Fears, Deaths, Mourning, and Burials in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria

Os trabalhos existentes sobre mortes na Nigéria foram feitos sem muito foco crítico em como o público respondeu à política de emergência ou às intervenções do governo em tempos de pandemia. Fundamentalmente, esta é a lacuna que este trabalho de pesquisa se propõe a preencher. Este artigo enfoca os eventos de dor, luto e luto após mortes relacionadas à COVID-19. Assim, este artigo analisa mais as interseções entre a COVID-19 e o discurso da morte, expondo e interrogando as variâncias, ambiguidades, ambivalências, corolários e paradoxos em meio a conversas complicadas de saúde pública. A pesquisa empregou fontes primárias e secundárias. As fontes primárias incluem crenças africanas, relatos de jornais sobre pandemias passadas e atuais; e narrativas de rádio, televisão e mídias sociais. As fontes secundárias incluem revisões da literatura existente sobre mortes e pandemias. A análise histórica é essencialmente utilizada neste artigo. Este artigo identifica duas categorias de "cadáveres" criados durante esta pandemia de COVID-19. A primeira categoria são os «Cadáveres Pandémicos» (APO) e a segunda categoria é «Cadáveres Não Pandémicos» (nPDB). Variados concomitantes que caracterizam "cadáveres pandêmicos", incluindo estigmatização, apatia, alterização, ambiguidades, genderização, demografia, politização, contestações e armamento são interrogados a partir de perspectivas sócio-históricas. Aumentar o estresse das famílias enlutadas são questões em torno de mortes, já que os enterros são adiados ou realizados dentro das restrições dos protocolos COVID-19 do Centro Nacional de Controle de Doenças (NCDC), muitas vezes com a presença de um número limitado de familiares do falecido. Assim, as dores e tristezas não são apenas sobre a perda dos entes queridos, mas a incapacidade de dar-lhes um enterro condizente, uma vez que os nigerianos adoram celebrar a liminaridade de seus entes queridos para a eternidade. Da mesma forma, o luto antecipatório tornou-se mais agregado e agravado no país no contexto da maneira de anunciar a morte de poucos políticos populares que morreram em decorrência da COVID-19. Fundamentalmente, esses ônus problemáticos, nuances e intrigas sobre mortes em tempos de pandemia de COVID-19 são historicizados. Este artigo conclui que as dores, o luto, a tristeza, a morte e o sepultamento são historicamente constituídos e configurados em relação às interações sociais, econômicas, políticas, culturais e ambientais.Extant studies on deaths in Nigeria have been conducted without much critical focus on how the public responded to emergency politics or the government’s interventions during pandemics. Fundamentally, this is the gap this research aims to fill. This study focuses on pain events, grieves, and mourning following COVID-19-related deaths. Thus, this study analyzes the intersections between COVID-19 and death discourse by exposing and interrogating the variances, ambiguities, ambivalences, corollaries, and paradoxes amid convoluted public health conversations. This research employed both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include African beliefs, newspapers reports of past and current pandemics, and radio, television, and social media narratives. Secondary sources include reviews of existing literature on deaths and pandemics. Historical analysis is used in this study, identifying two categories of dead bodies created during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first category is Pandemic Dead Bodies (PDBs) and the second category is Non-Pandemic Dead Bodies (NPDBs). Many concomitants characterizing Pandemic Dead Bodies including stigmatization, apathy, otherization, ambiguities, genderization, demographication, politicization, contestations, and weaponization are interrogated from socio-historical perspectives. Heightening the stress of grieving families are issues around deaths, as burials are postponed or held within the restrictions of National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) COVID-19 protocols, often with the presence of limited family members of the deceased. Thus, the pains and grieves are not just about the loss of loved ones, but the inability to give them a befitting burial, since Nigerians love to celebrate the liminality of their loved ones into eternity. Likewise, anticipatory grief became more accentuated and aggravated in Nigeria regarding the manner of announcing the demise of some popular politicians who died of COVID-19. Fundamentally, these problematic encumbrances, nuances, and intrigues concerning deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic are historicized. This study concludes that pains, grief, sorrow, death, and burial are historically constituted and configured regarding social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental interactions

The cost of cooking a meal. The case of Nyeri County, Kenya

Energy for cooking is considered essential in achieving modern energy access. Despite this, almost three billion people worldwide still use solid fuels to meet their cooking needs. To better support practitioners and policy-makers, this paper presents a new model for comparing cooking solutions and its key output metric: the 'levelized cost of cooking a meal' (LCCM). The model is applied to compare several cooking solutions in the case study area of Nyeri County in Kenya. The cooking access targets are connected to the International Workshop Agreement and Global Tracking Framework's tiers of cooking energy access. Results show how an increased energy access with improved firewood and charcoal cookstoves could reduce both household's LCCMs and the total costs compared to traditional firewood cooking over the modelling period. On the other hand, switching to cleaner cooking solutions, such as LPG- and electricity, would result in higher costs for the end-user highlighting that this transition is not straightforward. The paper also contextualizes the results into the wider socio-economic context. It finds that a tradeoff is present between minimizing costs for households and meeting household priorities, thus maximizing the potential benefits of clean cooking without dismissing the use of biomass altogether

Constitutional immunity clause and the fight against corruption in Nigeria

One of the most pressing debates in Nigeria today is on the continued retention, or removal, of the immunity clause enshrined in section 308 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Some scholars canvass for the removal of the immunity clause because its retention, they argue, appears ironic in view of the stance of the government to rid governance of corrupt practices, including misappropriation of public funds. Others have called for its retention while another set of scholars further ask that it be extended to the leadership of the National Assembly and the States Houses of Assembly. This latter group has said that the Senate President, the Deputy Senate President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Deputy Speaker as well as the Speakers of the States Houses of Assembly and their Deputies should be granted immunity under the Constitution. This article discusses the immunity clause and its sphere, extent and limits as it relates to the officers protected, the arguments for and against its retention in the Constitution, as well as state practices in other jurisdictions.It concludes that it is expedient to retain the clause, but the call in some quarters to expand it to cover the leadership of the National Assembly and States Houses of Assembly is not viable.Keywords: Corruption, immunity, Constitution, sustainable development

Rethinking the Nexus between History & Scientific Knowledge: Speaking Truth to ‘Power’ and the People of Nigeria

It is evident that the global village is highly characterized with scientific innovations such as breakthroughs in automobile, space travels, medicine, nuclear weapons, inter-ballistic missiles, television, ipads, ipods, palm tops, proliferation of the Social Media network (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and a host of others. Arguably, this innovativeness seems not to have direct interconnectedness with history. To put it more aptly, these scientific products are invariably not the products of the practitioners of history. Consequently, in Nigeria, this had affected the way the generality of the people view history as a discipline. Not surprisingly, admission into the departments of history had been nose-diving, despite concerted efforts to make the discipline more attractive to proposed undergraduates. Evidently, calculated apathy and inferior complex have been built around the discipline. Thus, the fortune of history as a discipline is declining and its survival is being endangered. Reportedly, some educational policy makers in Nigeria have suggested scraping history as a subject in the Nigerian secondary schools and subsequently, this had watered down historical scholarship at the tertiary level. The argument is that, Nigeria as a developing nation, must embrace technical and technological courses if it must attain development. Plausibly, this argument is not tenable. Fundamentally, this paper attempts a censorious look into the interconnectedness between History and Science. The position of this paper is that history is scientific in nature; hence it contributes to scientific knowledge. Therefore, history, as well as other courses in humanities must not be neglected. In fact, if Nigeria, and other African countries want to trace their paths to technological breakthroughs and innovation, history is one of the disciplines that must be taken critically both by the people and the governments

The Yoruba Language and Literature in the 21 st Century and Beyond

The pervasive poor reading culture, the phenomenon of indigenous language endangerment and the dominance of new media of modern telecommunication have had condemnable impact on the survival and continuity of Yoruba language and literature. Despite the significance of language and literature in cultural expression, the value attached to Yoruba Literature is waning in our contemporary society. This paper therefore poses the question: is there hope for Yoruba Literature in the 21stcentury and beyond? There is no homogeneous answer to the question owing to some variables such as language attitude to Yoruba; linguistic alienation of some children for not using Yoruba Language by some homes and the negative attitude of Yoruba natives to the use of the language in eco-linguistic spheres. The paper observes that there is “literary endangerment” of Yoruba Language and literary texts written in the language because of the incompetence of the contemporary Yoruba children and youth to speak and write in mutually intelligible Yoruba linguistic codes. This paper therefore posits that Yoruba language and literature should be a compulsory prerequisite for any further study and other opportunities, particularly for candidate from Yoruba extraction

Effects of Organisational Climate and Health on Teachers’ Organisational Citizenship Behaviour

This study tested whether contextual factors of organisational climate and organisational health would significantly count in teachers’ organisational citizenship behaviour. Two hundred and seven (207) teachers randomly sampled from secondary schools in an education zone in Ogun State, Nigeria participated in the study. Measures included Organisational Citizenship Behaviour Scale (Settoon & Mossholder, 2002), Organisational Climate Descriptive Questionnaire (Hoy et al., 1991) and Organisational Health Inventory (Hoy et al., 1991). Analysis was done using the Multiple Regression Analysis with results tested for significance at the .05 level. Results revealed that organisational climate significantly accounted for 19.2% of the variance in the overall organisational citizenship behaviour with supportive behaviour as potent factors. Organisational health significantly predicted 29.3% of the variance in the overall organisational citizenship behaviour. It was concluded that organisational climate and organisational health would significantly predict individual-based, organisation-based and total organisational citizenship behaviour. Implications of the findings and recommendations for research and practice were made. Keywords: Organisational Citizenship Behaviour, Organisational Climate, Organisational Health, Teacher

‘Blindness to the obvious’?: Treatment experiences and feminist approaches to eating disorders

Eating disorders (EDs) are now often approached as biopsychosocial problems, but the social or cultural aspects of the equation are often marginalised in treatment - relegated to mere contributory or facilitating factors. In contrast, feminist and socio-cultural approaches are primarily concerned with the relationship between EDs and the social/ cultural construction of gender. Yet although such approaches emerged directly from the work of feminist therapists, the feminist scholarship has increasingly observed, critiqued and challenged the biomedical model from a scholarly distance. As such, this article draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with women in the UK context who have experience of anorexia and/or bulimia in order to explore a series of interlocking themes concerning the relationship between gender identity and treatment. In engaging the women in debate about the feminist approaches (something which has been absent from previous feminist work), the article explores how gender featured in their own understandings of their problem, and the ways in which it was - or rather wasn’t - addressed in treatment. The article also explores the women’s evaluations of the feminist discourse, and their discussions of how it might be implemented within therapeutic and clinical contexts

Representations of Yoruba Political History in Drama and their Implications for Yoruba Nationalism

The political history of modern Yoruba society is replete with ancient civil wars that nearly tore apart the entire Yoruba nation. The significance of these wars lies in how their understanding and reinterpretation have influenced and reshaped certain cultural epistemes of Yoruba identity, as represented in cultural products such as drama and film. Playwrights of Yoruba extraction have published a considerable number of dramatic texts on Yoruba political history and civil wars. However, only a few of these playwrights go beyond merely chronicling events as they occurred in the past; most do not attempt to reinterpret these incidents to foster a robust Yoruba national consciousness. This paper, therefore, critiques two dramatic texts—Adebayo Faleti’s Basọ̀run Gáà and Wale Ogunyemi’s Kiriji—because of their relevance to discourses on the quest for internal cohesion within the Yoruba ethnic group. The study finds that the genesis of Yoruba internal crises, which eventually culminated in the civil wars, can be traced to the mismanaged euphoria that followed the Abiodun-Gaa power tussle in the Old Oyo Empire. Kiriji, on the other hand, reveals that the last major Yoruba civil war—the Ekiti-Parapo War—ended only physically at the battlefronts, with little effort made to reconcile the underlying issues that led to the conflict. Although Yoruba playwrights have taken significant steps to document these civil wars, they could make a greater impact by infusing their works with creative reinterpretations of these historical events, thereby contributing to the broader project of Yoruba nationalism

Challenges of Slum Upgrading in Port Harcourt, River State, Nigeria

Environmental decay in a city is essentially caused by rapid urbanization and the mismatch in the provision and maintenance of housing and infrastructure. This study examined challenges of slum upgrading in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. The study aims to examine slum areas and their living conditions, and finding out the most critical and problematic zone of the slums Two sources (primary and secondary) of data were utilized in the study: The study population for this study was the residents of Diobu and Waterside in Port Harcourt, River State. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data appropriately. Findings established that 11.3% acquired primary education, 29.0% have secondary education, and 14.0% had NCE, 21.0% had both HND and degree and 3.8% had no formal education. Findings showed that 31.7% of the residents were owners of the building while 68.2% were living in rented apartments. Findings revealed that 40.9% of the respondents have bad drainage system which would lead to dirty environment and 6.5% having very good drainage system. The study concluded that majority of building structures in the study area are old that existed for decades without maintenance and the surrounding environment very poor due to neglect

Effect of Silver and Graphene Oxide Nanoparticles on the Growth Behaviour of Escherichia Coli

The antibacterial study using nanoparticles (NPs)have many advantages such as the use of alternate of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Although much information have been garnering, many more is still required. In this investigation, Escherichia coli was cultured in standard LB nutrient broth with two different NP species, Graphene oxide and Silver NPs under varying concentration. The growth of bacteria was expressed by measuring of the culture absorbance at 600 nm. The results demonstrated that silver NPs inhibited the bacterial growth, while Graphene oxide (GO) showed the enhancement of bacterial growth