Showing posts with label NADECO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NADECO. Show all posts

Saturday, September 16, 2023

The Metamorphosis Of Uncle Soyinka

 By Ugoji Egbujo

Professor Soyinka is a genius. Besides his exceptional creativity in drama and poetry, he has fought oppression like an attendant spirit. However, in the last few months, he has spent more time proving that he is human than engaging the demons of corruption and injustice. Before Tinubu, his friend ran for president, Soyinka would dwell on the credibility of the electoral process and dream of mass participation.

*Soyinka 

And if INEC spent two years seeking the authority to transfer polling unit results electronically to enhance transparency and eliminate substitution of results at collation, Soyinka would insist it was non-negotiable. And if INEC ran into a suspicious glitch on election day, leaving room for mischief at collation centres, Soyinka would worry about the integrity of INEC and lampoon the credibility of the process.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

Nigeria: Gen Bamaiyi’s Heroes And Villains

By Paul Onomuakpokpo
When the odd-defying English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking quipped that “we spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let’s face it, is mostly history of stupidity,” he did not do justice to the relevance of history to a people’s development. But if he had people like a former Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Ishaya Bamaiyi in mind when he said that, hardly can we find his postulation impeachable.
Babangida, Obasanjo and Buhari 
For in most cases, history panders to the dictates of power. Such history unabashedly transforms the foibles of its originators into virtues.

This accounts for the centuries of the denigration of the black population as a benighted segment of the human race, without history, culture and philosophy, and thus their appropriation as hewers of wood and drawers of water for their white counterparts. But we need not go far to understand the manipulation of history to suit the purpose of its writer. We find enough evidence in the history of the Nigerian civil war as different participants and observers in the crisis tweak the history of that period to suit themselves.
This trajectory of the manipulation of history has been replicated in the case of the June 12, 1993 election crisis that has defined the nation’s subsequent democratic experience. What we have witnessed is a preoccupation with a Manichean bifurcation of participants in the crisis into heroes and villains. But the tragedy is that there is hardly an agreement on whose perspective is right since the real masterminds of the crisis have refused to apologise and tell the nation the truth. The further danger is that the generation who did not witness the crisis would be left with a welter of perspectives from which they may not be able to sift out the truth.