Nigeria: Homelands Under Siege!

 By Sunny Awhefeada

Homeland holds significance in many ways. It embodies the phys­ical, psychological and spiritual essence of man. Homeland could be a birthplace or an adopted place of origin. Both ways, a homeland has an endearing and enduring impact on people. It has a pull that is difficult to ignore or avoid. Before modernity and globalization came with displacement and tendency to see everywhere as home, the idea of the homeland carried with it a romantic allure that it became a motif in po­etry and music.

 The enduring impact of the homeland magic and mystic finds eternal resonance in Evi Edna Ogholi’s “No Place like Home”. Her scribal brothers, Gabriel Okara, Tanure Ojaide, Ibiwari Ikoriko, Joe Ushie, Ogaga Ifowodo, Ebi Yeibo, Obari Gom­ba, Peter Omoko and Stephen Kekeghe, in their poetry romanticized an idyllic home­land that was lost to capitalist rapacity em­bodied in oil multinationals and insensitive successive governments under the firm grip of comprador bourgeoisie. People had gone to war to defend their homeland. No matter how far people sojourned in the distant past they always made attempt to return to their homeland.

The Value Of Peter Obi

 By Abiodun Awolaja

As I begin these lines, I remember 1998 like yesterday. An old man on the street where I lived in Ondo town, exasperated by General Sani Abacha’s bloodthirsty rule, shrugged and said the following: “Well, at least he will leave the position in his old age.” Those were the days when it was almost an anathema to think of democracy. 

*Peter Obi 

Had God Almighty not taken Abacha out of the way just a few days after the man I have just referenced made his doleful comment, there would have been no democracy in 1999. The way Abacha and his colleagues carried on, it was as if they owned this world. They could kill and jail people at will. They looted the country dry and, in the words of the poet Tanure Ojaide, “threw questioners to hyenas.”