A 57-year-old man of Nashville, United States of America, claims that he has managed to lose 60 lbs (27kg) of body weight by eating McDonald’s fast food three times a day for 100 days straight.

If you’re trying to lose weight, fast food is probably the first thing you cut out, but one Nashville grandfather’s dieting experiment will probably make you see things from a totally different perspective. 57-year-old Kevin Maginnis had been doing a media tour explaining how he managed to lose a considerable amount of body weight by eating McDonald’s Big Macs, quarter-pounders, french fries, and apple fritters three times a day for 100 days straight. Maginnis also claims that the unusual diet also helped him bring down his cholesterol, blood sugar, as well as his heart attack risk rating. And all he did was cut the portions he ate in half.

“Half a plate to lose the weight – three-quarters of a plate to maintain the weight, any food, including McDonald’s,” Maginnis told NBC’s Today Show. “I was pre-diabetic before – down into healthy ranges now.”

Maginnis first announced his unconventional diet in a TikTok video that went viral, but 100 days after starting it, he actually came back with some impressive results – he managed to drop from 238lbs (108kg) to 179.5lbs (81.4kg), by eating fast food three times per day. After seeing him shed the extra pounds, his wife joined him on his quest to show that portion control is the way to go.

“She’s Mclovin’ it,” he jokingly said. “I think she’s beautiful now so it’s just the health reasons. We want to get into a better overall healthy weight.”

Even though he has been told that eating McDonald’s isn’t sustainable in the long run, Kevin is confident that he has found the perfect way to lose extra weight without feeling miserable. He can still eat whatever he likes, as the McDonald’s menu offers plenty of variety, but he only eats half a portion, saving the rest for his next meal.

“I wait until I have that actual heat, not my head craving foods but my body actually at that place where it’s really truly hungry,” the 57-year-old said. “Hunger, it turns out, is one of the best seasonings you can add to anything.”

“I’m never depriving myself. I’m eating McFurries, I’m eating cinnamon rolls, I’m hitting Big Macs, I’m eating French fries,” Maginnis added. “I’m just delaying myself because I’m going eat the whole thing. I’m just not going to eat it all in one sitting.”

Dieticians will say that even by cutting portions in half, Kevin is still getting well over the recommended 2,300 milligrams of sodium daily” and that many of the ingredients in fast food aren’t ideal for a healthy diet, but he claims that, while consuming different macronutrients is definitely important, shedding the pounds first is more important for his health than focusing on the foods he eats.

“Eating different macronutrients that are going to help my brain function — if I’m dead, my brain function is not going to improve, so let’s get rid of this obesity killer first,” Maginnis said.

Kevin isn’t the first person to lose weight on a McDonald’s diet. Back in 2014, John Cisna, a school teacher from Iowa, ate fast food for 90 days and lost 37 pounds.

 

Oddity Central

It’s no secret that we physically shrink as we get older, but did you know that your brain (yes, your brain) is also getting smaller? Before you panic, it’s important to know that age-related shrinkage is normal. But if you want to get a head start on improving your brain health, here’s what to do.

When your brain starts to shrink

Most studies indicate that brain volume starts to change in your 30s or 40s; however, “it’s in your 60s or 70s that we start to see more promenade atrophy, or changes in the brain happening, both in normal aging and in disease related,” says Dr. Charles Bernick, staff neurologist at Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

“We know that normally with age, brain volume declines in a somewhat predictable manner. The weight of the brain declines 5% per decade after the age of 40,” he continues. “That’s due to a combination of loss of cells, degeneration of fibers, reduction in volume of the cells themselves.”

Why your brain starts to shrink

There is a difference between age-related shrinking of the brain, or atrophy, and disease-related shrinking. The concern, according to Bernick, comes into play when the shrinkage is more than what you would expect for age because it can reflect a disease process, whether it’s due to vascular changes in the brain, or a disease like Alzheimer’s.

While there’s no way to monitor brain atrophy due to normal aging, symptoms to look for include changes in mental function, such as memory loss, difficulty with problem solving or finding words.

“Atrophy is only uncovered if you become symptomatic, such as having changes in your memory or cognitive function,” explains Bernick. “Those would be the reasons to have brain imaging done, where you might pick up shrinkage or atrophy.

Symptoms would trigger an evaluation, such as an MRI brain scan, to detect atrophy. There are also automated tools that can determine whether certain volumes are outside the expected range for age, he says.

Ways to maximize your brain health

While it’s not possible to prevent normal brain aging, there are strategies you can use to maximize your brain health and help reduce your risk of developing disease, such as Alzheimer’s. These methods include:

Regular exercise

Diets that are rich in antioxidants, such as a Mediterranean diet

Staying mentally engaged

Getting proper sleep

Attending to other vascular risk factors, such as monitoring and managing blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes

Refraining from smoking

Although some sources claim that brain health supplements, such as creatine and omega-3 supplements can help, Bernick says the science is “murky at best.”

“Our recommendation would be to focus on proper nutrition and getting vitamins and minerals through diet,” he says. “Eating a balanced diet that includes a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats should be your first approach. It’s only if you’re deficient in certain vitamins or minerals that you should look toward supplements.”

 

Fortune

President Bola Tinubu has signed into law the bill on uniform retirement age for judicial officers.

Tinubu signed the bill into law on Thursday.

In a statement by Abiodun Oladunjoye, state house director of information, the president pledged that his administration would strengthen the judiciary and empower judicial officers.

The bill, titled: “Constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria, 1999 (fifth altercation) (No.37) bill, 2023”, was the first to be signed by Tinubu since taking the oath of office on May 29.

The law extends the retirement age of high court judges — and others — from 65 to 70 years.

The retirement age of justices of the appeal and supreme courts is already pegged at 70.

The legislation also ensured uniformity in the pension rights of judicial officers of “superior courts of record” specified in section 6(5) of the 1999 constitution (as amended).

On May 2, the national assembly directed Amos Ojo, its clerk, to transmit the bill to former President Muhammadu Buhari for assent.

However, Abubakar Malami, immediate past attorney-general of the federation, advised Buhari to decline assent to the bill.

In a memo dated May 23 and addressed to the office of the chief of staff to the president, Malami said the bill appeared to be “far-reaching, unduly wide, ambiguous”, adding that it made no “justification” for the extension of retirement age and benefits for judges.

The former AGF said the bill if approved, may lead to further agitation for the extension of the retirement age of justices of the supreme court and court of appeal.

 

The Cable

Labour Party and its presidential candidate in the February 25 election, Peter Obi, on Thursday evening, sought an order of the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja to interrogate the Independent National Electoral Commission.

LP and Obi, among other things, are seeking details relating to the information and communication technology experts used by INEC in the conduct of the election.

LP and Obi are challenging the declaration by INEC that Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress won the election.

In two separate motions argued by their lawyer, Patrick Ikweto, Obi posed 12 questions to be forwarded to INEC as part of efforts to support their petition which questioned the integrity of the election.

The petitioners averred that the interrogatory application if acceded to, would assist them in solidifying their claims that the conduct of the election was flawed.

However, counsel for INEC, Kemi Pinhero, objected to the move, on the grounds that the application was brought outside the time specified and allowed by law.

He contended that moving the application outside the pre-hearing session had robbed the court of jurisdiction to hear it.

Also, both the counsel for Tinubu, Akin Olujimi and counsel for the APC, Lateef Fagbemi, opposed the request.

The presiding Justice, Haruna Tsammani, reserved ruling on the interrogatory applications by Obi and his party.

He also adjourned further hearing in the petition till Friday (today).

Meanwhile, the Peoples Democratic Party and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, on Thursday, called their first subpoenaed witness at the Presidential Election Petition Court despite vehement objection by the respondents.

The witness, Friday Egwuma, who was an INEC ad hoc staff, told the court that he served as Presiding Officer at Polling Unit 17, Aba North in Abia State.

Egwuma told the court that he experienced technical glitches at the point of uploading the captured presidential results to the INEC Results Viewing Portal.

He alleged that the results could not be electronically transmitted in real-time after capturing it on the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System.

Egwuama gave the testimony during his cross-examination by the counsel for INEC, A.B. Mahmoud.

He pointed out that the difficulty he encountered was only in relation to the presidential results as other results pertaining to the senatorial and House of Representatives elections were electronically transmitted to the portal seamlessly.

He, however, noted that there was an option to use an offline mode in such a situation.

Earlier on, before the witness testified the respondents had opposed the admissibility of his deposition.

The court reserved ruling on the objection until final judgment.

 

Punch

National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON) has announced a policy that will require Nigerian pilgrims in Madina to be moved to Makkah five days after they arrive in the city for the Hajj pilgrimage. 

NAHCON’s Deputy Director of Information, Mousa Ubandawaki, in a statement on Wednesday, said the rule which would take effect from today was due to complaints of overcrowding of Nigerian pilgrims in the City of Madina. 

Ubandawaki stated that while the commission is giving 100 percent opportunity for Nigerian pilgrims to visit Madina in the first phase or before Arafat, the move was to avert sanctions against the country if there are pilgrims overcrowding in Madina.

“The commission had to adopt the new policy after wide consultations and exhaustive deliberation. Moreover, it is a known fact that Nigerian pilgrims live in the exclusive Markaziyya area during their stay, a decision which has been overwhelmingly commended and for which the commission never intends to compromise.” 

He stated that the policy was to avoid being penalised for airlifting more pilgrims into Madina than the available accommodation or being forced to take the pilgrims to another area which is well below the standard of the current Markaziyya. 

“As tough a decision this may seem, we felt it is a necessary action we need to take so that we won’t be at the receiving end of Saudi laws, and at the same time it was considered more utilitarian for Nigerian pilgrims to spend five days in Madina thereby allowing more pilgrims to travel to Madina in the first phase from where they would be moved to Makkah to continue with their Hajj rites than to delay their departure for wants of bed spaces in the Prophet’s city,” Ubandawaki said. 

He called for the understanding and support of the pilgrims, Hajj officials and other stakeholders for the successful implementation of the policy.

 

Daily Trust

Federal government has declared Monday, June 12, as a public holiday in commemoration of Democracy Day.

In a statement on Thursday, Oluwatoyin Akinlade, permanent secretary of the ministry of interior, said the country’s democratic journey has experienced stormy and smooth paths.

“But the ship of state, its institutions and most importantly, the Nigerian people have remained steadfast on the tenets of democratic governance,” she said.

“On this memorable occasion therefore, Nigerians and friends of Nigeria are invited to appreciate the progress that has been made, celebrate the milestones covered and look forward to a better future for the country’s democracy.”

In June 2018, former President Muhammadu Buhari declared June 12 as the new date for the celebration of Nigeria’s democracy.

The decision was to posthumously honour MKO Abiola, presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.

Before the new date, Democracy Day was celebrated annually on May 29.

 

The Cable

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Ukraine has taken ‘significant’ losses this week – US

The Ukrainian military has suffered “significant” casualties in its faltering attempt to mount a counteroffensive against Russian forces, US officials told CNN on Thursday. While Kiev has kept quiet about its losses, Moscow estimates that the offensive has already cost Ukraine almost 5,000 lives.

Ukrainian troops hoping to break through Russia’s defensive lines have met “greater than expected resistance from Russian forces,” the American network reported, citing anonymous “senior US officials.”

CNN’s sources described how Russian forces used anti-tank missiles and mortars to put up “stiff resistance” and inflicted “significant” casualties, as the Ukrainians struggled to get their Western-provided vehicles through densely-laid minefields.

After months of delays and mixed messages from Kiev, Ukraine’s counteroffensive began on Sunday with an attack by six mechanized and two tank battalions along five sections of the frontline near Donetsk, and in other regions to the north and south. Further attacks followed, and although pro-Ukrainian sources described these thrusts as “probing” attacks, it was clear by the beginning of this week that the counteroffensive had begun in earnest.

The fiercest fighting took place on Wednesday night along the frontline near Zaporozhye, where the Russian military has spent several months constructing multiple lines of minefields, trenches, gun emplacements, and anti-tank obstacles. The Ukrainian 47th mechanized brigade attacked with a total strength of up to 1,500 troops and 150 armored vehicles, but Russian troops – backed by artillery and air support – repelled the assault, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Thursday.

Key to Russia’s defense has been its suppression of Ukraine’s air defense systems, allowing its fighter jets and attack helicopters to operate with impunity over the frontline.

The minister claimed that during a two-hour battle, the enemy lost 30 tanks, 11 armored personnel carriers and up to 350 troops. According to Shoigu’s daily updates, Ukraine has lost around 4,995 soldiers and almost 100 tanks since Sunday.

Despite the apparently colossal losses, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN earlier this week that Washington believed “that the Ukrainians will meet with success in this counteroffensive.” However, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, urged caution, telling the network on Monday that it was “too early to tell what outcomes are going to happen.”

“Everyone knows perfectly well that any counteroffensive in the world without control in the skies is very dangerous,” Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said in a Wall Street Journal interview on Saturday, adding that “a large number of soldiers will die” during the operation.

** Ukraine rejects Türkiye’s Kakhovka dam proposal

Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmitry Kuleba has vehemently dismissed Türkiye’s proposal for an international investigation into the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, calling the initiative a “game to indulge the Russians.”

This comes after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held phone conversations with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on Wednesday, offering to organize an international commission to investigate the attack on the dam, which would include experts from all three countries, as well as the UN.

Speaking on the Ukrainian 1+1 news channel, Kuleba stated that he was sick and tired of the UN and others who were proposing to investigate the explosion and accused them of playing a “game of quasi-justice.”

“It’s absolutely clear who’s who,” Kuleba said, dismissing any suggestions that Ukraine could have been responsible for blowing anything up. “Take it easy, gentlemen,” he said. “We've already been there. It's all just a game to indulge the Russians.”

Later in the interview, the minister admitted that some sort of investigation into the dam’s destruction would take place eventually, but that it would not be anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has also blasted the UN and the Red cross for failing to act amid the flooding caused by the dam’s destruction.

The Kakhovka dam was partially ruptured on Tuesday morning, causing flooding in multiple towns and villages along the path of the Dnieper River. 

Moscow has insisted that the “deliberate sabotage” of the dam was ordered by Kiev to cut off the water supply to Russia's Crimean peninsula. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has also suggested that the attack might be linked to Ukraine's attempts at launching a large-scale counteroffensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has labeled the incident a “barbaric act” that has led to a “massive ecological and humanitarian catastrophe” and accused Ukraine of “committing war crimes” and “openly using terrorist methods.” He also warned Kiev and its Western backers against gambling on a path of dangerous escalation.

** Ukraine was ready to sign peace deal with Russia but gave up under US pressure — Patrushev

The Ukrainian leadership was ready to settle the conflict with Russia but gave up under the US pressure, Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said on Thursday.

"Had it not been for the US pressure on those whom they installed at the head of Ukraine, this situation would have not happened, Even the Ukrainian leaders themselves were ready for signing a peace treaty and gave Russia written proposals that we, in principle, approved," Patrushev said, obviously referring to the negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Turkey in March last year.

However, as Patrushev went on to say, "in the morning, they [members of the Ukrainian delegation] gave [the proposals] to us during the negotiations and in the evening they said: ‘No, we give them up.’"

"This happened only because the United States had put pressure on them and said that no negotiations must be held," the secretary of Russia’s Security Council stressed.

As Patrushev pointed out, "there are interested parties in this conflict," first and foremost, the United States and Great Britain.

Istanbul document

The first Russian-Ukrainian negotiations after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine took place in Belarus in early March 2022 but the talks yielded no tangible results.

A new round of negotiations took place in Istanbul on March 29, 2022, following which Russian Delegation Head, Presidential Aide Vladimir Medinsky announced that Moscow had for the first time received Kiev’s principles of a possible future agreement in witting, stipulating, in particular, Ukraine’s neutral, non-aligned status commitments and its refusal to deploy foreign troops and armaments, including nuclear weapons, on its soil.

Russia pulled out its forces from the Kiev and Chernigov areas. However, the negotiations on the peaceful settlement were totally frozen after that and, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said, Kiev gave up the accords reached in Istanbul.

In October last year, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky enacted a decision by the country’s National Security and Defense Council on banning any talks with Putin.

 

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Hundreds plucked from flooded homes; Ukraine dismisses counteroffensive reports

Hundreds of Ukrainians were rescued from rooftops on Thursday, two days after waters from a huge breached dam submerged villages, fields and roads in the southern region of Kherson, as Kyiv dismissed reports its counteroffensive had begun.

Drone video showed areas where often only the roofs were visible above the flooding. The region's governor said some 600 square kilometres, or 230 square miles, were under water.

The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam came as Ukraine prepared a counteroffensive, likely the next major phase in the war in which tens of thousands of people have been killed, millions uprooted and entire cities reduced to ruins since Russia's "special military operation" began on Feb. 24 last year.

NBC news, citing a senior officer and a soldier near the front lines, said the offensive had begun. The Washington Post cited "four individuals" in the armed forces saying the same thing.

Asked about the reports, a spokesperson for the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces told Reuters: "We have no such information."

In its daily Ukraine briefing, Britain's defence ministry on Thursday reported heavy fighting along "multiple sectors of the front", adding that Kyiv held the initiative in most areas.

Ukraine's military said the flooding in Kherson had forced Russian troops to retreat by five to 15 km and had "practically halved" Russian shelling.

A senior Russian commander briefed President Vladimir Putin on how his forces had repelled a large-scale Ukrainian attack in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, the TASS news agency reported.

Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said earlier on Thursday that Russian forces had withstood fierce overnight attempts by Ukrainian troops to break through the frontline in Zaporizhzhia and had inflicted heavy losses on them.

Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield reports.

TRADING BLAME

Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the bursting of the Soviet-era Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which sent waters cascading across the war zone of southern Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands to flee.

Moscow and Kyiv also accused each other on Thursday of shelling the area as rescue workers in rubber dinghies tried to save people and animals from the still rising flood waters.

Russian shelling wounded at least nine people in Kherson on Thursday as residents were being evacuated, Ukraine's interior ministry said.

The Prosecutor General's office initially said one person had been killed by the shelling but later said no deaths had been reported. A Reuters reporter in Kherson said he could hear what appeared to be artillery fire.

The Kremlin similarly accused Ukraine of shelling Russian rescue workers in the area.

Friends and family of stranded residents posted appeals online with names, photos and GPS locations of residents. The coordinator of a volunteer group on the Telegram messaging app said the appeals were getting more urgent because people were running out of drinking water.

One man, Sergei, told Reuters the last time he spoke with his 83-year-old father-in-law in the Oleshky region was several days before the dam collapse.

"The latest information is that there was a lot of water in the street, as high as a person," he said. "Houses collapsed and went under water."

Ukraine said the floods would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into "deserts".

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has appealed for a "clear and rapid" international effort to help flood victims, held emergency talks with officials in Kherson, one of five Ukrainian regions which Moscow claims to have annexed but only partially controls.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said aid agencies had delivered bottles of drinking water, water purification tablets, hygiene kits and jerrycans.

"Drinking water remains the most pressing need," it said.

MINE HAZARD

The Kremlin said Putin had no plans to visit the region but was monitoring the situation.

Putin, without providing evidence, has accused Ukraine of destroying the Russian-controlled dam at the suggestion of its Western allies.

Kyiv said several months ago the dam had been mined by Russian forces who captured it early in their invasion, and has suggested Moscow blew it up to try to prevent Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro river in their counteroffensive.

It is not known how many people may have died as a result of the flooding. The Russian-installed mayor of Nova Kakhovka, near the dam site, said on Thursday at least five people had died but the total death toll is sure to be much higher.

Kherson's Ukrainian governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said 68% of the flooded territory was on the Russian-occupied left bank of the Dnipro River.

The "average level of flooding" in the Kherson region on Thursday morning was 5.61 meters (18.41 ft), he said.

The water level at the Kakhovka reservoir was approaching a dangerous low, the state company overseeing the facility said on Thursday, saying this could affect the nearby Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station and water supply to other regions.

The U.N. atomic watchdog said on Tuesday the plant, Europe's largest, has enough water to cool its reactors for "several months" from a pond located above the reservoir.

Ukrainian and Russian officials have also warned of the danger posed by mines planted during the war and now scattered by the floods.

 

Rebel mobilisation in southern Sudan raises fears of conflict spreading

Residents of Sudan's South Kordofan State reported mobilisation by a large rebel force on Thursday, raising fear that internal conflict could spread in the country's southern regions.

The rebel force, the SPLM-N, is led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, and is estimated to contain tens of thousands of men as well as heavy weaponry.

It is unclear what position Hilu might take in the conflict that erupted in the capital Khartoum on April 15 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), but its mobilisation raised fears of clashes, residents said.

SPLM-N forces had moved into several army camps around Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan, prompting the army to reinforce its positions, they said, adding that the RSF had closed the road between Kadugli and El Obeid to the north, depriving the city of supplies.

In past months there had been skirmishes between the SPLM-N and the RSF.

In the capital Khartoum, where fighting has been concentrated, residents reported sporadic battles and air strikes on Thursday.

Those included clashes in the south of Khartoum around a military complexcontaining weapons factories where the army has been trying to regain control from its paramilitary rivals.

Reuters was not able to independently confirm the accounts.

The war has triggered a major humanitarian crisis that threatens to destabilise the region. More than 1.4 million people have been displaced within Sudan and a further 476,800 have fled into neighbouring countries.

LAWYER KILLED

Beyond the capital, unrest has flared in the western region of Darfur, already struggling with the impact of two decades of conflict and displacement.

In El Geneina in West Darfur, the city worst hit by recent violence, a lawyer who had worked on the cases of displaced people and eight members of his family were killed in an attack on their house earlier this week according to the Darfur Bar Association, a group that monitors the conflict.

A medical union reported that a new wave of attacks had begun on Wednesday in the city, which has been cut off from communications for several weeks.

Fighting in Khartoum and the adjoining cities of Bahri and Omdurman has intensified since a 12-day ceasefire between the army and RSF formally expired on June 3.

The recent ceasefire, brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States at talks in Jeddah, had been repeatedly violated, but had allowed for the delivery of limited amounts of humanitarian aid.

Mediators told Reuters that a proposal had been put forward at indirect consultations in Jeddah for a 24-hour truce that would be more closely monitored than previous truces.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said on Wednesday said there had been no formal resumption of talks in Jeddah but Washington remained "deeply engaged" with the two sides.

The conflict in Sudan derailed the launch of a transition towards civilian rule four years after a popular uprising ousted strongman President Omar al-Bashir.

The army and RSF, which together staged a coup in 2021, fell out over the chain of command and military restructuring plans under the transition.

 

Reuters

I’m getting ahead of myself. Father’s Day is still next Sunday. But after the Executive Editor of LeVogue, LEADERSHIP’s Fashion and Lifestyle magazine, Nikki Odu-Khiran, asked me if I could write a piece to mark the day, it got me thinking. 

If my father, who passed on May 28, 2000, ever had to write on Father’s Day, what would he have written? Of course, he wouldn’t have written anything. A pensioner who worked as a storekeeper at the Apapa (Lagos) Quays of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) before he retired in 1996, Robert could barely write. 

But my, oh, my, he could hold a crowd with his speech. And if you wanted to get him going, then talk politics, especially about Nigeria’s Civil War.

I can imagine what he would have said about Father’s Day back then. Being a father in his time is different from being a father today. And if my children have to write about Father’s Day two and a half decades from now, they’ll probably be using the same lens of wistful contemplation. Every generation thinks its burden is the heaviest. 

My father would not be surprised, for example, that I didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had to write something. I got that from asking several sources I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember, I never could ask him his age.

What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable. Mucking about asking him about his age would have been crossing a line. 

Fast forward 2023. My children not only ask me to “surrender” my PIN number and God-knows-what-else, my four-year-old granddaughter asks me my name, my mother’s name, and once teased her own mother to call my wife by name. And that, of course, is woke.

I’m not sure my father would have thought so. Perhaps if he had lived to see his great-granddaughter, he would have half-jokingly, half-embarrassingly dismissed such precociousness as a regrettable 

consequence of the new-age bug.

If my father wanted me to become anything other than a journalist, I’m not sure there was much I could have done about it. You studied what you were told, which was often either law, medicine or engineering. Being a father at the time meant laying down the rules about virtually everything from your child’s hairstyle to their course of study. And being a son meant one thing: obedience. 

Fortunately, my father wasn’t really interested in my career choice. All he wanted was for me to be the best in any career I wanted, a concession which I still find hard to explain, given his dominance in my life. 

My father believed that staying away from booze, parties and girls was the beginning of wisdom and kept a long cane to enforce it. You really couldn’t blame him. Ajegunle, where I grew up, was one of the most congested slums of Lagos at the time. Booze was cheap, parties rampant, and girls plenty. 

Of course, boys being boys (and occasionally with the connivance of my mother), I sneaked off to parties a few times, stayed out late and swigged a few bottles of beer. I even wrote frothy love letters with lines from James Hadley Chase. 

However, when I crossed the line like when I went off on my own to see a football match at the National Stadium where dozens died in the post-game stampede, my mother gave me the full measure of a fan belt hung on the door lintel until I was covered in welts and near passing out, while my father turned a blind eye.

Of my many transgressions growing up, bringing a girl home, even when I was over 21, would have been considered a cardinal sin. It didn’t matter that I was out of secondary school and in higher school for my HSC, my father often warned, sternly, that hanging out with a girl when he was still responsible for me meant that I was in a hurry to relieve him of any further fatherly responsibility. His favourite phrase was, “If you get any girl pregnant, you’re done for!”

I’m sort of stuck in that groove. Tried as I have to be a modern-day dad, my children — all in their adult years — still know I felt a bit awkward, especially in the very early stages of their relationships. I think psychologists call it conditioning. 

It’s futile, isn’t it? I mean for a father, these days, to worry too much about the social life of their grown-up children? You worry as they grow up, hoping they will pass every stage of growth when they should. Then you worry when they start making friends, hoping they will survive peer pressure. 

Then you worry when they start going out, hoping they will keep the right company; you worry when they start going to school hoping that for all the huge bills you pay (and for their own sake) they will make good grades and turn out well. 

Then when they finish, you also worry about how they will get a good job; how they would marry and who they would marry; and perhaps when they would have children. And when the grandchildren come, the worry cycle starts again. 

I guess my father had all these worries, too, maybe less so in many ways than my mother had them. Yet, in a way, he had far more control of things than I could ever hope to have over my own children. If he didn’t want me to go out to a party, to see Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me or any of Amitabh Bachchan’s hit movies, for example, which I rarely did, he only needed to say the word and, very often, that was that.

As a father today, however, if I don’t want my child to go to a party, he could bring the party home by phone. And if I don’t want him to go to the movie, he could watch Netflix on a speed dial.

If I told him that too many bananas and sweets could unleash the village masquerades on him, which was what my mother told me obviously for my own good, he could simply ask Google. And I’ve just been told that if I give my son a timeout, thanks to the next big thing, Apple’s Vision Pro, he could simply recreate his own new world indoors.

I wasn’t a sheltered kid. Back in the day, my father was happy to put my school “chop money” into my hand every school day and off I went, either alone or with other students, covering a distance of at least 25 kilometres to and from school through shortcuts and winding street corners on foot. We didn’t have to worry about kidnappers.

It’s a different world today. Being a father when my children were much younger also meant being their driver for school runs, popping up on Open Day and fretting about what age they should get a phone, things my father would have considered helicopter parenting. 

Sometimes, being a modern-day father can feel like the Chartterjees in the legal drama Mrs. Chartterjee Vs Norway, only in the domestic sense, where your own grown-up children take the place of the Norwegian authorities. 

Today’s children have a completely different code of how they want their own children raised, nurtured and treated, different from what your mother or father taught you!

And increasingly, a number of them relate to you differently. On this Father’s Day, for example, if you’re nice, your son might even offer you a bottle of beer! The mere thought of it would make my father turn in his grave. I can almost hear him say, “this generation is done for!” Is it?

** Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

After scraping flour from her hands with a large, sharp knife, Vera Putina went through the photographs. A very small child with a velvet cravat and smart strap shoes. A boy equipped for winter, in a balaclava and scarf, and for summer, with just a pair of shorts. A pupil in the back row at the Metekhi village school, the brightest in his class. All had the same blond hair, weak chin and sulky bottom lip; all had pale eyes, Russian eyes, like hers. Most also had the wary, sidelong look of an unhappy child. Yes, Vladimir Putin had been unhappy. And it was partly her fault. But there was no mistaking him when, in 1999, he left the shadows to become the president of Russia. What mother would not recognise her own son? Besides, he walked as he always had: like a duck.

The photos were only copies now. Soon after she made her claim, the KGB came to her house, took the originals away and told her not to talk. But this was the most exciting happening in the village for years. Metekhi was a dirt-poor farming place at the foot of the Caucasus in Georgia, on the Kura river. The houses were shoddy brick and patched cement, with rusty fences. The roads, though grandly named after Stalin, were mostly dirt. Vera’s own house was peeling everywhere, though she kept it nice with lace curtains and had a bower of green vines for a garden. She was Russian, not Georgian, but with her hearty laugh and can-do attitude she was popular; and soon everyone, even the boys plucking frogs out of the river, knew that Vera was the mother of “the king of Russia”.

She was 73 when she came forward, having seen him on her new television on the news. Until then, she had kept quiet. But she was convinced that Vladimir Putin, “Vova” as she called him, was her lost, special child. He was the result of a college affair, a mad fling after a dance with another student, Platon Privalov. When she later learned Platon was married, she broke it off the next day. But by then she was pregnant with Vova. She kept him for the moment, and when she met Giorgi Osepashvili, a Georgian soldier, in Tashkent and married him, Vova was part of the arrangement.

The marriage lasted, but it didn’t go well. They argued all the time. Giorgi said he had money, but his parents’ house in Metekhi, where he took her, was a half-ruined hut. He made a peasant out of her. And then Vova set them fighting. Not because he was a nuisance; he liked fishing and reading, especially Russian fables, and did beautiful calligraphy. True, he could get furious when he wrestled, refusing to lose, and he tormented the neighbours’ chickens with his catapult, which she still kept. But he was mostly a quiet boy. Giorgi never beat him, just cut him dead, and talked loudly of kicking the “bastard” out. In the end, when Vova was nine, Vera sent him to her parents. But they were too ill to cope with him, and sent him to a military boarding school. After that she lost touch until she heard, somehow, that he was in the KGB.

This, of course, was not the origin-story Vladimir Putin told. The president’s parents were given in his autobiography, “First Person”, as Vladimir Putin senior and Maria Putina, who lived in Leningrad. During the siege of the city in 1941-44 their two infant sons died of starvation; Vladimir’s father found his mother laid out with the corpses, but rescued her. Vladimir was born in 1952, exactly two years after the day, October 7th, when Vova was born to Vera. That was the president’s story. Vera’s was that Vova had to repeat first grade in his Leningrad school, because his Russian was not good enough; that accounted for the birth-year discrepancy. But Vladimir and Maria were only “foster-parents”.

That idea did not fly in Russia, where the president ignored it and it sounded like Georgians making mischief. But beyond, and abroad, journalists were intrigued. They noted that Mr Putin gave almost no details of his childhood up to the age of ten. It was likely, too, that he would hide any Georgian connection, which made him half-foreign and invoked Stalin’s ghost. Some facts stacked up: in 2008 the Daily Telegraph found that a Vladimir Putin had indeed attended Metekhi school for three years. Other events raised suspicions. In 2000 two journalists investigating Vera’s story, a Chechen and an Italian, were killed in separate “accidents”. At one point strangers, two men and two women, came to Vera’s house and took blood for a DNA test. She never heard the result.

For as long as she could, until her daughters stopped her, she kept the story going. In 2003, when she was 77, she opened her house and her heart to a Dutch film-maker, Ineke Smits. In “Putin’s Mama” she showed the rigours of her life in Metekhi, which after 52 years she had never really taken to. In Russia, she had sung and danced. Now, scarf tight on her head, boots laced on her legs, she trudged through mud, chopped firewood with a vigorous axe, fired piles of straw in an orchard, hoed the weeds from Giorgi’s railed-off grave. (“Hi, how’s things?” she casually asked him.) She drank bright red local wine, filtering it past her toothless gums.

As she laboured, she also mused about Vova. She wondered why the “foster parents”, both of whom died in the 1990s, had never publicly talked of him. Presumably they too had been told not to. Then again, men who joined the KGB were supposed to forget their families. Well, Vova had certainly forgotten her.

She had not forgotten him. There were times, especially when he invaded Georgia in 2008, when she felt ashamed of him. But in general she felt more ashamed of herself. She wished he would make just one visit to Metekhi, when she would tell him she was sorry for sending him away, and explain that it wasn’t her fault. Sometimes she actually dreamed that Vova came; but he never spoke to her, and then he would be called away. She thought those dreams occurred because she lit candles for him in church.

When the KGB had come to take the photos they left one behind. It showed a child of three in a short belted tunic. His fringe barely cleared his eyes and his eyes were gleaming, as if he had just stopped crying. He was not instantly recognisable as Vladimir Putin, as the others had been. The whole set-up looked much older. But what she recognised, Vera said, was that gleam in his eyes. Plausibly or not, he was Russia’s ruthless president to her.

 

The Economist