News, Events, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Fashion, Beauty, Inspiration and yes… Gossip! The Only Place It Happens!
It is the saddest night of October 2020. Nobody spoke except the shovels in their hands, heaping sand on slain bodies, bones and blood in a shallow mass grave. Secretly, they buried a great number of unnamed, unfortunate citizens in the still of the night. One, two, three…20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, […]
Continue ReadingOnce upon a time, before money displaced Ifa in the Land of Oduduwa, decency was the crest on the Yoruba crown. This was before government’s filthy hands slowly opened the palace gate, grabbed the glittering crown and tore off the crest. So, the crown, crest-broken, tumbled into the mud, crestfallen. Étiquette is not strange to […]
Continue ReadingNature was enveloped in darkness as dawn quickened in the womb of time, pushing towards the birth canal, carrying on its head daylight. The cock, being nature’s timekeeper, knew the water was about to break. So, it sounded like the flute in its throat, cookooorooocooo! And nature stirred awake. Upon hearing the cock crow at […]
Continue ReadingI possess neither the intellect of Albert Einstein nor the anointing of Apostle Matthew, the tax collector and Jesus’ disciple. I’m only a Lagos-born hunter from Igbajo, the Citadel of the Brave — an inheritance of Osun State. Unlike Einstein and Matthew, I’m no Jew, no scholar, no philosopher. Never can I hold a candle […]
Continue ReadingAt the Admin Block, where I had to pay some fees and do some paperwork, something instructive happened. I came before a registration officer, who was in high spirits. He greeted me in Igbo but I answered in English. He looked at me from head to toe, and asked in Igbo what my name was. […]
Continue ReadingWas. Is. Will. The spellbinding sight of the throne would blush King Solomon green with envy. With a grin, the elephant walked majestically towards the throne, swishing his tail as its tree-trunk legs embossed map-like footprints in the brown earth. He clambered up to the throne, turned around, made a throaty sound of satisfaction with […]
Continue ReadingCleveland, a city in Ohio, USA, was long regarded as the sufferhead among American cities. Bearing on its big head the weight of an unfortunate nickname – The mistake on the lake – Cleveland shares a few similarities with Nigeria. How did Cleveland get its nickname? This is how. As recently as late the 1960s […]
Continue ReadingBitter, sweet and curious creature, the honeybee. When the honeybee stings, its abdomen tears up, its mouth opens and closes, hitting the ground in a final kiss of death. That is the fate of the honeybee and its stinger – a weapon it uses for protection and the harbinger of its ultimate death. Hey, the […]
Continue ReadingWhen cornered by death or stalked by danger, an insect called the Malaysian Exploding Ant turns against its assailant, ruptures its abdominal muscles, causing its poisonous glands to explode. With the explosion of the poisonous glands, the ant releases an irritating substance in all directions. The released secretion is capable of immobilising or entangling the […]
Continue ReadingTomorrow is D-Day. The belly of the sky is heavy but no one knows what it will birth. The sky rumbles in labour pain. The water has broken. But no meteorologist is ready to put their certificate on the line and make a forecast. The sky booms in thunder and lightning, the wind whistles in […]
Continue ReadingWear a crown on a pig, clad it in the starchiest agbada, and sheathe its feet in Gucci shoes; it’s still a pig, not a king. More than a thousand years after Oduwuwa ruled Ile-Ife in the 12th Century, and his scions expanded the kingdom to Dahomey and beyond, a taboo of impunity has descended […]
Continue ReadingBroken in every bone, life hangs by the thread for 62-year-old comatose patient, Nigeria, inside the intensive care unit of the decrepit Ass-o-Rock hospital, Abuja, where it nurses diseased kidneys, liver cirrhosis and an enlarged heart while the Chief Physician, Dr M. Buhari, stands by with a shroud, clutching a book entitled, ‘From national hero […]
Continue ReadingUntil science unmasked the myth of the jungle and brought the secrets of wildlife home to man via the television, little did the world know the lion wasn’t the king of animals. Yep, the world never fully realised that the lion, when alone, was a potential danger, whose presumed invincibility is magnified by the strength […]
Continue ReadingAs the Boeing 747 airliner descended at the J.F. Kennedy International Airport, spread-eagled, its massive tyres forked out, grinding the New York tarmac on the dot of 4pm. This was when Abba Kiyari roused from his deep slumber since the Delta plane embarked on the 13-hour flight from Lagos, Nigeria. All his life, he had […]
Continue ReadingOn the opposite side of Ass-o-Rock lies a stagnant, stinking body of water. Once a river of clear water, but the tidal waves of corruption, greed, ego and selfishness have killed virtually all the aquatic creatures therein, making it almost as dead as the Dead Sea. The stinking lagoon is the heritage of the Peoples […]
Continue ReadingNightfall in Abuja. Smoke filters through the savannah foliage, skywards. A bird’s-eye view reveals that all is not well under the canopy of forest below as a cacophony of voices rises and falls like traders’ babble on market day. It’s another hunting season in the Forest of a Thousand Demons located in the Ass-o-Rock region, […]
Continue ReadingKings don’t die. They depart to ancestral underworld in vaults known to the Yoruba as aja ile. The mountainous confetti of praise heaped in the trail of the departed Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III, is bigger than the entire Oyo kingdom because Iku Baba Yeye was larger than life itself. What’s Iku Baba […]
Continue ReadingArole Oduduwa, my second mental image of you left me in pure dazzlement of your unfolding personality, which I thought was a perfect fit for the big shoes left behind by the departed Ooni Okunade Sijuwade, Olubuse II. But William Shakespeare warns, “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Kabiyesi, it’s […]
Continue ReadingKABIYESI Onirisa, I call your name in awe and utter fear; it’s the impudent subject that the king kills. I stand at a respectable distance away from the crown, may the second-in-command to Adimula not kill me. May my mouth not kill me. May the king’s hoe and the king’s machete not strike my feet. […]
Continue ReadingAlthough Oshodi Tapa rose from the ashes of slavery to become a warrior and foremost Yoruba leader over 170 years ago, his footprints on the sands of time in the land of Eko were etched in honour, industry and gallantry, unlike the infamous pathway to MC Oluomo’s emergence, which was soaked in blood-red colour. Unlike […]
Continue Reading