2023 Vote: It’s Now The Turn Of A Prince

 By Banji Ojewale

Because Nigeria has a near naughty knack for nibbling at the past, history is also going the full circle to dish us troubling traditional tricks and torments. One such is the dithering act we’re taking straight from English playwright William Shakespeare’s historical classic, Hamlet, as the ballot day approaches. 

The tragic hero, Prince Hamlet, isn’t sure which path to pick at a crossroads, the same way Nigeria and her citizens seem to be uncertain about the coming poll in February and March, 2023. Will the ballot hold? Or it won’t? Should it hold? Shouldn’t it? 

Nigeria: June 12: I Still Remember

By Ikechukwu Amaechi
June 12, 2018, was the 25^th anniversary of Nigeria’s historic election, which outcome held out so much promise. How time flies! Who will believe that 25 years have rolled by and yet the June 12, 1993 poll, which by the sheer magic of one man’s transcendental personality almost obliterated the country’s primordial fault lines of religion, ethnicity and prependalism, remains on the front burner. 

Generals Abacha and Babangida 

While some claimed to have stood on June 12 in the days the locusts ate under military jackboots, many dismounted the high horse at the return of civilian rule on May 29, 1999, partly because the primary beneficiary, President Olusegun Obasanjo, worked so hard to ensure that the date and what it represented were consigned to the dustbin of Nigeria’s history. The winner of the election, Bashorun MKO Abiola, had died almost a year before the 1999 polls and most stakeholders had been sucked into the new political tendency.