Rivers Crises: A Challenge To Nation-Building

 By Obasi Igwe

Peace happily returned to Rivers, Ijaw nationalists having precipitately weighed-in for Fubara, turning party affairs ethnic, and leaving Wike with barely feeble support. Rivers State is a contrivance emphasising power over harmonious development, another expression of a flawed Nigerian structure awaiting statesmanly healing, hopefully under a modern democratic secular state of equal laws and equal applications built on civilised Common Law principles in an organically restructured true federalism. 

*Fubara and Wike 

Never force strange bedfellows into marriage merely to spite another. Rivers disproportionate volatility is not from multi-ethnicity, but due to a malign doctrine of Igbo landlocking undergirding it, whereof Igbo communities, nicknamed “Igboids,” are decoupled from their hinterland kith and kin; Bonny, Opobo, parceled to Ijaw trusteeship; leaving Andoni, Ogoni, askant. Negative contradictions of sharing booties of machination are behind Rivers problems, and until resolved the “fire next time” could be unimaginable.

Chinua Achebe: The Eagle On Iroko At 91

 By DAN AMOR   

Prof. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, easily one of the world's most popular and celebrated novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would have turned 91 years today having been born on November 16, 1930. Yet, amidst the torrent of tributes and acclamations that heralded the transition of Professor Achebe to higher glory on March 21, 2013 (more than 8 years ago), at Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, some hacks or literary kill-joys still found space to circulate that Achebe’s style of writing and literary philosophy were not original or sophisticated enough to attract the sympathy of the Nobel Committee.  

Achebe 

That is to say that the whole gamut of Achebe’s literary corpus was not deserving of the Nobel Prize for literature. Whereas the import of this anniversary piece is not about the politics of Achebe’s world view as a global citizen, no amount of false-hood and propaganda can diminish the fact that he was one of the most cited twentieth-century thinkers and quintessential intellectuals. While this may not be surprising for a man who had authored one of the most influential novels in world literature – and had changed the way the world at large appreciates the African cosmology and ontology – Chinua Achebe remains a conundrum to most people.