Showing posts with label Alfred Rewane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfred Rewane. Show all posts

Monday, September 19, 2022

Shettima’s Freudian Slip…

 By Bello Maigari

Senator Kashim Shettima has again amused serious-minded Nigerians, this time, opening up on how his principal in the All Progressives Congress, APC presidential ticket, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu would combine the hospitality of General Sani Abacha and the competence of Muhammadu Buhari as president.

*Shettima and Tinubu 

Speaking last Thursday at the 96th-anniversary celebration of the Yoruba Tennis Club in Ikoyi, Lagos state, the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN quoted him as saying Nigeria needs the “hospitality” of Abacha. For Nigerians unfamiliar with Abacha, a slight recall of some of the worst abuses in human rights are easy to recall.

The extra-judicial killings of Mrs Kudirat Abiola, Alfred Rewane and many others recorded and unrecorded are living testimonies of the hospitality that Shettima wants Nigerians to remember. Shettima’s principal, Tinubu was driven to exile like many other Nigerians who kicked against the military regime’s decision to usurp the mandate given to Chief MKO Abiola.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Nigeria: The Past As President Buhari’s Utopia

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
Whenever President Muhammadu Buhari lifts the façade and allows us a glimpse into the convictions that propel him, he leaves no room for doubt that he is out of depth with the demands of his high office. At that moment of supposed candour, Buhari rather recommends himself to us as a relic of an antediluvian era that is far removed from the nuances of democracy and the challenges and possibilities of contemporary life. 
*President Buhari
Buhari is fixated on the valourisation of the past as an irreplaceable era that was full of glories that neither the present nor the future can yield. Thus, Buhari yearns for that past. He wants us to exhume that past because it held the secrets of an Eldorado that are elusive to the present.Yet it is a past that the majority of the citizens would like to consign to eternal oblivion because it only afflicts them with searing memories. Indeed, the past that in the imagination of Buhari provided a utopian state is in the reckoning of the citizens a dystopia that he is recreating in the present.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Sylvester Akhaine’s Logic Of Struggle And Humanism

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
The world is a theatre of struggle. Every stage one finds oneself at, one should know that it is a struggle; it is one of the principles of social Darwinism – Sylvester Akhaine

With Donald Trump clinching the United States’ presidency on the back of the promise to privilege the welfare of Americans and deport immigrants he considers as parasites, such foreigners have only the option of making their own countries great to cater for them and obviate the need of seeking succour overseas. To make their countries to attain a level where they do not need to be economic refugees in foreign countries like that of Trump imposes on such citizens the necessity of a struggle to remove impediments to the development of their societies.
*Sylvester Akhaine
For African states and other formerly colonised countries of the world, the need for a struggle to attain their national destinies is very familiar. It was such a struggle that paved the way for political independence in the 1950s and 1960s in African countries. Thus for these African states to overcome their new masters, whether internal or external, there is the need for them to resume the path of struggle. This validates the intervention of Sylvester Odion Akhaine, through The Case of a Nursing Father, in the contemporary discourse of resistance by the citizens of post-colonial states against their economic and political oppressors to create prosperous societies.
Beneath the veneer of a preoccupation with existential affairs such as those at the home front as signified by the title of the book are weightier issues of a people’s struggle to be free from oppression in its multi-faceted forms. But then, even at the home turf, a struggle is required for the solidification of humanism. This is demonstrated by the author’s refusal to align with the members of his elite class who objectify their fellow human beings by making children from poor homes as housemaids.
While such housemaids spend their days in drudgery in the service of oga, madam and the children, no one spares a thought for their education. The author resolves the conflict that could ensue from his resistance by becoming a nanny in order to accommodate the professional demands of his medical doctor wife. By both husband and wife accepting to take turns to care for their first child, they avert a feminist war of equality.
Thus, in the African context, there is the robust possibility of mutual help between a husband and a wife as counterpointed by a brand of Western feminism that breeds an unnecessary gender hostility.