A Walk Amongst Writers And Odia, A Living Legend

 By Owei Lakemfa

I drove to Mamman Vatsa Writers Village, Mpape, Abuja. It is a huge sprawling estate of multiple storey buildings, many under construction. It is easy to get lost in this maze that is the home of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA. Somebody from the hilly top pointed at a building in what may well be a valley.

*Ofeimum

Outside the huge theatre, I found nobody. I was confident there were people inside. But it was like a void. Finally, I found somebody who confirmed a reading by Odia Ofeimum was scheduled for the theatre. But that was still some three hours away. I knew that, but I was also aware a pre-reading session was going on. The task was to locate it.

Nigeria: A Tribunal From Hell

 By Obi Nwakanma

I watched with extreme difficulty, and not insubstantial pain, the interview in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in which the poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, very painfully, tried to subvert the truth about the Nigerian election, by claiming that the Labour Party “came third” and knew that they “did not win the election.” That the Labour Party had become a regional movement. That Peter Obi and the party leaders were trying to push young people into the streets to protest. 

Here, let us reproduce Soyinka in full: “One party took over the Labour Movement and then it became a regional party…my own organization has a monitoring unit, and so I could say categorically that Peter Obi’s Party came third, not even second! And that the leadership knew it. But they wanted to do what we call in Yoruba, ‘Gba Jue!’

Fashola’s Perverse Doctrine: Performance Trumps Integrity In Politics!

 By Olu Fasan

Babatunde Fashola, SAN,  former governor of Lagos State and outgoing Minister of Works and Housing, has a reputation for erudition and a knack for memorable turns of phrase. Recently, Professor Wole Soyinka credited him with what he called “the Fashola Dictum”, based on his saying that elections should be “carnivals and festivals”, not wars. Yet, sometimes, Fashola’s logic is flawed and, sometimes, his views are warped. Take his recent apologia for Bola Tinubu, his former boss and predecessor as Lagos State governor. 

*Fashola

In an interview on Channels TV, Fashola was asked about Tinubu’s integrity. He ducked and dived. He was so slippery that pinning him down was like nailing jelly to the wall. Eventually, he delivered an appalling apologia. Allow me to quote the words verbatim. 

Fascists? Look No Further Than The Ruling Party

 By Olu Fasan

As a creative writing scholar at Oxford University, I have been reviewing the legendary literature Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka’s latest book Chronicles from the land of the happiest people on earth. Reading the book, a political fiction, I’m enthralled by its linguistic and literary quality. Imagine my bafflement, therefore, when Professor Soyinka recently used the word “fascistic” to describe Dr. Datti Baba-Ahmed, vice-presidential candidate of Labour Party in February’s presidential election.

What drew Professor Soyinka’s ire was Dr Baba-Ahmed’s controversial interview on Channels TV. “Whoever swears in Mr Tinubu has ended democracy in Nigeria,” he said, adding: “Mr President, do not hold that inauguration. CJN (Chief Justice of Nigeria), your lordship, do not partake in unconstitutionality.” Baba-Ahmed argued that Bola Tinubu “has not met the requirements of the law”, having failed to secure 25 per cent of the votes cast in Abuja.

Election Petitions: Nigeria’s Judiciary Must Redeem Itself

 By Olu Fasan

In Nigeria, elections almost always end up in court. To stem this tide, the Electoral Act of 2022 introduced the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, a technology that would drastically reduce electoral malpractices. If that happened, election results would be more credible and less prone to legal challenge, although election matters remain justiciable, that is, subject to trial in a court of law.

Indeed, BVAS reduced the number of petitions arising from this year’s general elections, compared to the six previous elections since 1999. However, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, wilfully refused to use BVAS in the presidential election and in some governorship elections. Consequently, several results announced by INEC raised issues of process values and substantive justice that are now subject to trial in the election tribunals and the courts, ending up, inevitably, in the Supreme Court.

Soyinka: Celebrating Our Own Kongi At 87

 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 time remain secure; but idolatry 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 87th  Birthday Festival, which ultimately climaxes today, July 13, 2021, 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."  

Nigeria Is Under Attack!

By Anthony Cardinal Okogie

On a Monday in September 2015, former finance minister, Chief Olu Falae was on his farm in Ilado near Akure when some armed men came looking for him. At gunpoint, they abducted him and held him until the following Thursday. At the age of 77, he was made to walk several kilometres. He was made to sleep in the rain. According to his own account published in some national dailies, every half an hour, his armed abductors threatened: “Baba, we are going to kill you.  If you don’t give us money we are going to kill you.”

*Cardinal Okogie

By 2018, herdsmen were wreaking havoc in the states of the middle belt of Nigeria. Then, a retired Chief of Army Staff, a veteran of military intervention in Nigerian politics, General Theophilus Danjuma, warned that there was ethnic cleansing in the middle belt. Having lost confidence in the government’s willingness or ability to deal with the situation, General Danjuma called on the people of the middle belt to take responsibility for their own security. The reaction of aides to the President of the Federal Republic was to insult him and call him names he did not deserve to bear.

Pius Adesanmi: The Human Oxymoron Politicians Must Learn From

By Banji Ojewale

Professor Toyin Falola has put it most concisely: Pius Adesanmi is the man who leaves and lives. He argues that although Adesanmi is leaving the scene, still he lives. He’s gone, but he’s not done. He’s gone, but he’s still on. He’s dead, but not dusted. There is more to Falola’s dirge than the lyrical alliteration.

*Professor Pius Adesanmi 

There’s also more to the oxymoron of a departure that yet defies an exit. To capture or press a point, you must confront it with its alter ego. To prove Adesanmi 'lives' on, you challenge his death with the greater fact of what he has left behind that offers assurance of his being alive, as it were. You put the two opposite each other: Adesanmi’s death and his works and life that touched many he seems to have left orphaned.

Nigeria: Mindset Of Our Politicians

By Passy Amaraegbu

The greatest minds are capable
of the greatest vices as well as
of the greatest virtues.
—Rene Descartes.

A family of five perishes in one night because their old generator caught fire at midnight and before neighbours could offer any help, the soot suffocates them. A professor of engineering dies in a general hospital due to poisoned intravenous injection he received. Famine is ravaging several villages because the indigenes can no longer engage in productive farming. The villages are now the den of robbers, kidnappers, killer herdsmen and marauders. The road network linking several villages, towns and communities have degenerated and disintegrated. Some of the roads that were repaired are also quickly being eroded systematically.

*Nigerian Politicians

No doubt, the situation in the various levels of our societal life may not always be as sordid as earlier portrayed but in some occasions it is or even worse. Our society has reached a negative tipping point. We are on the edge of the cliff and if no systematic and determined positive steps are taken by the citizens and the government, the result will be an imminent and inimical descent into catastrophe. 

Celebrating The Literary World Of JP Clark

By Hope Eghagha

It is within the context of a poignant, profound and perhaps arcane ritual imagination that we encounter John Pepper Clark in his literary world as evidenced by the evocative power of his primal poetic and dramatic compositions. Especially so are some of the early works such as Song of a Goat through Ozidi, the ‘middle’ The Boat, The Return Home, Full Circle, Casualties and the later Remains of a Tide.

*JP Clark 

His only known work of prose the semi-autobiographical and bitingly sarcastic America their America, at once immediate in content and prophetic in thematic concern exists outside this ontology of ritual and the mythic imagination. Almost to the letter (or depth) of contemporary effusions from Trumpian America, this work captures the supercilious arrogance of white America and victims of racial disharmony narrated after a personal encounter with the programmed academy of American culture, capitalism and sociology which our young and bristling JP had found condescending and utterly restrictive. 

Buhari 2019: The Audacity Of Buharideens

By Martins-Hassan Eze

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance  and an conscientious stupidity” — Dr. Martin-Lurther King Jnr.

Walahi! This thing called shame some Dudu’s just don’t have it. How can a man with conscience and human heart refuse to acknowledge the regrettable fact the GMB is a disaster; a ticking time bomb. Is it not now clear that GMB is the worst thing to happen to Nigeria since the return of civilian rule in 1999? Yet, some mugus are not just shameful enough to stop selling the candidature of this Mobutu in the social media. And, I ask. Is the protection of lives and properties no longer the primary responsibility of government? Have PBM and APC not failed woefully in this regard? Perhaps, for Elrufai; the petit Kaduna tyrant and Dean, college of Buharideens, good governance is all about ethnic cleaning and political jihad. 

President Buhari 

Who should we blame? Did KONGI the noble laureate not bemoan the fact that social media is a vomitorium some years back?  Some folks think that the social media is their village stream. They just jump into the square with rotten and stinking narratives: fighting corruption is the reason why we should become slaves in our country. Fighting corruption is also the reason why all ancestral lands of non-Muslims in the north should become a mass grave and grazing land for Fulani herdsmen.

Buhari, Our President In The Clouds

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Bristling with rage at the unceasing carnage and fecklessness that have bogged down the nation since the emergence of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari as the president, Prof. Wole Soyinka recently warned us against the fate of a people whose affairs are presided over by a leader in a trance. But not a few of those who are befuddled by their devotion to Buhari sniggered at Soyinka’s position as another instance of the dramatist over-dramatising the perceived failings of his president. 

*President Buhari 

But those who did not share Soyinka’s prescience and thus did not appreciate the horrendous developments that validated his position can no longer ignore what has happened since that grim verdict.

Indeed, we have all been confronted with subsequent stark developments that have been triggered by the administration of Buhari which show that Soyinka’s position remains unimpeachable.

Nigeria: A Short Essay On ‘The Other Room’

By Banji Ojewale

“In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman”

– Margaret Hilda Thatcher (Late British Prime Minister)

*President Buhari and wife, Aisha

It’s fast turning out that ‘the other room’ in the cosmos of President Muhammadu Buhari is where we have to look for answers to some of the bewildering national questions of the day. When he was grabbed on camera as he faced the world to disclose the existence of an enclosure exclusive to his wife, the president hardly perceived the location as a world beyond his own vision. His remarks were a gratuitous riposte to a loving spouse’s customary admonition. He ignored her and sought to cage the woman, as it were. But the genie was out of the bottle.

Buhari: The Making Of A Tragic Hero

By Abraham Ogbodo

The Aristotelian perspective defines the tragic hero as being complete in all the indices of greatness, but lacking in an essential character trait that makes all the difference. This is called the tragic flaw in literary theory and criticism. But for this tiny character failure, which occasions the tragedy, the tragic hero will have arrived safely at destination in the great journey called life.

*President Buhari

This was when tragedy was defined as the exclusive experience of kings and princes. That definition changed with the advent of the 20th Century American playwright and essayist, Arthur Miller, who made every man (not only noble men) a tragic hero.

Buhari’s Presidency: Facts And Fiction

By Abraham Ogbodo

I am worried about the ongoing narrative that Nigerians desired a change from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) misrule and agreed in 2015 to kick out Goodluck Jonathan and vote in Muhammadu Buhari as President.

Nothing sounds more fraudulent. Was there a consensus at anytime on that? The answer is no. Rather, the Buhari presidency was a risk specifically undertaken by a tiny but powerful clique solely for its benefit and not the benefit of Nigerians.

*Jonathan and Buhari

Now that the risk has failed and woefully too, the same clique is trying to change the narrative and make the mistake look like everybody’s mistake. It will not happen. I know the truth is always a casualty when history is being hurriedly written from many perspectives. But not this time please because I am going to tell the truth to shame the devil and stop it from escaping with vain glory. 

President Buhari And The Herdsmen’s Endgame

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Of the many traumatic marvels of the President Muhammadu Buhari government, its predilection for crashing deeper into the abyss when we thought that we would no longer be jolted by its blunders, is striking. If his linkage to marauding and bloodthirsty Fulani herdsmen were only a staple of blackmail sustained by his traducers, he has just stoked the suspicion of his fidelity to their ghoulish vision with his response to the killings in Benue State.

*President Buhari 

Buhari did not bother to visit Benue for a first-hand apprehension of the tragedies that the Fulani herdsmen inflicted on the people. Nor was he seen to have expressed deep regret over the killings, except the platitudes that were regurgitated by his aides after a grudging approval from him. Or is this not a true measure of his lack of humanity and a perverted sense of justice and patriotism that while the nation was gripped by grief, Buhari and the governors from his northern region were preoccupied with his re-election in 2019?

President Buhari Still Doesn't Get It

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

After listening to President Muhammadu Buhari's three minutes, fifty-six seconds national broadcast on Monday, August 21, his first since coming back to the country from a 103-day medical tourism in the United Kingdom, I concluded that he still does not get it.

I doubt if he ever will.

*President Buhari

Prior to his speech, I was not overtly hopeful I would hear anything grand, ennobling and soul-lifting.

Yet, after a three-month absence from duty post, during which time he presumably had time for sober reflection on what ails the country of 180 million people over whose affairs he superintends, I had hoped he would have realised the need to calm frayed nerves and bring people together through moral suasion.

How wrong I was.