living with my mother-in-law. She insists I do my husband’s laundry which I never did even while we were dating and in our first few years of marriage. My husband’s laundry has always been done by dry-cleaners. Beyond this, I feel policed in my own house; like I am working on egg shells. I do not know how to talk to my husband about it. Please I will appreciate your advice on how to deal with this problem. I will be reading comments.’’

Social media could end marriage as we know it. It has become the stranger in the bed of matrimony. It is the third wheel on which some spouses unload their marital problems, but which most times complicates them. A husband goes on a philippic on social media on how women are unfaithful because he suspects his partner is cheating, and a wife flies ‘the men are scum’ trope because she suspects her spouse has a side chick – to the entertainment of strangers who do not give a hoot.

I recall the case of a certain man who went on a social media joyride, revealing lewd details of his wife. The marriage ended in divorce.

I think marital differences become irreconcilable when social media is invited to bed. The internet never forgets. Really, we live in a society where marriage counsellors are mostly pastors without training and who lack competence to advise anyone on marriage. Biblical prescriptions often counselled by pastors – of ‘’wife submit to your husband and husband love your wife’’ – are flawed and vacant of real-life solutions.

So, most people turn to social media to vent about their marital challenges and seek answers from strangers – without vicarious experience. But every marriage experience is unique. As faces are different, so are the problems. It is not one size-fits-all. The prescriptions for marriage A could be lethal for marriage B. I believe every marriage must work out its own salvation, and in the event peace becomes the Holy Grail in the union, there is the exit door which is as wide as the entry door. Marriage should not be a life sentence with hard labour. But fundamentally, salvaging it should be primary.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND MARRIAGE STATISTICS

Here is what Perspectives of Troy Counselling Centre, a counselling and mental health centre in the US, says on social media and marriage statistics.

‘’A recent study from Boston University revealed that non-social network users were 11.4% happier in their marriages than couples who frequently used social media. Heavy users were 32% more likely to contemplate leaving their spouse. The study also suggested a possible correlation between the number of Facebook users in a state and the divorce rates for the area. States with a higher increase of Facebook users showed similar increase in divorce rates.

Another study in Great Britain showed that close to 25% of married couples argued at least once a week because of social media use, and 17% fought daily over something they found about their spouse online. 20% of respondents reported that they fought with their spouses on Facebook, and nearly half said they secretly logged into their spouse’s accounts.’’

As a matter of fact, social media removes from a union exclusivity – a key ingredient for a congenial relationship — when spouses elect to communicate their problems to amused aliens online instead of thrashing out issues with their partners. I read on Twitter on Saturday of a certain lady who was regaling her followers with details of incidents in her marriage to which she admitted her husband was absolutely unaware of. Communication is the lifeblood of marriage. But when primary communication is relocated outside a relationship, the union becomes eviscerated of emotion.

Why should your spouse become aware of your challenge on social media – and it is not that you ever communicated it to him/her in any way before?

I spoke briefly to Marriage Matters International on social media use and marriage, and here is what the counselling centre says: ‘’I would advise couples not air their dirty linen in public, it is very unhealthy; it complicates the situation, rather they should share testimonies to encourage other couples. Couples should seek professional help if they are having challenges in their marriage.’’

Keep your marital business off social media. A wrecking marriage is salvageable with social media uninvited.

Fredrick Nwabufo is a writer and journalist Twitter @FredrickNwabufo

Two anecdotes have been used to justify the controversial pulpit tirades of senior pastor of Citadel Global Community Church in Lagos, Tunde Bakare, whose video went viral last week. One is that famous Obinde proverb, popularized by former governor of Lagos and Osun States, Olagunsoye Oyinlola. Second is one I stumbled into during the past week, a rationalization of ancient Yoruba treatment of their warriors and the morality of their warfare.

Bakare had shot artillery fires at opponents of All Progressives Congress (APC) leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The anecdotes, spun and spearheaded by some leading Yoruba, also crucified my own piece of last week entitled Tinubu, run! Please, run! and likened it to the anticlimax of the proverbial man who used the blade of his cap to decapitate an elephant.

“I have a word for some Yoruba people whose stock in trade is nothing but a rancorous noise characterized by bitterness and resentment about the ancestry of the former two-term governor of Lagos state, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Carry your stone… those Yoruba rancorous elements, noisemakers who have not achieved much as Asiwaju Tinubu has achieved, but are always querying and worrying themselves about his ancestry,” Bakare had said.

In 2014, at the grand finale of the second term campaign programme for Rauf Aregbesola, his predecessor as Osun governor, Oyinlola had regaled the campaign audience with the Obinde. I was there. While submitting that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the centre had been unfair to Yorubaland, Oyinlola likened the injustice and unfairness to the maltreatment of Obinde, an unfortunate widow. He called it iyanje Obinde (the cheating of Obinde).

Obinde was a quintessential Yoruba housewife in matters of fate and endurance. She saw in their very raw forms, ‘the fiery flames of fire and the searing glare of the sun.’ She suffered immensely in the home of her husband through multiple child-bearing and slaving to take care of her children.  When her husband took ill, she was again the one who ran helter-skelter to procure a cure for what ailed him. Then the man eventually died and that was when her suffering got elevated. The husband’s extended family needed funds to bury him. They went out to borrow money and what was the collateral?

The bereaved woman herself. Obinde was pawned in a system called Iwofa. The Iwofa institution in Africa, a system of pawnship which thrived from 17th to 18th century, was such a cruel arrangement which secured individuals as collaterals for debts incurred by others, most usually their relatives and acquaintances. Such pawned individual worked in the house or commercial venture of the moneylender, in exchange for the loaned money. Their release is only secured when the money is paid. It was this gruelling system that Obinde was made to face, after serial sufferings in the home of her husband. Those sneaking this story into the 2023 political narrative are saying, if a longsuffering someone is denied the presidential seat, it would mean he has laboured in vain for the Yoruba people.

The second anecdote used to justify Pastor Bakare’s tirade was a hypothetical conjecturing of the disposition and psychology of war in Yorubaland. When Yoruba go to war, do they moralize or put morality in abeyance? When they return from such wars, how do they treat their warriors? What then is the place of their highly burnished moral code if adversity and peace sway how they moralize? The anecdote claims that Yoruba don’t moralize the past of their warriors and it is in tandem with Bakare’s claims in Tinubu’s defence.
The man who told me the story, an older friend of mine, is an ally of a foremost Yoruba civil war hero and retired General whose name I do not have the permission to reproduce here. The General, he said, authored this psychology of war narrative. Let me begin from its summation, its kernel being that, Yoruba do not despise their heroes, no matter their pre-heroism baggage, even if such heroes hitherto waddled in the sewage with the swine. This particular hypothetical story situated a war situation and how Yoruba fought such in traditional Africa.

The atmospheric that birthed the story goes thus: The older friend of mine and the retired General, at the thick of the guerilla war by the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) against General Sani Abacha, lived in the United States of America. My friend had, one bright morning, walked up to the General and challenged him. “General, I have known you all these years for your uprightness, righteousness and as a strong stickler for excellence,” he began. Why then did the General become obsessed with Bola Ahmed Tinubu who, he alleged to the General, was perceived to be the converse of all that the war hero stood for?
Like an old man telling a moonlight tale of prowess and conquest to impressionable children, the General reportedly began the war hypothesis, the narrative of which I paraphrase in my own words here: “Let us imagine a situation of turmoil in traditional Yoruba society. Wailing and crying oozing from suckling mothers and children in their diapers; the town in turmoil, running from pillar to post. All townspeople then rush to the palace of their king, shouting that the town had been besieged by murderous enemies. The king frantically sends for the town’s warriors and their leading Generalissimo. He is however shocked when told that they had all bolted out of town. Nobody is prepared to face the rampaging and advancing enemies.

All of a sudden, a young rascal, despised by the generality of the people for his waywardness, comes forward and tells the king that he is capable of stopping the advancing army. Looked down upon and perceived with odium by the people of the town, the king reluctantly gives the rascal the go-ahead to rescue the people from the blood-sucking enemies. If, at the end of hostilities, that rascal wins the war and comes back home with the head of the enemies, in Yorubaland, such rascal is a hero and Yoruba would clothe him, in spite of his nakedness,” the General reportedly told his guest.
The third narrative I encountered in the last one week is that it would be amoral, wicked and incongruent for a dog to kill a snake that threatens to kill a people, only for that selfsame dog to be driven away from sharing in the meat on allegation that its saliva is irritating.

These three narratives were spun by people around me, in defence of Senator Tinubu to justify Pastor Bakare’s denunciation of his enemies who continue to harangue him because of, in Bakare’s words, “Tinubu’s ancestry and rough beginning.”
In that pulpit fury, Bakare escalated what had hitherto been hushed up in whispers in Nigeria about Tinubu. The preacher, while delivering the homily to his congregants, plunged headlong into the dirty, murky waters of politics. He likened Tinubu to the biblical Jephthah, so as to adumbrate the thesis that, the fact of his birth notwithstanding, Tinubu rose to power. Why Bakare alluded to Biblical Jephthah is unclear, or rather, intriguing, because the most renowned bit about this biblical character was that he was a judge and warrior who, on going to a war, pledged that if he won, whoever met him upon returning home would be sacrificed to God. His daughter ran out to meet him and Jephthah sacrificed her. So, is Tinubu really a Jephthah who had pledged or would pledge and sacrifice anyone around him to get whatever he wanted – like Oluronbi in folklore who pledged her only son to the gods of the village?
“Like Jephthah the Gileadite, he (Tinubu) has fought many battles on behalf of the Yoruba people and won despite his rough beginning and God does not need anybody’s permission to put such in his hall of fame despite their past deeds and ancestry…Despite his growing up challenges, the dents and the detours of his life, he like Jephthah delivered Lagos State and nearly all the southwest states from the onslaught of the PDP from 1999 to 2007,” Bakare said.
The most fitting comparison of Bakare’s Tinubu analogy is that anecdote from the Yoruba retired General about how Yoruba rate their Generalissimo, especially why, in spite of the cruel and condemnable offering of his daughter as sacrifice, Jephthah still remained a hero among the Gileadites for his valour and coming to the rescue of his people.
Bakare has come under huge flaks for the above statements. What was worrisome to people was that the voluble pastor had attacked Tinubu a short while ago. In a vitriolic sermon, he had charged at Tinubu thus: “That’s why potholes are killing you… you can’t drive now anymore because what is meant for road has been stolen since democracy began, they are living larger than life, having jets here, having jets there, having house in Bourdillon… You will not go without vomiting what you have stolen…” he had said, among other things.
Both the Yoruba war narrative and the travails of Obinde seek to state that, when Tinubu was in the struggle to rescue Yoruba people from the manacles of Abacha, where were the moralists who now see him as belonging to the sewage? When he sold his property abroad to finance NADECO, where were we? Those pushing this line have not told us if it is also right and acceptable for a warrior to come back from battle and then plunder his villagers’ straws to roof his private residence?
I disagree with both the Yoruba General and Pastor Bakare. First, in all Yoruba literature I have read and serial bonding with elders from whom I mopped up the mores, lore and culture of the Yoruba people, I am not sure I ever came out with any indication that Yoruba relegate morality to second fiddle in any consideration. Especially when it comes to their leadership. Yoruba are a very proud, self-respecting and moralistic people who value name and honour above valour. Yes, they keep rascally children for hot days of attack from outside infiltrators but they don’t present such children when it comes to the question of who leads them. In those moments, they filter for purity, they comb for quality and honour. They look for morals and use uncompromised scanners to pick leadership candidates. The facts of Tinubu’s intervention for the Yoruba people during the NADECO war against military despots are well noted and documented. He, alongside other greats’ exploits, can never be over-emphasized and will forever be in the annals of our history. The facts of his governorship of Lagos are also documented, especially how many leaders have been hatched from his incubator. But there is also the question, what manner of leaders are some of those birthed by his machine? He has his pluses, but his unexplained past and even the present are there too as listed by Bakare.
Our case is like that of an aeroplane passenger. He assumes he is not being flown by a pilot with a tainted flying history. It is one of the reasons why Tinubu should not be the candidate of the Yoruba.

▪︎Babagana Zulum, words are eggs

Borno State governor, Babagana Zulum has, in the last couple of years, risen to become a poster of what Nigerian governors must be and how elected government officials must always intervene on the side of the people. Rather than sit in the comfort of the Government House, shooting out orders, Zulum goes to the theatre of conflicts and becomes a participant in the resolution of crises in his state. He has thus received kudos across board for being a government official who knows his onions. However, like every man who has their price, Zulum’s Achilles’ heel seems to be flippancy. When he flips his words, Zulum overshoots.
A few weeks ago, the governor yielded to the mundane push of party-ism and got Nigerians shocked to their marrows. Zulum had told a disappointed world that the rate of insurgency during the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reign was far higher than now. He gave the shocking comparative analysis while playing host to some northern elders of the Arewa Consultative Forum in Maiduguri who, incidentally, had paid him a visit in respect of the over 40 rice farmers who were beheaded.
“From statewide statistics on affairs in the 27 local government areas since 2011, the fact is that despite the recent happenings in Borno State, the security situation in Borno State and indeed that of the Entire North East Sub-region is still far better under Buhari and this is based on records,” he said. Why the governor would yield to the incubus of political party divide, at a time when insecurity had become second nature of his state bothered the people.
The comparatives had yet to subside when Zulum again visited Jakana, a major town along Maiduguri-Damaturu highway, last Monday. He had visited the town as a result of the abduction of 30 travelers in the state. In Jakana, the governor was quoted to have said that he was disappointed that majority of attacks within the last two years were as a result of the military’s inability to properly secure the people. He went further to state that he had discovered that routine attacks on the people took place between Auno and Jakana which was a distance of about 20 kilometres and wondered why the army was unable to secure this short stretch of distance.
“And incidentally, the majority of Boko Haram’s attacks along this Maiduguri-Damaturu-Kano Road, keeps happening between Auno and Jakana. So, if the military cannot secure 20 kilometres, how can they keep us with the hope they will defeat the Boko Haram?” he had wondered.
There is no doubting Zulum’s proactive disposition to governance, as stated above. His unusual courage is manifested in the number of times he had escaped death while embarking on his peripatetic voyages in and out of Maiduguri. These voyages are embarked upon to safeguard the welfare and security of his people. However, Zulum failed woefully on the comments emanating from this visit to Jakana. This is as a result of his failure to acknowledge that those soldiers who secure Borno and the rest of the volatile parts of the Northeast, are made of flesh and blood, like every mortal. Someday, we will have the benefit of knowing the actual casualties of the Boko Haram war and we will all realize, to our utter shame, that these poor soldiers deserve every support, every encouragement we can muscle up in their favour. It is only families of the fallen soldiers who understand or feel the calamity that is currently afoot in that troubled war area.
With the above in mind, Zulum should not have made a sweeping condemnation of those fighting compatriots. I imagine how downcast, how miserable, with their humanity diminished and ego punctured, those soldiers were after the Chief Security Officer of Borno State defoliated them and rendering them naked, with the flipping of his lips. While the governor had every reason to feel for his people, especially against the backdrop of the recent incident of the 30 kidnapped passengers, he ought to have taken cognizance of the emotive implication of his words. He should rather have left such reviews to journalists and public analysts and let the military establishment handle the punitive aspect of whatever inadequacy he noticed. But he spoilt everything with his verbal attacks.
All of us owe our fighting forces, from commander to the rank-less rifleman, due duty of care. We must not do anything that will demotivate or discourage them. Some of them have been on that tour of duty for three, four years. Rain and sun, they are there, dodging bullets and bombs, shooting at the enemy and the enemy shooting back at them. While governors and the governed savoured the sumptuousness of Christmas on Friday, they were there in the trenches, warding off the evil of the enemy. Happy New Year will meet them again on January
1. We must not compound their woes with such bad words as uttered by Zulum. He can do better.
Leaders are often advised to be taciturn in their presentations because words are like eggs; the moment they are broken, they become an irretrievable mess for the speaker to grapple with. That is the lesson of Zulum’s unfeeling attack against patriots inside the trenches fighting to keep the enemies of Nigeria – Boko Haram – at bay. While Boko Haram insurgents fire salvoes against them to break their morale and splinter their resolve, their own governor also fires rockets of indiscretion at them, thus making of them victims of double assaults. It is a bad one that should not happen again.

Sadiq Daba, the actor, ran into some serious health issues recently. He cried out for financial help to undergo foreign treatment. Pronto, Nigerians reacted overwhelmingly. But wait. I did not hear anybody talk about Daba’s religion or ethnic group. The people who tweeted and retweeted his appeal for help, and those who contributed money, were certainly not from his village. I was so so so so so happy. It confirmed, yet again, my pet theory about Nigeria — that we do not hate each other. We are just victims of the unending political manipulation of ethnic and religious identities for selfish gain. Evidently, ordinary Nigerians have the “Nigerian spirit” in their DNA.

Indeed. I have met extremists and chauvinists from across religions and races. I am yet to hear anyone declare that we were not created by the same God. One of the most astonishing things about life, to me, is the fact that although we can choose to be Muslims or Christians, and so on, nobody can choose to be Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba or whatever. We just woke up one day to find ourselves as members of one ethnic group or the other. It was not our making. So why should you discriminate against me, and hate me, on the basis of an ethnic identity that is beyond my control? Is it my fault that I was born into a family that was clearly not my choice?

Today, I am going a little bit practical on how we can renew our minds. There is a saying that Rome was not built in a day, a proverb originated by the 19th century English playwright, John Heywood, who also gave us immortal expressions such as “out of sight out of mind”, “better late than never”, and “the more the merrier”. He said Rome wasn’t built in a day “but they were laying bricks every hour”. This, in some sense, tells us the value of consistent hard work, perseverance and conscious efforts at construction. If Nigeria is going to change, therefore, we must alienate those who see themselves, first and foremost, as ethno-religious champions. It all starts in the mind.

But, pardon me, Rome was not destroyed in a day either. It took ages to build the city but took a much shorter time to destroy it. Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD. In three days, they looted, burnt and wrecked the beautiful city. That hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire. Same thing applies here: the destruction of Nigeria by ethnic champions and religious bigots will not happen in one day — it is a gradual, steady process. That is why we the people must guard our hearts jealously before we are recruited into the hate brigade under different guises. Those already recruited can decide to desert straightaway. We need to build, not destroy.

My suggestions. To start with, do not participate in the sharing of messages and materials that are clearly intended to preach hate and prejudice. Saying “shared as received” is pure hypocrisy. You can be critical of leadership without attacking or disparaging their religions and ethnic origins. As a matter of principle, I do not share messages that are clearly meant to spread hate. It is a duty I owe my conscience. We all have terrible things to say about other people. If we do not allow love to guard our hearts, we will keep adding fuel to fire. Therefore, before you press the “send” or “forward” button, ask yourself: what is my motive? Unto thyself, be honest.

Also, do not feed your children with hate and prejudice. Fill their hearts with edifying things. A senior colleague of mine, a Muslim, married a Christian, who then converted to Islam. He told me he once engaged the services of a cleric to teach his children the Qur’an every Sunday. One day, he overheard the cleric telling the children not to drink from the same cup or eat from the same plate with their aunts, who were living with them, because they were “infidels”. My colleague fired the “afa” on the spot. He remains a devout Muslim, sure, but he saw danger and immediately quenched it. This kind of hate messaging certainly fuelled the mindset that birthed Boko Haram.

This is how hate works: it focuses on what divides us rather than what unites us. If there are Qur’anic verses that say Muslims should love and care for Christians, the hate merchants will focus on where Christians are called “infidels”. If there are verses in the Bible that say “love your neighbour as yourself”, the messengers of hate will focus on “what fellowship does light have with darkness?” There is nothing you want to justify with the scriptures that you won’t find. If you truly have love in your heart, you will focus on the verses of love. The God that forbade eating four-footed creatures is the same God that ordered Apostle Peter, in a trance, to kill and eat! To the pure all things are pure.

And this is how prejudice works: because Chief Obafami Awolowo did not declare Oduduwa Republic in solidarity with Biafra in 1967, every Yoruba is a traitor — including the one that was born early this morning. Because an Igbo chap was arrested for 419, every Igbo person — dead, living or unborn — is a fraudster. Because Barkin Zuwo struggled with speaking English, every northerner is an illiterate; in fact, no northerner has a brain. Because of the insane activities of ISIS and Boko Haram, every Muslim is a terrorist, including your friend. Tragically, there are people that the only thing they can see in you is your language or religion, not the content of your character.

Let me quickly say this before I shut down my laptop and take a stroll: it is very difficult to resist the message of hate and prejudice in a society already polluted by manipulative politicians, their overpaid sidekicks and our inept leaders. I know. When everybody is saying there is casting down, it is very difficult to go against the grain and say there is lifting up. You just go with the flow. But maybe the “casting down” gang is not as big as the “lifting up” brigade — just that the latter has been intimidated into silence. They must begin to speak out. Rome was not destroyed in a day. Those working to destroy Nigeria neither sleep nor slumber.

As for me and my house, we resolved long ago that we would never feed our children with hate, prejudices and biases. These things are usually passed on from generation to generation. I resolved to follow the example of my grandmother by celebrating the best in others rather than focusing on their worst. I would rather talk about the dignity in labour you find among the Hausa, the creativity among the Igbo and the industry among the Yoruba. Accuse me of living in denial and I will accuse you of living in bitterness. Accuse me of being politically correct and I will accuse you of being self-righteous. Accuse me of being naïve and I will accuse you of being jaundiced. It’s all in the mind.