From a Christian perspective marital rape doesn’t exist if marriage is a covenant in which both husband & wife have mutually given their bodies to each other 1 Corinthians 7:3-5,The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the

THE EBONYI STATE GOVERNMENT APPROVES OVER ₦500 MILLION FOR HAJJ SPONSORSHIP AMID ECONOMIC HARDSHIP

It's flogging a dead horse at this point, but I feel like people need to understand how mind control works and the power of marketing. Mind control in real life is not the "remote control" scenario that is depicted in Nollywood. It works more like repetition and suggestion to eventually gain influence over a target's mind. Let me use a Goodluck Jonathan example. There are hundreds of thousands of people today who THOROUGHLY DETEST Goodluck Jonathan and everything to do with his person, his administration, and even his family (whom they have never met and know very little about). Objectively, it makes no sense because going by the hard numbers and data, he was one of the best presidents Nigeria has ever had, exceeded probably only by Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet, in the minds of so many Nigerians, he is the SI unit for everything that is terrible about a president. The GEJ data and the GEJ public perception have such a wide gap between them that if one isn't familiar with how immutable data is, one might actually believe the data is wrong, because "How can all these people be wrong about one person?" Actually, the explanation is simpler and more horrifying than you think. In June 2012, Dana Air flight 0992 crashed in Lagos, killing 159 people in the 2nd deadliest air disaster in Nigeria’s history. Within 45 minutes of the plane going down, a mysterious broadcast message began making its way across BBM, Facebook, 2go, and WhatsApp, claiming that the crash happened because the plane was in distress but wasn't given permission to land because Patience Jonathan's jet wanted to land at the same time. Supposedly, while circling and waiting for GEJ's wife to land, the Dana aircraft's engine stalled, and the plane crashed. The important thing to note here is that while this rumour was eventually debunked conclusively (Patience Jonathan was at home in Abuja minding her business at the time of the crash, and the AIB report is clear that poor maintenance and pilot error caused the crash), IT DIDN'T MATTER. Once that seed had been planted, the fruit it bore was an overwhelming feeling of disgust and bad blood toward Patience Jonathan. The point of the rumour wasn't to push the narrative that she caused a plane crash - it was to generate such a powerful negative reaction toward her that for the rest of her time in the public eye, everything people saw her, they would subconsciously react with hatred and revulsion. If you were to ask one of these people afterwards, "Do you believe that Patience Jonathan caused the Dana Air crash?" they would tell you, "Of course not, I'm an educated person. I read the news, and I saw what the AIB crash report said." Meanwhile, education or no education, the truth is that the goal of the rumour had been accomplished - people who knew better began hating Patience Jonathan in a completely rabid, unsettling way. When I did my NYSC at EKTV, my (female) boss (who was a sweet person) used to regularly make these really cruel remarks about Patience being childless, purportedly because her womb was cursed by God. Wole Soyinka came out and called her a "Shepopotamus." If you didn't know better, you'd think that Patience Jonathan must have actually done something to deserve the amount of vitriol she got when her husband was president. For those in the know, it was all just part of a wider campaign strategy to completely demonise and destroy the image of Goodluck Jonathan using the emotional back doors that exist in all of our minds. The agency that was responsible for this particular deployment of PR dark arts still exists in Ikeja GRA, and I know the person who wrote that broadcast message. In fact, I almost got a job there in 2014. So when - 10 years later - I see people still bloviating about how GEJ, statistically one of the best leaders Nigeria has EVER had, was a "terrible" president, I don't know whether to feel sorry for them or to smash them over the head with a book shelf. Sad.