Raise your hands, automaticians. OK, so I'm very glad to be here. Another reason for me to be very excited today, this is my first WordPress talk outside my country, India. Other than the talks I've given to my colleagues, thank you. So I'm going to speak today not too much about the software and the code part of it, which I leave to my colleague, Sudeep Tho. I'm going to speak drawing experiences from what brought me to WordPress and to the community. It's about something which is called to WordPress, which is to help people publish their ideas or what I call in my words, create their own medium. So my background, just to give a very quick introduction, I have been a happiness engineer doing technical support and wrangling happiness for automatic. Since January 2017, I've done quite a few odd jobs before that. And what brings me to WordPress and what got me actually into digital marketing itself, not just WordPress, is a community project which I did for my ethnic community based in India called as radioidli.net. Just to break it short, it was a website which began in Blogger with embedded YouTube and multimedia content. And just when I discovered there is WordPress.org, I moved it to a self-hosted WordPress site. And that's where my learnings about websites, about hosting, about analytics, about marketing. Way before Facebook hit India, things like I used stuff like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups and other discussion forums. So all those learnings came from this small community project. So yes, we are here as WordPress community, but this ethnic community project also gave me a lot of insights. That's what I'm going to share bits of what I gathered from that experiment, which finally led me to where I am today, enjoying a good career in WordPress itself, right? So yes, another disclaimer, I'm not good with coding yet. So I just know HTML, CSS. I know that if you show me a code of a theme or a plugin, I know what that particular PHP loop does, but if you ask me to write it from scratch, I will need help from colleagues or the experts, right? So why am I choosing this topic? All of us are, when we mention the word ideas, the first thing that comes to our mind is perhaps Albert Einstein or those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or inventors, the founding fathers of WordPress or other projects, right? But let me tell you, each one of us has what's called as ideas or sparks within us, right? So if we are ready for a quick call of hands, let's do this together, right? So how many of us felt this in our mind? I can write well, I can rhyme well, maybe a little bit, but I'm not a writer, not a poet. So how many of us have felt this even in a slightest sense? Don't be shy, right? Ideas, okay, I'm okay with singing. I have my own style, my own genre, but I'm not sure if I can really dare to take it out beyond the bathroom, right? So how many of us have felt that? Rahul, I can see, I've been there as well.  And I'm not a journalist, I don't write for any newspapers, but yes, I do have a political opinion or I have an opinion about things happening around me in my country, in my locality, in my community. How many of us have felt that? Quite a few of us. Sometimes we felt the need to do something about it, write about it, express. Well, we are talking about ideas. I'm not a qualified teacher since we have teachers here as well. I would like, but I would like to study together if not teach with a larger community of students or interact with teachers around the world. We do feel things like this. Now, quoting Seth Godin from his famous TED Talk, ideas, all of us have ideas, but those ideas which spread very well, they succeed. And they end up creating what we call as impact and they end up changing things around the world. I was just mentioning that Matt Malinweg was a blogger, was a journalist at that point in time with CNET. He had a personal, what's called as a developer's itch to make a better blogging software which could understand emojis and symbols better. And that became the founding point of WordPress which is today 30% of the internet, of all the websites. So it all begins with ideas which spread because of some good purpose, because of various reasons. Of course, the talk gives a good reference about how do ideas spread. So all of us have our ideas and even if we think we do not have our own ideas as WordPress professionals, we help our clients and many other people, maybe our friends, our relatives, we help them spread their ideas. And that's why ideas always need a proper medium to propagate to spread out. And that's where the role of WordPress as a content management system or as a software came into my life for my small community project and today it's powering some of the largest projects as well. Now, why is it that CMS like WordPress can really create an immense impact which perhaps was not possible in the past? Or it was not, it was perhaps in the hands of only a powerful few. In the past or even till now, to some extent, a successful medium happens if you have great infrastructure and good distribution. So infrastructure is where you bring the ideas, host it or print it and then it goes about and it has to be distributed through a vast network whether it's the newspaper boy who wakes up at 4 a.m. and gets that newspaper to your home or there's so many stores and places from where you pick up your reading material. So or even vast amounts of money being spent in marketing through digital or any other medium to make things spread out, right? But the good point out here is back in the past, if you had to have a very powerful medium, you need to have a very good press with those huge printing machines, lots of paper, lots of cost to procure that which means you and of course it's a regulated industry as well. So you needed to have some good industrial backing which means good finance, some deep pocket, the promoters and of course you needed some political support to make all those things happen. So press which is the infrastructure was like very heavy but now that we have word press, the barrier to do that is actually come down and that's the main point of my talk today. So sites can begin with a zero budget and again to begin with something, you need not have complete coding knowledge. When I did radio idly, I just had to, I only had the information or the skill of just writing emails. So when I logged in, I didn't even know what's a content management system but when I logged in there was a place where I could add title, I could add the content, I could embed somebody who told me you can copy paste this code from YouTube to here and the video will start showing there. That was my moment of truth or whatever you may say. Now to learn that the barrier was minimal as compared to the technology involved in the earlier mediums. So which is where impact is coming in and yes, people can begin, let me put a disclaimer here that I'm mentioning an automatic product. So even for people who are not very well versed with starting their own websites that are resources like we have something called as learn.wordpress.com. The whole idea, wordpress.com was created was that people who do not have any knowledge about hosting, who do not have any knowledge about the infrastructure part, we are reducing that barrier further by giving a free platform to begin and then gradually upgrade if you like. And yes, all of this still gives you the freedom to move things out to a self-hosted site. So the beauty is you can now, unlike in the past wherein you had to procure infrastructure and huge distribution you can actually begin with zero budget and I can tell you there are quite a few websites around the world written by influential journalists and thought leaders which still run on either blogger, on blogspot or the wordpress.com sub-domains as well. But people come to them because of the content, because of the unique ideas they bring in. So yes, it is good to have your own domain but let that not be a barrier for you to start or for your clients or anyone to start. Let them get a taste of it. Once they are convinced, once they start making money of it, they grow stronger and they can have their own projects coming up. And yes, when we talk about distribution, we today have social media wherein we can create discrete pockets of interest. It's not that I publish a huge billboard, wherein there is so much of wastage to people to whom the message is not relevant at all. Yeah, so if I'm having a website on pets and more specifically cats. Yeah, so within pets also we got a niche of cats and dogs, right? So if my medium is about managing cats or managing pets, I can create an interest group within various social media whether it's Instagram, whether it's Facebook or Twitter. And for all you know, there are already groups in all these media wherein people are talking about this, this unique interest that they have. So it doesn't take too much of effort for us who are writing in that particular space to go and check each of this popular social media as to which are these places where my interested users are already talking. Can I get in with a conversation and maybe put useful content from my website out there and then make the site popular? That's what I did with my community website. I saw few distinct groups of Yahoo groups, Google groups. Those days, India had a social media thing called as Orkut, which was a Google product. So it was very popular in India and Brazil. So there were groups within that speaking about heritage, about history. But out there I found younger people wanting to show their talent. And that's where I actually got in conversation and created this medium. So distribution also, if you do it properly, you can do it beginning with zero cost. And then later on you can think about maybe going for the paid way of advertising. Throughout all this, there are various ways in which you can start a website for free. Or some might argue saying that why do I need a website? Let me create things on Facebook. Or let me create something on Twitter. What you need to be always aware is wherever you are posting the content, who owns it? And tomorrow if I have to move out the content because of some conflict or the other, how portable is it to move it out and resurrect the content elsewhere? Now that's where the beauty of WordPress as an ecosystem comes in. So suppose you even begin with creating a free website on WordPress.com. You reach some point in time wherein you grow out of all the features available there. Or you want to move the content to your own website. You can just export the content to exactly the way it is, to a self-hosted website. So that's where I'm speaking both about I mean, there is total freedom. You completely own the content and you can also port it out anytime. And even backward portability, if you say that you don't have the money to money nor maybe in some cases the traffic of the sites grow and you may want to bring it back to WordPress.com because some users find things, the infrastructure of WordPress.com better, they can even bring it back. It works both ways. So the point I'm making here is freedom to move the content and always owning the content.  It's a hotel room, right? It's good for people to meet there, but yes, when you want to call people, you need to call them to your home or to your permanent office. So that's where a website or something developed using WordPress actually helps. So how do you get started to spread your own ideas? Think of an area of interest, a unique, of course you can make your own personal blog wherein you write almost about everything that you do perfectly fine. But if you want to make a real powerful medium, it has to be focused on a particular interest or a particular passion, which many others will then follow and map themselves into, right? So you could begin with an area of expertise or passion. In my case, it was my little community. In some other cases, people like music. It could be a genre of music. You just keep writing about it on a regular basis. And when you begin, you are not really sure about how much time or how much money you want to invest to reduce your risk. You can begin with a free platform or with a low-cost platform. And what's most important is for any medium, what worked for me with Radio Idli project was I defined a weekly periodicity. I made it a point to post every Friday. And through the week, I would gather content or recordings from various people. And then I would do a weekly edition. And that really brought a bit of stickiness from users and they would really expect content to come on that point in the day. So publishing regularly and creating a content calendar really helps. So you can create a content calendar around some good events happening, pertaining to the community. It could be some small event that you might be organizing, different parts of or different subtopics that you might have within your own interest. You can do that. And to be very honest, something which really helped me was many times we get caught into this loop that my site needs to look like the most beautiful magazine website in the whole world. Like I want to make a replica of the New York Times or the CNN website. But if you ask the person how many articles do you think the CNN website shows in the front page? And how many sections and subsections does it have? Do you have the same number of complexity? No. But the bright side is you can begin with something very simple. The way it worked for me was I did not have too many sections to begin with. So it was just people giving their own recordings, singing anywhere between traditional Konkani songs to Bollywood songs. So it was only songs to begin with. And then people started coming with photographs of religious and colorful festivals which have been celebrated for hundreds of years in different parts of India, of coastal India, where my community thrives. So over a period of time, it turned into a blog with categories. Music, religious events, concerts. So we had categories which grew over a period of time. And once I had categories in place, once I had adequate content in place, I could experiment with different themes on a test website. And then from a blog website, I gradually moved from a blog website with a featured content on top. And once I had about, say, about 100 plus articles, I moved on to a magazine theme. So my approach, rather than design, and then let's figure out the content later. For a medium, it's the other way around. First, get enough content, and let the content direct you or give you ideas to create, or let the design follow the amount of content that you get. Who knows, the nature of your content would be so unique that it would suggest a different kind of a design, not the standard magazine themes. So for example, you are into podcasts. So maybe the nature of your content would demand a sort of a beautiful player on the top right of the site, which would align itself in the middle when you look in the mobile phone, because it's a very different genre. And of course, there will be a subscription button if people want to subscribe to the podcast, feed itself on their devices. So just an idea, just an idea out of my mind out here. So begin with something simple. Design can be tweaked further. That's another beauty of WordPress.com, or WordPress software in general. Things inside, rest in pages, posts, media, there are discrete content modules which can be reorganized and displayed in a variety of ways. So, indeed content is the king. Don't be shy. Don't be shy of starting with a subdomain and don't be in a hurry to pump in a lot of money initially. So invest and upgrade gradually as your audience grows. And one example of what I mentioned about thought leaders still running on subdomains is a gentleman by the name of Ajay Shah who is quite an authority in economics in India. He's a professor, plus many people follow his views on economics. If I'm not mistaken, it still runs on blogger. It's ajayshad.blogspot.in. So, yeah, blogspot or blogger is out of our community thing, but I'm just giving an example that a medium can exist out of a free itself while it can hold very valuable content. So now we spoke about how do you go about building the website, getting your content together and letting the content guide you on the design of the website. Now the next question, how do I let people know about it? So many times people I worked on some client projects earlier, they were so excited they would publish first on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and then they would say, oh no, since I've already posted it everywhere, why do I post it on my website? A good approach for a person involved in building a medium would be publish first on your website and then crosslink it, crosslink place those links on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. There are of course tools to auto-publicize on these platforms the moment you publish over here, but personally I'm an advocate of writing your own personalized snippets for that particular medium, so for Facebook you can read more lines so write maybe 2 or 3 lines out there and then add your content Twitter is a shorter characters so write something which is catchy which may be a hashtag or two and the content goes there Instagram is more visual make sure you use a very good image with a square form factor preferably and then add the link so when you publicize make sure that you adapt the content for publicize first on the website and then adapt the announcement as per the social media that you are using and then you share your social links based on the way you like and very important social media as we know resists anything being sold or pushed to them so as far as possible try to get into an existing conversation saying that okay you are talking about politics in Southeast Asia here is what I wrote about and here is a summary about what I had written if you need to read more here is the link so this is a nice and fair way of plugging your content rather than saying hey this is my website it's the best view on Southeast Asia go and read this so naturally people will say oh this person is just blowing his own trumpets and without actually making a conversation so the promotion has to be in a very human conversation way and that really helps comment genuinely on other similar blogs so if your website is about culture of your particular place there might be other culture websites so whenever you write genuine comments or your own views out there or appreciation out there your link appears there naturally and of course you get not necessarily a SEO backlink but real humans will see your link and click when they see that yeah this website looks something very similar right so that's how you get virality there are projects like dailypost.wordpress.com wherein there is a topic given and if you link to that topic your content shows alongside that of many others who have also posted their topic and that actually brings in a lot of traffic from people who are really interested in that the topic which is announced I would recommend you to go through this of course I'll give you the slide as well for you to check now coming to the topic of search engine optimization biggest disclaimer this is my personal view search engines think of it from Google's point of view or from your point of view how many of us over here would like to be cheated none right so imagine Google who is making a sincere attempt to show the most relevant results based on some 200 questions some 200 plus questions as they claim but Google's agenda is to show agenda is to make the user happy not the advertiser slash lister happy so Google's first agenda is if somebody is asking for the best sushi joint in Singapore there would be 200 questions it would try to get the most accurate answer for that based upon the from where the person is asking there are different parameters on it so if I create a website which just happens to have a title of best sushi in Singapore and we expect to do certain technical tweaks to get our chances brighter so that's possible earlier but day by day Google doesn't like those tweaks so increasingly Google doesn't like things which are done for the search engine but Google will love you if you do certain things which improves relevance to the user and experience to the user so by relevance to the user you write best sushi joint in Singapore but in Orchard Street or something which is much more accurate and close write some good content about your personal experiences which is and in a language which the locals will understand because guess what the local will do keywords search using his language not the standard English so to make the user experience better you need to speak the user's language which automatically translates to good keywords for Google and second in the experience part that's where most of the SEO tips actually help like using a relevant title the length of the title the length of your Parma link or using a real Parma link rather than slash question mark page id equals 1 2 3 4 it's not that Google hates it it's like life becomes easier if you use real English in the link since the users love it hence Google loves it so increasingly you will find any of the search engine updates leading towards a point wherein it will be the exact emulation of a user normal users don't see what's the code on the site they will only see what's the relevance of the content and what is the experience that they get things like how does the mobile appear on a mobile device how does the content appear on a mobile device so it's likely that your site will rank very well on a desktop but not as high in mobile because somebody else has got a better mobile design so these are the simple philosophies of SEO which will increasingly in my opinion take over as compared to those tweaks or get your site in top 10 within next 30 days so those techniques will increasingly diminish because naturally Google doesn't want to be cheated by things done for the search engine they want genuine things done for the user and hence for Google so when you do that when you write content focused on your topic of interest when you write it for the users and you write it in their language so users searching in their own language will naturally get to your site over a period of time and that's the last part of my talk thanks for bearing with me so long so a marathon of many small steps it's not that you can create a medium overnight most of the things that you see which go viral die down equally fast so how many of us still dance to a certain style when it came it was a rave we still do dance but it's not no longer a rave as it happened then but if you were to look at some of the classic songs like the old jazz and others so people there is still an audience which which is there out there so what should be your approach you might hire the best people to write you might hire the best people to run your website but on your own if you were to run a medium out of your own passion what I mean by level up user is someone who knows almost all the admin WP admin features if not the complete PHP code you need not know the PHP code you need not know CSS but you get into WP admin you should know what each of the the options on the menu does whenever there is a new menu option which appears you should be curious enough to say hey what does this button do click if you've seen Dexter's laboratory the way the button and the thing blows up so here nothing blows up upgrade to a paid plan only when it's justified for and for very clear reasons rather than the glamour of owning it right and upgrade to a self hosted WordPress.org website at the right time in case you are beginning with the WordPress.com site and hopefully one day it's my wish that one of your mediums will turn into a WordPress VIP customer or something that requires that scale of service and it's not a thing out of imagination it's perfectly possible it has happened right so I would like to end on this note from the automatic creed which is like a nice paragraph on which guides us in our work and even in our life which says that we are in a marathon and not in a sprint so no matter where we need to go or how far the goal is the only way to get there is put one step at a time and with that I would like to thank all of you so my Twitter ID is at NarthPie and of course I'll be here to interact with all of you do we have time for any questions or maybe I think I already missed my time or how are we with the time we have time for questions so why don't everyone grab some pizza and get us a portion sure that would be great thank you so much sure 15 oh I am not on time


ACF, or Hanezi, and the People's Democratic Party criticise President Mohammad Bahari as the Presidency alleges a coup plot, and pay the 100 million Naira or risk the lives of Windfield University students. What should the federal government do? Or this is plus politics, and I am Mary Ann O'Connor. The Presidency has alleged that some individuals in partnership with some religious leaders and foreign elements are trying to destabilise the sovereignty of the country. It warned that it would deal with any group that does anything to undermine the democratically elected government of the country. The People's Democratic Party PDP in response described the allegation as a resort to blackmail in the face of leadership failure. And while expressing its opinion, the Pan-Niger-Delta Forum, PANDEF, said the Presidency is chasing shadows rather than looking for solutions to a myriad of problems facing the country. Well joining us to discuss this is Alesta Wilcox, he's a political analyst. Chris Itamonola is a legal practitioner. And Dimeji Fabi is a political analyst and a member of the People's Democratic Party. Thank you very much gentlemen for being part of the conversation. Thank you for having me. Thank you very much for listening to the audience. All right, great. Thank you very much. I'm up in here. All right, great. I'm going to start with Misty Itamonola.  What does the Presidency mean by a coup plot when they say a coup plot? I mean we as Nigerians have heard about coup plots under the military administrations and this was a thing which even the President had been part of while he was in uniform. When they say there's a plot to overthrow the government, what do you think they mean? And I mean we know that this is an allegation of sorts. Is the Presidency saying that these people that they've not necessarily mentioned their names but pointed fingers to are capable of overthrowing a democratically elected government in a democracy? Well, when you say a coup plot, it automatically potends the illegal takeover of a constitutionally elected democratic administration that is in place and brought up by the Constitution. And for a coup plot to take place and to successfully have legitimacy, the implication is that Section 1 of our constitution which establishes the supremacy of the constitution will automatically be suspended. Once there is an attempt to plot a coup, what an illegal government or abdication of the coup plotters will have to do will be automatically to suspend the constitution and by so doing come up with the claims that will legitimize whatever acts they are doing. Simply put, that is what it means to plan a coup. I'm just curious because in the 21 years of our very nascent democracy, have you really heard any presidents, sitting presidents, make these sorts of allegations of a coup or a planned takeover and what do you think would have necessitated this allegation made by the presidency? Because this is not the first we're hearing of, a few days ago the DSS also warned that there were people who were trying to, in fact they warned that people should stop speaking negatively about the government of the day and that there were sudden plans on being on earth. And now the presidency is coming out to say, well, we know we have a list of these people. What do you think must have necessitated that? One of the people with the administration that they legitimately put in place, a government under the democratic setting is a government for the people, by the people and for the people and the essence of it is why they have put the APC-led administration is first and foremost to secure their lives and properties. In the north you are having agitation, in the west, in the south, in the east, everywhere you are having agitation and what the presidency, what the president ought to do is to rise up to the occasion. I mean, there is so much dissatisfaction all over the nation and one that comes, it simply means it's your shadows. Even if the people are dissatisfied with the expression, one thing you can't take away in an administrative setting, in a democratic setting, is the will of the people to make their comments. And how many people are going to start arresting, how many people are going to guard? Why all you need to do is to rise to the occasion, look at the north, look at the south, look at... There are so much inequality, for example, in the area of appointments, in the area of job creation, in the area of insecurity, I mean, they are talking about, look at what they just released about 39 students and we do not know whether Ransom was fed or not. Whether Ransom was fed or not, the most important thing is, I mean, every day you are hearing about kids, you are hearing about kidnapping, and that is not what Nigerians voted against. I'm not an administration officer. But Missy Terminal, this is not the first time in the country that we have had disaffection. In fact, Nigerians have been long before now, divided along ethnic, religious and political lines. Yes, you might argue that we've not had it as bad as this, but could this be a premise for which a government would be screaming blue murder that they want to be overthrown by not just political leaders, they're talking about past political leaders and they're talking about religious leaders. And this means you're talking about the Muslim leaders, you're talking about the Christian leaders. I mean, this is a very hefty allegation. With all due respect, it is imperative for us to go beyond the allegation of coup plotting. I mean, if the presidency is certain about that, that's why he is the president. That's why it's the presidency. For goodness sake, you can't talk without verifiable facts. If you are certain that there is an attempt to overthrow your government, first and foremost, who are these people? Go for them and take them in accordance to law. Number two, beyond going for them, the question to ask your service, you are put in administration for a given reason. Are you fulfilling that? The reason why the APC administration took over from the PDP leadership administration is an inverted comma, the assertion that the PDP is not doing well. And of course, there are various promises that the APC-led administration of our president inquiry asserted in order to be able, I mean, upon which, upon which premise it came into power.  Within a particular period, the dollar is going to be this or that or the rest of that. A period of almost eight years, are you fulfilling that? So it's not an issue that, it's not, it's not, the fact is not that in the past administration, there have not been challenges, but that Nigerians trusted you that you are going to give them a better life. Are you doing that? The answer to that is no. Well, of course, we're going to leave that one open-ended. But let me go to Alesta Wilcox. Alesta, the presidency has said that it's ready to keep the country together. And I want to quote them directly. Even if it ruffles unruly feathers, they said, in the process. Now, what's happening, what we're seeing in the country, the disaffection that Mrs. Hamunullah has been making reference to, the insecurity, you know, the much disaffection that we're experiencing today. Does it seem that the government has been able to keep people together? And if they have, why are we at this point where we are today? Well, thank you very much. I listened to Mr. Hamunullah very well. I think he's my brother. By going by name, Hamunullah, I think he's my brother. So I wonder if he was speaking for the PDP, I think. I just asked you a question, Alesta. Let's answer my question. Then you can speak on it, Hamunullah. Can I take my question, please? Can I take my question? I have freedom of speech now. Let me answer, please. Now, if you're talking about a disaffection, I can never, I can't imagine when Nigerians have never experienced disaffection with governments. This is not the first time. It made a mistake that this was the first time I've been alleged coup plot. This is not the first time. During the time of Abbas and Jo, there was an alleged for coup plot. Even in the time of President Yara when he was sick, there was an alleged attempt at coup plot. Those are not things that are strength in Nigerian politics. I don't know about disaffection because it has always been there and will always have disaffection. So long as there is struggle for power and one side of the divide takes power, there will always be disaffection. It happens all over the world. Go to the UK, between the labor and the conservative. Oh, go to America, Democrat and Republican. There will always be disaffection because who sees from different angles. And so it's not unusual. Right now, maybe, and I will always say, sometimes we exaggerate situations in order to score our point or make our points clear, there has been, nobody looks at, each time we talk about this government, nobody looks at achievements. We always want to protect the country in such a bad light that nobody looks at any achievement that is being done. Rather, we use one incident to expand. We speak as if Nigeria is the place nobody lives inside. Go on the streets. Everybody tells you nobody lives in Nigeria. Everywhere is bad. Every corner is bad. You can't travel on the road. I travel on the road every time. Grifently, I go to Protacot by road. I come back. Thousands of cars do that. So some of these things are either politically motivated or overblotted out of proportion. Not to say that there are no challenges. There are challenges. The issue of agitation is long in our country. We've not, I can't remember last time, through either state creation, local government creation, self-sufficiency, it's not through tie-haring self-sufficiency movement. The Biafra tried it in the 70s, in the 60s. The Masab tried it, I've been on it since 2002 or there about. So it's not a new thing. Rather right now, what is happening is based on political expediencies, based on non-state divide, we're spanning this horizon. So it's not that of place for people to want to capitalize on this overblotted, I call it overblotted, security challenges, overblotted out of proportion, security risks to want to try any foul thing. And that is why there's a government in place and the government has the capacity to detect and so they've dictated and they are warning. Remember recently, just last week, a very prominent, let me not mention his name, I like mentioning him, but I will not mention, a very prominent religious leader in this country, a leader of PFN, talked about, I mean, came on and said, the President should leave. Such a statement. And what is wrong with that? If somebody said, these people elected the President and if the person says, I mean, they all have rights to their opinion. Hold on, what is wrong in me saying if my President cannot do what he promised, then he should honorably step down. Is that a crime? This is a President that was elected. Is that a crime, is that a lesson? Is it a crime to ask a President who had rolled on the wings of bringing us security, peace, safety, employment and fighting Boko Haram? What is wrong in asking that President to step down if he's unable to do his job? Honorably, what is wrong with that? No, I ask the question, it's a yes or no answer. What is wrong with it? I'm answering you, let me answer you, everything is wrong because there are ways by which you can remove the President from office. There are, the Consulate provided a way to remove the President from office. If the individuals are- I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I apologize. I apologize, but I wanna just, you know, collect something out. There's a difference between me making a move to remove a person and me saying to you, honorably step down if you cannot do the job. The operating word is if. So there's a difference between asking you to and actively trying to get you out of office. I'm sorry, you are not the one that made the statement. Well, I'm trying to make you understand the sentence structure in this conversation. I am the one that brought it to court. I'm the one that brought it to court. So let me expand just on it. What I'm saying is the context upon which you will wake up either on your code piece or whatever and say the President should leave the office. Now, if you feel strongly about policies, you are free to accept, probably it's not the type of policies. If you feel strongly that the President can do a lot of things, then you can table a motion as an individual or a representative from the National Assembly for its impeachment, but you don't look. That is the kind of statements that are going on on this gravity. You don't go and put at that level, at that level of leadership, controlling, knowingfully whether you have so many flaws under your code and you make such statements. Those can be transmitted to insurrection. So the statements you make, how you make it and the context you make it is very important and so that people do not misread your statements. And by so doing, carry out acts that are not intended by your statement because at that level, you are not just talking for yourself, you are talking for millions of other people who you are leading. So it is different for me and individual to say the President should leave and you that controls thousands of followers, millions of followers to make such statements in public. So these are the things that we must get again. If there is areas you are not satisfied, point them out and I keep talking about also point out areas that are okay, point out bad areas, then make an informed opinion. Which is always bad, bad, bad, bad. Because maybe the side is supported, didn't win and at all time will bring down this other side. I don't think we're happy with the point. Thank you very much. Let's move to Mr. Dimeji Fabi. Let me ask, because I want to pick up from where Alastair left off. At what point does criticizing any government whatsoever in power become a cool plot as the presidency has alleged? At what point does constructive criticism or people crying foul because they are no longer feeling safe according to all of the people who have been coming out to speak. Either asking that the banditry issue be dealt with, Boko Haram hoisting their flag in Niger state or the kidnappings everywhere. At what point does criticism become a cool plot or send vibes to the people to want to overthrow a government? Well, thank you very much and good evening viewers. Let me start by saying that as a country, I think we've really mixed certain things and that thing is being honest with each other. It's an unfortunately the Nigerian government is not seems Nigerian government is not being honest with the people of Nigeria. First and foremost, I'd like to say that there is no cool plot anywhere. The federal government is just chasing shadows and they know what they're doing. If you come out and tell us that, okay, we know those who are behind this, then what are you waiting for?  As far as I know, and then a lot of criticism that you see out there is a reflection of the convergence of opinion. The convergence of the summit of opinion that Nigeria is gradually becoming a failed state. They are genuine criticisms. Everybody that has spoken about the presentation of Nigeria today have shown so much concern about the situation. It has never been this bad. And if a government, a responsible government, so to speak is taking those constructive criticisms as being antagonistic to the government, being an attempt to organize a cool plot, it means that that government is confused and that government is not really honest with the people. They are only afraid of their own shadows. And that's why I support the gentleman that first spoke. Nigeria is in a bad situation and we must all agree to this. It's not about politics, because those that are being killed on daily basis. But Alastair disagrees with you. He's saying that you're all blowing this out of proportion.  Are we blowing the territory in the country out of proportion? And he's saying that you all seem to be making... Alastair is saying that things are not bad and that there are good things that are happening, but we never ever talk about those good things. So I'm wondering, as someone who's in the opposition... With due respect, with due respect... Are you sure that you're not being biased towards the government? I live in Lagos. With due respect to the gentleman, I don't know whether he lives in another country or not. Even in Lagos, it says he's living. How many people are living in Lagos? Now please, let us be honest with ourselves. This government of President Muammar Dubar is fond of coming out to say we know this, and at the end of the day, they should be able to be above board, no matter what. We are not saying they are not trying to... Alastair, please, can you exercise some decorum? Let the gentleman speak when you were speaking? Yes, yes, yes. I don't know why he has to go to that extent. Now, what I'm saying is that the government has to be honest. The government has to be honest with Nigerians. A lot of things suggest that things are not who I am supposed to be. Many prominent Nigerians on daily basis are coming out to advise this government. Of recent, is the former vice president of Nigeria, who told them this is the time to declare war on terror. If other went to say that, go ahead and get... We call them reserves in the US or in the UK. Go and get the ex-military service that Nigerians have used, that have been used Nigerian money to train, to come back to this unit top. But when a government is so arrogant, this is what you get. So looking for a makeshift to say that there's a coup plot somewhere, as far as I know, it's very, very duplex. So as far as I know, it shows that the government is confused and they don't know what they want to do. Recently, the former Senate president of Nigeria, he wrote the president an open letter. They should go back to that letter and do what is there. It is simple. You came on board to tell us that you can handle security. I tell everybody who cares to listen that I personally will never forgive as a president for failing in security. Just like I will never forgive the vice president with the way our judicial system is. Because the impression we're given was that they are A to A class to the first class student in security and judiciary and law. So why are we having this problem? So as far as I know, the DSS came on board and said, we know these people.  Let Nigerians see that I will support you. I'll press the government if they're able to do that. It goes beyond coming out to tell us that we know them, I am not doing anything. That is just keep blackmail as far as I know. And I stand with my party, this is not a matter of hope, but I stand with the portion of my party that this government is just chasing shadows, as you wake up and do what is right for Nigerians. We are being killed on daily basis. The economy is in bad shape. So if someone out there on the national TV is telling me everything is going right, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's quite unfortunate. Let us take something for instance, a government that we all voted for. This is democracy. And Nigerians are happy that we're having democracy. You said in the open remark that we had a president who at some point on point of order in this country truncated democracy. So is it all these people that are giving credible advice and suggestions to Nigeria that are now planning coup to overturn this government? This government has lost the credibility. They have lost the respect of the people. They have lost the confidence of the people that sit down and have a rethink and give Nigeria the kind of governance that we desire or deserve. All right, I just wanna go back to Mr. Tamanola. I just wanna look at the weight of this statement because of course, like the presidency said and I want to reiterate, they would not mind ruffling unruly feathers. But I wanna go back to something that Ohaneze and Pandef said, they lambasted the presidency. In fact, they said that this is a democracy and it's not a military rule. They said that they were not interested in un-sitting anybody. In fact, they urged the president to deal with the situation in the country and leave speculation. In fact, they did say that it was embarrassing for a president to call former leaders, former political leaders, especially vice presidents and former presidents, that there was a word that was used. It just fails me now. More like saying that these people were angry that they were not being carried along. They were given a name and they're saying that this is very unruly of this government to name names. In fact, they did not just talk about political leaders. They talked about, it means that we're talking about Khan here. We're talking about the GNI and they're saying these people are supposed to or are plotting allegedly to overthrow the government. Does it mean that every single person, every preacher, whether it's a Muslim cleric or a Christian cleric, does it mean that former president, good luck, Janosan, former vice president, Tukua Bubaka, former president, Ulusha Gwabasanjan, I mean the list is endless, that all of these people could be ganging up against their own country because ganging up against this government means it's a gang up against the presidency and legally do these people, although they've not been named, but if they were to be named, do they have a grounds to drag this government to court if they do not produce an evidence? The answer is definitely negative. The answer is negative. And one of the high points of a democratic setting like I've earlier stated is constructive criticism. And when you are criticized, the essence of it is the people who are criticizing you, the objective is that they want you to do better, that's one. And with all due respect, a cross section of the groups that have been aforementioned were groups that supported this current administration to come into administration. I mean, would you say that Ulusha Gwabasanjan has criticized the administration because of a coup plotting? I mean, you've always known Ulusha Gwabasanjan, our past president, at one point in time or the other, he criticized the immediate past administration and he's criticizing the current one. Will it be because of coup plotting? As a matter of fact, I can tell you any attempt by any military for a coup plot in this nation will fail because we've gone beyond that. What Mr. President has just been asked to do is to secure our lives. In terms of security, go to the mud, go to Brown state. Brown state was one of the states that stood behind this current administration in times against the previous administration. The issue we are talking here with all due respect to my colleagues on the platform is not an issue of PDP, APC, or any other party. It's our destiny. And if we fail to be truthful, to be honest, I'm encouraged Mr. President to scramblin' the institutions at the end of the day, we won't be here to witness the things that are going to happen. Nigeria is definitely degenerating. In terms of the economy, what is the value of the Naira to the dollar? In terms of our, we promised us there'll be deregulation and at the end of the day, in spite of your deregulation, for goodness sake, where are the refineries? Where are the other things? These are questions that are begging answers. I'm not here to criticize Mr. President. I'm not here to criticize Mr. President. The most important thing is I'm begging him. Mr. Tamerla, we have to go.  We have to go. To the constructive criticism, nobody's going to on-site. If he's going to be on-site, it has to be by democratic means. We hear you. Let him with full due respect. Stop. Come and address the Nigerian people and secure them. We need to go. We need to go. Time is not on our side, but I want to thank you, Christy Tamerla, Lester Wilcox, and Mr. Fabiyee for being part of this conversation. We appreciate you all. Unfortunately, we could not go further with this conversation, but thank you. We don't have a lot of response there. We don't have a lot of response there. Well, we need to take a short break now when we return as regarding the abduction of the Greenfield University students, what should the Nigerian government do in this regard? Well, Ahmed Khuni will be telling us exactly what he thinks the government should do.


What's up y'all it's your girl Kinsey here from Layton Sports Guards and I am ripping a personal for Rob V We've got a 21 22 tops chrome ua for champions league soccer hobby and a 22 23 panini revolution soccer hobby box Best of luck Rob. Thanks again for your order Let's see we uh, we're gonna start with the revolution Of course drew. Thank you It's been fun ripping for you man We've got two 50 sunbursts of joseph salt fractal of chaloba or sorry diamond got rookie of mathas numyos uh fred on the infinite uh supersonic of smith row rookie of ben piercent fractal got bobby clark rookie uh jeon lucca sumaka infinite got futures rookie of romeo la la via a coal palmer fractal marquinhos rookie um basuma on a diamond shockwave mason mounts a gibbs whites fractal last pack of revolution Got rookie of rica lewis nice one there for man city a uh messier infinite And all righty rob that will do it for the revolution Now time for the tops chrome Got many diamond of uh filthota a nice one there to 125 refractor of uh curado marcel sabitzer rookie refractor of scalvini refractor of kunde Got aqua lava of raven birch Got speckle of tiago tomas That would be hilarious if they did that uh the future stars kema vinga refractor auto theo hernandez for ac milan Theo hernandez It's gonna be the auto there point of rock charisma Got future stars graven birch Got many diamond of uh avan avana Aveniel's avan nelson she's 275 That would not come out golazo of viny jr sparkle of knoff chasing glory rookie uh pepe david naras refractor Sobby simons on the future stars refractor refractor is uh giovanni rena And we've got pink mini diamond of georgino Chenali that is 99 of 175 Alrighty rob that will do it for your soccer boxes. Congrats again. Thanks so much for hopping in and we'll get this right out to you


This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters Here. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Condo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura and I'm your host today. Condo Insider is the show relating to condo living and we deal with issues that are near and dear to those people who live and work in condos and I have to hear with me today very special guests from the Mediation Center of the Pacific. I have Katie Rainey. Katie is, she's the special programs director for the center and I have Nathan Nikaito who I've known for a real long time and he's the manager, Mediation Manager for the center. Thank you for being on our show today. Thank you for having us on. Thanks for having us. Katie, are you just graduated from college? I graduated with my master's, yeah, just like a couple years ago. I got a master's in communication at UH Manoa as well as a graduate certificate in conflict resolution. So I was studying about mediation facilitation and different conflict resolution techniques. And now you're the special programs director for the Mediation Center of the Pacific? Yeah, special programs coordinator, yes. Tell us about what the center does. The center does so much. So we help other people to talk through their problems so that they can negotiate a solution for themselves. Our mediators are there to help other people find the solution that they can't themselves because they're too emotional about what's going on or their dispute has been going on for so long that they feel like there's no way out and then they come to our center and we mediate. We have impartial mediators who are trained for this type of communication skills and also depending on the case specific content information about Islam, that sort of a thing. And they help the parties in dispute resolve their conflicts. And so where is the center located? We're on 245 North Kukui Street in Honolulu, we're just on the edge of Chinatown. Okay, and so if somebody wanted to use your services, what would they do? Would they pick up the phone and call you, go online? Can they reach you through their website? They can call us. So our number is 521-6767. And we will be scrolling that throughout the show. It'll be scrolling on the screen so that people want to call you. You also have a website, right? We do have a website and you can learn more about the types of cases as well as we have a few training programs. So if you'd like to learn better communication skills for resolving conflict in the workplace, we have a mediation skills for managers, one-day workshop, as well as a basic mediation training that takes you through those steps if you want to apply that into your own life. Okay, and if somebody wanted to use your services, do they have to pay anything? That really depends on the type of case that's going through, but all of our cases have a sliding scale fee based on household income. So if you're not able to afford it, we work with you to make sure that whatever gets charged, you'd actually be able to afford. And in fact, with condo disputes, you do have a subsidy program. We do. We are partially subsidized by the Real Estate Commission. And this is the state of Hawaii? Yes, right, yeah. And the money comes from something called the Kondo Ed Fund? Yes. And the Kondo Ed Fund is funded by people who live in condos. And for you people out there who are listening to this program, you may not know it, but your maintenance fees every other year are used to fund the Kondo Ed Fund. And your association gets billed by the state of Hawaii based on your, the number of units. And I was very shocked because when this started over 20 years ago, it was a dollar and a quarter per unit per, every other year, by any of them. And I found out that in 2000, and it's every odd year, so it would have been 2017, it was $10 per unit. You do the math and those of you living out there, that means $10 per unit. So if you live in a 300 unit building, your association every other year writes a check for $3,000 to the state of Hawaii for Kondo education. And that money is used to educate boards of directors and owners of condos and to provide funding for dispute resolution, which is used in the mediation program that your center offers, right? Yes, yeah. Correct. And let's talk about Kondo disputes because, you know, people who have disputes who live in condos, I mean, I think it's a special type of situation because you're living in the same building that you're fighting with people, right? Whether it's another unit owner or resident or whether it's the board of directors or the managing agent, right? I mean, and it's very uncomfortable for this dispute to go on.  We got to sue the board. We got to sue the managing agent. And the whole program under the Kondo law is set up so that you don't go to court. You don't have to get an attorney. And so can you explain what you have more than one type of mediation that you offer for Kondo disputes? Yeah. So I really want to re-emphasize what you were saying is that with Kondo disputes, you can't really walk away because the dispute is where you're living. So it really needs to get resolved as quickly as possible. And mediation is one of those resources that's most effective the earlier you do it. So once a dispute kind of starts, just go to mediation and really talk it out. They can pick up the phone and just call you. Yep, exactly. That number 521-6767 that you told us earlier. They can just pick up the phone and call you and somebody will walk them through the process. Yep, they get transferred to our client services who are very wonderful people. They ask them a few questions about the issues that are coming up, some demographic information, as well as the contact information for the other people. The client services contacts everyone else who is involved in that dispute to tell them about the mediation and then to schedule a time that really works for you. Our office is open Monday through Friday. We do mediation at 9 a.m. and at 1 p.m. We schedule about a three-hour block for them. And then we do have some Saturdays free as well, so we can work within your schedule. And I think you mentioned a website earlier. Do you have the website address? Yeah, so it's www.mediatehawaii.org. Okay, and that's where people, if they want to go online and look at your website and find out what kind of services you offer and who they can contact. And there's information on that website. Yes, yes. And you guys listening, it's really important that you do this.  If you have a dispute with your neighbor, with the board, with a managing agent, I mean, the Mediation Center of the Pacific is a resource for you to go to. And if you do the evaded mediation, the state of Hawaii will subsidize a portion of that expense. Yeah, so there are two different approaches to mediating condo disputes. So we have the facilitative approach and then we have the evaluative approach. Why don't you tell us what the difference is? Sure. So with the facilitative approach, it's really, they use a lot of the same skills where it's active listening, reflecting, asking very pertinent questions and trying to help the parties come to negotiate their own solution. The way that that evaluative differs from the facilitative approach. Well, when you're with facilitative mediation, when you're talking about, you know, you have a mediator, are the people in the same room? Because sometimes it's very uncomfortable if you're having a dispute with somebody to be in the same room. And so, you know, it's hard for them. I mean, if I was having a fight with my neighbor, I don't think I'd want to be talking while that neighbor was in the room with me and the mediator. And that's perfectly fine. We can set up a system if the dispute is too untenable. They can enter at different times and never see each other. We can keep them in separate rooms and the mediators will go back and forth between the two of them. So you never have to see the other side that you're fighting with? If you don't want to, you don't have to.  We can have you in the same room, but then there'll also be time during the mediation where the mediator will talk with one person and then the other so that something that maybe is part of the dispute that you don't want the other person to know, you can share it with the mediator. And then the mediator will ask you at the end of that private session, is there anything that I can't share with the other party? And if there's something that you really don't want them to know, the mediator won't tell them and they'll be able to work it out anyway. So how is the evaluative mediation different from the facilitative mediation? The evaluative approach uses another tool. It uses the tool of evaluation. So the mediator in that case is very familiar with condo case law, with condominium law and is able to assess the cases of the parties involved and give a mediator proposal or a mediator evaluation that assesses the strength of each of the parties' cases. If this were to go to court, what the judge might say and offer some alternatives for that. And with the evaluative mediation, the center has trained certain people to act as neutrals in those evaluative mediation cases, haven't they? Yes, we have a cadre of mediators who are very, very familiar with condominium law. And I know some of the neutrals that have been trained for evaluative mediation are condominium attorneys. Some of them are, yes. Right. And so these are people who know what the law is. Absolutely. They know what the law is. This is what they do in their professional careers. So basically what you're saying is with evaluative mediation, let's say you have a dispute with your board and we're talking about a provision in their bylaw about documents. Let's say they wanted some board minutes. Yeah. And for some reason the board just wouldn't give it to them. And so here we are, we're fighting about documents and the statute does say an owner can have documents and if certain types of documents, I mean they can look at them for free. If they want copies they have to pay a reasonable charge. I mean the statute and it goes into different documents, even employment agreements you can see. Yeah. And so now you've got a unit owner and they're fighting with their board. So you have an attorney who is very knowledgeable in these areas and he basically listens to both sides and he says, you know, you've got a good case and he'll go to the other side and he says, you've got a crappy case. Right? It's not so many words. Right. But that's basically it. Right.  It's going to cost you a ton of money. I mean, so that's what happens in evicted mediation, right? And when somebody gets an opinion, it's easier to kind of bring people together and in my hypothetical, maybe in that case, the board would just say, hey, you know, it's not worth our time to fight this. Let's just give them the documents, which the statute says they're entitled to have anyway. Yeah. So, yeah, in cases like that, the mediator would act as sort of an agent of reality and say that if the statutes are very clear that this is what's required of you and you're not doing it. So how do you think your case is going to go with that? Here are some other alternatives that you could do. And, yeah, it ends up being resolved without having to go through any sort of court process. And, yeah. And that was the whole intent of the evaluative. Yeah. It's like if you get an expert or, you know, somebody who knows what they're talking about or has been trained to know the law and the procedures, and so they're going to say you're right and you're wrong.  So, you know, it kind of, if I heard something like that, I think I'd want to settle the case rather than spend time and expense trying to fight it. Mm-hmm. Because, you know, and I think that was a whole theory of, you know, requiring people to do evaluative mediation. Yeah. And it definitely is a reality check to say that the case that you have right now is on shaky ground. There's not a lot of law and there's not a lot of precedence that will support it. So, if you were to go to court, it probably, you probably would not get the result that you think that you're going to. You're not going to be as successful as you think you are. So, other options would be better to pursue at that point. Okay, you know, we're getting to the halfway point. So, we're going to take a one-minute break now and when we come back, we're going to talk about some stories. Sure.  So, anyway, when we come back for our break, we're going to talk about some stories that, you know, will reflect what you guys do on a day-to-day basis at the Center. Yeah. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggled with hunger. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more.  If you're not in control of how you see yourself, then who is? Live above the influence. Hi, I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground every Friday here at 1 p.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground. That library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you. If you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Yeah, go into it. Okay, welcome back to Kondo Insider. And we have, as our guests today, Katie Rady and Nathan Nikaito from the Mediation Center of the Pacific. And Nathan, who is the mediation manager, is going to tell us about some of the types of mediation that Kondo, Kondo dispute mediation, that the center deals with. And, you know, if you could tell us about some cases that are covered by facilitated mediation and some by the evaluated mediation process so that our listening audience can kind of get an idea of the kind of dispute you guys handle and how you handle them. Sure, thanks for asking, Jane. Basically, as it relates to condominium cases, issues that are covered under the Kondo statutes, 514AMB, would be available to be subsidized by the state. The other criteria they have is the ALL must be registered. ALL is not registered. That subsidy program is not available to be used. Normally, the owners or the ALL has the choice of either facilitative or evaluative mediation, but in evaluative mediation, since the upfront costs are a little more. In facilitative cases, for the owner, the fees are on a sliding scale. I believe the Kondo share, the ALL's share would be a flat $250. For evaluative cases, each side must agree that they're going to first use evaluative mediation. They must agree on the evaluative mediator to be used, and they'll each pay for an initial hour of mediation, $375. Whatever is above that, if the preparation time and mediation last longer than two hours, that is where the subsidy will pick up the balance. That means that if it goes longer than that for two hours, that means that the state of Hawaii will write the check to the mediation center for the parties. Correct. What kind of disputes come to your center? There's a wide gamut of condominium disputes that range from unequal enforcement of house rules to the board is not like you already mentioned with Katie providing me the documents I'm asking for. And unequal enforcement. That's where the president, where the president maybe parks in a 15-minute stall for two hours, and everybody knows it's a president's car. He doesn't get a ticket. But you park in there for 25 minutes, and all of a sudden you got a notice of violation. This unequal enforcement, that's got to be the number one, gripe that people seem to... And they all know. I've heard from condominium office, how do they know I'm the president? Well, duh. I think they kind of know who it is. Why don't the security people give that ticket a car? Because it's been there for two hours, and it turns out it belongs to a board member. And that kind of stuff does not sit right with most people and it shouldn't. It shouldn't make any difference. Whether you're a board member, the president, or the guy who owns a studio apartment, everybody gets treated the same. The rules have to be applied equally to everybody. And so when they aren't, that's the one, that's when they come to you guys, right? We have other issues such as whether improvements that the owner made were approved by the AOA board. Sometimes there are issues like squeaky floors. Upstairs neighbor has installed flooring that the downstairs neighbor's feeling makes too much noise. There are... That's got to be one of the harder ones, the squeaky floor ones. And so have you been involved in any of those types of... Not me personally. But the squeaky floor has come more than once. That's one of the, maybe I should say more frequent, but it has come multiple times for radiation. And I think what people don't understand is when you move into a condo, you kind of give up some rights. And sometimes if you're real sensitive to noise, maybe you shouldn't live in a condominium because you're living in very close quarters to other people. And I think you have to expect some level of noise. I mean, when it gets out of hand and gets very loud, where it interferes with your sleeping and your living there, then I can see maybe getting upset. But I think they have to be a little bit tolerant because it comes with the territory because you're living so close to each other. One of the things that mediation is really good for is that if you were to just let it go and just have this annoyance come at you and it says over and over and over again and then it builds up and builds up, and you're not really thinking about what's happening on the other side. You don't know if they know that their floor is squeaky or if they made an improvement that is something for them that they really need for them to live right, either changing the floor or whatever else other accommodations that they've made. And you may not know that.  It's going to explode at the end. So if you mediate when you're... and you actually try to resolve the dispute when it's first coming up, after the first couple of times when you're saying, oh, my gosh, it's happening again. They keep making the noise, keep squeaking. It's so squeaky, right? If you try to resolve it at that point, you're much more likely to actually come to a resolution and find out something that will work for both of you. And then the annoyance will stop after that or you'll find some way to really work it out. Right.  I am just so upset. There was a case recently in Maui and some of you may have read about it in a newspaper. $1.9 million lawsuit where the association was hit with a judgment. This is a squeaky floor. A squeaky floor case. And what happened is a unit owner is a disabled person, a blind person. And he got permission to put in wood floors so that he could maneuver his way around his unit. And it was the unit below who complained about the tapping. Okay? And that's when the board started trying to tell him no, he had to remove his wood floors. And you know, what gets involved here is you have a person with a disability. And so that is covered by fair housing which says that the association has to make reasonable accommodations. So that means that if a person is disabled and he has to have a cane and a wood floor allows him to maneuver in his unit, then you know, the association's going... I mean, that's a reasonable accommodation. I don't know how you tell them. Oh, no, you can't have a wood floor. You're going to have to put carpeted floors and I don't know how you maneuver. But you know, I think the issue in that case is we found out that that case, none of the attorneys knew about this mediation program that's in the condominium statute. Nobody knew about it. I'm thinking, but that, you know, that has got to change. And so you people listening out there, you don't want to go into a courtroom to resolve your dispute. You want to use places like the Mediation Center of the Pacific who will do facilitative or evasive mediation and some of it is subsidized and you don't want to go into a courtroom because that case took three years. And I think the association ended up finding the unit owner $200 a day and it went up to almost 67 days. So it was a huge amount. And they were going to foreclose on his unit. And for those of you who think that your case isn't important enough, there's an insurance company that ensures most of the condominiums in town, in the state, insurance associates and its owner is Sue Savio. Sue Savio tells me that there are two, maybe three, carriers, D&O carriers in the state of Hawaii. And because of these claims, and Hawaii has got more claims than California, New York and Florida, all those states with huge condominium communities, Hawaii has more claims. And so our insurance is more expensive. So even though that lawsuit happened in Maui, she tells me that all of us are going to be effective and that's why we got to keep these lawsuits out of the courts. We have to find some way to resolve them without going into a courtroom because it ends up, because if our insurance goes up, guess who pays it? The people who own the units. So that means your maintenance fees are going to go up. Even if you weren't involved in a lawsuit, it's because all these other people who didn't know about mediation decided, oh no, I'm going to hire a lawyer and I'm going to sue the association and get my pound of flesh. And in the end, all of us end up paying more money to live in a condominium. You do a very simple calculation, right? Mediations are measured in hours, whereas the lawsuits are measured in years. If anybody balks at maybe $375 for an evaluative mediation, if you think about the $1.9 million that might happen in court, it doesn't seem that much anymore. And I understand that the plaintiff, the disabled person in his wife, their attorney's fees were over $900,000. I mean, and those numbers are just mind-boggling and you figure how did it get to this point? I mean, and when I heard about it, I just shook my head. I said, you know, we're not doing a really good job in getting this information out about mediation. So that's why you guys are here. That's why you guys are here because, and that's why I'm imploring the people who are watching this show and who listen to us that you need to think about mediation and arbitration to resolve your dispute because you don't want it to fester. It doesn't get better, it gets worse, and it gets more expensive. So bite the bullet, call the Mediation Center of the Pacific, ask them about their programs, and like I said, they're very cost-effective and the evaluative mediation is subsidized by your maintenance fees. So, you know, and tell your friends and neighbors because we don't want to see any more lawsuits about things that could have been resolved early on by mediation at a reduced cost. One more point to put in that's important. Those fees that we were talking about, they only apply if the mediation takes place to open the case for us to contact the other party, the back and forth. If they end up saying no, they don't want to mediate, there's no fee. So a fee will only apply if the mediation actually comes together and occurs. So it doesn't cost anything to try. Yeah, there's no harm in trying. If you think that you're going to want to resolve this dispute, any dispute that you have, call in. Talk to our client services. They can tell you about whether it would be a good mediated case or if there's another resource out there that maybe you could use and really just get that process started and you won't get charged unless the mediation goes through. But then again, it is in the larger picture a very nominal fee for the mediation process itself. And it really, the basis of mediation is really on building relationships, on renewing that trust. And when you're living next door to the other person, when you're working with them, if you're on the board, it's really important for you to have a good, strong relationship and mediation really helps you to communicate better and to really rebuild that trust so you can have a long-term relationship with these people. Because you live in the same building anyway, so you've got to get along. Why can't we get along? But thank you so much, guys, for being with us on our show and for giving us the information. And for those of you listening, please put the Mediation Center of the Pacific on your resources list and please contact them if you need to do dispute resolution. And join us next week for another informative show on Condo Insider about condo living. Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you.


President Bola Tinibu has rolled out his administration's plans to make health care cheap and easily accessible to all Nigerians. President Tinibu unpacked his health sector reorganization and liberalization plans while delivering his address at an event commemorating this year's universal health care coverage, UHC Day, and the unveiling of the Nigerian health sector renewal investment initiative held at the President Shavila Abuja. President Tinibu said his administration, through the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare right from the 2024 physical year, will commence a massive revamping of the health sector through the resuscitation of physical infrastructure and equipment as well as restraining of personnel across the sector. Health is not merely the absence of disease, but the embodiment of physical, mental, and social well-being. It is a fundamental human right and Nigerians commitment to achieving universal health care coverage is reflected in the unwavering dedication of my administration to hold this right for every individual younger hold in rural or urban areas. Delivering improved quality health. The outcome is an underpinning factor in my promise of renew hope. That hope is ignited here today and with your support. All motor lab partners and agencies health is back on the front burner. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.