By Chidi Odinkalu
“It was as if the football club wanted to regain through football what the Igbo ‘lost’ during the war.” – Segun Odegbami, MON
By Chidi Odinkalu
“It was as if the football club wanted to regain through football what the Igbo ‘lost’ during the war.” – Segun Odegbami, MON
By Chidi Odinkalu
Politics in Nigeria is largely of the transhumant variety. It is not defined by any big ideas. With the exception of perhaps the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Nigerian politicians have been largely devoid of clear ideological moorings.
Freed as such from the forces of ideological gravity, the only impetus that they respond to for the most part is from the stomach. Gravity in Nigerian politics tends to be a force defined by the imperative of human grazing.
An opposition may be essential for democracy to thrive but no Nigerian politician or party wants to linger in that neighbourhood. In power for 16 years at the centre, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has been an abject failure since it went into opposition in 2015, unable to articulate any alternatives to the unmitigated disaster that has been the government of the All Progressives Congress, APC. Both parties are separated by a revolving door.
By Chidi Odinkalu
In 1989, academics, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, published to great acclaim their study of the evolution of the diverse dialects of English language from different empires. Their title was The Empire Writes Back. The book shows how various outposts of the empire took ownership of the language and adapted its grammar and usage.
*OdinkaluFew
outposts from Empire have been as prolific in this enterprise as Nigeria.
Conceived as somewhat of an illegitimate offspring in the ménage à
trois between Sir George Taubman Goldie; his mistress, Flora
Shaw; and his successor in propinquity to her, Frederick Lugard, Nigeria became
a colonial experiment in the Tower of Babel.
A national anthem composed in 1959, one year before independence which occurred in 1960, acknowledged this reality in the third line of its first stanza, reminding the world of the aspiration to create a country even “though tribe and tongue may differ.” The anthem itself invited citizens to “hail” the country in antiquarian, biblical third person, symbolising a relationship with the country that was fractured from origin. Never mind that the hailing was to be done in the borrowed language of a foreign country.
By Yemi Adebowale
A large number of senators, across party lines, showed a bit of courage last Wednesday by pushing for President Muhammadu Buhari’s impeachment in the face of the appalling security situation of beloved Nigeria. But the coldblooded President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan tactically stalled the motion to give the inept Buhari six weeks to improve the country’s security or face impeachment.
*BuhariIt is appalling that Lawan did not allow the senators to discuss the raging insecurity in the country as agreed during an earlier Executive Session. He knocked it off the day’s Order Paper, preemptively, making it impossible to accommodate the debate on this vital issue at plenary. I was not shocked by Lawan’s action. This man has never been on the side of traumatised Nigerians. The senators eventually walked out of the red Chamber in protest, chanting “Buhari must Go,” “Lawan Must Go”.
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.
*BuhariThe 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.
By Chidi Odinkalu
“If your
country is torn apart by war; if the economy is in crisis and if health-care is
non-existent, you are likely to be miserable.” Yuval Noah
Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, p. 34 (2016)
The end of the year is usually rich with delightful expectations for children and young people across the world. It offers a break from school to look forward to and lots of gifts to receive and exchange. It is not for nothing that it is also called a “season of goodwill”.
Prof Odinkalu
For Nigeria’s young people in the age of Muhammadu Buhari, however, it is anything but. Mind you, this was the generation that, deliberately deprived of a sense of historical record and reckoning based on it, powered Buhari to an improbable political resurrection in 2015. Six years later, they are paying with their blood and lots of it. It doesn’t bear recounting but maybe it does.
By Reginald Okafor
Chidi Odinkalu has cut a niche for himself as a critic of the
intellectual hue in the last few years in Nigeria so much that his views are
well regarded. His place in advocacy and as a former Chairman of Nigeria Human
Rights Commission (NHRC) place him in a privileged position. They confer some
credibility on whatever he says. But, in a recent piece he wrote titled ‘Ken Nnamani:The Man Who Sold His Conscience’, Odinkalu missed his shot by a mile!
*Chidi Odinkalu
Odinkalu, in what is understandably his frustration with the state of anomie in the southeast, where killings and unexplained kidnappings have been the lot of the people, took umbrage with the current administration and dragged some persons in the ruling All Progressives Congress into the sordid affairs in Anambra State, one of them former Senate President Ken Nnamani, a man who has earned his badge of integrity even in the murky waters of Nigerian politics.*MKO Abiola |