welcome!
Against the appropriate backdrop of the ongoing pro-reforms protests is the sobering fact that close to 50% of Nigerians are in the death grip of multi-dimensional poverty. Nigeria as the Margaret Thatcher famously once remarked ‘Nigeria is a rich country full of poor people.’ So what is new about rich man…poor man in Nigeria? Nothing…
I have been fortunate to have done quite a bit of overseas travel compacted over the summer months and coincident with the long holiday break in the school calendar. As I look back, exhausted and trying to catch my breath inside the salt mines of Lagos, I realize that all the trips I took were…
I wager that this critique about my muse might still have some validity today. I am often accused of not writing for the common man because I write about ‘lofty’ ideas that fly above the heads of ordinary readers. Three decades ago, I was particularly stung by this critique, even as I persisted in…
This piece has some resonance with the just concluded Ekiti elections. It is a cautionary tale that underscores the need for a tactile kind of empathy with the people. Recently, I paid an unscheduled visit to a state owned general hospital. Mercifully the visit was not for treatment but to make some inquiries; either way,…
On my recent visit to Lagos I received at the hotel a brown envelope from my old friend Tunji Lardner, whose bulky frame has somehow found a way of elbowing itself into this column on previous occasions. I had learnt that he had returned to his old metier from the world of civil society…
The Preface In Casting Stones 1, I bemoaned the moral relativism of the Nigeria of my youth. I look back now, some thirty years on, indeed a generation away on how quaint my moral dilemma must seem to the Nigerian youth of today. Considering that most Nigerians,(perhaps as much as 70% if you consider our…
This was one of my literary flights of fancy. I was mercifully now preoccupied with Nigeria, just gazing at the moon and contemplating my navel. Annoyingly, man is no longer universally thought of as being the centre of the Universe. An intrepid Polish astronomer by name Copernicus, debunked that idea, way back in the medieval…
I must confess that I typically ignore the insincere and outright mendacious rant that issues forth like effluence from the Federal House of Representatives. However this morning, seating in traffic and listening to the radio, I was somewhat startled by the media report that the Speaker of the House, Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal, had reportedly…