Back in the 1990s while growing up in my parents’ house, we had a gateman called Fatai whom I found very interesting, to their noticeable disapproval. Fatai was seemingly the antithesis of everything I was being raised to be at the time – happy-go-lucky, feckless, slovenly, unfocused, immersed in mundanities and apparently just unaware of the world as it passed by. As long as he got his salary, supplemented by the occasional rolled up 20 naira note passed through the car window when he opened the gate for oga or madam, Fatai was fine with his lot in life. Sometimes, one of the buxom ladies who walked around the GRA hawking bread would respond to his advances and he would get a few weeks of amorous activities into the bargain – utopia!

My parents soon made it clear to me that I was not to hang around the gatehouse or talk to Fatai because they had certain expectations of me and they considered him a bad influence. Over the course of several “I’m-not-spending-this-much-on-school-fees-to-hear-you-speaking-pidgin-with-the-gateman” conversations, I eventually got the message.

People like Fatai were apparently disadvantaged in life, and I was advantaged. The expectation was that I must deliver returns on that advantage so as not to offend God who created both Fatai and I. People like me were supposed to grow up and become the drivers of a new successful Nigerian society that would naturally stop producing Fatais. It definitely made sense on paper, and for a very long time, I believed it too.

Over the past few weeks however, having closely observed how a great number of people I consider to be friends, colleagues and members of my network have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have reached a dismaying conclusion about the very people whom anyone would expect to know better.

Why Are We Like This?

Bill Gates is almost as famous for his work in African healthcare as he is for being a billionaire investor. He has a Nigerian friend who is also a billionaire in dollars, albeit one who operates from the other end of the innovation spectrum. When this prominent Nigerian billionaire realised that slowing the distribution of COVID-19 would involve shutting down all but the most essential business operations, a company-wide memo emerged forcing literally all but everyone without a foot in the ICU to keep coming to work.

Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft – Bill Gates’ two big business operations that dwarf those of his Nigerian friend several times over – went fully remote. Gates himself immediately focused his attention on deploying his resources to help fight the disease. His Nigerian friend who regularly sits on important panels with him at Davos discussing “Africa Rising” was only concerned with keeping production going. Presumably, production would still have a purpose when the consumers are dead and the economy is decimated.

While the Nigerian billionaire was doing his best Ebenezer Scrooge impression, a PRO of Zone 2 of the Nigerian Police Force was in London attending a high society birthday party in a high-risk country. In what came as a surprise to exactly nobody, it turned out that she and the other attendees were in fact exposed to infected individuals at the party. Upon returning home, this high ranking officer of the law ignored the instruction from the Federal Ministry of Health to self-isolate for 14 days and went straight back in to work – potentially exposing hundreds of her colleagues, their families and secondary contacts when called out on this shocking malfeasance by a social media user, the police PRO openly lied about her prior whereabouts and claimed: “It is on record that I was in my office on the 17th.” No matter that she herself had uploaded an Instagram live video and several images of herself in London – images that were hurriedly hidden after being called out; no matter that several soft-sell publications had specifically named her among the attendees at the party; no matter even that pictorial evidence of her presence at the party soon emerged – rules are for lesser beings you see.

In fact, prior to being called out for potentially being a COVID-19 superspreader, the police PRO was on her social media pages giving advice about preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

Not only were the NCDC’s rules exclusively meant for lesser beings, but apparently health advice was too.

She was, after all, the world’s first Schrödinger’s police officer – present both in Lagos and in London on March 17 until pictures and reports determined that she was actually in London. For the achievement of conquering the rules of the space-time continuum and solving a centuries-old quantum physics problem, spreading a deadly viral pathogen to dozens – potentially hundreds – of innocent Nigerians was a small price to pay.

While Schrödinger’s Olopa was busy putting Einstein to shame through simultaneous bilocation on two separate continents, dozens of parents at a nosebleed elite school from my childhood were also getting their own stunning COVID-19 performance-ready. Having recently returned from their travels and knowing that they were potentially exposed or even infected, they not only likewise refused to self-isolate, but also permitted the school to remain open until the Lagos State Government directed all schools to close. You know, because there is love in sharing. Or something.

Now, not only have several members of said parent body tested positive to COVID-19, but the potential statuses of the children, teachers, gardeners, kitchen staff, groundsmen and security staff who were also needlessly exposed remain unknown. Apparently COVID-19 was only supposed to infect Italians, Spaniards and Americans, not self-important upper-middle-class Nigerians and the schools their kids go to.

The coup de grace in this festival of bourgeoisie foolishness took place high up in the headquarters of a certain bank in Lagos, which sent round an internal memo last week with names of staff who were to proceed on self-isolation after having received their children from high risk countries over the preceding week and weekend. The memo came on Wednesday, April 1, after said individuals had gone to work and mingled with their colleagues for two entire days.

After being potentially exposed by their children, neither the higher-ups concerned nor the bank saw it fit to take immediate action. Instead, they waited inexplicably for 48 hours before taking action, by which time hundreds of colleagues might have already been infected, presumably, there is again love in sharing. Only after this happened did the bank finally allow its junior staff to work from home.

I wish I made these stories up, but they all happened.

The Nigerian Elite: Fatai in Versace

My parents raised me with the idea that to be privileged meant to be canny and to make smarter decisions than the Fatais of the world. By virtue of the information and resources you had access to, your actions were expected to be comparatively intelligent, savvy, considered, and always geared toward the long term and the bigger picture. If Fatai was a song, he would be a furious two and a half minute Zlatan noise fest that is forgotten within 6 months, while you the elite would be an intelligent, multi-layered 24-minute Fela number that gets its own musical 30 years later.

Now, however, I know for a fact that none of this is true. The stunningly stupid, irrational, barely believable actions I have repeatedly observed over the past couple of weeks betray the dismaying reality that most of the enlightenment, erudition or thinking ability that are ordinarily associated with wealthy and upper middle-class Nigerians are in fact just veneers.

The Nigerian elite as it turns out is just Fatai in expensive clothes. Take Fatai out of the gatehouse, add a few zeroes to his bank account balance, put some nice clothes on his back and there you have it – a Nigerian ‘elite’ is born. The barrier for entry is being trampled underfoot because the only criterion is money. Fatai and the billionaire think the same way. Fatai and the Police PRO think the same way. Fatai and the multimillionaire society school parents think the exact same way. Fatai and the highfalutin bankers only differ in their account balances.

Both Fatai and the Nigerian elite have the same feckless, insular, benighted, disgustingly self-centred and remarkably unintelligent approach to life. The same way Fatai sits in his tiny gatehouse and contentedly watches the world go by, the Nigerian elite ignores the access they have to information, choosing to act with the same infuriating lack of perspective that once saw their ancestors capture their neighbours and march them to ports for sale to Europeans, without giving a thought to how such a business could possibly scale and what the impact on their future would be.

When Fatai decides to woo the neighbourhood bread seller, he does not think about the important details. Questions like “Have I thought this through?” “Do I have a condom so as to avoid future complications?” “Is there any future in this dalliance?” and “Is this even worth it at all?” are lost in the haze of his horny tunnel vision. This is the same type of tunnel vision that afflicts the Nigerian billionaire who dares a deadly viral outbreak because presumably, in the event that his continued production aids its spread and it becomes a nationwide disaster, he will be able to sell his output to Nigerian corpses.

It is the tunnel vision that afflicts Schrödinger’s Olopa when she decides to visit a high-risk country because she just has to be at that party because whatever social capital she hopes to buy with her presence will be useful if she ends up infected with a deadly infectious disease. It is the tunnel vision of the returnees and those directly exposed to returning family members who go straight back to work or to drop off the kids at school on Monday morning. Just like Fatai furiously making love to Bilikisu in the gatehouse without a condom, life is all about the here and now.

The only difference is that Fatai is poor and they have some wealth – that’s it. This is not how elite formation is supposed to work. Money is certainly a factor in elite formation, but it is never supposed to be the sole deciding factor. Every successful society is led by cultural, political and economic elites who all embody some sort of code or group ideology. An ‘elite’ whose only animating ideology is “We do what we want, when we want, how we want, and we expect no consequences for our behaviour because we have some money,” is an elite practically begging to be ended by a black swan event like COVID-19.

Arguably, it is already happening in fact.

If you want to catch a glimpse of what your future holds if you choose to carry on being millionaire and billionaire Fatais instead of adapting and changing your behaviour, you could start with what the future did to the original Fatai. We ended up getting a video intercom buzzer system which immediately rendered his continued presence superfluous. He was out of a job within a month and I have not heard from him ever since. Life went on and the world passed him by.

That is exactly what will happen to you too.

BusinessDay

Three-quarters of Africans favour multiparty democracy. Whereas in rich countries the fashion is to lament democracy’s shortcomings, Africans want more of it. Their passion is born of experience. Many have endured one-party or military rule, and know that unaccountable rulers abuse. Hence the bravery of the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese who protested against the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir last year. After three decades of tyranny, plunder and economic mismanagement, they had had enough. What started as a rally against higher bread prices turned into a popular wave that forced the army to ditch the despot and agree to a transition to democracy.

A struggle is raging in sub-Saharan Africa. Most Africans, like people anywhere, want to choose their own rulers. A smaller but powerful group—autocrats and their supporters—is determined to thwart them. Over the past 30 years democracy has gained ground in Africa. During the cold war, peaceful changes of government at the ballot box were almost unheard of, because of Soviet and American support for friendly tyrants. After 1990 nearly every African country held elections. But in the past decade democrats have been pushed back again. Political freedom has shrunk in Africa since 2008, according to Freedom House, a watchdog. Crooked ruling parties have found myriad ways to nobble opponents and make elections unfair. The share of Africans who report that they are free to say what they think fell from 79% to 70% in 2008-18. Of the 21 countries that switched off the internet last year, 12 were African. The same number have passed laws making it harder for ngos to operate.

Several trends favour the autocrats. China offers cash for roads and bridges with no pesky questions about governance. The current White House has no interest in promoting democracy. And new surveillance technologies let autocrats snoop inside dissidents’ phones, making it easier to harass them.

However, Africa’s democratic backsliding should be seen in context. It is smaller in scale than the advances of the 1990s and early 2000s—a case of three steps forward and one step back. And the forces that favour democracy remain strong.

One is urbanisation. The share of sub-Saharan Africans who live in cities has doubled since 1975, to 40%, and continues to rise. City folk are younger, better educated and harder to intimidate than their rural cousins. In the countryside ruling-party thugs can chivvy whole villages to the polls and threaten to take away their food aid if they back the opposition. In cities, by contrast, dissidents can more easily organise. Autocrats try to suppress urban turnout at elections, but this often causes anger to spill onto the streets. African political protests are more than three times as common as they were in 2012, by one estimate, and last much longer. Soldiers can disperse any crowd, but sometimes refuse to shoot. Some even switch sides and join the protesters, as at a crucial point in Sudan’s uprising last year.

Another force is Africans’ desire to build institutions to hold the mighty to account. These include a probing press and vigorous ngos: think of the tireless reporters who exposed Angola’s kleptocracy, or Catholics who proved Congo’s election was stolen. They include assertive courts: think of the judges who overturned rigged elections in Kenya in 2017 and Malawi in February. They include legislatures, which are not as toothless as is often supposed. Most African presidents are now subject to term limits, which are more than twice as likely to be honoured as broken. And they include reformers within ruling parties. The big struggle in South Africa is between the pro- and anti-corruption factions of the ruling African National Congress; the anti-theft wing narrowly regained the upper hand in 2017.

Some say that an obsession with democracy is misguided, that China proves smart autocracy is better at promoting economic growth. Yet studies show an association between democracy and higher growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Other research suggests that the more democratic a country is, the more likely it is to invest in education and health. Strongmen with spreadsheets can foster development for a time. But democracy does it better. And the moral argument for it is even stronger.

Africa’s battle for democracy will be won or lost by Africans themselves. Still, the rest of the world can and should choose a side. The West has been hopelessly inconsistent, one minute lambasting Zimbabwe for ballot-rigging, the next minute endorsing the same crime in Congo. Better to offer steadier and more united support for democracy. Outsiders should not only reject sham elections but also be more outspoken in the period between votes. Diplomacy is often about timing. Outside help is most useful when a political stand-off could go either way (as when Gambia’s president tried to hang on despite losing an election, but was ejected by the threat of force from neighbouring countries) or when a new, reformist regime is finding its feet (as in Ethiopia today). To know when to intervene, countries need diplomats on the ground, and governments back home that listen to them. President Donald Trump’s gutting of the State Department has not helped.

Support for elections should be more creative. Rather than merely watching what happens on polling day, donors should back local ngos that can spot intimidation months in advance; digital analysts who can detect disinformation; and parallel voter tabulations against which official results can be checked.

Most important, outsiders should support institution-building. This is slow and thankless. The results are less visible than China’s railways and dams. Yet it is essential. Prosecutors, legislators and journalists all need training; some also need cash to keep the lights on. African whistle-blowers are harder to ignore when outsiders trumpet their findings. It would be wrong for outsiders to fund opposition parties. But championing financial liberalisation can make for more competitive politics, especially in countries where state-run banks deprive opposition parties of credit, thus making it hard to fund campaigns.

Africa matters. By 2060 it will have twice as many people as China. Outsiders should care whether such a giant neighbour is prosperous and peaceful. Democracy cannot guarantee that, but its absence makes poverty and disorder more likely.

The Economist

Sometimes, it's not what people say about your business that matters but how they say it. And then how you react.

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. 

I've met quite a few Harvard graduates over the years.

I've heard it said they can be a touch self-regarding. My own impression is that some, at least, can instinctively regard others with a casual disdain.

No, of course I'm not specifically referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg here. He didn't graduate.

A recent conversation with a Harvard graduate, however, drew me to a story about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Bezos went to lowly Princeton. In 1997, however, he gave a little talk to some Harvard graduate business students about his online store known as Amazon.

As Brad Stone's book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazonrelates, the large-brained students began to chat among themselves as if Bezos weren't there.

Then, one of the fine Harvardians told Bezos: 

You seem like a really nice guy, so don't take this the wrong way, but you really need to sell to Barnes & Noble and get out now.

Naturally, many will chuckle at the realization that Amazon's position is a touch more secure than Barnes & Noble's these days.

But there's one profound lesson here and one that's truly glorious.

When you have a business based on a vision of the future, rather than the present, understand that the majority of your critics will likely be looking from the perspective of the present.

They see now and they have a certain belief how now will influence the future.

Sometimes, though, now will be rendered swiftly irrelevant by a fast-moving future. And the future we're currently living in has moved at far too fast a pace for many people's liking.

Ignore, then -- as Bezos surely did -- anyone who criticizes your business using a framework of the right now. (Barnes & Noble is much bigger, so duh...)

Here's the more glorious lesson. It comes from the words this graduate student used: 

You seem like a really nice guy, so don't take this the wrong way...

If a potential investor -- or even a self-confident critic -- patronizes you by telling you that you seem like a nice guy/woman/person, understand that they are piffleheads. And, preferably, avoid them in the future.

It's easy to feel hurt by such words. But they say everything about the speaker and nothing about you.

The speaker is merely judging you to be inferior and crudely attempting to let you down "gently." They're not giving you anything useful. And by adding "don't take this the wrong way," they're merely telling you how they want you to react -- passively.

Of course, many have debated whether Bezos is, indeed, a really nice guy. He can often seem like a touchingly heartless, ruthless billionaire.

I suspect, though, that in the pre-muscular days of 1997, he was so nerdy that he may not have dwelled too long on the Harvard student's bloviation. That was the year Amazon went public, so Bezos was likely busy preparing investors for prolonged losses.

No, not everyone will end up being Jeff Bezos. I wonder, though, whether he ever pauses to think what became of that graduate student.

What are the chances he's currently working for, I don't know, a bank? And what are the chances he seems like a really nice guy?

Inc

In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff - and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he's still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off.

Dan Price was hiking with his friend Valerie in the Cascade mountains that loom majestically over Seattle, when he had an uncomfortable revelation.

As they walked, she told him that her life was in chaos, that her landlord had put her monthly rent up by $200 and she was struggling to pay her bills.

It made Price angry. Valerie, who he had once dated, had served for 11 years in the military, doing two tours in Iraq, and was now working 50 hours a week in two jobs to make ends meet.

"She is somebody for whom service, honour and hard work just defines who she is as a person," he says.

Even though she was earning around $40,000 a year, in Seattle that wasn't enough to afford a decent home. He was angry that the world had become such an unequal place. And suddenly it struck him that he was part of the problem.

At 31, Price was a millionaire. His company, Gravity Payments, which he set up in his teens, had about 2,000 customers and an estimated worth of millions of dollars. Though he was earning $1.1m a year, Valerie brought home to him that a lot of his staff must be struggling - and he decided to change that.

Raised in deeply Christian, rural Idaho, Dan Price is upbeat and positive, generous in his praise of others and impeccably polite, but he has become a crusader against inequality in the US.

"People are starving or being laid off or being taken advantage of, so that somebody can have a penthouse at the top of a tower in New York with gold chairs.

"We're glorifying greed all the time as a society, in our culture. And, you know, the Forbes list is the worst example - 'Bill Gates has passed Jeff Bezos as the richest man.' Who cares!?"

Before 1995 the poorest half of the population of the United States earned a greater share of national wealth than the richest 1%, he points out. But that year the tables turned - the top 1% earned more than the bottom 50%. And the gap is continuing to widen.

In 1965, CEOs in the US earned 20 times more than the average worker but by 2015 it had risen to 300 times (in the UK, the bosses of FTSE 100 companies now earn 117 times the salary of their average worker).

Breathing in the crisp mountain air as he hiked with Valerie, Price had an idea. He had read a study by the Nobel prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, looking at how much money an American needs to be happy. He immediately promised Valerie he would significantly raise the minimum salary at Gravity.

After crunching the numbers, he arrived at the figure of $70,000. He realised that he would not only have to slash his salary, but also mortgage his two houses and give up his stocks and savings. He gathered his staff together and gave them the news.

He'd expected scenes of celebration, but at first the announcement floated down upon the room in something of an anti-climax, Price says. He had to repeat himself before the enormity of what was happening landed.

Five years later, Dan laughs about the fact that he missed a key point in the Princeton professors' research. The amount they estimated people need to be happy was $75,000.

Still, a third of those working at the company would have their salaries doubled immediately.

Since then, Gravity has transformed.

The headcount has doubled and the value of payments that the company processes has gone from $3.8bn a year to $10.2bn.

But there are other metrics that Price is more proud of.

"Before the $70,000 minimum wage, we were having between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team," he says.

"And since the announcement - and it's been only about four-and-a-half years - we've had more than 40 babies."

More than 10% of the company have been able to buy their own home, in one of the US's most expensive cities for renters. Before the figure was less than 1%.

"There was a little bit of concern amongst pontificators out there that people would squander any gains that they would have. And we've really seen the opposite," Price says.

The amount of money that employees are voluntarily putting into their own pension funds has more than doubled and 70% of employees say they've paid off debt.

But Price did get a lot of flak. Along with hundreds of letters of support, and magazine covers labelling him "America's best boss", many of Gravity's own customers wrote handwritten letters objecting to what they saw as a political statement.

At the time, Seattle was debating an increase to the minimum wage to $15, making it the highest in the US at the time. Small business owners were fighting it, claiming they would go out of business.

The right-wing radio pundit, Rush Limbaugh, whom Price had listened to every day in his childhood, called him a communist.

"I hope this company is a case study in MBA programmes on how socialism does not work, because it's going to fail," he said.

Two senior Gravity employees also resigned in protest. They weren't happy that the salaries of junior staff had jumped overnight, and argued that it would make them lazy, and the company uncompetitive.

This hasn't happened.

Rosita Barlow, director of sales at Gravity, says that since salaries were raised junior colleagues have been pulling more weight.

"When money is not at the forefront of your mind when you're doing your job, it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you," she says.

Senior staff have found their workload reduced. They're under less pressure and can do things like take all of the holiday leave to which they are entitled.

Price tells the story about one staff member who works in Gravity's call centre.

"He was commuting over an hour and a half a day," he says. "He was worried that during his commute he was going to blow out a tyre and not have enough money to fix that tyre. He was stressing about it every day."

When his salary was raised to $70,000 this man moved closer to the office, now he spends more money on his health, he exercises every day and eats more healthily.

"We had another gentleman on a similar team and he literally lost more than 50lb (22kg)," he says. Others report spending more time with their families or helping their parents pay off debt.

"We saw, every day, the effects of giving somebody freedom," Price says.

He thinks it is why Gravity is making more money than ever.

Raising salaries didn't change people's motivation - he says staff were already motivated to work hard - but it increased what he calls their capability.

"You're not thinking I have to go to work because I have to make money," Rosita Barlow agrees. "Now it's become focused on 'How do I do good work?'"

Barlow has been with Gravity since the early days and knows that Price wasn't always so generous.

He acknowledges himself that there was a time in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when he was obsessed with saving money.

The downturn in the US economy decimated Gravity's customer base and its income fell by 20%. Business logic would have dictated letting go about 12 of the company's 35 staff, but instead Price focused on cutting costs.

After five tense months, the company started turning a profit again, but Price was profoundly spooked, and kept salaries low.

At this time Rosita Barlow was experiencing her own financial problems, and secretly working at McDonald's outside work hours. When McDonald's offered her a promotion, she accidentally left a training manual on her desk at Gravity, and someone spotted it.

Her bosses called her in for a meeting.

"They sat me down and my immediate reaction was to cry," Barlow says. She thought she was being fired.

Instead they told her to figure out how much money she'd need to stay on at the company and they raised her salary to $40,000.

"I was very impressed and proud of her and mad at myself," Price says.

It took him a few more years to grasp the scale of the problem among his staff.

"Most were too intimidated to come to me and tell me how a lack of pay was hurting them," he says.

Before 2015, he had already begun giving employees 20% annual pay rises. But it was his conversation with Valerie that convinced him to go further.

Price had hoped that Gravity's example would lead to far-reaching changes in US business. He's deeply disappointed and sad that this hasn't happened.

Some did follow suit, PharmaLogics in Boston raised their minimum salary to $50,000, and Rented.com in Atlanta raised theirs too. He believes that, by means of online lobbying, he also influenced Amazon's decisions to raise their minimum wage.

But he had hoped for widespread, structural change.

"Boy, was I wrong," he says. "I've really failed in that regard. And it's changed my perspective on things because I really believed that through the actions that I did and that other people could do, that we could turn the tide on runaway income inequality."

The change has had a profound effect on Price and his lifestyle.

Before taking a pay cut, Price was the cliché of a young white tech millionaire. He lived in a beautiful house overlooking Seattle's Puget Sound, he drank champagne in expensive restaurants.

Afterwards, he rented his house out on Airbnb to help stay afloat.

A group of employees became sick of watching him turn up at work in a 12-year-old Audi and secretly clubbed together to buy him a Tesla.

A film the company posted on YouTube follows one of the group, Alyssa O'Neal, as she schemes with her colleagues to surprise him with the car.

"I feel like this is the ultimate way to say thank you for all the sacrifices he's made and any of the negative stuff he's had to deal with," she says.

Price then walks out of the office into the car park, sees the car, and starts crying.

Five years later, Price is still on Gravity's minimum salary. He says he's more fulfilled than he ever was when he was earning millions though it's not all easy.

"There's tests every day," he says.

"I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg and I have dark moments where I think, 'I want to be just as rich as Mark Zuckerberg and I want to compete with him to be on the Forbes list. And I want to be on the cover of Time magazine, making lots of money.' All these greedy things are tempting."

"It's not like it's easy to just turn down. But my life is so much better."

BBC

I once escorted a friend to our children’s school Accounts office to help plead for more time to pay her children’s school fees.

My friend was a single parent, her ex-husband would not pay school fees but would buy the children expensive stuff like phones, gadgets etc so he could be seen as a good daddy whilst shirking his responsibilities.

Anyways, back to my story, The Accountant was apologetic and told us that he couldn’t do much as the school was servicing a huge loan and many parents were owing. In confidence, he told us that the graduating set of that year owed over N20 Million in fees. I was shocked because I knew most of the parents of the children in that class and they were high fliers, rode expensive cars, went on exotic holidays, had the best phones and gadgets. They also ensured that their children got the latest games, phones etc.

I was upset because here I was striving to pay fees on time, at the same time envious of these same set of parents not knowing that they were more interested in making social statements than ensuring that their children’s education was priority. 

There is a lot of “pepper dem “going on in our society and I am afraid it is reaching ludicrous heights. We have 8 year olds asking their friends- when you go into a plane do you turn left or right? Left being 1st or business class and right being Economy.

We have young children telling their peers about houses bought in their names, how much their fathers or mothers earn. We have children bringing huge sums of money to school, all decked up in designer wears and carrying designer bags. Children being introduced to skin whitening products from primary school, telling teachers they don’t need to read much because they will marry rich or already have monies in Trust Funds set up in their names. Children insisting on being ferried to and fro school by particular models of cars. 

I read an article recently written by a young man who went to an elitist school and unknown to him, everyone thought he was the poorest child in school (by the school standards) because his school uniform and stationary were purchased in a shop in Lagos, not at Marks and Spencer or WHS ‘in the abroad’, his father picked him up with an old car- a 1989 Peugeot 504 whilst other children were picked in Prado jeeps and SUVs.  It wasn’t until a close friend of his visited him at home that the news that he wasn’t poor made the rounds. 

A lot of schools especially the elite ones have had to cancel party packs from being shared in school because they contained everything including the proverbial kitchen sink and parents were going to ridiculous lengths just to better the other.

It’s the same scenario we are seeing at weddings. The proposals are becoming silly, the comical photo shoots, the astronomically expensive asoebi. Everything is done extravagantly mostly with the motive to out-do the last social gathering and trend on social media.

We have people who grew up in Yaba, Surulere, Ebute Metta telling you with glee that they don’t “do bridges” forgetting that the international airport is on the mainland.

Some years back, I was in a shop on the island looking at curtains for my home and was approached by another lady in the shop, a friend of the owner who enquired as to who was making my furniture for me. When I told her I lived in Ikeja, she told me that she wouldn’t be able to do me the favor of making my furniture as she lived on the island and only worked in VGC/ LEKKI. I smiled and told her that I already had someone making my furniture.

At that time, I lived in GRA Ikeja where one plot of land was the price of 3 plots in VGC and 2 plots in Lekki. 

This peer pressure cuts through so many sectors. We are sending children to secondary school at ages 8, University at ages 14, mostly because our friends are doing the same, forgetting that every child is different. Some can handle it but most can’t and also, that there is a reason why educators advocate that children enter into classes at certain ages.

Both my children spent a gap year at home when they finished secondary school because we wanted them to be 18 years before they went into university (I had just turned 15 when I went to Uni and as far as I am concerned, it didn’t help me at all, I may have been book smart but not emotionally ready for adult life so it was no huge surprise to me that I had an extra year in school).

Of course our children grumbled and complained about having to stay at home whilst their friends were already at university and how they would be in lower classes than their mates but we kept our resolve and kept them occupied by learning different skills, ensuring they became  street smart as they learnt how to go out by themselves in public transport (danfo not Uber ) and gave them time to bond well and relax from academics before they began the journey to proper adulthood. 

We parents are sending the wrong signals to our children that appearances matter a lot and the end justifies the means but are we thinking circumspectly? 

Do we know the consequences of the seeds we are sowing? 

We are seeing children that think their life is over because at age 25 or even 30 they don’t have the kind of cars or material things that their mates have, children that are not satisfied or content with their lives but want to be and look like others. Children that are killing themselves because they don’t fit into their supposed social groups. The most devastating effect of peer pressure is that it breeds discontent and our children are beginning to look at their lives as being inferior when compared with their mates. This results in them always wanting more without enjoying what they have, as Nothing will ever be good. 

I know some people will be quick to defend parents especially those who have the money to meet their children’s needs and I agree, if you can afford it please indulge.

My problem, however, is with those who cannot afford it and those who can afford it but do it for the wrong motives. The Yorubas call them “ Kari mii “ they must see me. It’s the motive that breeds the peer pressure, the feeling that they must know that I have arrived – “I will show them”. “My money has come”. 

It is true that children suffer and will be subject to pressure from their peers, that’s the way of the world and it’s a rite of passage, I have, however, come to the conclusion that we parents also suffer in no small measure from peer pressure and we tend to pass our insecurities to our children. The tendency to always compare our children with others, to over compensate, to always run things by our friends, to go against our values and beliefs because our friends, religious heads etc are doing the same are subtle ways that show how affected we are by the opinions of others. 

Peer pressure has both good and bad effects and some of our decisions will be affected by our peers, I however hope that the motives for our actions as parents will be based on our beliefs and values and no one else’s. 

Finally, I ask the question, are you consciously or unconsciously a member of the pepper dem gang?

Your boss pays you N30,000 per month.

Now let's assume that you decided to save all without touching a dime, it would take you 36 months to make N1million.

(Did I hear you say 3years?)

Absolutely!

On the other hand, if you can convince an organisation like Dangote Group to print and supply 5000 umbrellas to them (to be used as souvenirs) and you make just N200 profit per umbrella, in just one day you must have made N1million.

What about becoming a billionaire, that is where it gets crazy!

Now let's increase your pay to N1,000,000 per month and you decide to save all without touching a dime. In a year, you must have saved N12million. It would take about 84years before you can make N1billion. (Please subtract your current age).

On the other hand, Nigeria has a population of about 200 million people, If you can supply salt to just 12million people once in a month and you make just N200 from each person supplied, in one year, you must have made N2.9billion.

This shows that to become rich, you have to stop talking to bosses and start talking to clients.

HARD ANALYSIS:

Divide your SALARY by 30 days and see what you get (i.e. the number of days in a month and see the funny thing about your salary plan)

FOR EXAMPLE

(1) An average level-12 worker in the state government civil service earns NGN 60,000.

**** And this translates to NGN 60,000÷30= NGN 2,000 every day. This is LESS THAN the amount made daily by an AVERAGE HAWKER in the city.

(2) A freshly EMPLOYED GRADUATE BANKER in most NIGERIAN BANKS earns an average of NGN120,000 monthly.

So everyday, you get NGN120,000÷30= NGN4,000 as the daily value for your work-life. By implication, this is LESS THAN the amount earned DAILY by an AVERAGE DRIVER in d city and in some villages.....

(3) If you are a FRESH GRADUATE EMPLOYEE in some oil companies, you earn an average of NGN300,000 monthly. So in a day your WORK-VALUE is NGN300,000 ÷ 30= NGN10,000

**** This is LESS THAN the daily amount earned by an IRRIGATION FARMER supplying vegetables to Lagos MARKETS, a TIPPER CAR DRIVER supplying sand for three BLOCK INDUSTRIES and CONSTRUCTION SITES just 3 times a day and DRIVERS of DANGOTE TRUCKS who have bought off the trucks at scrap value and vare using them to convey products between villages and the cities for just five business owners.

HOPE BY NOW, IT IS SINKING IN, RIGHT?

And when there is an ISSUE in the FAMILY that requires FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE, the DRIVERS, HAWKERS and the rest are looking up to you with a WHITE COLLAR JOB.

(4) If you are an NYSC MEMBER, you DON'T need to be told that:

*****NGN19,800÷30 = NGN 660 is your worth on a daily basis.

I hope you know that PURE WATER SELLERS who own a shop, a pepper soup joint and a small TOYOTA COROLLA car to distribute pure water to five restaurants earn MORE THAN you and WHEEL-BARROW PUSHERS working on contract for three warehouses probably make MORE MONEY than you EACH DAY

Wake up and be more productive. We should be more proactive, create room for more income and strive to diversify our streams of income.

The earlier you wake up and smell the coffee, the better for you.

Someone right now will say this analysis is too ideal to be true but take your time and do it, you will grasp the crux!!!

STOP waiting for the Government to feed you, feed yourself and help the Government feed others. That is where we are in this age.

I wish you an Entrepreneurial mindset.

Think ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

Dream Big 2020 must be good.

Build Your future!

* Author Unknown 

Angry citizens have swelled the streets of cities across the globe this year, pushing back against a disparate range of policies but often expressing a common grievance -- the establishment's failure to heed their demands for a more equitable future.

While street protests are nothing new, experts say the intense 2019 flare-ups reflect a growing sentiment that the social contract between governments and citizens has broken down, with voters paying the price but unable to affect meaningful change.

"What unites the protests is that all are responding to a sense of exclusion, pessimism about the future, and a feeling of having lost control to unaccountable elites," said Jake Werner, a historian at the University of Chicago.

The financial crisis of 2007-08 in particular, he said, exposed systemic failings and induced years of austerity and insecurity for millions of people.

It also produced an acute sense of unfairness, in particular among young people who see their prospects of earning a decent living slipping away with every price hike or benefit cut.

"What was previously experienced as proper or natural is now increasingly experienced as a form of domination and injustice," Werner told AFP.

As a result, it often takes only a small move to spark a protest -- in Chile it was a metro ticket increase, in Iran and France it was higher fuel costs -- that balloons into a wider revolt demanding better living standards.

Elsewhere, like in Hong Kong and Algeria, calls for greater political freedom have become a potent rallying force.

"The belief in democracy's capacity to change people's lives is undoubtedly eroding," said Erik Neveu, a sociologist at the Sciences Po political science university in Rennes, western France.

'Rejection of neo-liberalism' 

For Olivier Fillieule, a specialist in social movements at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, this year's protests built on the same dynamics which produced movements as diverse as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, or the Russian opposition to President Vladimir Putin.

"Don't forget that Time magazine named 'the Protester' its person of the year in 2011," Fillieule said.

"The rejection of neo-liberalism is the main driver of most of these movements," he said, noting that "the state's abdication of some of its responsibilities leaves people alone against the market."

The impression that big companies and the wealthy seem to get a free pass -- despite calls to force multinationals to pay more taxes -- only further inflames the sense that the game is rigged.

"Society is fed up with paying and paying. They've squeezed us like a lemon," said Marcela Paz, a 51-year-old teacher, during a protest in Santiago, Chile, in October.

And if the traditional rungs for climbing the social ladder are out of reach, experts say more people will feel that protests, and potentially violence, are the only recourse.

In France, for example, the "yellow vest" anger over high costs of living quickly spiralled into rioting and clashes with police -- and eventually forced the government to pledge billions of euros in tax cuts and wage boosts.

Then in December French unions backed by the "yellow vests" called a nationwide strike to protest against pension reforms, which brought the country to a virtual standstill for several days.

'Unaccountable' 

Experts say the multitude of long-running protests, some of which have carried on for weeks or even months at a time, could provide mutual energy while also inspiring new movements.

"It is clear that protests and other forms of movement activity have been very much on the rise in recent years, and perhaps this year in particular," said Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University in California.

And reflecting the distrust of top-down democracy, most movements have rejected leadership, embracing instead a "horizontal" organisation facilitated by social media or as in Hong Kong by secure message apps.

In some countries like Iran and Egypt, the governments have tried to curtain the social movements by cutting off the internet, but without much success in the long term.

These are not only "Facebook revolutions", says Geoffrey Pleyers, a sociology professor in Belgium and France. These are profound movements where young people often take the lead, but then become intergenerational, he adds.

The "horizontal" organisation makes it harder for authorities to single out someone to negotiate with, or to arrest, in a bid to quell protesters' anger.

"This demand of dignity is central in the movement since 2011," Fillieule said. 

"The question of structuring a movement, and how it will be represented, comes second." 

Even if governments give in to certain demands, they risk facing more protests unless they address the anger that sent people to the streets in the first place.

"It's not that the nature of authority changed -- elites are just as unaccountable today as they were ten years ago," Werner said.

"What changed is that elite unaccountability has been exposed, because popular forces are no longer aligned with elites as they once were."

Compiled by Olalekan Adeleye

AFP

Democratic freedom is shrinking in Nigeria, a global index report has stated.

The report was published by CIVICUS, a coalition of civil society groups.

According to the report, Nigeria has slipped from being an “obstructed” nation in 2018 to a “repressed” nation — the second worst rating a country can have — this year.

It is now ranked among 38 other countries in the same category, like Madagascar, India, Pakistan, Brunei, Iraq and Turkey.

The term “repressed” means that democratic freedoms such as the freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association are significantly constrained in Nigeria, Matthew Reading-Smith, Communications Coordinator of CIVICUS, said in a statement.

The research sourced its data from 536 civic space updates from October 1, 2018 to November 11, 2019, across 196 countries.

Each country’s civic space is rated in one of five categories – open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, or closed – based on a methodology that combines several sources of data on the freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression, the report reads.

The report, titled People Power Under Attack 2019, attributed Nigeria’s latest ranking to government’s continuous clampdown on journalists, activists, its intolerance to dissent and opposition, and renewed drive to regulate the social media by the National Assembly.

Armed with the Cybercrime Act and Terrorism (Prevention) (Amendment) Act 2013, both federal and state authorities have incarcerated Nigerian citizens for series of ridiculous reason as “insulting the president”.

Mr Jones Abiri, a journalist who has been in and out of prison, was first held without trial for 2 years until finally granted bail in October this year on the charges of terrorism, sabotage and cybercrime.

Mr Omoyele Sowore, organiser of the #RevolutionNow protests and publisher of the online media outlet, Sahara Reporters, alongside Mr Olawale Bakare, was also arrested for planning protests to call for good governance in the country. Court orders to release him were ignored by the authorities.

Citizens who in defiance carried on with the protests were met with force by State Security Service, a security outfit directly under the presidency.

Reading-Smith said the CIVICUS Monitor is concerned about the disruption of protests and the detention of protest leaders, attacks on journalists, and the use of restrictive laws to stifle dissent and opposition.

“The Monitor is also concerned by the Nigerian government’s proposed use of restrictive legislation to muzzle opposition,” he said, adding, “The Senate is currently considering ‘The Protection from Internet Falsehood and Manipulation Bill’, which would make statements on social media which may ‘diminish public confidence’ in the government punishable by a fine and/or three year prison sentence. If passed, this law would allow the authorities to order a shutdown of internet access and social media.”

Alluding to this fear, censorship was found to be the second most common violation found in Africa, after protest disruption.

“This is reflected in places like Sudan, Guinea and Zimbabwe, where mass protests in 2019 were met with excessive use of force,” the report notes.

The report found censorship, protester’s detainment, harassment, restrictive law, intimidation to be the top five civic violations across the world. Others are attack on journalists, protest disruption, detention of journalists, use of excessive force and criminal defamation.

PT

This is confession time: My pessimism about Nigeria is as huge as its expansive landscape. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I believed that the beautiful Nigerian was either not yet born, born and died prematurely or will never be born at all. My experiential encounters with the Nigerian did not help matters. You meet countrymen who give you the impression that you could not find a good man in Nigeria. In virtually all sectors of the economy, distressing news is the order of the day. The politician is a mess, the journalist is a mess, the banker is a mess, the lecturer is a mess, the pastor is a mess, the Imam is a mess; and so on and so ad infinitum. So where is the good Nigerian? Is he buried in the womb of time or is he yet to unfurl?

This acute pessimism that there was ever a good man to be found in this landscape was reflective in virtually all my essays. In a discourse with a friend who is a professor of political science a few weeks ago, he said that, as messed up as Nigeria is, she could not be isolated from global socio-historical trend; that there was always a spark that would ignite redemption; that the very sparse good persons in Nigeria could be the sparkle for redemption. I didn’t believe him a jot. Wherever I went, I crusaded the barrenness of redemptive possibility for Nigeria. An occurrence that tinkered with this narrative happened a few days. I will dwell on it presently.

I carried this crusade even outside this shore. My refrain was, Nigeria is a messed up country. Exactly eight days ago, my friend and host in Atlanta, Georgia, the very amiable Romanus Agbojeyin and I had gone to Alabama. We had been driven by a fellow Nigerian who had been residing in the country for almost three decades now. Sashed by the cold weather, in contrast to the very clement weather in our own country, the man kept asking me what was the way out of the Nigerian mess. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country, I refrained repeatedly. 

We had gone inside one village in Alabama called Cragford. Four of them had paid for a cow and got a white farmer to kill it, skewer the body into pieces and share the meat into four equal places. The Nigerians had paid about $900 for the cow. I saw an ordered society of immense proportion. Good network of roads, water and electricity, even in the villages, a contented people and a society that brooks no compromise of its laws. The white farmer, with equipment on the farm, just brought out the cow, shot it, smoked out the furs, washed it, cut the entrails and finished the whole exercise in about an hour. His children and even their wives live on the farm. They are contented. Why can’t Nigerians also have this level of contentment?, my friends asked. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country, I replied.

The friend of mine who had spent decades in America must have regretted meeting me. We departed with me sowing a quantum of sour grapes into the vineyard of his mind. He wanted to bring some telecommunication innovations into Nigeria, he said. He is engrafted in the process and is known for his expertise, he told me. I laughed rambunctiously. Can you pay bribes to government rats? Can you put up with the sabotage of the Nigerian, your proposed workers and all that? Are you ready, even for the treachery of your family members? I kept on quipping. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country, I told him. No one will tell you by the time you will scamper out of Nigeria.

Great interlocutor that this friend of mine was, he took me on a long-winding journey into the story of America; how the country that is now known as God’s own country was, some ages ago, a more messed up country than Nigeria. Today, America is now the place of refuge for millions of people who had a history of greater order than her. He told me how, as Parmenides, the Greek philosopher said, that the only constant thing is change and how you cannot step your feet into the same moving water twice. That is America. Our country defies all indices of socio-political analyses, I interjected. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country.  

So I came back home. Unfortunately for me, it was a very rough journey. The tempest and turmoil in the air was extremely troubling. The turbulence that pockmarked three of the four flights I made on the journey had succeeded in boring a very huge hole of phobia into my heart. So, my next journey to Abuja, three days after my arrival, I decided to undertake by road. I didn’t mind the about ten hours of travel. It was better than the cataclysmic prospect of being thrown into the Atlantic Ocean and being feasted upon by some audacious sharks and whales. I also chose to do the trip by public transport, tucked inside a vehicle that mirrored us as a people.

Inside the bus, you could hear tales of Nigerians’ encounters with the frustrations of the system and how frustrated they are. Nigerians also wished for a good country that would cater for them; that they would manifest their innate patriotisms for. Long journey bus travels are veritable masses’ own parliament. They upbraid their leaders in the parliament, of course, leaving themselves out of the blame for the mess that hangs shamefully on the neck of Nigeria. They defend their talakawa folks, mock leaders who are “stealing our money” and curse them even. If the parliament is lucky to have a vociferous commuter, he instantly assumes the role of a Speaker of the Parliament. In that instance, the parliamentary procedure would be more interesting. Within this space, tiffs do occur too. Why is that man refusing to shift? Does he think he owns this place? If he was rich as he pretends, why is he here inside a public transport with us? They shouted at one another.

The second day, I went about my businesses in the Federal Capital Territory. As usual, in my mind, I began a wholesale critique of the FCT. Fake capital, I said. This is not Nigeria; this is a made-up imagery of Nigeria. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country. Abuja pretends as if Nigeria was well, I soliloquized. How would a first-time guest of Nigeria who lands in Abuja not believe that this country was hale and hearty, whereas she stomachs within her divisiveness, mutual hatred and distrust, slums, beggars, acute poverty and all that?, I asked. I was disdainful of all the skyscrapers, the aesthetic pretention of the FCT. This was a needless fabrication!

From Bwari where I had gone to prosecute my assignment, I took a cab to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Gigantic building, beautiful and befitting of the Nigerian judiciary, I concluded. Finishing with the assignment, I stepped out of the judicial edifice and hopped into a cab. He couldn’t take me to Bwari straight, the cabby said. So he took me to a motor park at NICON Junction area.  I hopped out and joined another vehicle that was proposed to take me to Bwari. That was where I found out I was in a hot soup. My mobile phone, my totality, which contained, literally my all – was missing! I searched everywhere. No dice. I jumped out and frenetically ransacked the park for the cab driver. He had dissolved into thin air, I concluded.Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country!, my inner instinct told me.

After the dogo turenchi of my inner being, reality dawned on me. Then I began to sweat profusely. My enemies had got me, I immediately shouted. How do I begin to gather all that I had on the phone… the interviews for my upcoming book, and all that? Unfortunately for me, I had earlier switched off the phone due to its dwindling battery power. So, crestfallen, believing that I had been given the bitter end of the cigarette to suck, I went back to Gwari, concluded my assignment and went back to my hotel. I was calling the number repeatedly. Still, no dice. I slept and had a nightmare. It was as if I had lost my life.

The next day was a Friday. By that time, I had called my lost number for about fifty times. It kept on echoing that refrain, “Sorry, the number you have called is switched off.” At each refrain, a bead of sweats cascaded from my brows, hit the bridge of my nose and dejectedly landed on the floor. By about noon, I had for that day called my number about twenty times. So, this particular call came to my second mobile phone. It was from a friend of mine. He had called my number and the person on the other end, a Hausa man’s voice, was saying some things he couldn’t decipher. His alarm, he confessed to me later, was that “our friends” had invited me to their office for a chat. Not yet, I told him. So I jumped off where I sat and called the number. Truly, the voice was Hausa. I told him that I owned the phone and that I would want to retrieve it. He said I should come to the NICON junction area, the car park beside it. I drove with a friend to the park and met him. Lo and behold, my phone was waiting for me. He was all laughter as he read anxiety on my face. I hugged him.   

At that point, a very cheeky voice from within me crept out. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country? It asked in a very condescending manner. Stupid little thought, get thee behind me! I thundered. Forget, Nigeria is a messed up country? it said again impudently. Then, I got really sobered, clad by a sobriety that a little rascal gets when his mother finds out he had contracted a venereal disease. The Nigeria where this young man lives cannot be a totally messed up country, a counter voice replied the impudent little voice. And the man who rescued me from my pangs was Hausa, not Yoruba, not Igbo. Was the equation saying anything about ethnic tolerance? The young man could have fled with my life, the phone. He stood the chance of selling the mobile phone for an amount he could not make from his cab driving job, in more than a month of toil. He was miserably clad, with a pair of semi-bathroom slippers. He wasn’t literate. I doubted if he had taken his breakfast. I looked at him with unbelievable wonderment, as if he was a cow blowing saxophone. The one that got me bewildered most was that he refused to collect my appreciation token. He merely saw me off to the car and waved me bye.

As I was being driven out of the FCT, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. How could I write Nigeria off this unconscionably? How could I fling the blanket on Nigeria this unfeelingly? If Nigeria was thoroughly and totally messed up as I refrained, would I have found my precious mobile phone again? In the Rwanda which I, in a previous installment, shouted its praises to high heavens, didn’t I lose my money therein and never found it again?

“Why can’t you give Nigeria a second chance?” the stubborn little thought wangled its way into my mind again; this time, the temerity of its entrance into my consciousness became embarrassing. And it has stubbornly barged into my mind like a mouse strolls on and off into the debris container, ever since.    

By last week it was undeniable: 2019 has become the year of the street protester. As hundreds of thousands marched in Hong Kong and Santiago, Lebanon and London, what has become a global explosion of people power was prompting panic among a host of governments — and raising some interesting questions about how and why it was all ­happening.

Of course, the phenomenon is not new, even in modern times. Since the late 1980s, when people took to the streets in the Philippines and South Korea, and then in the captive nations of Eastern Europe, mass movements of people have been overthrowing governments or, at least, creating political turmoil.

But this year is exceptional for the sheer breadth and diversity of the unrest. Hong Kong, which has now had 20 consecutive weeks of mass protests, has had perhaps the most noted uprising. But the Middle East has seen demonstrations in Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and Iraq in addition to Lebanon.

In Latin America, Chile’s riots followed mass protests in Ecuador, Argentina and Honduras. In Eastern Europe, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Serbia and Georgia have been rocked. Vladi­mir Putin has had to contend with the largest street demonstrations in Russia since 2102 . And the list goes on.

Why now? After all, the global economy is still growing, as it has for the past decade. In most of the world, poverty is declining. Governments in many countries where people are marching are corrupt, repressive or simply dysfunctional — but arguably no more so than they have been for decades.

Facile explanations have flourished. In Chile, where at least 18 people have died in demonstrations, foreign correspondents who rushed to seek explanations from Santiago’s left-leaning intelligentsia came away with a suspiciously ideological story: The “neo-liberalism” that Chile has practiced over the past 30 years, it was said, had failed. But wait. The poverty rate has fallen from nearly 50 percent to 6 percent during that time, living standards have risen dramatically, and inequality is less severe than in all but two other Latin American ­countries.

Some Middle East analysts jumped to the conclusion that the unrest in Iraq and Lebanon showed that people were finally fed up with sectarianism, especially that promoted by Shiite Iran. Maybe — but that doesn’t account for the uprisings in Sunni Algeria, Sudan or Egypt. A New York Times survey posited “a louder-than-usual howl against elites in countries where democracy is a source of disappointment.” But that doesn’t explain Algeria or Hong Kong.

A simple conclusion could be that the global unrest has no shared characteristics other than the tactic of taking to the streets. But I think there is more to it than that. Hong Kong and Egypt, Chile and Lebanon have two things in common: pervasive social media and a rising generation of discontented youth who are masters of it. The combination of the two has changed the balance of power between government and society in both democratic and authoritarian states.

Chile’s protests began not with unions or opposition parties but with middle and high school students, who used social media to call on riders to jump subway turnstiles in protest of a fare hike. The protest went viral; the government, caught unawares, overreacted and called out the army. Soon the whole country was in turmoil. Similarly, Lebanon’s unrest began with young people outraged over a tax on phone calls made on WhatsApp.

In Egypt, thousands of mostly young, male soccer fans took to the streets of Cairo in response to a call from a previously unknown businessman who posted videos on YouTube denouncing corruption. The panicked regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sissi responded by arresting numerous opposition activists who had nothing to do with what was an entirely new channel of discontent.

By far the most sophisticated use of new media is by the opposition movement in Hong Kong, which has used it to remain leaderless. Activists coordinate over secure apps such as Telegram; they used another app to identify and avoid police deployments before Apple pulled the tool under pressure from Beijing. As elsewhere, the backbone of the movement is young people, including ­teenagers.

This is a motivated generation, pushing for dramatic change in the political status quo. In that sense, the youth of 2019 are a little like those of 1968. Their command of new communications technologies makes it easy for them to attract followers, circumvent the usual channels of public debate and blindside governments. They are able to mobilize large numbers on small issues, such as fare increases, and tap into general discontent that otherwise might have remained unexpressed.

The mass protests they have generated have had very different aims in very different places. But they augur a new era of political conflict.

Washington Post