7 SIGNS OF INFERIORITY COMPLEX

Inferiority complex is a feeling of not being competent in any given activity; it is a personal feeling of inadequacy arising from the overcompensation of other’s achievements /goals over yours.

Inferiority complex could also be said to be a conflict between the desire to be recognized and appreciated and the apprehension or anxiety of being humiliated. This feeling is often subconscious.

The seven (7) signs you have to watch out for to determine when you are exuding the feeling of inferiority complex are vividly enunciated in the subsequent paragraph(s).

1. Hypocritical Attitude (H.P.): People who do not feel alright about themselves have problem feeling good about others. They would always look out for loopholes in people’s endeavours to try to convince themselves that they are not bad at all. These people cannot feel comfortable as being attractive, intelligent and competent, e.t.c., they will only have the feeling of being good provided they are only one around exuding the aforementioned qualities.

2. Tendency Towards Blaming (T.T.B.): Some people project their weaknesses onto others in order to lessen and ameliorate the pain of inferiority. For instance, if a person shows his weaknesses or inadequacy to others in order to prompt them to noticing it, so that his perceived incompetence can be justifiable by his short story of woe. This is just a step towards giving the responsibility of their failures to others.

3. Feeling Of Persecution (F.O.P.): when carried to the extreme, blaming others can extend to believing that others are actively seeking to ruin you. If a student fails an exam he sat, it may comfort him to believing that his teacher hates him and would do anything to hurt him. This will only allow him to avoid personal responsibility for his action.

4. Inappropriate Response To flattery (I.R.F.): This works in two forms. Some may refuse to listen to anything positive about themselves because it is inconsistent with their interior feelings. Others may be desperate to hear anything good about themselves and constantly fishing for compliments.

5. Sensitivity To Criticism (S.T.C.): Although people who feel inferior ‘know’ they have shortcomings, they do not like other people to point this out. They tend to perceive any form of criticism, regardless of how sensitively and constructively it is presented, as a

personal attack.

6. Tendency Towards Seclusion And Sensitivity (T.T.S.S.): Because people with an inferiority complex believe that they are not as interesting or intelligent as others, they believe other people have the same feeling about them. So they tend to avoid speaking up in public because they believe doing so will create an embarrassing demonstration of their ineptitude.

7. Negative Feeling About Competition (N.F.A.C.): People who have inferiority complex like to win games and contests as others, but they will always avoid such situation because deep down, they know they cannot make an head way. Not coming first is an evident evidence of otal failure.

Do not worry if you have all or some of these signs, you can bring it to the barest minimum by telling yourself that no one is perfect, and that a mistake made is a correction gotten.

THE IRONY OF E-PORTAL

E-portal is something that rings bell in the ears of almost all youths in higher institutions and those seeking the Almighty admission. Majority of students can simply define the computing term (E-portal) based on the function they used it for in their various universities. Some will tell you it is the icon they click on when they want to check their screening results in their aspiring institutions of learning. While those that have scaled the hurdles of UME{University Matriculation Examination} and Post-UME will tell you it is a link on their institution’s website which takes them to the registration page each time a new semester commences.
The tale of woe in the mouths of majority of Nigerian students in various universities, and the prospective ones, has always been similar in all institutions (Polytechnics and Universities). E-portal has become the bane of students (both intending and bonafide). It is now an insuperable and recurring obstacle that students now fast and pray to overcome. The worst hit in this electronic endemic, called e-portal are students still vying and milling to get a space (an admission) in their chosen schools. Their subconscious has been stacked with it without their knowing. If only they had known that it is not any evil-day that they should loathe. Facility E-portal is a web programming that comes with comfort in data management, thereby making it easier for an administration and its stakeholders to access information without the exertion and boredom of rummaging through avalanche of files.
Facility E-portal is a powerful web-based facility that allows institutions to access and manage a variety of administration; it enables stakeholders to keep track of their resources. It allows students to check their academic performances and teachers can also reach accurate facts about students immediately (www.sero.com). But this has never been the story when students try to access their results online. With E-portal, students have got the rungs in their admission ladder total four. It is one that has become a daring examination conducted by no mean body, which intending students have to write without the aid of various forms of examination malpractices that give respite to the seemingly academic numb-skull. It is one pit that various institutions has indirectly dug to give students a run for their admission. It is what successive admission-seekers experience with patient anxiety of what their results or admission list holds for them, each time it is released.
Some weeks ago, Obafemi Awolowo University broke rare ground by releasing the Post-UME results of over 40,000 prospective students within 24 hours. This gesture was lauded and gladly received by all, as they perceived it as a welcome development which will dispense away with the unnecessary stress prospective students get subjected to when accessing the school’s E-portal. Some had even been downbeat about it, saying that like limited vehicles that convey people to their various destinations, the E-portal will soon wear the garb of sluggishness in answering to every student’s click and electronic knock. This was trenchantly reviled by the upbeat; they posited that due to the glaring technological advancement of the school in releasing the result within a day, their (the pessimist) opinion may be far from the truth. As if on the pessimists’ cue, students were once again at the mercy of this ‘great’ E-portal. Some who got their results printed very early were tagged and counted as the luckiest. The rest were subjected to Post-UET (Post University Examinational Trauma). Those who got illegally helped by their ‘mercinaries’ during the said examination, could not get the same succour that was given to them during the said examination. They were also part of the struggling pack
The intending students of Federal Polytechnic Ede, Osun State became a willing audience in the e-portal saga. Theirs was quiet humorous, which pitched their tents against the wrath of the school’s authority. The school authority announced through their e-notice board that registration of chosen applicants closes after two weeks from the date the admission list was uploaded on the school’s website. The said list had been declared released by the school authority through their website few weeks ago. But the announcement seems to conflict with what was actually uploaded on the site, only scrap of the list could be found on their e-portal. This has given rise to purported spurious speculation. It was presumed that the school might have refused to pay the programmer of the website what is due. Some students of the institution, who were forthright in their views, confirmed the claim as a recurring decimal in the institution. This they hinged on the indebtedness of the institution to its web-programmer, leaving the students to bear the ultimate doom.
University of Ilorin’s case was one which would make anyone laugh till his eyes get swollen with tears; theirs {University of Ilorin} was a sorry state. Since the applicants of the institution wrote their Almighty entrance examination, the facility e-portal had gone on sabbatical, it could no more be visible on its site, even when it has been reported in some quarters that the result had been released. Students are left to form a search party in recovering the e-portal from where it had mysteriously gone to.
With its (e-portal) feat in the educational sector of our country, it {E-portal} has bravely won for itself an anthem:

E-portal, How Great Are Thou!
No Examination Impersonation or,
Examination Malpractices,
Could Ever Make Ye Succumb,
Ye Are Great!

Early Female Sex: Parental Negligence And Economic Penury

Despite their (the female) frailty and natural vulnerability, the female has always been the worst victim of any reprehensible and brazen societal act of any society. Could this be the orientation of the objectification of the females? Only the basis on which dastardly acts are carried out on them could tell.
The females have always been the participants of unpleasant sexual activity like: vicious rape, early marriage and the exchange of sexual pleasure for money and positions. A survey of girls that live in Itupate, Ota-Ona, Gbogbo, Obaale, dormitory suburbs of a city (Ikorodu) in Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria, shows that 75% of young girls never further in their education from O’ level, 35% couldn’t scale the hurdle to the Senior Secondary level, as they were stalked in Junior Secondary School 1, 2, 3, while 55% of those that made it to Senior Secondary level never got good grade when passing out. This leaves them to result to learning one or two vocational skills to get empowered for the seemingly bleak and uncertain future ahead of them. The reason for this lull that might lead to a permanent stop in their educational carrier can only be attributed to one factor – early sex which resulted to early maternity
The last time I paid a visit to one of my relatives that stays in Ikorodu on September 21, 2009 to be precise. My ears were filled with what I could not utter; my eyes say what would always linger in my memory. This moral disorder (early sex) has become a commonplace in the social activities of this suburb. Young girls now tout pregnancy as an expensive jewel that adorns the neck. They walked shoulder high with as if it was going out of fashion. Some will back their circumstance up by telling you that: “it is an ‘investment’ that would later bear fruits in the future. They have caved a niche for themselves in this societal immorality by flaunting their pending womanhood in the face of those that seek the Lord’s face night and day to be called by their baby’s name. The causative agents of this social thoughtlessness can not be distant from the inattention of the parents, who are to serve as a guide and watchmen to the young and the economic inability of the latter, which renders them ignorant and helpless in the face of this shameful act.
85% of the parents in this place have much of their physical exertion and attention put in their various trade and businesses, which they believe if okay, could put smiles on the lips of the family. Thereby, caring less about the fruits of the home (the children). This only reason keeps them far from home six days in a week as they spend many hours on their businesses. Seven o’clock p.m. has become an odd time of arrival, because business activities has just started.
During this time of the absence of the parents at home, children are left to meander from house to house, in order to overcome their loneliness. This places them (especially the females) at a close range for the predators’ catch. Some go to houses under the guise of watching latest home videos and they never live better to tell the story. In absence of parental watch and security, men old enough to sire them, who cannot control their libidos, lull them into coerced sex. There was even a story of a man who cashed in on the innocence of a young girl by telling her to help him with the buying of the popular noodles called Indomie and some eggs in a nearby grocery stall, to make for his breakfast. The girl later came out of his room with a profusely bleeding virginal. But for the people that rescued her to, she would have given up, becoming a total victim of coerced sexual irresponsibility.
Parents are now left with bitter pill to swallow as option to save their faces from shame
(abortion). A girl (name withheld) which is believed to be 15years of age, who lives in one of the suburbs (Itupate) in Ikorodu, banked on the confidence of a brother mine to (name withheld) reflect her sexual ordeal and the penchant she has developed for the act. In her words: “The last sex I had resulted to pregnancy after it had evaded the effectiveness of the pill which was given to me by the boy who had it with me. The thing later made me pregnant, if not for the conscious and spirited move of my parent who took me to where I aborted it; I would have been its ‘candidate’ by now. Can you believe it? The aborted pregnancy was almost two months old. The doctor warned my family to tell me that I should stay off sex for six months, that due to the multiple abortions I had had before the recent one, I might risk my life if I had one again. But I can’t just stay off sex for a week, my body tempts me.

……to be continued.


• This true life story was compiled by Joseph Omotayo.