Dele Giwa: Lingering Echoes Of A Murder

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

 “Death is…the absence of presence…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound”.    – Tom Stopard, German playwright. 

*Giwa 

 

In the morning of Monday, October 20, 1986, I was preparing to go to work when a major item on the Anambra Broadcasting Service (ABS) 6.30 news bulletin hit me like a hard object. Mr. Dele Giwa, the founding editor-in-chief of Newswatch magazine, had the previous day been killed and shattered by a letter bomb in his Lagos home. My scream was so loud that my neighbour barged into my room to inquire what it was that could have made me to let out such an ear-splitting bellow. 

We were three young men who had a couple of months earlier been posted from Enugu to Abakaliki to work in the old Anambra State public service, and we had hired a flat in a newly erected two-storey building at the end of Water Works Road, which we shared. My flat-mate, clearly, was not familiar with Giwa’s name and work, and so had wondered why his death could elicit such a reaction from me. But later that day, as he interacted with people, he realised that Giwa’s death was such big news, and by the next couple of days, he had become an expert on Giwa and his truncated life and career. Across the country, Giwa’s brutal death dominated the news not just because of the pride of place he occupied in Nigerian journalism practice and but more because of the totally novel way his killers had chosen to end his life.

June 12: Barbers At Work

By Banji Ojewale
"You cannot shave a man’s head in his absence"

—MKO Abiola, winner of 1993 Presidential Election

*Late MKO Abiola

Is Nigeria Still Redeemable?

By DAN AMOR

Every real nation state is an historical product. It is, in Marx's celebrated phrase, "the official resume of the antagonism in civil society", but under historically determinate circumstances. As such, it is the product of the historically specific constellation of class relations and social conflicts in which it is implicated. 

*Buhari 

It may, therefore, indeed, it must, if it is not to rest on its monopoly of the means of coercion alone, incorporate within its own structure, the interests not only of the dominant but of the subordinate classes. In this quite specific sense, then, every real nation state has an inherently relative independence, including, as well, the independence to understand the dynamics of its made-made domestic crises. In consequence, therefore, the general characteristics of the Nigerian nation state today may be seen in terms of the enormity of its domestic crises and social contradictions.

Liberating Nigeria Through Advocacy And Sensitization

By Chukwuka Igwegbe

As the 2019 general elections draws near, there has been a huge clamour for the populace to get their Permanent Voters Card (PVC) and vote for credible leaders. The clamour, though having good intentions is not rightly placed. Information available reveals that majority of the voters from the 2015 general elections were the uneducated masses. The educated class were reluctant to come out to vote, and in actual sense, most do not even have their permanent voters card. This nonchalant attitude by the educated class during election period has been the reason for the continuous bad leadership being experienced in Nigeria.

Despite having a skewed process in political parties in Nigeria that favours the emergence of elected leaders backed by money bags, the educated class have a lot of roles to play to change the narrative.

Special Status For Lagos Long Overdue

By Dan Amor

Alongside the experience of history and the role of national and international identity, the one theme that emerges in the evolution of cities throughout the continent of Europe is the impact of ideology, whether conservative, ecological, feudal or socialist. Past ideologies have created cities that are memorials to the divine monarch (Versailles), to the imperial mission (Vienna), and to utilitarianism and the pursuit of profit (Bradford). It has been suggested that the morphology of the city is not only the product of the civilization that houses it but also a factor in the creation of that civilization.

*Governor Ambode

At a more prosaic level, it is clear that in cities such as Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Helsinki, attitudes towards conservation, social housing provision and public transport reflect the contemporary dominant social-democratic ideology of the Scandinavian countries. In contrast, the development of many West German cities in the immediate post-war period occurred within the framework of a social-market economy and a certain rejection of planning resulting from the experience of twelve years of National Socialism.