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Neglect of the boy-child ―Social Implications of the female empowerment

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4 years ago

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Would female empowerment lead to the neglect of the boy-child in Nigeria?

A man named Ambrose is seated perusing a magazine. He pauses at some page and shares his thoughts with his friend, Ann.

Ambrose:

Look, these girls that you guys are empowering will still grow up to marry these boys that you are neglecting.

Ann:

(trying to understand)

Explain better.

Ambrose:

Nowadays, you see girls achieving more than the boys in schools. You see opportunities like scholarship programmes for girls just like the one in this magazine. Conferences and seminars and the whole fuzz about the girl child. But you hardly see anything for the boy child. We have neglected the boys so much that they are now on the streets leading in crimes like kidnapping, rituals, yahoo (internet fraud) and the likes. These boys are also the highest population in prison, while the girls are leading with flying colours in different sectors.

Ann:

(Still trying to understand) Okay…So, what is the problem?

Ambrose:

That is what I’m saying. We are now so focused on the female child that we abandon the boy child and leave them on their own to figure out life. When these ladies are ready for marriage, they will not find the boys that would meet their standards because these boys would probably be in prison or living recklessly. The boys that might even manage to have a decent living would become intimidated by the intelligence and high status of these girls that they would feel unworthy to marry them. The girls would become desperate for a suitable partner and then the scripture that says “…in that day, seven women will take hold of one man…” will be fulfilled.

Ann:

Oh, I see. To begin this conversation however, there are some generalisations that would need to be made specific.

First things first. Who are you referring to as “you guys” and “we”?

Ambrose:

Ur..m, basically, that’s just a “blanket word” for society.

Ann:

Hold on. We will not be able to have a successful conversation if we both throw “blanket words”. If a problem must be tackled, there must be specifics; so you have to ruminate.

Ambrose:

(Thinks hard) Really, I just used that word.

Ann:

Let me assist you. Many women/girls empowerment and rescue programmes are pioneered by women, especially older women. Right?

Ambrose:

Yes

Ann:

So, can we safely agree that “you guys” and “we” have a pragmatic implicature referring to the women?

Man:

(Takes a deep breath) Something like that.

Ann:

Okay. We got the missing link in your complaint. Women.

Ambrose and Ann:

(Chuckles)

Ann:

You see, growing up as a child, my siblings and I had this attitude loosely called “ha sirim chuwa ewu” in Igbo.

When we individually see a potentially harmful object obstructing a walkway at home or an object that is not supposed to be where it is, we would just ignore and carefully pass around it because, in our minds, we were not the ones who kept it there. What is more? We were not told to remove it. So, our mom, upon noticing that behaviour, would rebuke “ha asirim chuwa ewu”, come on take that thing out of the way!”

Ambrose:

(Laughs)What does that mean?

Ann: 

I was just going to explain that. It is emanated from an illustration of a person who refuses to chase a goat away from eating a tuber of yam until they are told to do so. “Ha sirim chuwa ewu” literally means, “they told me to chase goat” but its contextual meaning is also extended to a person or a group of people who avoid partaking in the solution of a problem that would benefit a certain number of people including themselves. We see this behaviour exhibited by politicians who would rather hoard national funds than use it to the benefit of all thereby resulting in the stagnation we constantly experience.

Anyways, back to our talk.

If the women have taken the responsibility of seeing to the empowerment of these young girls, should it not be an exemplary act for the men to emulate instead of guilt-tripping the efforts of these women by saying they (the women) are abandoning the boys?

Let’s look at the idea of parenting in this society. Most fathers would prefer to spend their time with their friends in the beer parlour as long as they have fulfilled the responsibility of providing financially for the family (even though we know that in our social reality, women are active breadwinners as their partners).

The term “work and family balance” is used for career women and not men because subconsciously, when we think of training a child, we think only of the women. This has resulted in the absence of fathers in the parenting role of training a child aside from finance. Implying that the empowerment of girls has resulted in the abandonment of the boy child sounds like a hypocritical statement because this problem has been there all along. The empowerment of the girl-child just made it obvious. And if at all, a conversation should be made about this abandonment, it should be a solution-driven conversation amongst the men, older men especially, on how they can assume the responsible role of grooming and empowering the boy-child.

Ann:

Moving on to your scriptural quote on the clinging of seven women to one man- (laughs heartily)

Ambrose:

(Chuckles) No, speak on. I’m listening.

Ann:

Honestly, I find that a ridiculous reference- no offense intended.

Ambrose:

(Nods)

Ann:

First, it is alarming how a girl, despite her achievements and contribution to society, is judged by her ability or inability to get married, suffocating her choice to accept or decline what we consider marriage. This is another subconscious thought that contrasts what it means to be human.

On top of that, you quoted biblical scripture to back up this bias. Would you still quote that scripture if you remembered that before Christianity was introduced, polygyny had been a cultural practice? Would you still make reference to that scripture if you acknowledged that other religions like Islam exist aside from Christianity? Would you still feel the urge to pin the empowerment of girls as the basis for the fulfillment of that scripture because you feel boys are abandoned?

Dear Ambrose, this conversation is not meant to be an attack but an attempt to resurrect critical and humane thoughts that would elicit responsibility from the older men in solving the problem of the male child abandonment that you have raised.

(Extends hand to Ambrose)

Ambrose: (smiles) shake hands.

♦ Favour Chiagozie Ebubechukwu is an Editorial  Staff Writer and columnist with the WAP

 

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Lifestyle

Kaduna Governor Commissions Nigeria’s First 100-Building Prefabricated Housing Estate

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2 weeks ago

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November 14, 2025

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Kaduna, Nigeria – November 6, 2025 — In a major milestone for Nigeria’s housing sector, the Governor of Kaduna State has commissioned a 100-unit mass housing estate developed by Family Homes and executed by Karmod Nigeria, marking the first-ever large-scale prefabricated housing project in the country.

Completed in under six months, the innovative project demonstrates the power of modern prefabricated construction to deliver high-quality, affordable homes at record speed — a sharp contrast to traditional building methods that often take years.

Each of the 100 units in the estate is designed for a lifespan exceeding 50 years with routine maintenance. The development features tarred access roads, efficient drainage systems, clean water supply, and steady electricity, ensuring a modern and comfortable living environment for residents.

According to Family Homes, the project represents a new era in Nigeria’s mass housing delivery, proving that cutting-edge technology can accelerate the provision of sustainable and cost-effective homes for Nigerians.

“With prefabricated technology, we can drastically reduce construction time while maintaining top-quality standards,” said a spokesperson for Family Homes. “This project is a clear demonstration of what’s possible when innovation meets commitment to solving Nigeria’s housing deficit.”

Reinforcing this commitment, Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State emphasized the alignment between the initiative and the state’s broader vision for affordable housing.

“The Family Homes Funds Social Housing Project aligns with our administration’s commitment to the provision of affordable houses for Kaduna State citizens. Access to safe, affordable and secure housing is the foundation of human dignity. We have been partnering with local and international investors to frontally address our housing deficit,” he said.

Also speaking at the event, Mr. Ademola Adebise, Chairman of Family Homes Funds Limited, noted that the project embodies inclusivity and social progress.

“The Social Housing Project also reflects our shared vision of inclusive growth, where affordable housing becomes a foundation for economic participation and improved quality of life.”

Karmod Nigeria, the technical partner behind the project, utilized its extensive expertise in prefabricated technology to localize the process, employing local artisans and materials to enhance community participation and job creation.

Industry experts have described the Kaduna project as a blueprint for future housing initiatives nationwide, capable of addressing the country’s housing shortfall more efficiently and sustainably.

With this pioneering development, Kaduna State takes a leading role in introducing modern housing technologies that promise to reshape Nigeria’s urban landscape.

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Books

The Pioneer’s Burden: Building the First Private Network in a Vacuum of Power

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4 weeks ago

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November 4, 2025

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  • Book Title: The Making of Bourdex Telecom
  • Author: David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex
  • Publishers: Bourdex
  • Reviewer: Emeaba Emeaba
  • Pages: 127

In the history of Nigerian entrepreneurship, stories of audacity often begin with frustration. A man waits hours in a dimly lit government office to place a single overseas call, his ambitions held hostage by bureaucracy. From that moment of exasperation, an empire begins. Such is the animating pulse of The Making of Bourdex Telecom, David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex’s sweeping autobiographical account of one man’s effort to connect the disconnected and to rewrite the telecommunications map of Eastern Nigeria.

At once memoir, corporate history, and national parable, the book reconstructs the emergence of Bourdex Telecommunications Limited—the first indigenous private telecom provider in Nigeria’s South-East and South-South regions—against a backdrop of inefficiency, corruption, and infrastructural neglect. Its author, a businessman turned visionary, narrates not merely how a company was built but how a new horizon of possibility was forced open in a society long accustomed to closed doors.

Bourdex begins with a stark diagnosis of pre-deregulation Nigeria: a nation of over 120 million people served by fewer than a million telephone lines. Through a mix of statistical precision and personal recollection, he paints a portrait of communication as privilege, not right—of entire regions condemned to silence by state monopoly. His storytelling thrives in such contrasts: the entrepreneur sleeping upright in Lagos’s NET building to place an international call; the Italian businessman in Milan conducting deals with two sleek mobile phones. That juxtaposition—between deprivation and effortless connectivity—serves as the book’s moral axis.

From these moments of contrast, Bourdex constructs the founding myth of his enterprise. What began as an irritation became a revelation, then a crusade. “I saw a people left behind,” he writes, “a region cut off while others dialed into the future.” His insistence on framing technology as a means of liberation rather than profit underscores the moral ambition that threads through the book. The Making of Bourdex Telecom reads not like a manual of business success but like an ethical manifesto: to build not simply for gain, but for dignity.

As the chapters unfold, Bourdex’s narrative oscillates between vivid personal storytelling and granular technical detail. He recounts his early business dealings in the 1980s and ’90s, the bureaucratic mazes of NITEL, and the daring pursuit of a telecommunications license under General Sani Abacha’s military government. There is a cinematic quality to his recollections—the tense midnight meetings in Abuja, the coded alliances with military officers, the improbable friendships that turned policy into possibility.

These sections recall Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria in tone and intention: both works diagnose the systemic failures of governance but find redemption in individual initiative. Yet Bourdex’s narrative differs in form. Where Achebe offered moral critique, Bourdex offers demonstration—an anatomy of perseverance in motion. He documents the letters, negotiations, and international correspondences with Harris Canada, showing how an indigenous company emerged through sheer force of will and global collaboration.

Such passages risk overwhelming the reader with acronyms, specifications, and telecom jargon—R2 signaling, SS7 interconnection, E1 circuits—but they also lend the book an authenticity rare in corporate memoirs. What might have been opaque technicalities become, under Bourdex’s hand, instruments of drama. The machinery of communication becomes metaphor: wires and waves as extensions of faith and tenacity.

To situate The Making of Bourdex Telecom within Nigeria’s socio-political history is to confront the paradox of private enterprise under public decay. The book chronicles the twilight of NITEL’s monopoly, the hesitant dawn of deregulation, and the emergence of entrepreneurial actors who filled the void left by government paralysis. In this sense, Bourdex’s story parallels that of other indigenous pioneers—figures such as Mike Adenuga and Jim Ovia—whose ventures in telecommunications and banking transformed the national economy from the late 1990s onward.

Yet Bourdex’s tone is less triumphant than reflective. He does not romanticize deregulation; he portrays it as both opportunity and ordeal. The government’s inertia, the labyrinthine licensing process, and the outright extortion by state agencies form the darker undertones of his tale. His clash with NITEL’s leadership—recounted with controlled indignation—stands as one of the book’s most gripping sequences. When a senior official demanded an illegal payment of ₦20.8 million for interconnection rights, Bourdex’s defiant reply, “You are not God,” rang out like an act of civil disobedience. In such moments, the narrative transcends the genre of business autobiography and enters the moral theatre of national reform. The entrepreneur becomes citizen-prophet, challenging a corrupt establishment with the rhetoric of justice and self-belief. That blending of economic narrative with civic conscience is perhaps the book’s most compelling feature.

Stylistically, The Making of Bourdex Telecom occupies an intriguing space between oral history and polished memoir. The prose is direct, rhythmic, and often sermonic, reflecting its author’s background as both businessman and public speaker. Anecdotes unfold with the cadences of storytelling; sentences sometimes pulse with the energy of spoken word: “Amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” The repetition of such aphorisms imbues the work with a sense of conviction, though occasionally at the expense of subtlety.

Where the book excels is in its evocation of atmosphere—the dusty highways between Aba and Lagos, the sterile corridors of power in Abuja, the crisp air of Calgary where the author first glimpsed technological modernity. These scenes transform what could have been a linear corporate chronicle into a textured work of memory.

Still, the narrative structure is not without flaws. The absence of an external editor’s restraint is occasionally felt in the pacing; digressions into technical exposition or moral reflection sometimes interrupt narrative flow. Readers accustomed to the concise storytelling of international business memoirs—Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog or Elon Musk’s authorized biography—may find the prose dense in places. Yet such density mirrors the complexity of the terrain Bourdex navigated. His sentences, like his towers, are built from layers of persistence.

Beyond its entrepreneurial chronicle, the book doubles as social history—a record of Eastern Nigeria’s encounter with modernization. The chapters on “The FUTO Boys,” a cadre of young engineers recruited from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, offer a microcosm of the new Nigerian professional class emerging in the late 1990s: educated, idealistic, and determined to prove that technical expertise could thrive outside the state. Their improvisations—installing antennas by candlelight, building networks amid power outages—embody the collective grit that sustained Bourdex’s vision.

The narrative’s cumulative effect is generational. Through the story of one company, we glimpse a society in transition—from analogue isolation to digital awakening. The book captures that liminal moment when the sound of a dial tone became a symbol of freedom.

Running through The Making of Bourdex Telecom is a persistent theology of success. Bourdex attributes every turn in his journey to divine orchestration: friendships “placed by the Invisible Hand,” setbacks reinterpreted as “divine redirections.” Such language, while characteristic of Nigerian entrepreneurial spirituality, acquires here an almost literary force. It recasts corporate history as providential narrative, where the invisible infrastructure of grace mirrors the visible architecture of towers and transmitters.

For some readers, this piety may feel excessive; yet it provides the emotional coherence of the book. The author’s faith is not ornamental—it is constitutive. Without it, the story of Bourdex Telecom would read as mere ambition. With it, it becomes vocation.

The foreword by Abia State Governor Alex Otti and the preface by former Anambra Governor Peter Obi frame the book as both inspiration and instruction. They read Bourdex’s career as parable: the triumph of private initiative over public inertia. Yet their presence also situates the work within Nigeria’s broader discourse on nation-building. The Making of Bourdex Telecom is not only the autobiography of an entrepreneur; it is a treatise on indigenous agency—on what happens when Africans cease to wait for imported solutions and begin to engineer their own.

In this respect, the book extends its influence beyond its immediate industry. Its lessons—about courage, timing, friendship, and faith—extend to any field where innovation must contend with adversity.

Judged as a work of literature, The Making of Bourdex Telecom is direct and sincere. Its prose favors clarity over ornament, and its authenticity gives the story a compelling sense of truth. Bourdex writes not to embellish, but to bear witness—to a time, a struggle, and a conviction that technology could serve humanity. The result is a hybrid work: part documentary, part sermon, part memoir of enterprise.

As a contribution to Nigerian business literature, it deserves serious attention. Few firsthand accounts capture with such detail the messy birth of private telecommunications in the 1990s—a revolution that reshaped the country’s economic and social fabric. In its pages, we hear both the crackle of the first connected call and the larger resonance of a people finding their voice.

Bourdex’s central message endures: progress begins when frustration becomes purpose. His journey from the backrooms of NITEL to the boardrooms of international telecoms is not merely personal triumph; it is a chapter in Nigeria’s unfinished story of modernization.

In the end, The Making of Bourdex Telecom stands as more than the history of a company. It is an ode to enterprise as nation-building, and to the stubborn optimism of those who refuse to let silence define them.

See the book on Amazon: >>>>>

_________

♦ Dr. Emeaba, the author of “A Dictionary of Literature,” writes dime novels in the style of the Onitsha Market Literature sub-genre.

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Houston

Houston and Owerri Community Mourn the Passing of Beloved Icon, Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie

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2 months ago

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October 3, 2025

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Houston was thrown into mourning on September 19, 2025, following the sudden passing of businessman and community advocate Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie, who peacefully joined his ancestors. Immediate family member in Houston, Nick Anozie, confirmed his untimely death and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of love and condolences from both the Houston and Owerri communities.

Lawrence was born to Chief Alexander and Lolo Ether Anozie of Owerri in Imo State, Nigeria, and will be dearly remembered by family members, friends, and the entire Houston community.

An accomplished accountant, the late Lawrence incorporated and successfully managed three major companies: Universal Insurance Company, LLC, Universal Mortgage LLC, and Universal Financial Services. Through these enterprises, he not only built a thriving business career but also created opportunities for countless individuals to achieve financial stability. His contributions to entrepreneurship and community development will remain a lasting legacy.

According to the family, arrangements for his final funeral rites are in progress and will be announced in due course.

Lawrence will forever be remembered as a loving and compassionate man who dedicated much of his life to uplifting others. He helped countless young Nigerians and African Americans overcome economic challenges by providing mentorship, financial guidance, and career opportunities. His generosity touched the lives of many who otherwise might not have found their footing. A devout Catholic, he was unwavering in his faith and never missed Mass, drawing strength and inspiration from his church community. To those who knew him, Lawrence was not only a successful businessman but also a pillar of kindness, humility, and faith whose legacy of service and compassion will continue to inspire generations.

For more information, please contact Nick Anozie – 832-891-2213

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