Female Lecturers Also Demand Sex From Male Students – Ghana Broadcast Journalist

Following the viral BBC documentary video on the alleged #Sex-for-Grades menace flourishing in Ghanaian and Nigerian universities, Ghanaian broadcast journalist, Ms. Oheneyere Gifty Anti, has said that the practise is more widespread than many are willing to believe. According to her, it is rampant even in primary and secondary schools. She also alleged that even female lecturers sexually harass male students and score them low if they refuse to yield…

Read Her Recent Post

UNILAG Crisis: The Devil Is In The Detail

By Banji Ojewale

…if gold rust, what then will iron do? For if a priest be foul, no wonder common man should rust—Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) English poet and author.

Evicted from Heaven for pride and rebellion against God countless thousands of years ago, the devil would hardly be expected to move in the mundane details of mortal man here on earth. But alas that has been his business, meddling in the affairs of puny man. He is everywhere man is: bedroom, market, school, politics, institutions, government, environment, mosque, church, heathen centres and even pagan or atheist abodes. He must order disorder where there is order, as he sought to do in serene and symmetrical Heaven. That is if you allow him.

The arch recidivist has also been at work at the University of Lagos, UNILAG, Nigeria’s foremost institution ranking as the 12^th in Africa. He has cooked noxious menu ready to consume all the parties, including those we presume are our beautyful ones, by the standard of Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah. What is on the table that Nigerians must not take from the devil?

Akachi Ezeigbo: Celebrating The Literary Icon

By Prisca Sam-Duru & Elizabeth Uwandu

For Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, Wednesday’s reading at the University of Lagos, UNILAG, was a great honour done to her by the institution which doubles as her Alma Mater and where she retired as a lecturer. 

The monthly reading organised by the English Department of UNILAG has turned into an event lovers of literature look forward to and Prof. Ezeigbo’s session didn’t let them down as she treated guests to an outstanding performance of  a dirge for late literary icon, Buchi Emecheta, which  earned her a standing ovation.

The multiple award winning writer and author of so many books which cut across all the genres of literature including children’s literature, opened her reading with her latest short story, “Mr. President’s Change Agent” which is coming out in November. “Mr. President’s Change Agent”, narrates the story of a woman who receives her share of injustice in the hands of an unscrupulous Nigerian police officer after she refuses to give a bribe. Being afraid that she may be shot by the desperate officer, and coupled with the fact that she is already late for her appointment, she parts with the only cash she has with her after she is delayed for over an hour.

Ken Saro-Wiwa: 21 Years After

By Dan Amor

Today, Thursday November 10, 2016, indubitably marks the twenty-first anniversary of the tragic and shocking death of Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni kinsmen, in the evil hands of professional hangmen who sneaked into Port Harcourt from Sokoto in the cover of darkness. By his death, the Sani Abacha-led military junta had demonstrated, in shocking finality, to the larger world, that it was guided by the most base, most callous of instincts. 

*Ken Saro-Wiwa

As a student of Nigerian history, and of the literature of the Nigerian Civil War, I am adequately aware that Ken Saro-Wiwa, against the backdrop of our multicultural complexities allegedly worked against his own region during the War, the consequences of which he would have regretted even in his grave. But I write of him today not as a politician but as a literary man and environmental rights activist. We remember him because, for this writer, as for most disinterested Nigerians, Ken Saro-Wiwa lives alternatively as an inspirational spirit, and a haunting one at that. Now, as always, Nigerians who care still hear Ken's steps on the polluted land of his ancestors. They still see the monstrous flares from poisonous gas stacks, and still remember his symbolic pipe. Now, as always, passionate Nigerians will remember and hear the gleeful blast of the Ogoni song, the song Ken sang at his peril. Yet, only the initiated can see the Ogoni national flag flutter cautiously in the saddened clouds of a proud land. But all can hear his name in the fluttering of the Eagle's wing.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a modern Nigerian hero who did not sacrifice sense and spirit merely to pedantic refinements. As an aggrieved writer, appalled by the denigrating poverty of his people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their God-given land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to his country as a whole, a fair and just democratic system which protects every one and every ethnic group and gives all a valid claim to human civilization, he was an embodiment of the writer as crusader. There is, indeed, a prophetic, all-embracing commitment to a depiction of the reality of his Ogoni kinsmen in his works about which he seems helpless. For that matter, there is in his writing career, something of an overloading, of avocation and responsibilities variously devolving on the ethnographer, the creative writer, the polemicist, the politician and the activist. No doubt, Nigerians will wake up one day to discover that in the little man from Ogoni, the nation produced, without realizing it, one of the major literary voices of the contemporary world.

If Ken Saro-Wiwa weren't head and shoulders above the ranks of the organized stealing called military regime, and if he didn't amply deserve his position as a recognized and popular Commander-in-Chief of the Literary Brigade of his generation, I wouldn't be wasting my precious time here discussing his contributions to modern artistic creativity and minority rights awareness in Nigeria and the world. The great division in all contemporary writing is between that little that has been written by men and women who had clarified their intentions; who were writing with the sole aim of registering and communicating truth or their desire, and the overwhelming bulk composed by the consciously dishonest and of those whose writing has been affected at second or tenth remove by economic pressure, economic temptation, economic flattery, and so on. For Ken, "writing must do something to transform the lives of a community, of a nation. What is of interest to me is that my art should be able to alter the lives of a large number of people, of a whole community, of the entire country, so that my literature has to be entirely different." It could therefore be seen that as one who hailed from one of the marginalized minority areas of this country, Saro-Wiwa used his literature to propagate the delicate and monolithic national question.

There Is No War Against Corruption In Nigeria (1)

By Femi Aribisala

I was invited to a Roundtable on Corruption by the Law Faculty of the University of Lagos, only to discover that some “Buharideens” had highjacked the occasion and were inclined to use it as a platform to promote the onslaught of “democratic dictatorship” in Nigeria.

*President Buhari 

The topic was on corruption in Nigeria, but the mast-head in the hall was more specific. It read: “Winning the War against Corruption”. This was easily seized on by government agents to imply that President Muhammadu Buhari was well on the way to dealing a mortal blow to corruption in Nigeria.

The composition of the invited discussants was biased. Most of those on the panel with me were dyed-in-the-wool government apologists. The Chairman was Professor Itse Sagay, currently the Chairman of Buhari’s Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption. As it turned out, he was not prepared to entertain any meaningful discussion about corruption in Nigeria. His agenda was to showcase ostensible government achievements in the anti-corruption campaign and to proclaim new promissory notes grandiloquently for public consumption.

Also there was Oby Ezekwesili of #BringBackOurGirls fame. She used to pitch her tent with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). But now that the All Progressives Congress (APC) is in power, she has been romancing the new government. It was even speculated at one time that Buhari would reward her with a ministerial portfolio. Not surprising, she is no longer as strident in demanding government rescue of the kidnapped Chibok girls as she had been under Jonathan.

The kingpin of the government apologists on the panel was Femi Falani, a lawyer and human rights activist. He was chosen to give the keynote address. Falana had been heavily touted as Buhari’s attorney general. In fact, on the eve of the ministerial appointments, a list was widely publicised in the press that had his name penciled in for the post. But someone apparently put an eraser to it. Nevertheless, in order to remain in the good books of the government, Falana seems to have jettisoned his earlier dedication to the defence of human rights.

More Deaths Due To Electrocution In Nigeria Unless …

(pix:geo.tv)

By Idowu Oyebanjo

Electrocution is basically death caused by an electric shock. While this is not a favoured topic, it is important to expose the facts about the Nigerian Power System and the high potential that it possesses to cause more deaths due to electrocution in the short to medium term if things are done improperly as they are now.

One of the anti-climax of not having stable electricity for over 50 years now in Nigeria is the fact that one did not hear so much of deaths due to electric shock from electrical appliances or devices. This is mainly because there was no "light". With the recent increase in availability of gas to power stations, and the attendant availability of electricity supply, the weakness of the power system will come to the fore and more electrical safety accidents are bound to occur. 

Unfortunately, because electricity is a good servant but a bad master, the fatal results of not following electrical principles in the design, operation, maintenance and control of the power system is death by electrocution! In the last few weeks alone, we have had the death of a staff of one of the electricity companies while he was carrying out his day to day activities on a power line. But more recently, the case of Oluchi Anekwe, a 3rd year student at the University of Lagos has reinforced the calls by experts for a holistic review of the operation of the Nigerian Power System.