By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
There is no better way of introducing Odia Ofeimun than pointedly stressing that “Odia Ofeimun is Odia Ofeimun!” Enough said.
Poet, publisher, editor, activist, polemicist, mentor, politician, columnist, factory worker, writer, dance-drama exponent, public intellectual, critic etc, Odia Ofeimun has packed uncountable lifetimes into one tumultuous lifespan.
We are currently at a crossroads. We need a leader to show us the way forward. We need a prudent president, a principled president who has what it takes to lead.
As we say in Naija: “We need person who sabi road; a person we go follow make this country better.” A new Nigeria is possible. We can make it.
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
I can never get tired of celebrating Nigerian literature, arguably Nigeria’s greatest gift to the world. The politics of Nigeria is a disaster that makes the whole wide world laugh at the so-called “Giant of Africa”.
Ever since the inspiring emergence of Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Nigerian writers have continued to astound the world with their seminal works.
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Nigeria today stands on wobbly legs, and what needs to be done to make the country to stand steady and strong is to go back to where the rain started beating the country in the modern day.
At independence in 1960, Nigeria was said to stand on a pivotal
tripod of East, West and North. The 1967-70 Nigeria-Biafra war ensured that the
North in alliance with the West defeated the East.
The oppressed minorities of course took sides with the victors
because nobody would ever want to be in the corner of losers.
That is a simple historical fact, and any other embellishments only exist to
serve expedience.
By Banji Ojewale
In the distant past, you wouldn’t talk about Chinua Achebe without instant reference to his mountaintop novel, Things Fall Apart. He was inseparable from his literary creature that outstripped its creator. But Achebe was lucky: he was spared the tragedy of bringing forth a monster which would fatally prey on its Frankenstein god. Achebe’s own genie was genial. Upon escape from the bottle-cage, it gave the illustrious novelist a new identity tag: Africa’s foremost storyteller.
However, 2012 would deliver another lingering
literary lease to this great man of letters. He wrote There Was A Country: A Personal
History Of Biafra. More than
five decades had passed to serve as a hiatus between the book of Achebe’s youth
and the new product of his advanced age. Both were mileposts, the one his first
published novel (1958), and the other his last huge work before his death in
2013.
But when on November 16, 2022, the world quietly observed the eminent raconteur’s 92nd posthumous birthday, we were all drawn to his latter-day effort rather than to the one that lionized him. Why?
By Emmanuel Onwubiko
Things are truly not looking good all around us in Nigeria and the signals are as bright as the sun with facts showing how tragic things have degenerated to and are piercing through the conscience of Nigerians like the sword of Damocles.
Things have fallen Apart in Nigeria, as prophetically affirmed by
the legendary writer, Professor Chinua Achebe, who wrote the iconic novel,
Things Fall Apart.
I sat in a corner of a coffee shop somewhere in Garki II, Abuja, and spent over 30 minutes waiting for the waitress to serve my hot cup of Cappuccino coffee, in deep thinking about a lot of things.
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Chinua Achebe lived in glory as the one-man institution who conquered the world for Mother Africa, and the great Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiongo, put it in these words: “Achebe bestrides generations and geographies. Every country in Africa claims him as their own.”
On November 16, 1930, Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born to a teacher-cum-evangelist father of the Anglican Communion in the town of Nnobi, near his hometown of Ogidi, in present-day Anambra State.
By Robert Obioha
The plan to redesign the naira by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has, like any other issue in Nigeria, been riddled with controversy and even politics. Ordinarily, the redesign of the naira for the envisaged benefits, which many Nigerians are interrogating, would not have generated the needless acrimony if adequate consultations were made and major stakeholders carried along.
The differing opinions on the issue from those serving in this government is unnecessary. It is an avoidable distraction. It also shows the level of incoherence among ministers and officials of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration. It is unthinkable that such a change in redesign of the naira is being contemplated without the knowledge of the minister of finance even if the law establishing the CBN did not expressly stipulate so.
By Tony Afejuku
Professors Olu Obafemi and Akachi Ezeigbo need no introduction to anyone who belongs to the profession of scholastic or literary or critical studies. In fact, the two of them – scholastic gentleman and learned lady respectively – do not need this column’s validation of their academic learning and significantly significant literary-cum-creative standing in our clime and beyond.
I have more than considerable respect for both of them not because they are voluminous as scholar-writers or as scholar-thinkers. But because of what each one of them individually means to me – even though they seemingly are two of a kind. But let me explain myself better without peeling each one’s scholastic or literary potato. That is not the goal of this enterprise now. What do I mean to say without keeping you in any cage of suspense a little longer than necessary?
Professors Olu Obafemi and Akachi Ezeigbo are two of the monumental admirers of this column. Deliberately, I have withheld the harmonious exchanges of ideas and praises relating to this column (and other matters) that we have shared – and are still sharing. The pictures they share with me, among others, help to constitute the pedal points of this column. What have we shared and what have we not shared?
By Promise Adiele
Nigeria’s god of literature, Wole Soyinka, needs no elaborate introduction. His evident literary flourishes underscore a deep mastery of the English language which he eminently utilises to address socio-political conditions in his native Nigeria and across the world. He has, several times, confronted misrule, urging the economic weary, downtrodden masses to stand up against bad governance and reject the entrenchment of power monsters in the polity. In his globally acclaimed civil war memoir, The Man Died, Soyinka magisterially submits that “the man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
By that epoch submission, the Nobel laureate encourages victims of feral exercise of power to speak up and not shut up because death is the comeuppance of timid acceptance of political and economic terrorism. Soyinka’s advice to the populace to speak up contradicts Bola Tinubu’s admonition that Nigerians demanding a new beginning from the present All Progressives Congress disaster should ‘shut up.’ Tinubu, the APC presidential standard bearer, was unmistakably direct when he recently encouraged his audience to tell those demanding a change of government in Nigeria to ‘shut up.’
By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
At the beginning of August 2022, President Muhammadu Buhari constituted a nine-member National Honours Nominations Committee with a four-year tenure. It is chaired by Alhaji Sidi Muhammad Bage, the senior judge who resigned from Nigeria’s Supreme Court in 2019 to become the Emir of Lafia in Nasarawa State.
The
Minister for Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs, George Akume,
inaugurated the committee on September 16 with the mandate “to screen and
select eminent Nigerians and friends of Nigeria, who have contributed to the
development of the country.”
In what would have been a record of unprecedented efficiency in the annals of such committees, a list emerged a mere fortnight later of recipients of national honours. Among the recipients, it listed the Emir of Lafia, himself the newly inaugurated chair of the National Honours Committee, for one of the highest honours – Commander of the Federal Republic (CFR).
By Ray Ekpu
When Nigeria lowered the Union Jack and raised the green-white-green flag that heralded its coming of age on October 1, 1960, there was boundless joy in Nigeria. It seemed like the unwrapping of a gift because you knew it was a gift but you did not know what kind of gift was wrapped inside the gaily decorated wrapping paper.
The soldiers thought they knew what was the problem. They came breaking the soil with their big boots and in the process, they also broke our hearts when they killed some of our leaders which in turn led to revenge killings the revenge killings dragged us into a war that lasted 30 months and consumed one million lives. As it is often said, the rest is history.
The Leadership Crisis in Nigerian Politics
By Chinua Achebe
David and Marianna Fisher University Professor, Brown University, RI, USA
There is a story about Bernard Shaw arriving at the New York harbour, and being immediately surrounded by journalists as he stepped off the ship. But before even the quickest of them could open his mouth, the celebrated playwright stopped them cold as he fired off: ‘Don’t ask me what you should do to be saved; the last time I was here I told you and you haven’t done it!’
I feel very much the same way
about what is happening in Nigeria. We know
what we should do, yet we refuse to do it. Instead we have been “blowing
grammar” all over the country as if our problem
stems from
insufficient argument. So I have turned down or simply ignored all previous invitations to join the talking.
My little book The Trouble with Nigeria published twenty seven years ago on the eve of Shagari’s second term opens with these words:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigeria character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmark of true leadership…
So the question of leadership was and is, pre-eminent, in my view, among Nigeria’s numerous problems. The little book does go on to identify other perennial issues such as tribalism, corruption, indiscipline, social injustice, preference for mediocrity over excellence, etcetera. But my thesis is that without good leadership, none of the other problems stands a chance of being tackled, let alone solved.
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
There is talk here and there of bringing back History with a capital “H” in the Nigerian school curriculum. It is cool by me to do a short history course with the ruling party, APC, and President Muhammadu Buhari. Necessary lessons need to be learnt before the elections that will lead into the next dispensation of Nigeria’s much touted democracy.
To start back in time, Nigeria’s first coup as arranged by Emmanuel Arinze Ifeajuna, Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, Adewale Ademoyega etc. did raise the issue of corruption as a major prong of why they struck to sack the First Republic. The entire coup attempt got mired in the corruption of ethnic politics until there was the bloodier counter-coup in which they revenge squad wanted secession, code-named “araba”, until the British colonial masters advised against herding into arid nothingness.
By Hudson Ororho
In our first year in secondary school at St. Peter Claver College, Aghalokpe, Delta State, we read a book, under the watchful eyes of our Priest/Principal, Rev. Fr. Jeremiah Cadogan, SMA, titled: Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. If my recollection has not failed me, the book has two principal characters: Scrooge and Manley. They were business partners.
In the story, not much was said about Manley save that he was a good man. Scrooge, on the other hand was described as a mean and miserly fellow. He would give shishi to no one. He does not even respond to the Merry Christmas greetings from the locals, describing same as sheer humbug. He was even stingy to himself as he would not enjoy the traditional Christmas turkey. The locals despised him. In retrospect, I wonder if he ever wore a St. Michaels label or a Marks and Spencer shoes.
By Obi Nwakanma
What was Sam Omatseye thinking? That he could traduce an entire Igbo, and get resounding applause for his hackery? Everyone knows that Sam Omatseye does a hack job in contemporary Nigerian politics, and since he could not fit in properly at the Denver Post, where he did the last bit of real journalism inside him, he went to the dark side.
He came home to Nigeria to roost, and he became what the ‘Mad Maxim’ – mad only because like his kinsman ‘Jadum’ celebrated in the poetry of Okigbo, he tells prescient truth – called a “Kept Man.” Reckon with that, dear reader: Sam Omatseye as a “Kept Man.” The image is so very apt, if indeed it means that a kept man is one in whom and through whom a pervert patron relieves and performs all kinds of pervert fantasies. I’m still trying to discern some reason inside Omatseye’s death wish – his distinct form of professional self-immolation.
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Chinua Achebe died at exactly 11:51pm (US time), that is 4.51am (Nigerian time), on Thursday, March 21 at the Harvard University Teaching Hospital, Massachusetts, USA, aged 82. It was one death that shook the entire world as tributes came pouring in from all the continents of the world, from presidents down to paupers.
%20Cover-pix-By-Ugochukwu%20Ejinkeonye.JPG)
For some of his admirers, the world stood still, yet for orders
events moved at a frenetic pace, culminating to the Thursday, May 23 interment
of the icon in his native Ogidi, Anambra State. The one-storey home of Chinua
Achebe looks quite modest from the outside but it has a lift inside. The
building for me captures the essence of the great progenitor of African
literature: the quality of what is within is greater than any showiness outside.
Achebe was interred at 4.30pm in a marble tomb in his Ikenga village ancestral home of Ogidi town in Idemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State. He was given an elaborate Christian funeral service at St. Philips Anglican Church, Ogidi, as opposed to the African mores he championed in his novels.
Book Review
Book: Tomorrow’s leaders
Author: Andrew Okhenoaghue Umoru
Publishers: Blueshield Publishers
Pagination: 124
Reviewer: Banji Ojewale
In 1983 Chinua Achebe, late Nigerian writer and critic, was a lone voice as he mourned the death and dearth of strategic leadership in his country. His intervention through the slim nonfiction, The Trouble With Nigeria, was mocked when it wielded the sledgehammer on Nigeria and argued that flailing leadership was primarily responsible for the country’s seasonal misery and crises. This eminent novelist of universal acclaim held that poor management of our enormous resources was the cauldron brewing the challenges besieging the land.
But a great community of critics rose after reading the book to give their fellow critic a sarcastic riposte: the troubles with Nigeria were too complex to be dealt with so simplistically in a small book and by attributing them to one single origin.
By Chuks Iloegbunam
Anambra is one of Nigeria’s 36 states. In size, it is the second smallest after Lagos, measuring only 4,844 km2. Lagos State is 3,577 km2. But Kaduna, Kano, Kogi States are 46,053 km2 , 20,131 km2 and 29,833 km2 respectively. Despite its tininess, however, Anambra’s motto of Light Of The Nation is true in many respects.
Compared to all other states, Anambra people have shone the brightest in all positive forms of human endeavor – academics, business, politics, sports etc. Olaudah Equiano, the writer and abolitionist came from Esseke, in Anambra State. So did Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the doyen of Nigerian journalism and the first President of Nigeria who played a pivotal role in the attainment of political independence from Britain in 1960. Chinua Achebe was from Anambra as were countless other notable novelists, including Chukwuemeka Ike, Nkem Nwankwo, Onuorah Nzekwu. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is from Anambra.
