YALI RLC: My Experience (Day 12)


It was the 12th day of the training and the 5th of October. Physical exercise was done by those who cared to do so, while breakfast was taken by everyone who needed to. Due to logistics, the day's session started later than scheduled, even though most of us were already seated in the lecture room at 8. Mr. Kappo came around at about 9 to inform us what was going on. Not too long from that time, lectures started.

Oluwatoyin Ademole Ayinde, who is an erstwhile commissioner of Lagos State of Nigeria, after his citation was read, started his lecture titled "Resilience, Environmental Security and Peace-Building". He defined disaster as a calamitous event, especially one occuring suddenly and causing great loss of life, damage or hardship and which is beyond the capacity of the local community. He enlisted national (military), economic, health, cultural, political, personal, community, food, environmental securities as elements that make up 'human security'. And just before snacks-break, he defined, (by quoting Calson, et al (2012),) resilience as the ability of an entity to anticipate, resist, absorb, respond to, adapt to, and recover from a disturbance.

After the break, he summarized the general hazards in West Africa as follows: drought and desertification, volcanic activity, landslides, soil erosion, sandstorms, floods, windstorms, pest invasion, wildfire and others. Every river-group was asked to pick one of the foregoing and discuss among-st themselves how youths can be engaged in finding lasting solutions to the problem. This was well done, and so much lessons were learnt. We left the lecture room for lunch at 1:05. We came back to see a short TED talk by a young Kenyan named Richard Turere. His talk made us learn, among many other things, that we have to "decide to do something", "work on it until we get a solution", even though scary moments will come, "we should never give up". He ended with the 3 keys of resilience: information, education, and communication.

Ambassador Sheikh Abdulazeez was our second speaker. He spoke on "Natural Resources, Governance and Security". He said natural resources are all naturally-occurring endowments to mankind: air, water, soil, plants, animals and so on. He spoke on how a particular resource can be a 'curse', and causes of insecurity. He enumerated leadership, vision and human capital development as the solutions. He didn't leave until he intelligently answered all the brilliant questions he was asked. He's indeed scholarly. He also charged us to 'take over'.

Mr. Kappo, then, talked about our trip; he said those who don't have the yellow-card needed to cross the border could now do so at the Seme border with a 'token' of NGN3000. Afterwards, some of us went to play football, some swam, and some had some minutes to relax.

Dinner was served later; everyone ate.

And that was just how day 12 ended.

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