DKINGJAY POST

LONG READ: The Sanusi speech that scolded Buhari’s government

0 in Share First of all, I want to break from tradition. Usually I speak in Hausa in Kano. But, I don’t know how I am go...

Monday, 29 May 2017

Mata's memories and high hopes




Each and every Monday during the season, Manchester United star Juan Mata pens a personal blog. In his final entry for the 2016/17 campaign, he reflects on the UEFA Europa League triumph and the spirit of Manchester and reveals his high hopes for next season...
Hi everyone,
This is the last post of the season, it’s time to take a break and wait for the next season to start. I’m taking my holidays and I’m feeling satisfied, that’s the consequence of winning a trophy at the end of the season, especially in the Europa League, a competition that I really like.
It was nice to share with all of you in Stockholm a good game and the joy of adding more silverware to United’s trophy cabinet. The road wasn’t neither short nor easy, but we finally got our goal, so next season we will play in the Champions League, which is what this club deserves and where we all want to be. Ajax was a tough opponent (it’s very brave to give so much confidence to so many young players in a team, so credit to them for that). However, I think we deserved to win because ever since the first minute of the final we had a very clear idea of what we wanted and we performed as an experienced, well-prepared team.
Obviously the atmosphere was different due to the terrible attack in Manchester just two days before the final, but that circumstance, instead of making us weak, gave us more courage to try to win and offer the title to the city, something to celebrate and to cheer up many people, at least for a few hours. I’ll never forget the reactions that we’ve seen all these days everywhere in the city (union, solidarity, respect, and many more values that make Manchester such a special place), and the ability of football to bring people together, to help, to contribute, beyond rivalries and tensions.
We have high hopes for the next season, but now it’s time to take a break, switch off from football and rest until the start of the pre-season training sessions. We will keep in touch through the social networks, where I read your comments and listen to what you say. You have been there in the good and the bad times and I’d like to thank you for that.
You are, in the end, the engine that helps us work and give all our effort day after day, in order to improve and, ultimately, celebrate things together. That’s why we enjoyed the victory in Stockholm so much: because we could dedicate it to you in such a difficult moment for everybody.
Have a great summer. Enjoy!

Hugs,
Juan.
Juan Mata's full blog is available to read on his official website.

Saturday, 27 May 2017

Between Life and Death, There’s San Francisco: A Reading List


They came in the tens of thousands, pushing baby carriages and packing roller skates. All in all, an estimated 200,000 pedestrians crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on May 27, 1937, its first day in business. The bridge was already a San Francisco landmark—a flaming, burnt-orange beacon conceived a decade earlier by Leon Moisseiff, who had engineered the Manhattan Bridge. It was a graceful design, but suspension bridges still weren’t entirely safe—the engineer’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge would fail spectacularly only a few months after it opened in 1940.
The Golden Gate also has a dark side. To afford a view of the city, the bridge has a low barrier that is easy to scale. (In “Jumpers,” the New Yorker’s Tad Friend meditates on the bridge’s reputation for death—for the families and friends of those who succeed in their jumps, it’s an indelible monument to their loved ones’ pain.)This month, city workers will finally begin the installation of a new barrier, a grey netting that will blend into the water without obscuring the view. Officials hope it will finally reduce suicide rates on the deadly bridge.
The Golden Gate Bridge has long embodied the contradictions of the city it overlooks: ambition, connection, innovation, a beginning and an end. San Francisco has always held those contradictions—a deep tension between life and death, old and new— and here some of our favorite stories about a changing city and the resilience of those who call it home.

1. “Death by Gentrification: The Killing That Shamed San Francisco” by Rebecca Solnit (The Guardian, March 2016)

Alejandro Nieto, a 28-year-old man murdered by policemen who claimed he was trying to taser them, died in part because of changes in neighborhood he’d lived in his entire life. Solnit argues that Nieto’s death was caused by the clashes that happen when a city’s new and old residents square off during periods of explosive growth.
San Francisco was never anti-newcomer: Until recently, it had always been a place where new people arrived to reinvent themselves. When they arrive in a trickle, they integrate and contribute to the ongoing transformation. When they arrive in a flood, as they have during economic booms since the 19th-century gold rush, including the dotcom surge of the late 1990s and the current tech tsunami, they scour out what was there before. By 2012 the incursion of tech workers had gone from steady stream to deluge, and more and more people and institutions— bookstores, churches, social services, bars, small businesses—began to be evicted.
San Francisco had been a place where some people came out of idealism or stayed to realize an ideal: to work for social justice or teach the disabled, to write poetry or practice alternative medicine—to be part of something larger than themselves that was not a corporation, to live for something more than money. That was becoming less and less possible as rent and sale prices for homes spiraled upward. What the old-timers were afraid of losing, many of the newcomers seemed unable to recognize.

2. “San Francisco is Dead. Long Live San Francisco” by Gary Kamiya (San Francisco Magazine, April 2014)

Is San Francisco dying? It’s a question that’s become a kind of parlor game for city residents and journalists like Kamiya, who calls the city’s war against itself “The Change.” That change is sweeping through the city as it becomes richer. But could it end up rebirthing the city?
The Change is an unconquerable force of nature, like death. And much of the reaction to it recalls the first three stages of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving: a combination of denial, anger, and bargaining. If we yell and rage loudly enough, if we find someone to blame, if we replace reason with hyperbole—Solnit memorably compared newly-arrived techies to ivory collectors in China—then somehow the city we know will come back…
But cities are also always being reborn. And as I wander through our new city, I find myself open to it. I’m not convinced that it is really going to become a soulless simulacrum of Manhattan (or worse, Atherton). I’m curious to know what San Francisco in 2025 or 2050 will look and feel like. I’m interested in the young people who are pouring in. When I wander through Dolores Park on a hot Saturday afternoon and watch the throngs hanging out, talking, drinking wine, smoking weed, and listening to music, I don’t examine them suspiciously, trying to figure out which ones are the bad techies and which ones are the good baristas (except for the people playing that inane toss-the-beanbag game—they gotta go). As I walk through Nob Hill or the Mission or mid-Market and see the fancy single-family homes or the sleek high-rise apartments that are sprouting up here and there, I don’t inwardly groan (except with real estate envy). Mostly, I view them with equanimity, as if they’re seedlings growing in the forest.

3.  “To Whom Does San Francisco’s Oldest Neighborhood Belong?”by Joe Garofoli and Carolyn Said (San Francisco Chronicle, December 2014)

The Mission is ground zero for the city’s gentrification wars, as families who have lived there for generations can no longer afford stability in their own neighborhood. In 2014, the Chronicle spent months diving deep into life in the Mission, finding that things aren’t as simple as out with the old, in with the new.
After 25 years on Valencia Street, Andrew McKinley’s Adobe Books was forced out because of high rents. His store reopened on 24th Street last year as a cooperative. “We were looked on as the gentrifiers of the old neighborhood,” McKinley said. “In the end, we (became) the victims of gentrification. Maybe now we are the gentrifiers again.”
On 24th Street, no business has earned that reputation more than Local’s Corner.
Milgrom uses “local” to refer to the food’s provenance. But to some Mission activists, “local” seems a strange choice, coming from a guy from New York.
And now they were picketing in front of his restaurant on behalf of a longtime Latina resident—a local—who was angry her party had been turned away from Local’s Corner.
After midnight, vandals attacked all four of Milgrom’s businesses. The message in the graffiti scrawls was unmistakable: “Die Yuppies.” “Get lost.” “Keep the Mission Brown.

4. “The Great West Coast Newspaper War,”by Eli Sanders (The Stranger, March 2010)

Tensions about money and legacy can play out in weird ways, like when San Francisco’s alt-weeklies went to war during the 2000s. The conflict was sordid at best, pitting the SF Weekly against its rival, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The epic battle that caused the two papers to steal one another’s delivery vans and smear each other online could be framed as one of gentrification too. (Spoiler: Three years after Sanders published this piece, the Guardian lost its battle and shuttered.)
No warm greetings from Michael G. Lacey [the executive editor and a co-owner of Village Voice Media], no kind wishes for ongoing professional relationships with everyone in the room. Instead, according to testimony in the court record, he disparaged the writing of the paper’s staff, the neighborhood in which they worked, and the product they put out. He told them things were going to improve now that he owned the place, but this would involve some big changes. No more political endorsements. (Younger readers don’t vote, he would later explain.) Less coverage of city hall. (Not what the 18-to-35 demographic wanted, he thought.) Longer investigative pieces. (To get at the “bigger picture” of San Francisco.) And a total ban on drawing inspiration from what, at the time, was unquestionably the city’s dominant alt-weekly: the Bay Guardian, founded in 1966, fascinated with the workings of city government, fond of picking fights with the local power structure, stamped each week with the motto “Print the news and raise hell,” and long a tribune for a certain strand of crusading West Coast liberalism.
To make clear his point about the changing frame of reference, Lacey grabbed a copy of the Bay Guardian off one of the desks in the room, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it. People who were at the meeting recall Lacey saying, “We don’t want to just compete with the Bay Guardian; we want to put the Bay Guardian out of business” and “We want to be the only game in town” and “We’re going to bury the Guardian.”

6. “Suddenly That Summer,”by Sheila Weber (Vanity Fair, June 2012)

Clashes between old and new, local and outsider, are part and parcel of San Francisco life, and they always have been: The city was born in the cradle of the Gold Rush, withstood generations of immigration, and is still in the throes of transformation. As radical as 1967’s Summer of Love wanted to be, it also was a movement with a foot firmly planted in the past:
What was unique was happening across town, where a group of young artists, musicians, and San Francisco State College students became besotted with the city’s past. “There was a huge romanticism around the idea of the Barbary Coast, about San Francisco as a lawless, vigilante, late-19th-century town,” says Rock Scully, one of those who rented cheap Victorian houses in a run-down neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury. They dressed, he says, “in old, stiff-collared shirts with pins, and riding coats and long jackets.” […]
More and more young people were flooding the Haight, including four beautiful girls from Antioch College, in Ohio. A sexy anarchist movement, the Diggers, had sprung up, and the girls joined in. One day two of them, Cindy Read and Phyllis Wilner, “were walking down Haight Street,” Cindy recalls, “and Phyllis said, ‘Isn’t this how you thought the world would be, except it wasn’t? But now, for us, it is!’ ”

Silva hired as Watford’s new manager



Hull City’s Portuguese head coach Marco Silva applauds the fans following the English Premier League football match between Hull City and Tottenham Hotspur at the KCOM Stadium in Kingston upon Hull, north east England on May 21, 2017. Tottenham won the match 7-1. Lindsey PARNABY / AFP
Watford hired former Hull City boss Marco Silva as their new manager on Saturday following Walter Mazzarri’s departure from the Premier League club.
Silva left Hull earlier this week following the Tigers’ relegation from the English top flight and Watford quickly made him their top target to replace Mazzarri.
Although Silva couldn’t stop Hull slipping into the second-tier Championship, the Portuguese coach earned praise for his work during five months in charge of a club dealing with boardroom turmoil for much of the season.
The 39-year-old had been linked with the vacant jobs at Porto and Crystal Palace, but Watford won the race for his signature on a two-year contract.
“Marco was one of the most sought-after head coaches in the Premier League,” Hornets chairman Scott Duxbury told the club’s website.
“His pedigree and promise speaks for itself, with his achievements in top divisions elsewhere across Europe as well as his work at Hull City last season.
“We are delighted to have secured his services and to be welcoming a head coach of his profile and potential.
“It’s an exciting time to be a Watford fan and I’m sure all supporters will join me in offering Marco and his family the warmest of welcomes to Vicarage Road.”
Silva becomes the ninth man to take charge of Watford in just five years, with owners the Pozzo family notoriously quick to punish perceived underachievement.
Mazzarri, who replaced the popular Quique Sanchez Flores last year, certainly fell into that category as Watford finished the season only one place above the Premier League relegation zone after losing their last six matches.
The Italian reportedly alienated Watford’s players with an egotistical approach and he struggled to win them over during a campaign that featured embarrassing cup exits against third tier Millwall and Gillingham.
Silva will be expected to lift Watford back to mid-table respectability as he looks to build on his burgeoning reputation.
He won the Greek title with Olympiakos in 2016 and the Portuguese Cup with Sporting in 2015.
After moving to Hull this January, he forged a strong bond with his players and their impressive results at home kept the Tigers in with a chance of avoiding relegation until the penultimate weekend of the season.

Inuwa Bawa, ex-military administrator of Ekiti, Gombe states, dies at 67


Former Military Administrator of Ekiti and Gombe States, Col. Mohammed Inuwa Bawa (rtd) has died at the age of 67.
The former intelligence officer and governorship aspirant in his home state of Kebbi, died on Friday due to complications from a surgery he had in Jos, Plateau State.
Barrister Aliyu Musa Yawuri, cousin of the deceased said the late Bawa had suffered from typhoid which affected his intestine and warranted surgery.
Yawuri said the deceased had died at FOMAS hospital at Millionaires Quarters in Jos and is survived by one wife and eight children.
Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, has reacted to the death of Bawa.
He described the passing as shocking and a great loss to the people of the state.
The governor in a statement issued by his Chief Press Secretary, Idowu Adelusi, in Ado-Ekiti on Friday, said the news came at a time the state just finished mourning the late military governor of the old Western Region, Gen. Adeyinka Adebayo (Retd.).
Fayose said, “Bawa came to Ekiti at a time we needed a man like him for the take-off of the state and despite the odds he met on ground as the first Military Administrator of the state, he practically squeezed water out of stone to lay a solid foundation for Ekiti.
“The late Colonel Inuwa Bawa braved the odds as the pioneer governor of our dear state to lay a very solid foundation on which others have been building.
“It is an understatement to say he worked assiduously for the progress of our state, he did work tirelessly for our state and its take-off.
“Despite the hitches associated with someone pioneering the take-off of a state, he was able to harness the human resources of the state to give the people the encouragement and motivation needed for the sustenance of the state.”

Inuwa Bawa, ex-military administrator of Ekiti, Gombe states, dies at 67


Former Military Administrator of Ekiti and Gombe States, Col. Mohammed Inuwa Bawa (rtd) has died at the age of 67.
The former intelligence officer and governorship aspirant in his home state of Kebbi, died on Friday due to complications from a surgery he had in Jos, Plateau State.
Barrister Aliyu Musa Yawuri, cousin of the deceased said the late Bawa had suffered from typhoid which affected his intestine and warranted surgery.
Yawuri said the deceased had died at FOMAS hospital at Millionaires Quarters in Jos and is survived by one wife and eight children.
Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, has reacted to the death of Bawa.
He described the passing as shocking and a great loss to the people of the state.
The governor in a statement issued by his Chief Press Secretary, Idowu Adelusi, in Ado-Ekiti on Friday, said the news came at a time the state just finished mourning the late military governor of the old Western Region, Gen. Adeyinka Adebayo (Retd.).
Fayose said, “Bawa came to Ekiti at a time we needed a man like him for the take-off of the state and despite the odds he met on ground as the first Military Administrator of the state, he practically squeezed water out of stone to lay a solid foundation for Ekiti.
“The late Colonel Inuwa Bawa braved the odds as the pioneer governor of our dear state to lay a very solid foundation on which others have been building.
“It is an understatement to say he worked assiduously for the progress of our state, he did work tirelessly for our state and its take-off.
“Despite the hitches associated with someone pioneering the take-off of a state, he was able to harness the human resources of the state to give the people the encouragement and motivation needed for the sustenance of the state.”