Nigeria: Mad And Dangerous Times

 By Sunny Awhefeada

These are mad and dangerous times for Nigeria and I must concede that we never saw this coming. Not even the famed prophets envisioned the ca­lamities now buffeting us as a people. Nobody foresaw or warned us. Those among us who lay claims to clairvoyance are largely charlatans who think about causes and effects of actions and offer surmises which they call predictions. 

That is why they always turn around to tell us they were misquoted, quoted out of context or point at what they claimed they told us, but they never did. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times tells of a time of acute social insecurity and how the people were impoverished and pulver­ized. Like other narratives by Dickens, the nov­el mirrors the grim, dark and dreary side of life in a manner considered to be exaggerated. 

Nigeria Is Not An Emirate

 By Chidi Odinkalu

November 28, 1988 was a Monday. In Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, FCT, a Constituent Assembly inaugurated by military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida, had been in session for just over six months since May 11, 1988. At the helm as its chair was Anthony Aniagolu, then a recently retired Justice of Nigeria’s Supreme Court. He was a Christian from Enugu State. His deputy was Muhammadu Buba Ardo, then Chief Judge of Gongola State, who died suddenly in 1991, two years after the Assembly completed its work. He was Muslim.

*Buhari 

The Secretary to the Constituent Assembly was one Alhaji Babagana Kingibe, whom the country has since then got to know a lot more eloquently, a Muslim from Borno State. Kingibe’s assistant was Amal Inyingiala Pepple, who would rise to the height of the civil service in Nigeria, before retiring in June 2009 as the Head of Service of the Federation. She is a Christian from Rivers State.

In those days, Nigeria had 21 states: Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Bauchi, Bendel, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Gongola, Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kwara, Lagos, Nigeria, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo, Plateau, Rivers, and Sokoto states, plus the FCT.

The Constituent Assembly, which Justice Aniagolu chaired, comprised 567 members drawn from all these states. A total 458 were elected, while 109 were nominated by the Federal Government, including the Chairman and his Deputy (both of them male), and drawn from the ranks of judicial figures, senior lawyers, titans of industry, traditional rulers, experienced public servants and administrators, academics and other professionals.