welcome!
This is an eerily prescient piece because it echoes the near-universal global angst about the future of planet Earth and locally, the present sense of hopelessness we feel about the future of our country Nigeria. It seems our day of reckoning has arrived as we are caught in the unrelenting grip of manifold existential crisis….
We have to lift a 100 million Nigerians out of poverty. That’s all I have to say. Enjoy! Dear Oga Patapata, I throwey salute o! I know say you never know me before, but I no think say dat one matter. Because as oga patapata consine, you no go fit know all the peoples wey you…
This was written in the immediate aftermath of the coup that ushered in the military government of General Buhari. In those days we naively believed that a Military government was always the antidote to a malfunctioning civilian government like the Shehu Shagari administration. I even speculated then given the ubiquity and centrality of the military…
I still get the occasional reference to this piece by total strangers who somehow still remember it 36 years on. As far as allegorical stories go, this is a classic about Nigeria, even if I say so myself. Three decades ago, the legacy of Britain’s perfidy and the spring-loaded self destruct ordinance it bequeathed to…
This piece was the preface to a longer lead story that was possibly about justice. Again against the backdrop of the #EndSars…Justice today remains elusive. Enjoy! The law is an ass. Many especially those who have suffered under the anvil of justice and vehemently protesting their innocence, implicitly believe this statement. And even those who…
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…
It is inescapable given the present outrage expressed in the #Endsars movement not to connect the systemic impunity of uniformed officers with then and now. The disdain and disrespect for civilians probably started with the coup of 1966. The armed forces in the course of their rise, State Capture and decades-old grip on political power…
Ah… sometimes I wistfully ache for the good old days when the media channels for this political war was limited to a predictable daily cycle of newspapers, television and radio. Nowadays the news cycle is twenty-hours and there is, of course, social media and the Internet. The medium might have changed, but the message remains…
Ah… sometimes I wistfully ache for the good old days when the media channels for this political war was limited to a predictable daily cycle of newspapers, television and radio. Nowadays the news cycle is twenty-hours and there is, of course, social media and the Internet. The medium might have changed, but the message remains…
Well… decades on, the hustle is real. Upon reflection, the reference to ‘a Neanderthal appreciation of food and shelter,’ was my own way of describing the lowest rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. With over 90 million Nigerians wallowing in systemic and multi-dimensional poverty, most Nigerians will never climb up that ladder to the point…