Women Born In The 1970s

"In Dakar, Charity was the favourite to win. She was on top of the world ranking at that stage with some quality performances including the 49.29 seconds she ran in Rome which was the second fastest in the African all-time list at the time. I was however unshaken in my resolve to end her dominance over me! In the final, I raced home first in 50.07 seconds with Charity second in 50.13. Wow, I was on top of the world not because it was my second African Championships 400m gold after the win in 1989 in Lagos, but because I was emotionally lifted and I didn’t look back from there, winning the 200m in a new 22.22 seconds personal best. I won our next four encounters in Lausanne, Brussels, Berlin and Moscow at the Grand Prix final before running an altitudes aided 49.52 seconds to win the World Cup in Johannesburg. It was a remarkable turnaround for me and a glorious show by Charity and I that got us ranked 1, 2 in the world. That was the first and so far only time Nigerians would dominate an event in the circuit."

"I lost to Charity by the narrowest of margins in Oslo (50.13 to 50.15) and thought I was getting back to shape but when she scorched to a new 49.29 seconds personal best at the Golden Gala in Rome, I was scared my African record would be gone that year if I didn’t get into shape. I was third in that race that night in 49.89 seconds. It was my first run inside 50 seconds that year but Charity’s performance got me really worried. She was 3-0 up at this stage but my worry and that of my coach, Tony Osheku was that we could lose the African record of 49.10 seconds that got me a bronze medal at the Olympics in 1996. My coach even said if she breaks the record,we would go back to our base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA to train harder. It was that scary"

"We made the whole world to focus on just the two of us in the women’s 400m. Charity was in great form and had a 5-0 lead in our first five meetings together. I remember she ran an altitudes aided 49.87 in Johannesburg and I came a distant second in 50.27."

"I am happy with the return of the National Sports Festival, after an absence of six years, because this is is an avenue from where we can spot future talents."

"Fashion is your way of life. It is your statement. It is the way you feel like expressing yourself in all ramifications of life. For me, fashion is not just about dressing or makeup or jewelleries. It is about the way you speak, the way you carry yourself in public and the way you comport yourself among others. I don’t wear heavy makeup nor go crazy about clothes. I try to be as simple as possible. I also love to be very smart in appearance, may be because of my background as a former athlete."

"Hard work. Every training session was like my last on earth. There was the target of breaking and setting records before you. The coaches will remind you of getting your personal best time. At times, I even trained with the guys. This propels you to train daily as if your life depends on it. But truly, our lives then depended on athletics. So my strength was diligence. But I must add that once I remembered that I was running for Nigeria, it also drew inner strength for me."

"What I am bringing on board is facilities others don’t have in their sport parks and I want to use them to groom potential athletes and give them encouragement. It is my desire to move them to the next level. We are starting this project because we need expansion for more activities, we now have the indoor sports arena, basketball, badminton , graded tracks surface area, football field, we have the gymnasium; it’s a one stop shop for sports activities."

"To tell you the truth, as a former Athlete, I am impressed by this initiative (Abuja Youth Games). This is really very noble. This is what the Ministry of Youth and Sports should encourage because this is the only way we can go back to the grass root to discover future Athletes that can represent the Nation in the future."

"My tender triceps started grumbling"

"Odinkemmelu took his body odor away to the kitchen and returned with a teaspoon of salt."

"Is honesty an achievement? Personality is one thing, achievement is another thing. So what has your father achieved? How much money is he leaving for you when he dies? Or is it his textbooks that you’ll collect and pass on to your own children?"

"Dear Friend, I do not come to you by chance. Upon my quest for a trusted and reliable foreign business man or company I was given your contact by the Nigerian chamber of Commerce and Industry, I hope that you can be trusted to handle a transaction of this magnitude."

"He brought out an it-was-white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brows."

"Although his position on the family tree could not be described in anything less than seven sentences, Odinkemmelu was introduced to us as our cousin."

"If it was authoritarian for the Nigerian government to ban the use of Twitter, it was even more problematic for an American swivelling in a chair in Silicon Valley to poke their finger into the internal affairs of a sovereign African state."

"I Do Not Come To You By Chance is set in the world of Nigeria’s 419 scammers. It was a world I was very familiar with having grown up in South East­ern Nigeria. There were lots of people, lots of young men I knew who were going to, who were 419 scammers. So I wanted to write a story of how people from good homes, people from the kind of home I came from could become international financial terror­ists."

"I spit out everything onto the page, from beginning to end, and then go back and edit. I’m one of those people who like to tick off things on my to-do list; so, it helps me psychologically to get to the end first, and then settle down to revise."

"Everyone can tell a story, but the skillful use of words is what I usually find captivating when reading a piece. The imagery. The alliteration. The emotion. The quotable quotes. Think Shakespeare. Think the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The skillful placing of word against word is what builds the masterpiece and turns a story into a memorable work of art. I often tell people how fascinated I was with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But while I have absolutely no recollection of the plot, I still remember how struck I was by her use of words. Her writing was pure art."

"My novel came before the story: I decided to write a novel before I knew what to write about. The story wasn’t burning in my heart or bursting to be let loose on the page. It didn’t feel like there was this one story that I had to tell. But I have always been fascinated by why people do the things they do. While trying to come up with ideas for my novel, I decided on a story that explored that."

"It would have to be one of those dangerous pieces of advice that people dish out all over the place. A particularly popular one is: Follow your heart. What if the person’s heart is leading them into a dungeon of doom? What if the person’s heart is filled with foolishness? ‘Follow your heart’ is not just unwise counsel; it is a recipe for anarchy. Imagine a world where each of us followed our heart to wherever it led us, without caring for the people around us or the laws of the land."

"Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached."

"When a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking."

"Being the opara of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges — a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard."

"For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a 'long-leg' — someone who knows someone who can help him — his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents' low-rent house."

"Boniface — aka Cash Daddy — is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He's also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell."

"At age seven, when it was confirmed that her right hand could reach across her head and touch her left ear, Augustina moved back to her father’s house and started attending primary school. Being long and skinny had worked to her advantage."

"Make una come see o, Graveyard don begin dey use perfume."

"Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his five limbs were thick and long."

"Ever since the cooperation agreement between the party leaders and President Museveni was signed, no party organ has convened."

"My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician."

"We have prospects for the Rio Games. We are in camp right now and we are working hard. The athletes want to go to Rio and win medals and do the nation (Nigeria) proud. We are all working together to ensure that we go to Rio to win medals and do the nation proud. The athletes want to win because they know that there is something good awaiting them and they stand the chance of making good contacts thereafter. These are the future stars of Nigeria. This kind championship was used to discover the likes of Endurance Ojokolo, Blessing Okagbare, Obinna Metuh and many other stars. It is a step in the right direction and should be sustained."

"We are overjoyed that she is responding to treatment and getting better. We spoke with her for several minutes, and we are happy that she has started talking about her future already. But, she needs total rehabilitation. The family is most grateful to Athletics Federation of Nigeria, the Bayelsa State government and the individuals that played this big role"

"She (Gloria) is responding to treatment and I’m hopeful she will be okay. When she is done with treatment, she needs to be constantly in the environment of track and field so that she doesn’t relapse again. I will sure be glad to see Gloria back into her former happy and joyous self, she is such a sweet and loving woman."

"It is a pity what is happening to Gloria. If she had known that things will turn out be bad for her...she could just remained in Australia. When her mates over there heard of her condition they were sad. Gloria rejected offers for her to represent Australia and returned to Nigeria. There were too many frustrations and coupled with the death of her father things took a turn for the worst. I’m glad that the AFN is doing something to aid her. It shouldn’t be another PR stunt, but a concrete step towards rehabilitating her. If this is the only thing the AFN can do this year it would mostly gladden my heart."

"I’m excited about running at the African Masters Championships. And most definitely I will love to race against Ojokolo. Perhaps when the younger ones see us perform they will want to go and replicate it as they participate actively."

"Meet Endurance Ojokolo, one+ of finest female sprinters Nigeria has produced. In 2005 she got to the 4x100m final of the World Champs & 14yrs later, she's the coach of @Dushos to his debut."

"I am so disappointed in those people who said our athletes fumbled in Durban. In the first place, people should look at the circumstances our athletes travelled to Durban. About one week to the competition, athletes from other countries were already on ground in Durban, but our athletes did not even know whether they would make the trip or not. Some of our key athletes couldn’t make the trip due to one reason or the other. Coaches were also affected. I want Nigerians to celebrate the athletes. At this stage of our preparation for Rio Olympics, what they need is encouragement. We must not do things that will make the athletes remember the hard way they made the trip to Durban."

"The number one reason many female coaches are not encouraged to stick with this career is the lack of support, and what I mean by support is about the Federation having your back. There are not many female coaches. There are about 10 of us in the country that I know of right now, but we are not being encouraged and supported. We need exposure. We can only get better when we are exposed, but we are not getting that from the Federation. A lot of the time you see a team consisting of four male coaches and one female coach, or none at all; where is the gender equity? These are some of the reasons women give up on coaching, because we are not getting the right support."

"Government has done everything so; it is left for us to pay back the kind gesture. We had good training, good facilities and good coaches. If any state deserves to win this festival, it should be Rivers."

"I go to where I am needed and I owe no one any apology for working for Rivers."

"In my first marriage, my husband wasn’t really supportive of me being a coach. But I am stubborn; coaching is what I do and what I love, and so I went for it. One of the major reasons that marriage failed was because of my career. We were together for 12 years, but there was a lot of quarrelling going on, especially when I had to travel for competitions or when I had to go to the stadium to train my athletes. I wasn’t ready to give up my career as a coach, so I formally ended the marriage in October, 2021. When you hear that a lot of women had to quit coaching because of the lack of support of their spouses, that’s actually the truth."

"I am a respected woman and I barely see any negative stuff about me in the media. I carry myself with dignity because I believe it’s us who give the media what to write about, if someone is bad they write bad stuff about them but if they are good then what is written about them is good too,"

"Trump's campaign is a study in the mob mentality, how people who would normally act with kindness and compassion can turn cruel in response to the rhetoric of their leader, or in retaliation to those who oppose him. In line, I met a middle-aged woman who had quit her job to care for her ailing father, who was too weak to stand, so he rested, in his "Make America Great Again" cap, against walls along the way. Her eyes filled with tears, she professed her own dedication to Trump, whom she saw as an authentic advocate of the downtrodden. But most of all, she wanted to show her father something special, an American moment that would make him proud."

"We've seen [Trump] follow the textbook road to autocracy . . . Our institutions were very fragile and corrupt and the refusal to admit that led to the broader refusal to recognise how profoundly dangerous [Trump's] installation was."

"If a mafia state has really taken hold, wouldn't someone from our institutions do something about it? And the answer is no, they didn't, but it's the lack of that expected response that I think has led people to believe things are safer than they are, better than they are, even in the face of overwhelming evidence."

"As scholars of authoritarianism have long advised, believe the autocrat when he speaks. The problem is that too few Americans believed in the concept of an American autocrat. Pundits ignored the threat of Trump enacting these policies through executive power. Enjoy hindsight while you can, Americans, the administration of “alternative facts” may rewrite your regrets as applause."

"", “I think people need to mind their business, and they should be mindful of what they say to others, especially because they do not know what others are going through.""

"Marriage, There Is More To It Than Riches."

"I do not feel I missed anything. There is time for everything as far as I know. I left Nigeria and Nollywood when God wanted me to leave. I am very happy that what came in terms of marriage at that time and which took me away came when it came."

"I decided to concentrate on my family but of course I was abreast with happenings in the industry"