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“America is back,” said Biden about a week ago. But which America, and whose America, is back? The answer to this questions was given earlier in a Presidential Memorandum, wherein he threatened to sanction countries which are still reluctant to make laws to promote, accommodate and perhaps even expand the rights and privileges of Lesbian, […]
Continue ReadingThis month marks a decade since the start of the “Afro-Arab Spring.” Led by technology-wielding youths. These revolutions toppled mummified dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. The dry harmattan winds of this North African spring blew across the Sahara desert three years later to topple the 27-year autocracy of Burkina Faso’s Blaise Compaoré in another […]
Continue ReadingOn January 9, 2021, operatives of Amotekun – the quasi-state police outfit of south-western Nigeria – went to Aiyete in Ibarapa LGA, Oyo state, on a mission to arrest suspected kidnappers based on “intelligence” from the local communities. At the end of the operation, Alhaji Usman Okebi and his two sons were killed and several […]
Continue Reading“To eliminate herders’/ farmers clashes, ECOWAS must take drastic steps in curbing foreign herders who are always armed with sophisticated weapons from making incursion into Nigeria just as the federal government must ban open grazing and block grazing routes from the northern to the southern part of the country” – Statesman Abdullahi Ganduje, a Fulani […]
Continue ReadingIn the last few days, I have been having cerebral discussions with some of my readers with Fulani background who accuse the press and some other Nigerians of ethnic profiling whenever they refer to killer herders/militias terrorizing the entire country as Fulanis. I have a lot of such Fulani friends; good and law-abiding people. One […]
Continue ReadingPresident Joseph Biden’s inaugural speech said it all. The United States of America has overcome the attempted coup of January 6 incited by President Donald Trump. The country is set to re-assert itself as the citadel of democracy. “Democracy has prevailed.” Democracy has truly prevailed! The coming of Biden, therefore, is not a welcome breeze […]
Continue ReadingNigerians do God. It is almost impossible to find a self-professed atheist in Nigeria. Mosques and Churches are usually filled to the brim on Fridays and Sundays, respectively. Loud chants of God are flamboyantly rendered, literally, from roof tops, in season and out of season. Accessible social spaces are littered with sermons and God talk. […]
Continue ReadingFellow Nigerians let me start by saying that I hate conspiracy theories generally. The reason is simple. They are like superstitions. They are not capable of any logical, rational, scientific analysis or basis yet people have wholesale beliefs in them. They consider them to be true, even though they know they are stranger than fiction. […]
Continue ReadingAmerica lost Africa for four years under Donald Trump. The Joe Biden Administration can regain it. Essentially, the United States should resist the temptation to compartmentalise the world into neatly convenient areas of descending strategic interest to it. The Trump Administration was a past master at that game. Its ideological war with China privileged the […]
Continue ReadingThere are at least two fundraising efforts ongoing for Sunday Igboho, now deemed a Yoruba freedom fighter. So far, one has garnered £43,024, raised out of its £100,000 goal while another one has raised about $4,000. A couple of weeks ago, when I got the links urging me to donate to those funds, I thought […]
Continue ReadingFrom Olusegun Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan and now Muhammadu Buhari, ‘triumphalism’ by members of the ethnic group whose ‘son’ is in power has become the defining ethos of their relationship with other Nigerians. This display of arrogance of power—even without deriving any ‘benefit’ beyond the fact that the president speaks their language—not only causes problems […]
Continue ReadingA town with well-established features of ethnic plurality, Okene, my place of birth, in the North-Central State of Kogi was like a mini Nigeria. Populated by Nigerians of various ethno-geographic backgrounds, Okene town emerged over early decades as a foremost centre of commerce, trade and local industry among contemporary communities. Whereas, the Igbo community in […]
Continue ReadingThe most distressful aspect of my recent interaction with cows and herders is that it has created a most unwanted distraction from the ongoing life and death Nigerian narrative. One has to take time off to deal with distortions and fake versions, while students are being reportedly waylaid and killed and/or kidnapped in Ondo and […]
Continue ReadingWole Soyinka, last week, wrote about mad cows and madder narratives. Where else do cows, what they eat, how they eat, and where they eat dominate discourses in the 21st century if not in a kingdom of fools? And, again, last week in Ibadan, Nigeria, rotten tomatoes and how they were disposed of claimed lives […]
Continue ReadingYou won’t believe this. As the Lagos state governor-elect in 1979, Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande was so much in a hurry to hit the ground running that he appealed to all headmasters and principals not to demand or accept fees for the new academic session starting in September – in line with the free education […]
Continue ReadingOn Sunday, February 14, the Nigerian Presidency in a statement signed by spokesman Garba Shehu reportedly affirmed that President Muhammadu Buhari is determined to ensure the protection of all religious and ethnic groups in the country, whether majority or minority, “in line with the provisions of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria […]
Continue ReadingDear President Buhari, This letter, my second to you in five months, will begin with a very, very absurd question: Mr. President, will Nigeria drift into another civil war under your watch simply because the ‘Giant of Africa’ does not know how to manage its cows? Yes, absurd: for, absurdity is the faithful cohort of the grotesque […]
Continue ReadingThis must be a distressful season for Professor Wole Soyinka as Nigeria journeys through its peculiar season of Kongi and the madmen. The Prof has spent almost a lifetime teaching in the classroom as well as national and international fora to know well enough that some people are uneducable. I am still deciphering the “leap […]
Continue ReadingBy a curious subterfuge, cattle and their handlers have finally managed to conquer centre stage in our national attention and discourse. Our security agencies and nearly all state governors are now engrossed in some form of interrogation of the herders’ menace. A few weeks ago, all the governors of the South West states held an […]
Continue ReadingIn the last few days, Fulani militias dominant in the North openly confirmed that they are the much-talked about bandits ravaging the entire country. They are truly Fulani militias as I have persistently identified them in my write ups. The expeditions of cleric, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi to the strongholds of the militias in the North-west […]
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