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My mystery Hausa friend has been busy with me lately. He has been firing a series of probing (invasive) messages. Sometimes, he asks questions; other times, he comes plain and provocative. On March 28, my friend told me “Igbos and Yorubas have been Nigeria’s problem since colonial times. They are still the problem. They heat […]
Continue ReadingLike Nigeria’s multiple-award winning poet, Professor Niyi Osundare, I am also “farmer-born, peasant-bred.” Like him, I “encountered dawn in the enchanted corridors of the forest.” A powerful pastor once came to our village with drums and flutes. It was supposed to be a one-off visit but that first arrival was a harvest of blessings for […]
Continue Reading“The ides of March are come,” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says in utter derision and dismissal of a life-and-death warning. And the soothsayer replies “Ay, Caesar; but not gone.” And truly, they were not gone. The 2023 elections should be over by now but they are not. There are people everywhere mocking poets and prophets. Clouds […]
Continue ReadingUnder the cover of darkness, a dish was placed on a highway in Lagos at the weekend. It was food for the gods but it was a madman that we saw eating it on Saturday morning. The video trended online in competition with the shrieks of electoral madness which thundered through the Nigerian skies on […]
Continue ReadingIf you were in Western Nigeria in the 1980s, you would remember a television drama with the title Fó’po mó’yò which featured Fadeyi Oloro, the hugely popular ‘venomous’ actor who died last week. May God rest his soul. Fó’po mó’yò is about the appointment and installation of a new king. It is about the intrusion […]
Continue ReadingThe 2023 presidential election in Nigeria is not the worst in human history. That dubious reputation belongs in Liberia where, in 1927, the then President Charles D.B. King scored 234,000 votes out of a total of 15,000 registered voters. The victor was also kind enough to give his opponent 9,000 votes as a mark of […]
Continue ReadingWho registered the kids we saw in the election queues in Kano on Saturday? I watched video clips of women on lines with four, five, six-year-old kids. They were all there to cast votes. I saw, in another video, a boy – a child – who was emphatic that he was at the polling unit […]
Continue ReadingAncient Oyo people found it very convenient to follow the Alaafin to Koso (where kings are made); they balked at following the Alaafin to Bara (the king’s burial place): Kòso ló se é b’óba rè; Barà ò se é b’óba lo. Nigeria’s politicians do not lick expiring presidential palms soaked in blood; they go for […]
Continue ReadingI am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful – Sylvia Plath, American poet and short story writer. Convener of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Professor Ango Abdullahi, was asked by the Sunday Tribune in an interview last week if he didn’t think the North retaining power immediately after Muhammadu Buhari […]
Continue ReadingThe naira exchange affliction of 1984 rose up a second time in 2022 and spilled into 2023 because it has always been the choice of Nigeria to submit to vultures. Don’t fail to listen to Chief Bola Tinubu who philosophised in Osogbo last week that despite the rains beating the vulture since the very beginning, […]
Continue ReadingListen to Senator Bola Tinubu Wednesday last week in Abeokuta: “If you want to eat palm kernel, put a stone on the ground; put a palm nut on it, take another stone and smash it on the palm nut. The nut will be cracked and the kernel will come out. You can see that it […]
Continue ReadingGeneral Ibrahim Babangida’s Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) had just finished its weekly meeting. What ministers do with the present occupant of Aso Rock, Abuja –praise and worship – was the lot of IBB then at the Dodan Barracks, Lagos. Toady appointees in abject servitude fawned over the president; everybody must congratulate the leader on […]
Continue ReadingSix weeks after the civil war ended in 1970, Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Vice Chairman of the Federal Executive Council and Federal Commissioner for Finance, addressed the revolutionary convention of the Nigeria Trade Union Congress (NTUC), the ancestor of today’s NLC and TUC. Chief Awolowo, at that event, listed what he called “the imperatives” necessary […]
Continue ReadingThere is a trending video of a senile Paul Biya, President of Cameroon, at the just concluded US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, DC. He is called to deliver his speech after President Paul Kagame of Rwanda. He comes out, sits down and starts browsing aimlessly through a pamphlet he is holding. He mutters some words […]
Continue ReadingMuhammadu Buhari started his presidency with “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” Will he end as a nobody’s man? Sometimes, and for some, it is gracious to maintain one’s lane, listen to your own vision, single, unattached. French statesman, Charles de Gaulle, who holds the copyright of “I am a man who belongs to […]
Continue ReadingHow to Rig an Election’ is one of the newest books in my library. I have all sorts of friends with a taste for weird writings. One of them, Tayo Koleoso from Saki, Oyo State, but based in the United States, bought and sent a copy of that book to me two weeks ago. “You […]
Continue ReadingThe National Bureau of Statistics in January 2012 released its ‘Nigeria Poverty Profile 2010’ report which contained data covering the previous 30 years. It showed that 17.1 million Nigerians were in poverty in 1980; 34.7 million in 1985; 39.2 million in 1996; 67.7 million in 2004 and 112 million in 2010. The same NBS a […]
Continue ReadingI do not know how many people still remember that Dr Tai Solarin was here. He was one of the most decent human beings ever created for Nigeria. Dr Solarin was a columnist with the Nigerian Tribune for most of his active life. Some 52 years ago (in 1970), he penned a piece with the […]
Continue ReadingWe had an unusual vice chancellor in Ife in the mid to late 1980s. His name is Wande Abimbola, professor of Yoruba Religion, Language and Literature. He loved his students and his students loved him. One day, he warned a sea of protesting students about the real Nigeria and its ways: “My children, don’t let […]
Continue ReadingI want to write about the civil war in Egbe Afenifere, then I remember what happened to the lame orphan who thought he could be the referee in a fight of witches. He was too ‘small’ for that magisterial job. I am too, and so, I will hide behind metaphors and allusions in engaging the […]
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