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Some cabinet members went to Western Region premier, Samuel Ladoke Akintola, to complain about the corruption of one of their colleagues. They said the man was stealing their party’s funds and eating government money with reckless abandon. They said the gentleman’s impunity knew neither the fear of the law, nor of the party and the […]
Continue ReadingThe first day of the year is never a good day to write about death and dying. Rotimi Akeredolu spent the last three or four years hard-headed on the frontline. As planted in his name, Akeredolu, he was a small man who nurtured himself to bigness on life’s battlefield. He was not my friend. Apart […]
Continue ReadingAhmadu Rabah was 28 years old in 1938 when he made a very strong bid for the Sultanate of Sokoto. He lost the throne to Alhaji Siddiq Abubakar, a man who was not even on the list of three submitted to the British Resident. Fatalists would say that was destiny at work. Ahmadu Rabah later […]
Continue ReadingThere are very good people in our courts; there are very bad people there too. Unfortunately, a one-eyed man gained prominence in a town and the whole town got called the town of the blind. The courts below can be both bad and incompetent. We will still be safe if the Supreme Court is a […]
Continue ReadingOn the streets of Ibadan, there is an Aisha Suleiman from Kano State begging for alms. The about-22-year-old lady suffered a sudden divorce and everything around her collapsed. The only option she could thereafter think of was to move down south in search of hope – to do street begging. At a spot along the […]
Continue Reading“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.” Imagine this George Orwel dystopian quote in his ‘1984’ applying directly to […]
Continue ReadingA commercial flight landed in Asaba on Sunday but its cabin crew welcomed passengers to Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja. A certified true copy of an Appeal Court judgment last week gave victory to both the respondents and the appellants. Nigeria of today is the textbook definition of confusion. I seek to describe what the Court […]
Continue ReadingIf I were a politician, my devotion hours would be to the courts instead of pouring oil on INEC and voters, deities of limited powers. If the gods complain, I would ask them where they were when ugly death was killing sinners and saints. The buck – our electoral buck – stops at the courts. […]
Continue ReadingWe sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it.” I do not know under what condition Bob Dylan wrote that song line. All I know is that it serves my purpose as I sit here at the bank of Nigeria searching for the right metaphor for what the country has become. […]
Continue ReadingBefore Abuja, there was Lagos as our Federal Capital. And this is where I would want to believe that there is something about our North and Federal Capital Territories. Before independence and immediately after independence, Lagos had a succession of two ministers of Lagos Affairs, both were northerners. One was Alhaji Musa Yar’Adua, father of […]
Continue ReadingSusanne Wenger was famous as Adunni Oloriṣa. The BBC in 2008 described her as “white priestess of ‘black magic.’” A Nigerian said she was “white priestess of an African goddess.” Until her death in 2009, she was the custodian of Osun Osogbo grove and everything connected to its sacredness. But that task was not what […]
Continue ReadingIf history were a child, the Yoruba would insist on calling it an Abiku. History keeps climbing the chimney and, in Wole Soyinka’s voice, yelling at us: “I am Abiku, calling for the first/ And the repeated time.” And with J.P. Clark’s opening glee, his entrance chant, history revels in “coming and going these several […]
Continue ReadingThe Charleston Gazette was an American newspaper that was born in 1907 but stopped bearing that name in 2015. One of the newspaper’s 1952 editions contained a piece with a clause that may have been written for Tinubu’s Nigeria: “Chicago, that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘get that elephant out of your room’.” Someone said coincidence is […]
Continue ReadingWhere witches contend and exchange punches, mere men do not stand by to watch. But part of the job of a journalist is to see and report; sometimes he runs commentaries on bouts – not minding if the pugilists are gods or principalities. There is an ongoing offshore Bola Tinubu versus Atiku Abubakar rumble-in-the-jungle, a […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Tinubu gave our country’s Minister of Defence and Minister of State, Defence to the North; he gave the North Minister of Police Affairs and Minister of State, Police Affairs; he gave the North Minister of Education and Minister of State, Education; he gave the North Minister of Agriculture and Food Security and Minister […]
Continue ReadingAn oba is put on the throne to keep “the bush at bay.” Collectively and individually, the successful oba is praised as “so’gbó di’lé/sò’gbé dì’gboro/ oba a s’ààtàn d’ojà – the successful king is he who turns forest to home; the one who turns bush to town. Karin Barber’s ‘I Could Speak Until Tomorrow’ (published in […]
Continue ReadingOpeyemi Bamidele was the candidate of the Labour Party in the June 21, 2014 governorship election in Ekiti State. He thought he had worked hard enough to earn a victory but on the D-Day, he learnt a lesson profound enough to last him a lifetime. At exactly 7a.m. on the day of the election, a […]
Continue ReadingThe only reason the poor have not started eating the rich in Nigeria is, perhaps, because this is the season of corn. And, I believe I am right. Check your neighbourhood. Except you are in this government, you would know that things are bad, very bad for every home. Every staple food is priced beyond […]
Continue ReadingToday’s Yorubaland is a very reluctant part of Nigeria. But it is also the most conflicted of the parts. Its goals are difficult to define – even by itself. A friend from the non-Yoruba part of Edo State asked me at the weekend if the serial declaration of today as a public holiday in the […]
Continue ReadingThe Jerusalem Post is arguably Israel’s most-read English news website and best-selling English newspaper. Last week Wednesday, it published an interesting report of what it described as a “nature drama” involving a large black snake in the town of Shoham, halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The huge snake was “found motionless with an equally […]
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