How To Enter Sapele And Warri From Benin Now

 By Tony Afejuku

Sapele and Warri are two significantly important Nigerian cities that need no introduction, special or un-special, from the historic, realistic and imaginative imagination of this creative creator whose impression of things is often – if not always – determined by features which fit the descriptions that convey meaningfully what must be conveyed – meaningfully.

Sapele and Warri, as very many people know, are two unique cities, two uniquely nifty cities, from whichever dominant or un-dominant impressions or perspectives open to us to define the cities. Of course, the cities’ dense and denizenly denizens and brought-ups where-ever they are always have something, something beautifully beautiful, to say about them in the same way that those of Benin, the antique city, allow their imaginations and conceptions to beautify it.

Nigeria’s Forthcoming Presidential Drama

 By Tony Afejuku

Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s political strategists? Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s democratic strategists? Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s law and legal strategists? Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s capitalist development strategists?

*Tinubu
Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s economic strategists? Who are President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s media strategists? These questions consisting of verbal repetition which emphasizes what President Tinubu and the masses of our people are up against are ones that cannot be swept under the carpet and must not be swept under the carpet.

ASUU’S Rightful Battle Of Moral Conscience Against Financial Realities

 By Tony Afejuku

I am suspending my focus on your Speaker of House of Representatives. I hopefully will re-touch next week, barring the un-expected, the first among equals in our House of Polifoolicians (H of P). For now I am yielding space to a reader who introduced himself to me as an un-employed Nigerian graduate – a delightfully articulate fellow. He is Dele Owolowo. Enjoy his peculiar rhythm on the ASUU-FGN’s intangible and tangible battle of wits and bluffs:

Hearty greetings to you, Sir and thank you, for the excellent pieces on ASUU.
On the ASUU-FGN issue ASUU would remain on the back foot while the government calls the shots. The main reason our education sector can be belittled and seemingly betrayed is because it is a sector with few economic aces to play and for this reason it brings little to the economic table (kindly clip the education sector I sent to your WhatsApp). We are running a knowledge-based rather than a productivity-based education value chain with the tertiary sector at the top of this economically unproductive value chain.

Petition To Profs Olu Obafemi And Akachi Ezeigbo On FGN

 By Tony Afejuku

Professors Olu Obafemi and Akachi Ezeigbo need no introduction to anyone who belongs to the profession of scholastic or literary or critical studies. In fact, the two of them – scholastic gentleman and learned lady respectively – do not need this column’s validation of their academic learning and significantly significant literary-cum-creative standing in our clime and beyond. 

*Prof Akachi Ezeigbo 

I have more than considerable respect for both of them not because they are voluminous as scholar-writers or as scholar-thinkers. But because of what each one of them individually means to me – even though they seemingly are two of a kind. But let me explain myself better without peeling each one’s scholastic or literary potato. That is not the goal of this enterprise now. What do I mean to say without keeping you in any cage of suspense a little longer than necessary? 

Professors Olu Obafemi and Akachi Ezeigbo are two of the monumental admirers of this column. Deliberately, I have withheld the harmonious exchanges of ideas and praises relating to this column (and other matters) that we have shared – and are still sharing. The pictures they share with me, among others, help to constitute the pedal points of this column. What have we shared and what have we not shared? 

ASUU Wins!

 By Tony Afejuku

By the time you read this, our public universities that our federal government’s intransigence caused to be closed for well over seven months may have been opened or are about to be opened.

Those who have seen the well above seven months of battle or of war between the FGN and ASUU as super serious contestation and deadly game of brawn and brain akin to those that can only be found in a play or a novel of tragic proportions might be happy to get to the end of the play or novel at last without pause.

Reflections On ASUU And The Constrictors

 By Tony Afejuku

Once again, necessity is compelling me to dwell on the FGN-ASUU imbroglio – which is becoming or has become bigger than an imbroglio. Perhaps we should call what the FGN is doing to and against ASUU a game of imbroglio? All positive hopes that our public universities on lock-down will re-open sooner than later are shrinking un-steadily second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day and month by month.

*ASUU, Federal Govt negotiating team 

Several persons have spoken and written and several more are still speaking and writing about this important issue that is now in the critical hurly-burly of our tertiary education. And after my last appearance here, I promised myself to keep quiet for sometime in the cherished hope that the constrictors who are gripping tightly the neck-muscle of our universities would withdraw their sphincters because they were more or less in touch with reality at last – especially after the Professor Nimi Briggs Committee honourably did their duty with unblemished integrity that the de-humanized constrictors in power never bargained for.

Nigeria: Salute To Our Troops

By Tony Afejuku

The grand finale of the 2019 Army Day Celebration and Combat Support Arms Training Week (ADC-CSATNW – my abbreviation) ended last week. Not being a soldier, I will not pretend that I understood/understand in toto what our Army did or did not do throughout the long week of the combat training and re-training of our soldiers who have done the little or the much they have done (and are still doing) for our country. No matter the havoc our Army chaps have caused us we cannot say without qualms that they have not done more than several good things for us and on behalf of us all.

Of course, as a boy who was reaching adolescence and who was trying to understand his surroundings and his Nigerian landscape, I did not have a glimpse of any Nigerian soldier until the early nineteen-seventies when our civil war broke out. No. I think I am wrong.

Nigeria: Letter To Our Politicians

By Tony Afejuku

What a Christmas it has been! What a new year it will be! And what future of our country confronts us! Where are our politicians to write and shape Paradise that our country wants? These were nagging questions, nagging thoughts that were versions and portraits and figures and images that were collectively part of my mental voyage as I spent ample time walking, thinking, meditating and trying to write about our country.

The source of my image-making power which is my sub-conscious mind moved and moved toward political action in our country as I paced about in the serenity of my wonderfully quiet abode of plain living devoid of material things that tantalize our politicians everywhere, materials things that our politicians crave, and which have turned them into exploiters, speculators, avaricious financiers who have unleashed in our country economic inferno preventing workers, including university lecturers and professors, from enjoying minimum wages corresponding to their labours.

President Buhari As Prisoners’ Taker

By Tony Afejuku

What is the significant significance of President Muhammadu Buhari to us in contemporary Nigeria? For readers who possess a medical or psychological or religious or even chauvinistic perspective he is Mr. President, who, always in his Northern medieval-like chausses, impresses or tries to impress as an answer to the illness, to the sickness of our contemporary times.

*President Buhari 

For those readers with a forward-looking view he is a mere undertaker, who proffers no constructive plan to living Nigerians who are being denied living wages and fabulous education and bodily and economic health they direly need. The man has simply fluffed his three years plus pre-presidential election promises and wishes. And his new next level theory – which I won’t bother to read – will not make him the saccharine president of our dreams. His next-level wishes must enter our Nigerian psyche as those of a political and presidential homunculus.