Nigeria: How Not To Gag The Media

 By Dan Amor

It is a sad story to tell but telling it we must. Before the advent of the present "democratic" dispensation, Nigeria was literally run by buccaneers who plundered the nation’s till into private use and built empires over the painful anxieties of the oppressed people. Upon assumption of office, the present crop of leaders (since 1999 till date) promised to make Nigerians put the pains of the past behind them as they were poised to embark on massive people-oriented programmes. 

Consequently, therefore, Nigerians who had long been living in penury and deprivation felt that the only option left to them was to hope for better days ahead. This is more so as the beauty of any government is its ability to bring together human and material resources and use them for the uplift of society. It would be recalled that during those dark days in our nation’s annals when the military usurped the polity to breaking point, the Nigerian media stood firmly on the side of the people. 

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.