Poet Of The People: Niyi Osundare

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu 

Poets from all over the world today do not come any loftier than Nigeria’s Niyi Osundare. In my book, he is the next poet destined to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

*Osundare 

Lovers of intellection are thrilled that on Wednesday, December 7, 2022, Professor Niyi Osundare will deliver his Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) Winners Lecture in Abuja. 

The lecture which is taking place within the context of the Annual Forum of NNOM Laureates is entitled “Poetry and the Human Voice”.

The significant event that is happening physically and virtually calls for celebration because Niyi Osundare is that one poet who speaks for the people. 

A personable mentor who jocularly addresses me as “The Maximum Metaphorist”, Osundare packs enormous craft and courage in his sublime verbs and profound nouns. 

Bestriding the Ethnic Politics: A Case Of Peter Obi

 By Ndubuisi Nwafor

“This dimension of our identity politics is frightening, but it’s not an unusual experience” – Gimba Kakanda, Daily Trust, 9 August, 2022

Nigeria’s political, social, cultural, economic and religious space is currently awash and agog with political activities. Such activities include ethnic, ageist, and other toxic innuendoes with the propensity to scuttle the very existence of our dear country Nigeria.

*Peter Obi 

The history of Nigeria’s power transitions may have assumed a parabola tangent, ranging from elections, coups and even appointments as was the case with transition from IBB to Chief Ernest Shonekan, but in all, good fortune and electoral popularity played major roles.

The argument that South East has been displaced politically in the power equation of Nigeria is an honest and painful truth, however, this situation is both self-inflicted and also as a result of festering fear of Igbo domination in the contemporary Nigeria.

MKO Abiola Deserves Apology, Not Humour

By Afam Nkemdiche

When I first heard about President Muhammadu Buhari’s surprise posthumous honour to Chief M. K. O. Abiola, the widely acknowledged winner of the 1993 presidential election, my instinctive thought was, “My God! How could he nerve his conscience to do that – he was a principal confidant of the maximum ruler who denied MKO his well deserved mandate, until the mysterious death-in-detention???”

*Abiola 

It cannot be gainsaid, even in fiction, that Buhari was the closest public figure to the Kano-born general in Nigeria’s darkest years. Soon after Abacha sacked Ibrahim Babangida’s contraption (Shonekan’s Interim Government), he decreed that all monies that accrued from petroleum be pooled into a Fund, the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF. The humongous size of the envisaged pool qualified the PTF to be immediately referred to as a “parallel government”; even the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, had to look to it for funding. Buhari was the first and only executive chairman of the PTF. This was a measure of the unique camaraderie that the duo enjoyed when Nigeria teetered on the brink of disintegration from November 1993 until June 1998 when Abacha suddenly succumbed to death ahead of his detainee. 

Buhari And The Petroleum Trust FRAUD

By Ray Ekpu

It is not known to this column how close Brigadier Sani Abacha was to Major General Muhammadu Buhari by December 1983. It was Abacha who announced at the end of a few minutes of martial music on New Year ’s Eve that the government of President Shehu Shagari had been thrown into the dust bin of history. Buhari became the fulcrum of that history as Nigeria’s head of state. On August 27, 1985, there was another game, the Revolving Doors’ game. Buhari was out, thrown out, while Ibrahim Babangida, was in, thrown into the pinnacle of political power in Nigeria.

Babangida clamped Buhari into the dungeon for some months where he cooled his feet, while his colleagues were bestriding the Nigerian political and military firmament like they owned the world. Babangida left or was forced to leave the throne after eight years of dangerous foot work. He called Chief Ernest Shonekan, a successful private sector entrepreneur, to come and take the baton of leadership.