Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nobel Prize. Show all posts

Monday, December 25, 2023

CBN: Cash Scarcity Is Here To Stay For A While

 By Dele Sobowale

“Cash Scarcity: People are hoarding bank notes – CBN.” VANGUARD, December 14, 2023.

Governor Cardoso and his new team at the top of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, can be forgiven if the current cash scarcity being experienced has caught them by surprise.


They were not in office in March, when it was predicted on these pages that another round of cash scarcity was inevitable; after the one induced by the CBN then. Before going into the reasons why we are not free of this problem yet, permit me to make one observation; which will be helpful to the current CBN Management.  Statements such as “people are hoarding cash” are more emotional than technical or professional; and they seldom solve the problem.

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Soyinka, Chimamanda And Obi-Dients: When Does Opinion Cross The Line?

 By Jideofor Adibe

In recent weeks Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, multiple award winning writer, Chimamanda Adichie, and supporters of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the February 25, 2023 presidential election  (otherwise known as Obidients), have been trending. The backgrounds were an interview granted by Datti Baba Ahmed in which he was quoted as saying that whoever “swears in Mr. Tinubu has ended democracy in Nigeria”. Elsewhere, Dr. Datti Baba- Ahmed was also quoted as saying that Nigeria does not have a President-elect.  

*Chimamanda and Soyinka 

The conversation took a different turn when Soyinka criticised the comments by Dr. Datti Baba-Ahmed, saying: “I have never heard anyone threaten the judiciary on television the way Datti did I heard the kind of menacing, blackmailing language that we were treated to by Datti. That kind of do-or-die attitude and provocation is not what I think we have all been struggling for.”

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Our Quintessential Soyinka At 82

By Dan Amor
It was once the fashion to single out four men of letters as the supreme titans of world literature - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe - each the embodiment of a great epoch of Western culture - ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern. These four literary icons of all times remain secure, but acclamation of Professor Wole Soyinka as the prototype of the inquiring spirit and courageous intellect of modern man has been sharply appreciated in our time, especially as we pass beyond the more leisurely issues of the post modernist era.
*Soyinka 
The intensely contemporary character of his works has made him the tallest iroko tree in the post-modernist forest of global dramatic literature. Yet, the commencement, two weeks ago, of the Wole Soyinka 82nd Birthday Festival, which ultimately climaxes today, July 13, his date of birth, unfortunately doesn't seem to wear the official insignia of the Nigerian government especially because he has started telling them the truth about the Nigerian condition. But, it is expected, as Christ Himself says in Matthew 13:57, "A prophet is not without honour, save his own country and his own house." 

In retrospect, in March 1996 when the Nigerian artistic and literary community was agog with the explosion of a series of events to mark the tri-centenary and two score anniversary of the birth of Von Goethe (1749-1832), the German creative genius and great thinker of all times, the Sani Abacha-led military junta, despite its sadistic, base and tyrannical complexion, surpassingly accorded the celebration an official recognition while declaring Soyinka, the custodian of our artistic signature wanted, dead or alive. Given the authoritarian intolerance of the Buhari government and the President's implacable disdain for anything cerebral, no one actually expected less from them especially at a time when Soyinka is telling him to listen to the cries of the Igbo and the minorities in the country, and to heed to the call for the restructuring of this lopsided federation. Oscar Wilde, the great Victorian English epigrammatist, in a state of protracted gloom once observed that: "Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable." Indeed, the brilliant Wilde cannot be faulted. But there is no more breeding ground for such critical vituperation than our current socio-political climate.