At best, Nigeria’s democracy in this Fourth Republic has been wobbly, standing, as it were, on feet of clay. And a quarter of a century thence, rather than getting better, things have got worse as the politicians are busy dismantling all the guardrails of democracy – civic participation, which undergirds every genuine democratic project; the rule of law, that norm which says no one is above the law and makes a democracy function properly; separation of powers and checks and balances, democratic values which ensure that no individual or institution would have too much power over others; federalism and limited government, which Dr. Meena Bose, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, at Hofstra University, described as “principles that ensure that the American political system protects liberty and natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Monday, June 2, 2025
Bola Tinubu And State Capture
By Obi Nwakanma
I have made this point at various points in this column, that for a nation to claim “independence,” or legitimacy, it must have sovereign control of its state institutions.
*TinubuIt should never be a transactional or “contract state.” Is Nigeria a sovereign state? I do not think so, because, currently, Nigeria does not seem in control of its sovereign institutions. As a nation, Nigeria is not governed by her leaders. It is under state capture. Those who parade themselves now as the leaders of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, are in fact, not answerable to the citizens of this republic.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Chinua Achebe, Nobel Prize And African Literature
By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
March 21 was here again recently. On this particular day in 2013, Professor Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s most distinguished writers and intellectuals took his last breath in Boston, Massachusetts, mourned and celebrated by his teeming readers, critics and divers people across the globe on whom his work and life had significantly impacted in various ways. I have decided to use this period to examine some of the important discussions that have continued to circulate around Achebe, his work and African literature which appear to have even gained considerable weight since his demise and have also distinguished themselves by the largely tantalizing distortions, half-truths and deliberate misinformation that have been carefully injected into them.
This service is for the benefit of students, younger professors and scholars who were yet to be admitted into the African literary household when some of the events stoking these discussions took place and who are innocently gobbling up the horribly deficient accounts being fed them by those who either do not have any better grasp of those aspects of the African literary history themselves or are on a deliberate mission to distribute misleading concoctions.
It seems so natural to commence with Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Literature Prize given that discussions on it have stubbornly refused to go away even after over a decade of Achebe’s passing.
*Achebe and the Nobel Politics
By 1986, it was very obvious that the Swedish Academy which annually selects the recipients of the Nobel Literature Prize had decided to bring it to Africa. But to actualize this, they did something that viciously affected the credibility of that year’s prize. They summoned African writers to Stockholm to discuss African Literature before them. While several African writers including the illustrious Wole Soyinka who won the prize that year trooped to Sweden to attend the conference which held from 11-17 April, 1986, Chinua Achebe thought that such an event was not worth his time.
In his message to the Nobel Committee rejecting their invitation, Achebe wrote:
“I regret I cannot accept your generous invitation for the simple reason that I do not consider it appropriate for African writers to assemble in European capitals in 1986 to discuss the future of their literature. In my humble opinion it smacks too much of those constitutional conferences arranged in London and Paris for our pre-independence political leaders.
“The fault, however is not with the organizers such as yourselves, but with us the writers of Africa who at this point in time should have outgrown the desire for the easy option of using external platforms instead of grappling with the problem of creating structures of their own at home.
“…I strongly believe that the time is overdue for Africans, especially African writers, to begin to take the initiative in deciding the things that belong to their peace…” (See “Ikejemba: He Had in Him the Elements So Mixed” by Professor Michael Thelwell, Usaafrica dialogue google groups).
One wonders what the astounded Nobel Committee members must have whispered to each other after receiving this letter.
Friday, November 29, 2024
Obasanjo’s Moment Of Epiphany
By Promise Adiele
I met Olusegun Obasanjo for the first time in his Abeokuta home in 2017. I had gone to interview him with Prof. Hope Eghagha as part of the research materials we needed for a national project. After three hours of robust engagement on various topics about Nigeria, I no longer had any illusions about Obasanjo’s sagacity, intellect, and sometimes exaggerations which exonerated him of all culpabilities, creating an infallible image of a being.
*Obasanjo
To say that Obasanjo is intelligent is to put it mildly. He recounted historical events with an uncanny exactitude and subtle arrogance that belies his position as a no-nonsense former leader of the most populous black country in the world. One can profitably argue that few people know or understand Nigeria more than Olusegun Obasanjo.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Why Bola Tinubu Is Insensitive To End Hardship
By Dan Onwukwe
Do you know why Bola Tinubu is always pushing the envelope on presidential powers and ignoring calls to end pervasive hardship in the country?
TinubuFirst, let’s get a textbook explanation for this question. Students of Management are familiar with this case study: It’s a common complaint in which managers of a knowledge-based company grumbled that the Chief Executive Officer couldn’t get his engineers to think like a leader. As it’s in corporate organisations so it is in politics.
Monday, November 18, 2024
1966 Coups, Biafra, Asaba Massacre, Gowon: Adebayo Williams On Chuks Iloegbunam
By Tony Eluemunor
“I prefer to be accused of nastiness than to join in
the national pastime of consigning events of a few years ago into prehistory”.
Chinua Achebe wrote that in the preface of his book of essays, Morning Yet On Creation Day, to explain why he had to include essays on the Biafran war in that book instead of pretending that the war never took place. Here and now, I second that “motion”.
Tatalo Alamu, in his offering titled Ninety Bouquets For Jack Gowon published in the Nation newspaper of November 3, 2024, poured encomiums on Gen. Yakubu Gowon, “as an exemplary Nigerian patriot, a soldier-statesman and shining moral exemplar for many of his compatriots”.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Nigeria Is Failing At 64; Sadly, Its Leaders Are In Denial
By Olu Fasan
Every nation that secured independence from its colonial rulers celebrates the freedom annually, as Nigeria did recently on its 64th Independence anniversary. However, such events transcend the symbolism. The real worth of an independence anniversary lies in whether a nation is better off today than it was at independence.
Friday, October 4, 2024
Nigeria: What Is The Meaning Of Independence?
By Sunny Awhefeada
I must begin by confessing that the title of the present discourse is not my invention. It was what I thought was an innocent question from Isio, my eight-year-old daughter. The day was Monday, the eve of this year’s Independence Day anniversary and the time was morning just before seven o’clock. As has been the norm since 2008, I already had the key to the car in my hands waiting as my wife dressed Isio up for school so I could take her on school runs when she shot the question, “Mummy, what is the meaning of independence?”
Thinking it was an innocuous question from a child who wanted
to know what independence was or is all about, my wife began to explain to her.
Isio retorted saying, “I know what independence is” and gave a brief overview
of the subject matter before going on to do an expose on what provoked the
question. She took on a rhetoric note saying, “I am asking the question because
what is the meaning of independence when people are not happy. People are
suffering. People are hungry.
People are afraid because of insecurity. People are dying. There
are no good roads. There is no regular electricity. Fuel is very costly. That
is why I asked, what is the meaning of independence?” Obviously she has been
reading newspapers and watching the news like her older siblings. I usually
compel them to read newspapers during weekends and make them watch the news. My
wife and I exchanged uneasy glances and heaved when our daughter was done
talking. We were both disturbed. I glanced at her again and again through the
rear mirror imagining what was going on in her mind that morning as I drove
her on the seven and a half kilometers journey to school.
My fear that morning, and even till now as I write, derives from
my concern for Isio and her generation and also for Nigeria our beloved
country that is being laid waste as a result of bad leadership and complicity
of the led. If a child that is less than ten years old and in primary school
could be so intensely aware of the sordid and sorry condition of our country
then things must have gone bad if not “worse and worst” for too long. My recall
of my earliest critical engagement with Nigeria should be around 1986 when I
had attained teenage.
That was the decade of the nation’s economic downturn when
families had to starve or invent strategies that earned them survival. It was
around that period that the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was foisted
on the nation to sap the citizens. Our childhood consciousness was assailed by
hunger and we knew that something was giving way. The other indices that
presently buffet us were then unknown or incipient and of unfelt consequences.
Therefore, at that level of teenage awareness my critical engagement with
Nigeria was not as intense, deeply conscious and heavily indicting as that of
my eight-year-old daughter in the present era.
The question, “what is the meaning of independence?” is not really Isio’s question alone, it is the question of the children of her generation and Nigeria owes them answers. Nigeria is the space in which that generation, just like mine, found itself so whatever contradictions that have made life unlivable and unbearable for them must be tackled and resolved by Nigeria, and by Nigeria I mean those of us who sired the generation. But are we ready to address and redress the situation? I doubt and strongly so. The “trouble with Nigeria”, apologies to Chinua Achebe, has become infectious and almost incurable.
When Achebe did a diagnosis of the country’s ailing
condition in 1983 in his insightful and refreshing monograph The Trouble with
Nigeria some people naively thought that the views expressed in that treatise
will light the nation’s path and lead it to some redemptive destination. For so
all-encompassing and thorough was that analysis that readers thought an
understanding of the thoughts shared in that pamphlet would constitute the
silver bullet for the eradication of our woes. Unfortunately, the problems
multiplied and became inveterate phenomena.
Looking back one is wistful to the point of tears in remembrance
of what inspired my generation. The stories our parents, especially our mothers
and grandmothers, told us about independence and the hope it held and the
untold joy its realization brought to them on that day in 1960 when the
green-white-green flag displaced the Union Jack thrilled us. Our social studies,
government and history textbooks contained the inspiring stories of the independence
movement and its eventual attainment.
Our teachers, great teachers that they were, also zestfully
taught us about the ideals and beauty of the activities that culminated in
independence. It was a frenzied moment that held the thrill arising from the
infinite possibilities of freedom. Ghana’s founding President, Osagyefo Kwame
Nkrumah, gave thought to the feeling generated by independence when he told his
countrymen to seek first the political kingdom and every other thing would be
added onto them.
Critical observers of the Nigerian and African condition should now reach the conclusion that the euphoria that greeted the anticipation and attainment of independence was misplaced. While the struggle for independence was ongoing there were Africans whose interests were largely selfish and they wasted no time in subverting the ideals of nationhood in new nations that they liberated from colonial bondage.
If historians and social scientists didn’t
see that cankerworm that gnawed at the body politick of the newly independent
nations, African writers from Nigeria, to Ghana, Kenya, Somalia, among others,
saw the pernicious trait and they aptly depicted it in their writings. Wole
Soyinka’s pessimism in A Dance of the Forest, Chinua Achebe’s corrosive A Man of
the People, Ayi Kwei Armah’s bleak The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ngugi
wa Thiong’o’s indicting A Grain of Wheat, all point to the African writer’s
capacity to see beyond the frenzy and revelry that greeted independence. The
crises that have held us down have always been there incipient and unnoticed
for a long time except for the clairvoyant.
Nigeria didn’t and couldn’t celebrate her 64th independence
anniversary because the phenomenon no longer has meaning. It lost its
significance many years ago. Rather than celebrate and memorialize the day,
Nigerians held their breadth and were tensed up in anticipation of the unknown.
The nation was militarized as security forces poured onto the streets to
preempt protests calling for an end to bad governance and clamouring for good
governance.
The new wave of protest which began in August was intended to
end bad governance and all its attendant ills. It was not about regime change,
but a call for responsive and responsible leadership. The protest organizers,
patriots them all, insist on continuing the protest on 1st October, the day of
the nation’s freedom in 1960. Afraid of freedom and uncomfortable with good
governance, those holding the levers of power rolled out military tanks to put
unarmed civilians clamouring for good governance in check while bandits and
terrorists are enjoying a field day in many parts of the country.
Independence has truly lost its meaning to the extent that those
ruling Nigeria have become afraid of freedom from bad governance. Nigeria has
been dubbed a failed state. It has been named among the most unsafe places to
live in the world. It has been awarded the unflattering medal of the most
corrupt country in the world. It has also been described as enmeshed in
multi-dimensional poverty. These are real, scary and biting reality to the
point that a child could question the essence of our independence. May be we
should bring back the colonial masters. After all, did government not give us
the old national anthem when we asked to be governed right? Let the old
colonial masters return in the same token!
* Awhefeada is a Professor of English
Friday, August 23, 2024
Only The Dead Protest In Nigeria
By Kenechukwu Obiezu
Protests may be no pills for the dying, but in Nigeria, they pilfer the dead, or at least, their dainties.
On August 1, Nigeria erupted in protests. The protests which pinched many states of the country hard, some harder than others, were over bread, but quickly bared deep-lying issues, braiding together knots of anger and despair over the state of the country.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Democracy Day: Electricity Bill Is Larger Than My Salary
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Today has been declared a public holiday by the Nigerian Government to mark Democracy Day. May 29 used to be Democracy Day until then President Muhammadu Buhari put forward June 12 as the real McCoy.
The greatest piece of fiction written in Nigeria
since the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart back in 1958 was the
fantastic yarn that promoted May 29 as Nigeria’s Democracy Day.
Some of us are even hard put coming to terms that there is civil rule in Nigeria let alone democracy. At the very least, to practice democracy a country has to first boast of democrats.
Friday, March 1, 2024
Remembering MKO Abiola’s Transformer Semiotics
By Banji Ojewale
One of the captivating political campaign lines of MKO Abiola has been immortalized in a seminal work by Professor Tunde Ope-Davies (Tunde Opeibi) of the University of Lagos. Titled Discourse, Politics and the 1993 Presidential Election Campaign in Nigeria, the book documents the drive of the gladiators to secure the mandate of the electorate.
*AbiolaOpe-Davies’ uncanny nose for hidden details smokes out Abiola’s rush for virtually every trick in the advertising books to outwit his main challenger, Bashir Tofa, of the National Republican Convention, NRC, leading Abiola to create the famous punchline on the transformer as a metaphor for abiding leadership. MKO, as he was fondly called, was of the Social Democratic Party, SDP. He is quoted by Ope-Davies (then known as Tunde Opeibi) as saying during his search for votes that all Nigeria needed to overcome its age-old statehood concerns was ‘one transformer’, one singular and enduring personality in the saddle whose beam of integrity would permeate all of society for salutary ripples in his days and beyond.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
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.
*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.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Nigeria: Disaster Foretold; More Disaster Inevitable!
By Tony Eluemunor
What Nigeria is going through now, be it religious, ethnic, social, political and economic, national insecurity, uncontrolled militancy and banditry, all our national ills, were disasters that were clearly foretold in a major publication.
*TinubuNext month will mark the 30th
anniversary of Robert D. Kaplan’s “THE
COMING ANARCHY – How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease
are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet”.
Published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in February 1994, it pretended to scrutinize the entire planet Earth, though it actually focused on West Africa – with Nigeria receiving a special attention which detailed out our problems and warned that things were about to get worse.
Friday, January 12, 2024
Betta Edu And The Crime Scene Called Nigeria
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Dr Betta Edu, the vivacious and chirpy politician from Cross River State, must be introspecting now. Just yesterday, she had the world at her feet, literally, and Nigeria was her oyster, where, it seemed, she could achieve anything she wished.
*Betta Edu and Bola TinubuAnd she achieved a lot. Born October 27, 1986, Betta chalked up incredible attainments in only 37 years. Right from the time she completed her secondary education in 2001 at the Federal Government Girls College, Calabar and obtained her first degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Calabar in 2009, her rise to super stardom has been incredible.
Friday, December 29, 2023
Who Dares Rechristen The University Of Ilorin?
By Tunde Olusunle
Whenever I’m privileged to visit
Ilorin the Kwara State capital, I include in my itinerary a visit to the
University of Ilorin (UNILORIN), as is popularly abbreviated. My passion, maybe
obsession with the institution is informed by a number of reasons. Principal
among these is the fact that I had two academic excursions to the revered
school, during which I obtained a bachelors honours and a master’s degree in
English, respectively.
Friday, December 15, 2023
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 AkpabioEmpires 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”.
Friday, November 17, 2023
Zik’s Day Beckons!
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The man fondly called Zik of Africa deserves his day. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s foremost nationalist and first president, deserves his birthday, November 16, to be slated as a national holiday.
*AzikiweIt is a deserving honour for the pivotal leader who led the charge for Nigeria’s independence on October 1, 1960.
As a result of his unparalleled efforts Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe would in the course of time become the only black Governor-General of Nigeria, the first President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the only Nigerian whose name appeared in a Constitution of Nigeria, the first Senate President, among many other sterling firsts.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
TheNiche Lecture: Why Does Nigeria Stride And Slide?
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
On Thursday, October 26, the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, NIIA, Nigeria’s foremost think-tank on foreign affairs, will host the 2023 edition of TheNiche Annual Lecture spearheaded by the TheNiche Foundation for Development Journalism.
Wednesday, October 4, 2023
An Airport For Chinua Achebe
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
There is a Chinua Achebe International Airport in Anambra State. It was a spectacular masterstroke from Governor Charles Chukwuma Soludo when he renamed the Anambra Airport at Umueri after Chinua Achebe.
The ovation that Soludo got when he made the announcement in his speech at the 63rd Nigerian Independence Anniversary which took place at Dr Alex Ekwueme Square, Awka, on October 1 was thunderous and long-lasting.
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Federal Republic of Fiction @ 63
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Nigeria is fiction. The country’s Constitution has been transferred to a new shelf in the library: the shelf containing fictional works. The latter-day patriots of Nigeria can cry all they want against me, but in this instance I only choose to stand solidly in solidarity with the words that Samuel Johnson uttered on the evening of April 7, 1775, to wit: “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.”
There can never be a short supply of toadies and ill-assorted scoundrels defending the many fictions of the government of Nigeria in this new age when former activists and revolutionaries have turned into government spies and informants.