Nigeria: The Poor Shall Not Die!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Delta State born gospel singer, Harold Ikuku, re­leased a popular album that was the rave of the moment in the tough and horri­ble years that the 1990s were. The song’s motif is “I shall not die”. Although a gospel song, it reso­nated with both Christians and non-Christians as a result of its affirmative message of survival in the face of brutal economic and psychological assault on the citizenry. 

It was this song that a man sang with so much gusto on hearing of the new pump price of petrol about three weeks ago, the second of such astronomical increase within two months of the present regime. When Presi­dent Bola Tinubu said, in his in­augural speech, that petroleum subsidy was gone, his handlers must have thought that it was a masterstroke in view of the fact that petrol subsidy had become an albatross for the Nigerian polity. 

Our Beloved Country Is Bleeding

 By Sunny Awhefeada

 I do not know why countries or na­tions are thought of in feminine forms (she/her). Perhaps, it is a strategy to endear us to the place of our nativity and create a bond, the kind that exists between a mother and her child. Growing up, we sang songs that endeared Nigeria to us. Our young and impressionable minds glowed with no­ble ideas to which our sonorous voices gave clarion utterances. Men and wom­en who lived generations before this era also thought of their place of birth in endearing terms and they went to war in defence of their homeland.

*President Tinubu and Senate President Akpabio

Empires and kingdoms rose and fell in battles to defend the homeland. Even Nigeria’s national anthem and pledge have mem­orable and endearing words to configure our allegiance and love for “our beloved country”.

Nigeria: Mad And Dangerous Times

 By Sunny Awhefeada

These are mad and dangerous times for Nigeria and I must concede that we never saw this coming. Not even the famed prophets envisioned the ca­lamities now buffeting us as a people. Nobody foresaw or warned us. Those among us who lay claims to clairvoyance are largely charlatans who think about causes and effects of actions and offer surmises which they call predictions. 

That is why they always turn around to tell us they were misquoted, quoted out of context or point at what they claimed they told us, but they never did. Charles Dickens’ Hard Times tells of a time of acute social insecurity and how the people were impoverished and pulver­ized. Like other narratives by Dickens, the nov­el mirrors the grim, dark and dreary side of life in a manner considered to be exaggerated. 

Borrowing In The People’s Name To Steal!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Those who run and ruin Nigeria read like rogue characters in a picaresque. Nigeria has turned out to be a sordid adventure and those who dominate our landscape are the picaros. Roguish, arrogant and bra­vura-like, our rulers prance about and do things that normal people will not do.

Yes, those who presently rule Nigeria are not normal. Their mental constitution is made of something in the realm of the abnormal. Daily, we are confronted with a multiplicity of inanities orchestrated by government officials who are never fazed by their acts of recklessness and perfidy. They have turned Nigeria into a nation of anything goes since infractions now happen without sanctions.

Nigeria And The Politics Of Hunger

 By Sunny Awhefeada 

My generation's first experience of hunger and its attendant crises was in the mid-1980s. My genera­tion here refers to Nigerians born after the civil war and attained teenagehood from 1983 onwards. We have read in history books of how starvation was one of the major tools that was deployed to fight the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

Pictures abound of chil­dren, youths and older people who suffered from the affliction of hunger. Not even the efforts of humanitarian agencies that tried to alleviate the hunger in the refugee camps that littered the secessionist enclave of Biafra alleviated the crisis. Hunger engendered dis­eases which in turn yielded deaths. Many still believe that starvation more than bullets and bombs was what made Biafra to capitulate when it did.

An Oil Producing Country Without Fuel

 By Sunny Awhefeada

The ongoing energy crisis manifesting as scarci­ty of petroleum products has for the umpteenth time portrayed Nigeria for what it truly is, a failed nation. Our failure is monumental and tragically so. A friend drew the analogy between Nigeria and a household that grows cassava, but lacks garri and the children from that home go plate in hand starving and begging whereas their parents’ farms hold thousands of cassava stems with robust tubers ensconced in the womb of the earth.

Nigeria prides herself as a leading oil pro­ducing nation, but like the man that lives by the riverside and washes his hands with spittle, Nigeria suffers peren­nial crisis in the petroleum sector. More than anything else, petroleum has been the most intransigent source of our problem as a nation. What has been described as the Dutch disease seems to find a lasting domain in Nige­ria.

Nigeria: Mad And Dangerous Times

 By Sunny Awhefeada

These are mad and dangerous times for Nigeria and I must concede that we never saw this coming. Not even the famed prophets en­visioned the calamities now buffeting us as a people. Nobody foresaw or warned us. Those among us who lay claims to clair­voyance are largely charlatans who think about causes and effects of actions and offer surmises which they call predictions.

That is why they always turn around to tell us they were misquoted, quoted out of context or point at what they claimed they told us, but they never did. Charles Dick­ens’ Hard Times tells of a time of acute social insecurity and how the people were impoverished and pulverized. Like other narratives by Dickens, the novel mirrors the grim, dark and dreary side of life in a manner considered to be exaggerated.

Nigeria And The Politics Of Hunger

By Sunny Awhefeada

My generation’s first experience and its attendant crisis was in the mid-1980s. My generation here refers to Nigerians born after the civil war and attained teenagehood from 1983 onwards. We have read in history books of how starvation was one of the major tools that was deployed to fight the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970. 

Pictures abound of children, youths and older people who suffered from the affliction of hunger. Not even the efforts of humanitarian agencies that tried to alleviate the hunger in the refugee camps that littered the secessionist enclave of Biafra alleviated the crisis. Hunger engendered diseases which in turn yielded deaths. Many still believe that starvation more than bullets and bombs was what made Biafra to capitulate when it did. 

Nigeria And The Politics Of Hunger

 By Sunny Awhefeada

My first generation’s experience of hunger and its attendant crises was in the mid-1980s. My genera­tion here refers to Nigerians born after the civil war and attained teenagehood from 1983 onwards. We have read in history books of how starvation was one of the major tools that was deployed to fight the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970.

Pictures abound of chil­dren, youths and older people who suffered from the affliction of hunger. Not even the efforts of humanitarian agencies that tried to alleviate the hunger in the refugee camps that littered the secessionist enclave of Biafra alleviated the crisis. Hunger engendered dis­eases which in turn yielded deaths.

Nigeria’s Gunboat Democracy

By Sunny Awhefeada

There is a sense in which some commentators are right when they argue that Nigeria is not a democracy. Their argument is based on the reality that the military has remained more than a recurring decimal in Nigeria’s political life. When the soldiers blew apart the pillars that held Nigeria’s democratic structure in January 1966, a pall fell on the nation and, the tragic detour which came with that experience is yet to yield the ideals of nationhood. Since then, with the exception of a few promising years, Nigeria has been ruled by hooded men who view statecraft as a cloak and dagger engagement.

*Nigeria's President Buhari

The 1966 coup(s) birthed military rule for thirteen long years and when Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1979, the military adventurers didn’t give politics a wide berth. They hovered around and menaced the politicians. It was concluded then that Nigeria had two leading political parties; the then ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and the Nigerian Army (NA). And in just four years after 1979, the army serenaded Nigerians with an end of year’s gift of martial music on 31 December 1983. The soldiers were back in power. This time, they held sway for sixteen tortuous years. Buhari, Babangida, ‘Bacha, ‘Bdusalami, all took turns to bash Nigeria. 

Nigeria: President Buhari’s Greek Gifts

By Sunny Awhefeada

June 12th 1993 was a Saturday and it met me in Ughelli.

June is a month of unpredictable rain, but that day was bright; bright and fair.

We trooped out to vote for a new dawn. 

 I was then an impressionable undergraduate of the University of Benin possessed by ideals instilled by youth.

*President Buhari 

The buildup to that day was momentous and exciting. The military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida had embarked on the rigmarole it called transition to civil rule programme.

In the course of that tortuous experience, political parties were formed and disbanded.

Politicians were classified as new breed and old breed and they were banned and unbanned.

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.