Oprah, Obama And The Story Of Black America: Alain Locke's 'The New Negro' Revisited

By Dianam P. Dianam

The twentieth century drew to a close with America's erstwhile Queen of Daytime Television Oprah Winfrey clutching a coveted trophy - proclaimed "Woman of the Century" (by Newsweek magazine) and "arguably the world's most powerful woman" (by Time.com and CNN). As though in a relay toward glorification of their ethnic stock, another African-American, Barack Obama, assumed office as President of the United States in the opening decade of the 21st century.

Is Buhari Poorer Four Years After?

By Banji Ojewale

A new race of men is springing up to govern the nation; they are the hunters after popularity, men ambitious…the demagogues, whose principles hang laxly upon them, who follow not so much what is right as what leads to a temporary vulgar applause. 

– Joseph Story (1779-1845), American Judge

*President Buhari 

President Muhammadu Buhari has offered the ‘ideal’ measuring rod to assess him and other public officers while serving the people or when out of office. We don’t need to consult any arcane research or some tongue-twisting grammatical construction to guide us to determine whether outgoing executives have fared well or underperformed. 

Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye's Peep Into Nigeria's Looting Culture

By DAN AMOR

Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye is not only a quintessential Nigerian writer and journalist, he is, undoubtedly, one of the most formidable literary and social critics in the country today. Ejinkeonye, whose birthday is today (May 27), is not only a wordsmith of note whose diction, and images capture the experiences and nebulous fancies of the Nigerian condition, he is also one of Africa's most celebrated newspaper columnists and public affairs analysts.

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Ganduje, Sanusi And Other Monarchs

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With a hasty dismissal of Abdullahi Umar Ganduje and Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as victims of self-induced embroilment in a power tussle, we are denied vital lessons for national development. Again, there is the cynicism that Ganduje who is allegedly steeped in corruption, fecklessness and vendetta lacks the altruism that should underpin his dismantling of the Sanusi monarchy. But until Sanusi secures judicial validation, his royal influence remains vitiated as his centuries-old Kano emirate is split into five. 

*Gov Ganduje and Emir Sanusi

We must appropriate the development in Kano State as an opportunity to assess once again the relevance of the traditional institution to contemporary existence. In Nigeria, like some other parts of the world, communities at inchoate stages of development where they lacked defined institutions for cohesion might have had a need for traditional rulers. But with the development of great institutions for self-regulation, Nigeria does not need the traditional institution.

Bulkachuwa: Red Rag To A Bull

By Banji Ojewale

We are not in Spain. But there, it is claimed that bulls are enraged when red flags flutter before them.   The matador, the man who fights and kills a bull in a sport, gets the beast into the game by waving the red cloth. The indifferent, motionless animal only charges at his opponent when it sights his muleta, the stick with a crimson swathe employed in the final third of the bullfight…We know what follows:  savagery, slaughter and sanguinary cheers from the spectators.

*Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa 

In Nigeria, we appear to be in for a bullfight over the Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa affair. She is the President of the Appeal Court, who has been asked to head the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal looking into the suit of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and its Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar. They are challenging the victory of Muhammadu Buhari in the poll of February 2019. 

Nigeria: President Buhari And The Untouchable Bandits

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If the senate really needed unimpeachable answers to the nation’s security questions, it only demonstrated another case of its accustomed dilettantism when it summoned the acting Inspector General of Police Mohammed Adamu.

*Buhari 

Latching on to the platitude that the knowledge of state security matters should be the privilege of only the few in the inner sanctum of government, the senate did not publicise the outcomes of its over two hours’ meeting with Adamu. Yet, unauthorised sources have divulged what transpired at the meeting. The IGP, not unexpectedly, at the meeting blamed his inability to tackle the insecurity on paucity of funds, personnel and weapons.

Imo: Will Emeka Ihedioha Be Different?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Since Mr. Emeka Ihedioha of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) emerged the winner of the governorship election held recently in Imo State, all sorts of people who are able to get themselves interviewed by reporters have been filling our ears with rambling tales about how a new “messiah” had emerged to liberate Imo people from the hands of their “oppressors” and “exploiters” and usher them into a glorious era of limitless happiness.

Emeka Ihedioha 

As a citizen of Imo State who has closely observed several governors enter and leave the Imo Government House, I find the whole absurd drama so revolting.

If only Mr. Ihedioha would spare some moments and reflect, he would realize that there is nothing new about the drab performance that these characters are staging today; nor is it peculiar to Imo State.

Why Public Office Holders Can't Enjoy Privacy

By Banji Ojewale

I do not believe that a society can sustain its democratic claims if it allows its public office holders to run two lives: an open public life and another jealously sheathed private one. At work, he or she is immersed in files, open for scrutiny, even if their over embroidered agbada or sky-touching gele wouldn’t permit a full and close watch. But at home, in their closet, they are liberated from any restraint. They at liberty to trash the discipline of service and accountability. 

Buhari

 That is equal to performing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the eponymous protagonists of the book by Robert Louis Stevenson. It’s one person leading two different lives. Jekyll takes a drug that breaks him into two separate personalities, one good and the other evil. Dr. Jekyll is the amiable character, while Mr. Hyde exhibits the pernicious traits. Yet it’s one person at work.

27 Years In The Hangman’s Noose

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

One of the enduring tropes of human comeback and survival is associated with Fyodor Dostoevsky who gained reprieve from execution at the last minute. 

Yet, the glistering success of the Russian writer in his post-near-death epoch would not have effectively obviated the ordeal of the pall of an imminent death that hung over him before his sudden freedom.

*Clinton Kanu 

But quite unlike Dostoevsky, that tragic hiatus was not short-lived in the case of a Nigerian citizen Clinton Kanu. In 1992, at the age of 29 when he brimmed with the hope of conquering the world, Kanu was sentenced to death for murder. Kanu’s ordeal began when his in-laws were accused of stealing a generator and fluorescent tubes.

FRSC And Nigeria's Beautyful Ones

By Banji Ojewale

Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, published the pillory, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, in 1968, to mock his society of the postcolonial era. It is a savage attack providing no redeeming feature, except for one puny protagonist who is derided for his high moral grounds. All around us in the book is putrefaction, literally and figuratively. Everyone is polluted and corrupted. 

The anonymous ‘man’ is the unstained figure who can’t understand why his countrymen and women are steeped in the sleaze enterprise. He can’t come to terms with a society where no one seems to care for his or her compatriot, as long as they can make some make merchandise of them, as long as they can fleece the government and smile to the bank. So, in a word, there are no beautyful ones to find their way into this first novel by Ayi Kwei Armah. 

Nigeria: Who Hates The President?

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

In the buildup to the 2015 elections, the wild, uproarious promotion of General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the man with the panacea for   Nigeria’s myriad of problems wasted no time in saturating the air.

*Buhari 

 This was, however, sloppily packaged with a strange, aggressive refusal to give the slightest consideration for any voice of caution, any alternative opinion no matter how sound and redemptive. You either joined the rowdy herd or you are a “hater” of the “messiah.”

Nigeria: Buhari And A University Of His Own

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With the current preoccupation of President Muhammadu Buhari with the setting up of his own university, his flatulent claim of being actuated by public interest has suffered further repudiation. His pet project has unravelled him not as a touchstone of integrity, moderation and patriotism but as another victim of the acquisitiveness of the nation’s leadership that has ceaselessly undermined good governance.

President Buhari and wife, Aisha 

 To be sure, it was not Buhari himself who publicly vouchsafed his plan to set up a private university. It was his wife who disclosed that she would set up a university with the name Muhammadu Buhari University. But even if Buhari were not the originator of the idea, the fact that his name is associated with the project shows that he is fully behind it. After all, he has not disavowed his wife’s claim since the news broke.

Buhari And Northern Elders’ Awakening

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is the height of delusional optimism if northern elders expected to crawl out of their cocoon of safety and complicity in the troubles of their region unscathed. They are as guilty as their past and present leaders whom they have blamed for the depravations of their region. They cannot convincingly give up their decades-old role of chorus leaders for bad governance for that of beacons of development signposted by the plenitude of security.

*Buhari 

The tragedy of their region that they have whined about is compounded by the fact of their obliviousness that they are too late in realising that President Muhammadu Buhari lacks the capacity to guarantee security. Without almost the entire swathe of the north including Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Benue, Niger, Plateau and Taraba states being rendered a wasteland by bandits, these northern elders would not have experienced this epiphany. These blood-hungry bandits have been abducting, killing both citizens and foreigners and destroying their means of livelihood. The northern elders bemoan how ruination has become the lot of agriculture as banditry has kept farmers in the north from their farms. 

Biodun Kumuyi: Ten Years After – How Time Flies!

By Banji Ojewale

How time flies! It’s been ten years since the death of Abiodun Kumuyi, beloved wife of Pastor W. F. Kumuyi, the highly revered General Superintendent of Deeper Christian Life Ministry. When this great woman passed on on April 11 2009, very few sensed that she had unobtrusively left behind lofty precepts far beyond the ambience of church business. Fewer still were aware that although these ideas were bred in a humble religious cradle, they represented an answer to the suffocating sophistry of secular man.

*Mrs. Kumuyi alighting from an aircraft 

Apart from her husband, their two children, Jerry and John, along with a cluster of brethren who worked with Biodun or watched her at close quarters, there was probably no other person (or group) in the church that had an inkling of the weighty work she was doing as she paced the grounds of Deeper Life Bible Church , Gbagada, Deeper Life Conference Centre, Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and International Bible Training Centre, Ayobo, now converted into Anchor University, the institution promoted by the church and as she travelled worldwide with her spouse.

Nigeria’s Heroine In Captivity: Let Leah Go! – Cardinal Okogie

By Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie

Leah Sharibu has become a symbol of Nigeria in captivity. Yet, this powerful symbol is ignored. How does one explain the fact that in the latest scramble for Nigeria’s wealth that the 2019 elections were, not even once was her name mentioned in any speech? No one even said a word about the Chibok girls! What mattered most to our political gladiators was how to win votes, or, to put it more accurately, how to be declared winner. Are these daughters of ours disposable? 

*Cardinal Okogie 

The insecurity that led to the abduction of Leah and the Chibok girls was given no attention.  Yet, it was caused by a combination of recklessness and negligence of our political leaders in matters of security. They had an opportunity during the campaigns to tell Nigerians how they would take responsibility for security and for the economy, for education and for infrastructure. But they settled for sophisticated forms of vote buying, dashing pittance to Nigerians whom they have impoverished by their politics. They resorted to the use of violence as potent instruments at the service of their inordinate ambition, using as militia young Nigerians deprived of access to good quality education by successive governments.

Nigerians And The Xenophobes

By Paul Onomukpokpo

If William Shakespeare lived in the 21st century, Shylock might not have made the foil to Antonio. After all, with the prodigious inroads of the Jews into every realm of human endeavour- ranging from the arts to the sciences and high-profile businesses – the respect they have earned would have served as an impregnable bulwark against any fecund imagination desirous of casting them in the mould of the greediest and despicably and mercilessly shrewdest species of the human race. 

Not even those segments of humanity that Donald Trump considers irredeemably reprobate and terroristic and thus places under his travel ban would sufficiently embody the vices that Shakespeare would have associated with that foil. But if Shakespeare had looked at Nigeria, he might have successfully ended his quest. 

Awolowo, Western Nigeria Television (WNTV) And The Barbarians

By Banji Ojewale

It has been said of Obafemi Awolowo, Western Nigeria’s first premier, that like Roman Empire’s first emperor, Augustus Caesar, he was ‘’an efficient organizer’’ and a ‘’great builder’’ who struck several feats that have remained unmatched in Nigeria’s record books several decades after his rule. In his severally referenced book, An Outline History of the World, H. A. Davies notes that Augustus appeared to have fulfilled his boast that ‘’he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.’’ He transformed Rome from a small republic not only into an empire, but also into a civilization that has influenced world history over the ages.

*Awolowo Obafemi

With Awolowo, there are also parallels that are engraved on marble. As premier from 1954 to 1959, when Nigeria was yet a dependent colonial outpost of Britain, he ran a government that has since been rated the golden era of the southwest, the outer region of the area stretching eastwards to the banks of the Niger also  being beneficiaries. Awolowo introduced free education, the first in our clime. He then embarked upon a voyage of social reforms that heavily subsidized health to announce to the world the arrival of a socialist, even if of the centrist hue.

Between The Patience Of A President And The Truculence Of A Party Man

By Banji Ojewale

Between the patience of a president and the truculence of a party man, there is a hungry chasm spoiling to swallow the whole nation. President Muhammadu Buhari says his second coming is going to be a calculated departure from the past, when he and his party were shy to run an inclusive government on account of the sharply divisive politics that preceded his advent. 

*Buhari 

So now, although the cloud of bitter politics is still overcast, Buhari says he’s about to deal with it through patiently accommodating interests outside his political family. That is the reasonable and guarded interpretation most watchers are giving his declaration after his victory at the poll of February 23.

Nigeria: Police March Of Murders

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Whenever trigger-happy cops kill an innocent citizen, they have only given expression to the adversarial relationship they have cultivated with the rest of the citizens. They have not done anything different from what others who occupy positions of authority do. Those who preside over the affairs of our nation see society as bifurcated between themselves and the rest of the citizens who should be subjected to ill treatment at their hands. 

To them, government does not exist for the people but for a handful of leaders and a coterie of their loyalists. Or why do our leaders not feel the pain of the citizens? How would our leaders feel the pain of driving on a pothole-ridden road when they fly above it? Would they feel the pain of being treated in a slaughterhouse that is outlandishly christened a general or teaching hospital when they fly abroad for medical treatment at the expense of the taxpayers?

Pius Adesanmi: The Human Oxymoron Politicians Must Learn From

By Banji Ojewale

Professor Toyin Falola has put it most concisely: Pius Adesanmi is the man who leaves and lives. He argues that although Adesanmi is leaving the scene, still he lives. He’s gone, but he’s not done. He’s gone, but he’s still on. He’s dead, but not dusted. There is more to Falola’s dirge than the lyrical alliteration.

*Professor Pius Adesanmi 

There’s also more to the oxymoron of a departure that yet defies an exit. To capture or press a point, you must confront it with its alter ego. To prove Adesanmi 'lives' on, you challenge his death with the greater fact of what he has left behind that offers assurance of his being alive, as it were. You put the two opposite each other: Adesanmi’s death and his works and life that touched many he seems to have left orphaned.