NIGERIA'S FIRST TEXTILE MUSEUM

Despite volumes that have been written and voices loud enough on the importance of the creative sector’s ability to drive tourism economy, government still appears lethargic. But all is not lost, as Abuja’s tourism landscape is expected to receive a boost this year with a Textile Museum at the proposed Arts Village.

It is, perhaps, the first of its kind in Nigeria where genre-specific museums are uncommon. The proposed facility is the initiative of a renowned artist, Nike Okundaye, whose career of over 40 years has been on textile art.The textile museum is being conceived as part of a big cultural centre to be built on a six-acre land said to have been acquired by the artist’s family a few years ago. As a textile artist, Okundaye is also known to be a passionate collector of modern Nigerian textiles across cultures. Some of Okundaye’s collections in textiles, as old as many decades, are currently housed on the top floor of Nike Art Centre, Lekki, Lagos.

“We have just been able to complete payment for our six acres of land in Abuja, on which we plan to build an Art Village,” Chief Reuben Okundaye disclosed at Nike Art Centre. The Art Village, he assured, will have “a Textile Museum for my wife’s over two thousand collections.It is of note that the artist’s passion in textile goes beyond producing the well-known Yoruba native adire fabric from which she has become a revered name globally. Nike, as she is fondly called within the art circle, has done a lot of paintings in different media depicting the adire texture. Apart from the museum, the Arts Village, according to Chief Okundaye, will have amphitheatre and gallery of African Art as well as a multi-purpose hall.

After opening for business in 2011/2012, a visit to Nike Art Centre revealed what one thought could generate the proposed Textile Museum. Obviously, the artist already had her dream of a specialised museum for textile worked out back then. At the textile museum section of the building, the artist’s passion for fabrics of African origin was loud. Okundaye then noted, “We are fast losing our traditional textiles and something has to be done.”

Neatly arranged in the textile section were hand-woven materials such as alari, sanyan, petuje, among other hand-woven Yoruba native textiles.When the proposed Textile Museum becomes a reality, Nike, again, would be filling a vacuum abandoned by the government. Currently, the Nike Art Centre is the only visible spot for modern and contemporary gallery in Lagos, a city variously described as ‘Africa’s six largest economy.” But a unit known as Modern Gallery at the National Arts Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos, remains a huge embarrassment to a nation like Nigeria. Apart from the fact that the art pieces on display are endangered – given the deplorable state of the building – the modern and contemporary textures of Nigerian art vigour are not updated.

FOR the Nike Art Centre, the passion is in favour of tourism as a strong ingredient of developing Nigeria’s economy. The Textile Museum, Chief Reuben stated, would go a long way in developing the tourism industry.“Tourism can create jobs as we are trying to do with the Textile Museum so that every family involved in tourism industry should able to feed themselves,” he said.

With over 25,000 pieces of art at Nike Art Centre’s gallery space, the proposed Arts Village in Abuja has enough pool of collection to feed from the Lagos facility. Perhaps, as part of preparation towards the building of the Textile Museum, promotion through workshops for better understanding of textile art would be touted as the focus of Nike Art Centre this year.

If anyone is interested in researching Nigeria’s tourism business in the context of foreign inflow of visitors, the Nike Art Centre appears to be the right resource spot. It is no longer news that the centre is known to be a spot of attraction for foreign tourists.

But a disturbing revelation came to light when Chief Reuben said: “Tourists complain about the difficulty in getting Nigerian visa for visit” and advised government to “relax” the process and condition for “tourist visa so that more visitors can come here” and argued, “we know because tourists who come here complain of difficult of about as much as six months to get a visa to visit Nigeria.”

A few hours after the Okundayes shared their 2018 plans with their guests, a list of artists and art patrons were scheduled to receive awards for their contributions in developing Nigeria’s art. The award night themed ‘Connecting Lagos with Art’ had Prince Yemisi Shyllon, Robin Campbell, Prof. Peju Layiwola, Ndidi Dike, Sam Ovraiti, Rom Isichei and Peju Alatise, among over 10 others as recipientsThe awards are important to encourage people to do better in creating and promoting art,” Chief Reuben explained. “We hope to make the award a yearly event.”Still on arts as a crucial content of tourism, the Nike Arts Centre appears to have its main focus of the year on Lagos State. It’s a proposed Public Private Partnership (PPP) to be known as Trash to Treasure. Nike said the project is a collaboration with Lagos State Government, adding, “It’s called Trash to Treasure, which we want to use in creating monthly festivals in collaboration with Lagos State Government.”

What looks like the pilot process of the proposed collaboration, she said, “has already started with a private outfit, Sisi Oge Beauty Pageant” and noted that Lagos has so much potential to be host to as many festivals as possible. “We can recreate other festivals in Lagos; people don’t need to travel out of the city to attend major festivals in the country.”

When the Nike Art Centre opened six years ago, space utilisation in curatorial articulation gave artists, who work in large format canvas and installation, more windows of artistic expression. Also, the centre expanded the number of works on display for exhibitions with a minimum of about 50 works on each of the four-flour building. It was an unprecedented availability of space in Nigerian art exhibition circuit despite the building’s challenge of columns that could obstruct viewing.In a given exhibition that may need the entire gallery space, as many as 300 pieces of art can be on display in a conservative curatorial style devoid of choking.

A Nigerian Artist with a differience

NIke is the Managing Director/CEO of Nike Center for Art and Culture, Osogbo where trainings are offered free of charge to all Nigerians in various forms of arts. The center was established in 1983, by Nike solely from her earnings as an artist and without governmental assistance. Nike opened this center with 20 young girls who were marching the streets in Osogbo aimlessly and who had no hopes for the future. In their tender age, Nike withdrew these girls from the streets and provided them with free food, free materials and free accommodation at her residence at Osogbo and taught them how to use their hands to earn decent livings through the art. So far, over 3000 young Nigerians have been trained in the center and who are now earning their decent livings through art. Many African countries now send their students to study textile art at the center.

The Nike Center for Art and Culture, Osogbo now admits undergraduate students from many universities in Nigeria for their industrial training programs in textile design. Over the years, this center also now admits students from all over Europe, Canada and the United States of America. International scholars and other researchers in traditional African art and culture also visit the center from time to time for their research works into Yoruba "Adire" fabric processing and African traditional dyeing methods.

Nike is also the Owner/Curator of the Nike Art Galleries at Lagos, Osogbo, Ogidi-Ijumu and Abuja. In 1996, Nike established a textile (Aso-Oke) weaving center at Ogidi-Ijumu near Kabba in Kogi State for the women of the village, employing and empowering more than 200 women in the weaving center. In June 2002, Nike established an Art and Culture research center at Piwoyi village, FCT Abuja with an art gallery and a textile museum, the first of its kind in Nigeria which will provide functional platform for research into Nigerian traditional textile industry in the Federal Capital Territory area of Abuja. In furtherance of these noble endeavors, Nike is currently the managing director and founder of the following organizations in Nigeria; "Nike Art Productions Limited" which she incorporated in 1994, "Nike Art Gallery Limited" which she incorporated in 2007 and the "Nike Research Centre for Art and Culture Limited" which she incorporated in 2007. Also in 2007, Nike founded the "Nike Art and Culture Foundation" with some notable eminent Nigerians as trustees, with the main aims and objectives of fostering Nigerian cultural heritage.

MICHAEL JACKSON CHILDREN TODAY

 In the image, 19-year-old Paris poses in a Metallica hoodie with her brother Prince Michael, 20, to her left, and a family friend, Omer Bhatti, to her direct right, with her youngest brother, Blanket, 15, at the end. 

On Christmas Day, Paris Jackson shared a new family photo, providing a rare sighting of Michael Jackson’s three children together.

"Happy Christmas from ours to yours #brahdas," the caption on the photo reads

Ruth Kadiri, got engaged

It is no longer news that 29-year-old Edo State actress cum producer, Ruth Kadiri, got engaged to her mystery man in Sweden during the week, as she displayed her engagement ring in a post without showing the lucky man whom she allegedly referred to as red cap chief.

Woman gets $284 billion electric bill, wonders whether it's her Christmas lights

You could own all of Netflix. Or purchase 747 Boeing 747s, with change to spare. Or erase the national debts of Venezuela, Nigeria, Peru and Iceland, combined.Or, if you're Mary Horomanski, you could pay for one month's worth of electricity.Horomanski, from Erie, Pennsylvania, was shocked recently when she received an erroneous electric bill displaying an account balance of "284,460,000,000," with a first payment due of $28,176."I opened it up and there it was," she told The Washington Post.Horomanski, 58, began counting the commas ("Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Billions . . . Can most people even count that high?"), then taking her glasses off and putting them on again."It wasn't due until November of 2018," she said. "It was like, well, I guess we have a year to come up with this billion-dollar bill."

What can you buy with $284 billion?

A wordsmith who spins magic, Lesley Nneka Arimah is our 2017 Artist of the Year

Lesley is a great writer,” said Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, which honored Arimah with its 5 Under 35 award. “She produced a collection of stories that are really hard to pin down. They’re funny and intelligent and fierce in their own way, and they’re unexpected. I love that I picked up that book and I had no idea what I was picking up. And I left a bit in awe of her craft.”

Arimah is at the forefront of a growing number of young authors, primarily immigrants and writers of color — in the Twin Cities, as well as across the country — who are writing some of the most original and interesting fiction and poetry being published today.

For all of these reasons, Twin Cities writer Lesley Nneka Arimah is the Star Tribune’s Artist of the Year for 2017.

Reuben Abati: Deregulation and the politics of public policy

This thing called democracy, particularly the Nigerian brand, never ceases to throw up new and intriguing lessons about the relationship between government and the people, and the larger, complex socio-political environment. I had gone to Lagos on an assignment in the last two days of the year 2011, when around midnight I received a phone call from someone close to the corridors of power, informing me that a meeting had just been concluded in Abuja where a decision had been taken to deregulate the downstream petroleum sector, and thus, in effect remove the subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit (Petrol).

I told him I was aware of plans to that effect, since the President had been holding a series of meetings with various stakeholders and constituencies on the same subject, but as at the time I left for Lagos, no final decision had been taken. The fellow insisted he knew what he was talking about and that in the morning, the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulation Agency (PPPRA) would make the announcement. Sometimes in the corridors of power, informal stakeholders could enjoy faster access and be even more powerful than persons with formal responsibilities. There are persons and groups whose livelihoods are so dependent on government and the people in power that even a whisper at the highest level resonates immediately as an echo in their ears. I learnt very early never to underestimate such persons.

As it turned out, Nigerians were greeted with the Happy New Year news of deregulation of the downstream sector on January 1, 2012 and if you’d remember, hell broke loose. It was the end of the Nigerian people’s honeymoon with the Jonathan administration, the beginning of a long nightmare, and an opportunity for the opposition to launch an unending campaign of blackmail, name-calling and abuse against the administration. I received an early morning summon to leave Lagos and return immediately to the Villa.

The Jonathan administration was definitely not the first to seek to deregulate the downstream sector and end a regime of subsidy, as a means of ensuring greater transparency, efficiency and competition. Since 1987, every administration had tried to manage this aspect of the curse of oil. Nigeria is the sixth largest producer of oil in OPEC, and the second largest exporter of the product in Africa, at a time after Libya, at other times, after Angola. But the big problem has always been making the product available to Nigerians at home, in an efficient manner and as they say, at an “appropriate” or “correct” price. The mismanagement of oil resource, which accounts for about 90% of the country’s exports, is at the heart of corruption in Nigeria.

Years of inefficiency and graft had resulted in the collapse of the country’s refineries, from low capacity utilization to eventual collapse, persistent scarcity of the product, large scale smuggling, the rise of an oil industry cabal, violence in the Niger Delta, oil theft, pipeline vandalism, and all the evils of irresponsible leadership. From being a major exporter of crude oil, Nigeria soon became a major importer of finished petroleum products, and as international spot prices were volatile, government provided private importers of refined products, a subsidy that took care of landing costs that could have been passed on to the people. But the subsidy continued to grow out of proportion, becoming a major drain on the country’s finances – from 1.42% of GDP in 1987, it grew to about 3% of GDP in 2011.

Every administration sought to check the resultant crisis through price controls or gradual deregulation. The people’s counter-argument and the source of the angry protests that always followed was that Nigerians should not be made to pay heavily for a God-given resource, and that if the refineries were to function efficiently and government officials would moderate their greed, Nigerians would not need to buy petroleum products at the most expensive rates in OPEC. The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), supported by other groups in civil society, led the protests against every attempt at deregulation, compelling virtually every administration since 1987, to review proposed increases in the pump price of fuel in order to pacify the people. Only Diesel (AGO) and Low Pour Fuel Oil (LPFO) were successfully deregulated in 2009. By 2011, the regime of PMS subsidy had become unsustainable. The decision to fully deregulate the downstream sector in 2012 was the boldest policy move by the Jonathan administration but it was also the costliest.

The NLC and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), and their affiliate unions together with civil society groups took to the streets and shut down the country. The main opposition party, the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) went into a propaganda overdrive, throwing every possible mud at the President and the administration. In Ojota, Lagos, the opposition organized anti-Jonathan and anti-government rallies. “Paid” and mobilized youths and musicians, wearing designer T-shirts, voiced expletives, danced, and screamed; in other parts of the country, the protests resulted in violence and the death of many. This was the season of the Arab Spring, and those who launched what became known as the #OcccupyNigeria movement were convinced that this was the best time to demonstrate the superiority of people-power over government policies. Everyday in the Villa, at the time, we agonized over what had become a frightening assault on the administration. President Jonathan was the country’s first Facebook President, the first president to use the social media to run an election campaign, globally he was second only to President Obama in terms of Facebook followership, but in the face of the 2012 fuel subsidy protests, that same online advantage became his nemesis.

Young people, excited by the idea of an “Ojota Spring” deployed online hashtags to tear down the administration. Government officials also took to the media to explain the deregulation policy to the people. Ministers were dispatched to their various political constituencies to explain, communicate and convince, thus: defending the government became a test of loyalty. In my case, before going to work in the public sector, I had written an article in 2009, in which I opposed deregulation and predicted that the government was so wrong it would soon mislead Nigerians to such a day when we, the people, would soon start trekking or riding bicycles, no thanks to official voodoo economics and incompetence. Access to more detailed information about the extent of the corruption in the oil and gas sector later made me to review my initial objections to the policy of deregulation. Nigeria would be doomed if it continued to rob the poor to enrich the rich and thus through subsidy payments sustain a tradition of theft and wealth without work.

That article was dredged up nonetheless and circulated widely and I got called all kinds of names, including being called a “turn-coat”. It was a trying time for the Jonathan administration: myths over-shadowed reason. The government was accused of acting hastily and failing to consult widely. But that was not true. Weeks before a decision was taken, President Goodluck Jonathan personally met with state governors, labour leaders, media chiefs, youth groups, civic and cultural organizations, leaders of thought, traditional rulers, oil marketers and importers,,. Behind closed doors, labour leaders and leaders of the ACN did not oppose the deregulation policy. I recall the union leaders only asking for palliatives and the ACN submitting a detailed policy implementation paper.

The second myth was that the government acted on impulse because it was “clueless”. Again, not true. The House of Representatives had probed the subsidy regime reporting massive fraud in the downstream sector. The Ministry of Finance and later the Presidency subsequently set up the Aig-Imoukhuede Technical and Verification Committees, which made worse revelations about how the payment of subsidy had become a huge scam. The Ministry of Finance on the basis of available damning evidence suspended further subsidy payments and insisted on proper verification of claims, an integrity check that was resisted by the major oil marketers and their agents. Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s mother was later kidnapped in the midst of all that.

Deregulation of the downstream sector was inevitable then as it is now, because the fuel subsidy regime had become a cesspool of officially backed corruption. The country could no longer afford to pay rent to an oil sector cabal feeding fat on the inefficiency in the sector, putting in their pockets resources that could be used to develop infrastructure and serve the people. This was the principled position. But following the January 2012 deregulation, those who had urged the Federal Government on, including State governors who always wanted more money, and marketers who spoke about how deregulation had worked with diesel and telecomm, abandoned the government to its fate. Opposition leaders who had submitted a blueprint for implementation, publicly led the protests. The betrayal was astonishing. The short and long term effects were devastating.

Let us now fast forward to 2016: The present administration has again, like the Jonathan administration, announced a removal of subsidy. The pump price of petrol is now officially N145 per litre. The objectives and the arguments are the same as in the past. But the context is different. Those who fuelled and funded the protests of 2012 are either quiet or openly supportive or apologetic as they now defend the principled position they once abandoned. The labour unions are factionalised, there is no co-ordinated protest, the media, the people and the civil society are indifferent, the government is not under any pressure to convince anyone: same policy, same issues, but different politics!

My prediction that one day, we will all ride bicycles or trek to work has now come to pass. But if that is the sacrifice Nigerians have to make to end the outright brigandage in the downstream sector, so be it, please. Putting the subsidy thieves to shame, ending a subsidy regime that encouraged round-tripping, rent collection, smuggling, instant gratification, theft, insincerity, blackmail, and cabalism may well become President Buhari’s most important legacy. This could have been done since 2012, but the politicians, desperately seeking power and office, failed to put Nigeria first, and looking back, it seems all the young men and women who died in that season did so in vain. Politicians must learn not to play politics with people’s lives for reasons of selfish convenience. President Buhari must stand firm but let him also take steps to ensure that local refining is restored and let him keep an eye on those saboteurs who always manage to find a way around every public policy. And to all the 2012 hypocrites now turned today’s yes-men: una do well o.