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As the melee I describe as the Godwin Emefiele malady gains traction, one anecdote that seems to capture it can be found in the song of late Ibadan, Oyo State-born Yoruba Awurebe music maestro, Alhaji Dauda Epo Akara. The malady is unexampled for its cunning. In it, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Emefiele, seeks […]
Continue ReadingThere was tension inside the main bowl of the Teslim Balogun Stadium, Lagos this day, December 11, 2014. President Goodluck Jonathan, having been rendered one of the most worthless clothes a people could wear on their festive day by the demolition propaganda machine of the All Progressives Congress, (APC) it was obvious that whoever scored […]
Continue ReadingHow was I to know that that meeting I had with the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, on March 2, 2022, was the last between a father and his son? In the last couple of hours of hearing of his passing, I have scrutinized, without success, memories of anything unusual in the sky on […]
Continue ReadingThe most appropriate representation of the impending 2023 presidential election contest for the Yoruba is what is called the Odun e’gun or the Egungun Festival contest. It is a festival-cum-contest in which masquerades file out in their rainbow coloured regalia, with a mammoth crowd gathered to watch them dance. As at today, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Yemi Osinbajo […]
Continue ReadingPrior to the July 11, 2007 coordinated bombing of commuter trains in India’s largest city of Mumbai, Indians, like Nigerians, were wrapped in the shawls of their innocence and naivety. On that day, terrorists violently yanked off the terror purity shawls off India’s face. In a matter of minutes, multiple explosive devices were detonated in […]
Continue ReadingIn Russia’s 1998 St. Petersburg local assembly elections, incumbent Oleg Sergeyev had been a thorn in the flesh of totalitarian governor, Vladimir Yakovlev. Upon Sergeyev’s launch of his bid to replace him, Yakovlev waited till election date to sting him with his amusingly ingenuous strategy. On voting day, voters, majority of whom were illiterate, were […]
Continue ReadingI delivered this paper yesterday at the World Kegites Club’s celebration of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 85th birthday which held at the OOPL in Abeokuta, Ogun State, with him in attendance: Yesterday, at the installation of the new Olubadan of Ibadanland, I took my time to listen to his cognomen, with studied interest. I came out […]
Continue ReadingThough it looks harmless, political cartooning can be nerve-racking, provoking the bile of political office holders and triggering a huge political umbrage in the process. In February, 2021, an award-winning political cartoonist with the Daily Trust newspaper, Bulama Mustapha, sketched a cartoon flake of a framed photograph sitting majestically on Nigeria’s Aso Rock presidential seat. […]
Continue ReadingChinua Achebe’s Tortoise folktale in his highly celebrated Things Fall Apart, among other motifs, excoriates an act of betrayal as evil. In having Ekwefi, one of his characters, narrate the proverbial cunning and treachery of the Tortoise to her daughter Ezinma, Achebe attempted to paint a moral canvass suggestive of the fact that traitors always […]
Continue ReadingTrinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, would seem to have Nigeria and the facts of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola’s death in military detention in mind when he wrote his famous novel, Half of Life. Renowned for and […]
Continue ReadingHow does one place the abduction and murder of a five-year-old Kano girl, Hanifa Abubakar last week? Hanifa, a student of Kids Academy, a private school located in Kwanar Dakata in Nassarawa local government area of Kano in Tudunwada, was abducted on December 2, 2021 by Abdulmalik Tanko, the proprietor of the school. After kidnapping her and collecting part of the […]
Continue ReadingSo I was at the Alausa Governor’s Office in Lagos. Accessing the governor was like seeking needle in a haystack. His Press Secretary sent words up that an irritant interloper had come to ferret response to a newsmagazine’s damming expose on the governor. After hours of waiting, a commissioner (names withheld) sauntered in and met […]
Continue ReadingEven in the grips of hopelessness, it will still be suicidal for a nation to be hopeless. This will seem to be the situation with Nigeria as she meandered into a new year yesterday. Same yesterday, President Muhammadu Buhari was at the shrine to offer the rituals of a new year. In his 2022 New […]
Continue ReadingCould Chief Ajibola Ige, former governor of old Oyo State, ex-Attorney General of the Federation and foremost apostle of Yoruba’s recent ancestor, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, have escaped the gruesome death that took his life on December 23, 2001, if he had chosen the sobriquet “Demosthenes,” rather than “Cicero”? Ige’s gruesome murder and the unfortunate circumstances […]
Continue ReadingLast week, as Minister of Information and Orientation, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, was engrossed in his theatrics over the Lagos EndSARS panel report; I was wrapped in sobriety as I listened to Manchester-based UK pop group of artists called the Hollies. Renowned for being one of Britain’s leading musical groups of the 1960s and into the […]
Continue ReadingAt No 9, Rumuibekwe Road in Port Harcourt on November 10, 1995, the devil sat in a corner, having a saturnalia. No one could see him. He wore dark goggles, donning the uniform of a five-star Army General, wrapped up in a huge celebratory mood. His arch-enemy, Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists […]
Continue ReadingA photograph forcefully elbowed itself into the media space during the week that just ended. It was that of President Muhammadu Buhari looking heavenwards, his two hands spread in total supplication to God, his countenance sober. He had arrived at the Islamic holy city of Makkah on Thursday to perform the Umrah (lesser Hajj). Makkah, […]
Continue ReadingLast Wednesday, Muhammadu Buhari and his newfound friend, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, locked each other inside the sacristy of the Nigerian presidential Villa, christened Aso Rock. When they came out afterwards, both wore the visage of 3-year old Syrian girl, Salwa and Cuckold, a 1997 book written by Indian, Kiran Nagarkar. Originally derived from the bird […]
Continue ReadingLast Thursday, when the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC) reportedly slumped at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, the story of the late enfant terrible of Oyo State politics, Busari Adelakun, crept into my memory. Media reports said that Bawa slumped at an occasion commemorating the National Identity Day. Same last week, Nigeria was […]
Continue ReadingAn early morning inferno broke out in Circus Maximus, Rome on June 19, 64 A.D. It spread like bushfire through the ancient city. Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar’s reaction was immediate: he scapegoated Roman Christians of the time and inflicted a persecution scarcely heard of in Roman history on them. Highly chagrined by the nauseating no-holds-barred […]
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