Nigeria Without Trucks And Their Drivers?

 By Adekunle Adekoya

Project Nigeria, started by the British with the 1914 Amalgamation, is still work in progress, after a century. In fact, next year will make 110 years of the Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates. Many people will say we have made a lot of progress since flag independence in 1960, while another multitude will counter them by saying we have made none. We are actually not progressing, they would say.

A coin has two sides; so I find on both sides — those that say we have made progress and those that are of the belief that we have not. It is a recurring debate where many are gathered, either at parties, bars, workplaces, or even in the molue or danfo, wherein self-appointed pontiffs who claim a lot of knowledge about what should have been done or not proclaim the way the country should have gone. In all the discussions, what is usually omitted is the fact that the individual has a role to play in the nation’s development, and that since many Nigerians don’t think they have an obligation to their country, they find themselves in situations they don’t like and are impotent to do anything about.

Abraham Adesanya And His Unfinished Business

By Dare Babarinsa

Papa Abraham Aderibigbe Adesanya cherished his role as the leader of the Yoruba. He knew it meant danger and sacrifice but he embraced his assignment with enthusiasm. Now that he has been with the ancestors for a decade, it is fitting to ponder on his ministry and the main assignments that dominated the final years of his crowded and productive life. Papa Adesanya was trained as a lawyer and pursued a career in politics, but his real vocation was leadership.

*Abraham Adesanya 

Adesanya was one of main leaders of Afenifere, the mainstream political and cultural movement of the Yoruba people which came into existence after the demise of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first Premier of the defunct Western Region and leader of the Yoruba nation. In the roaring 1950s, Awolowo became the first leader to govern almost the entire Yoruba country since the time the princes departed from Ile-Ife at the dawn of time. He made efforts to bring the Yoruba of the North, then in what was called the Ilorin and Kabba Provinces, (now Kogi and Kwara states) into the West. His effort was frustrated by the combined forces of the Northern Peoples Congress, NPC, and the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroun, NCNC. At the London Constitutional Conference of 1958, both the NPC and the NCNC preferred that the issues of new regions and the adjustment of regional boundaries be deferred till independence. 

Buhari Should Dialogue With Nigerians

By Dan Amor

Dialogue has been rediscovered the world over as a subject of public debate and of philosophical inquiry. Politicians from the ideological divides, leading intellectuals, and concerned citizens from diverse backgrounds are addressing questions about the content of the human character. In our country, Nigeria, the imperative for an all-encompassing dialogue cannot be overemphasized. Immediately after the Civil War in 1970, what our leaders ought to have done was to call for and host a national dialogue to cut a new deal and move the nation forward. But they were smug in their self-assurance. Unfortunately, they saw the entire polity as their war booty and were blissfully unaware of its consequences. The outcome was that desperation among Nigerians became infectious.

*Buhari

​Even when the military decided to hand over the reins of governance in 1979 to their civilian counterparts they hurriedly put together a phony constituent assembly and drew up a constitution without the input of the authentic representatives of the Nigerian people instead of opening up a forum for national dialogue. The upshot was that the Second Republic was soon to collapse like a pack of cards. In 1993, after the annulment of one of the most placid Presidential elections ever conducted in Nigeria by the military, the people openly canvassed for a Sovereign National Conference in which they would discuss the basis for the corporate existence of the country. But the Khaki boys in their wisdom repudiated this idea. Of course, Gen. Sani Abacha later organized his own conference in 1995 to give legitimacy to his illegitimate regime. Despite the stark illogicality of the military praxis, a few courageous politicians led by the late iconoclastic Yoruba leader, Chief Abraham Adesanya, called for, and hosted a well–attended All Politicians Dialogue in Lagos in 1997. This helped to galvanise support for the massive agitation for a return to civil democratic governance which became a reality on May 29, 1999.

​Again, the administration of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007), the first civilian government after a protracted period of military gangsterism, rapacity and greed, bungled a great opportunity to host a formidable National Political Conference in 2005 due largely to the plot for tenure elongation of President Obasanjo. The Goodluck Jonathan administration, by husbanding the 2014 National Conference in which Nigerians of all faculties were adequately represented, had succeeded in providing a platform on which the nation would be re-invented. Yet many continue to associate dialogue with a prudish, Victorian morality or with crude attempts by government to legislate peace. It is against this backdrop that all well-meaning Nigerians should advise President Muhammadu Buhari to dialogue with the aggrieved, from his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) which has manifested clear evidence of division in its infancy, to other Nigerians who feel shortchanged by his administration. The government seems to be fighting so many wars: the Boko Haram insurgents, militants in the Niger Delta, the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, the Shiites religious group in the North West, etcetera.