Rangers International And The Allure Of Soft Power

By Chidi Odinkalu 

“It was as if the football club wanted to regain through foot­ball what the Igbo ‘lost’ during the war.” – Segun Odegbami, MON

Nearly every Nigerian who was alive then remem­bers where they were at the end of 1976 when Al­yufusalam Rocks met Enugu Rang­ers International in the finals of what was then known as the Chal­lenge (Football Association) Cup. With a history going back to the Governor’s Cup, the first finals of which took place on 7 November, 1945, the Challenge Cup was the premier knock-out competition in Nigerian football. Although strict­ly inferior to the football league, the win-or-go-home traditions of the Challenge Cup captured pub­lic imagination in a way that the league did not.

Soludo, Don’t Let Kenneth Abana Die!

 By Emeka Obasi

Economists deserve special attention for you do not know how to place them. They propound theories which do not solve problems most of the time. Human wants are insatiable is the cover that guarantees Prof. Chukwuma Soludo and his men peace.

*Abana 

Kenneth Abana is not abstract Economics. He is living next door to the Anambra State governor. If you understand what Enugu Rangers represent in Igbo land, you must put a call across to the former Central Bank of Nigeria governor immediately.

Abana is a pioneer member of Enugu Rangers. In fact he was the youngest when Chief Jerry Enyeazu, supported by Chief A.W. Ibe and Ajie Ukpabi Asika, founded the all conquering football club in 1970.

What Do The Igbo Want?

By Obi Nwakanma

In an angry retort to a question thrown at him in his recent Media chat not too long ago, President Muhammadu Buhari asked, What do they (Igbo) want? Who is marginalizing them?

*Ojukwu 

In Biafra, under three years, they were making their own rockets and calculating its distances; distilling their own oil and making aviation fuel, creating in their Chemical and Biological laboratories, new cures for diseases like Cholera, shaping their own spare parts, and turning the entire East into a vast workshop, as Ojukwu put it.

At the end of the war, the Ukpabi Asika regime brought together these Biafran scientists and set up PRODA. The initiative led, in the first five years between 1970-1975 under the late Prof. Gordian Ezekwe and Mang Ndukwe, to designs of industrial machinery models and prototypes for the East Central State Industrial Masterplan, which remain undeveloped even today. The Murtala/Obasanjo regime took over PRODA in 1975 by decree, starved it of funds, and basically destroyed its aims.