Nigeria: After The Protests Storm

 By Sunny Ikhioya

Let us call a spade by its real name. The address by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu fell far short of resolving the issues raised by protesters. It only helped to exacerbate the prevailing situation. But what can the cowed masses do? It ended as expected. So much senseless destructions, time and money wasted, avoidable deaths and the battle shifted to another auspicious time and, that will be the day.

 The protests exposed the high level of neglect in the North as evidenced by illiteracy and poverty. The people are hungry down there in the streets; that is the real situation. If government does not vary its strategies to address the scourge of poverty in the land, there will surely be another protest, because you cannot keep a hungry and angry man at home. What we have been offering is just palliative, and palliative is not a final solution to problems, it is ameliorative and temporary. 

Soludo’s Challenge

 By Obi Nwakanma

Charles Chukwuma Soludo is a brilliant economist. He made a Nsukka first in the years when to make a first-class at the University of Nigeria was like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. These days the University of Nsukka is poorly run, and badly situated/oriented, and there is a narrowness to its own self-image that degrades it radically.

One hopes that the rise of its great alums, like Dr Soludo, a former student, and former Professor of Economics at the University of Nigeria might help push a “Nsukka renaissance.” In a sense, Nsukka gave Soludo his first rodeo.

*Soludo

One returns to the fountain of one’s intellectual growth to fetch the waters of life. But though Soludo might have been taught by the likes of Okwudiba Nnoli, I’m a little worried about his centrist, middle of the road politics: Charles Soludo was known among his fellow students in those years of Students Union Politics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as something of an “establishment figure,” who ran with the hares as a student member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the 1980s as an undergraduate student.

Pini Jason – A Date Still Fresh

By Kanayo Esinulo

It happened in the morning of May 4, 2013. Pini Jason was already beginning to recover from surgery which his doctor considered necessary and urgent. He had no choice but to submit himself in obedience. But days before he left Abuja for Lagos, we kept talking not just about the impending medical tour to Lagos, we also discussed the rampage of Boko Haram in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, a city he said he visited a number of times and developed so much love “for its streets lined with trees and flowers, but which these rascals are now destroying.” He told me how beautiful and peaceful Maiduguri was each time he visited the city either on official duty or on holiday. 

*Pini Jason 

We talked of other things like Jonathan’s response to the terror group, and then we would return to his health. “I am not feeling too well,” he said repeatedly, but kept assuring me that his doctor was certain that the surgery would come off pretty well.