Showing posts with label Professor Festus Iyayi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Professor Festus Iyayi. Show all posts

Monday, May 28, 2018

Nigeria: Gen Gowon’s Desecration Of History

By Sunny Awhefeada
Nigeria’s history has been so abused and distorted that there is hardly a consensus on what constitutes a genuine national narrative. Nigerian rulers have had to manipulate the history of their record in office to suit their whim. History ought to be sacred as the ultimate guide of a people. It is the unseen, but powerful propelling force from which a nation derives inspiration in the tortuous odyssey of national evolution. But when the history of a nation is subjected to deliberate distortions then such a nation is bound to be moored to the past with the people as captives. This has been Nigeria’s lot. 
*Gen Gowon
Nigeria hosted the 8th Commonwealth Regional Conference for Heads of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa last week. It was at that forum that Nigeria’s former military ruler, General Yakubu Gowon (rtd) did what amounted to a desecration of history. Hear him: “During our time, we did not know anything like corruption”.
He went a great length to buttress his assertion. Let us dream up an apotheosis for Gowon so that even in his lifetime he could become Saint Yakubu Gowon! What Gowon told his audience was far from the truth. The government he led from the hurly-burly of 1966 to the sedate ambience of 1975 was one of massive corruption.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Festus Iyayi And The Violence Of Death: Four Years After

By Dan Amor
Even for the casual observer of the convoluted Nigerian social system, the news of the murder of Professor Festus Iyayi, a University of Benin (UNIBEN) Professor, creative writer and human rights activists, was rudely shocking. The former President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was said to have died on Tuesday November 12, 2013 in an accident involving the convoy of the then Kogi Sate Governor Idris Wada. He was just 66. This was one inexplicable death too many. Four years after and given the fact that this was now the second fatal crash involving Wada’s convoy, the Federal Government is yet to punish the driver of his convoy’s vehicle that hit the bus in which the lecturers were traveling.
*Festus Iyayi 
Like Chima Ubani, another fire-brand activist who was killed in a similar circumstance a few years back, Iyayi was yet another victim of the penchant for the Nigerian State to murder its best and brightest stars. But I write of him today not only as a committed intellectual and activist but also as one of the best literary minds to have emerged in the twentieth century anywhere in the world. For Iyayi, one of Africa’s shining titans in the literary firmament, there is no more intrinsic and indivisible quality of art, no better, no other initiation is there into the craft of creative writing but the most discriminating and appreciative practice of the literature of engagement. The Nigerian politicians’ betrayal of national trust and the general apathy of the citizens provoked a fighting (revolutionary) literature from writers through committed satirization of society with prophetic dimensions.