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Opinion

Sunday, 27 October 2019 05:37

Okon and Baba Lekki vent their spleen - Tatalo Alamu

To the trendy and pace-setting Mercury Television in upmarket Magodo where the impossible Okon is fielding question on the state of the nation having been declared Man of the Decade by a rogue organization calling itself Movement for the Survival of the Indigenous People of Nigeria, MOSOSIPN. It was a wet and soggy morning with thunder crackling in the background as torrential rains pounded the old capital into submission. The truth of the matter is that the award is the equivalent of a time bomb, akin to hauling out the buried tail of a quiet cobra. Before then, Okon had…

Thursday, 24 October 2019 05:32

Rosa Luxemburg remembered - Edwin Madunagu

My last published piece, “Revolutions that ‘fired’ young Leftists” (September 26, 2019), was actually an abridgement of what was originally planned to be a much longer essay. That longer essay would have included not only some revolutions that failed, but also some revolutionaries that failed to make successful revolutions. In that excised segment was Rosa Luxemburg, a brilliant Marxist revolutionary whose life was brutally terminated a hundred years ago, in 1919, in the German Socialist Revolution that failed. It is with this exceptional woman whose photograph, together with those of five other women, has adorned the wall of our public…

Thursday, 24 October 2019 05:31

Buhari’s House of Commotion and Mamman Daura’s ‘Glass House’ - Farooq A. Kperogi

A few days before it became grist for Nigeria’s overactive social media rumor mills, a retired general and contemporary of Muhammadu Buhari’s told me, in the course of a 30-minute phone conversation, that Mamman Daura, Buhari’s nephew who is nonetheless older than him by three years, had made up his mind to “get at” Aisha Buhari by arranging a quiet marriage between Humanitarian Affairs Minister Sadiya Farouq and Muhammadu Buhari. He mentioned this as an aside and seemed to expect me to be curious enough about what he had told me to ask further questions. But I didn’t. That appeared…

Thursday, 24 October 2019 05:30

‘Alaghodaro’ as Edo’s poor governance metaphor - Tony Erha

Halfway into his four-year tenure, Governor Godwin Obaseki is still experimenting with the destiny of Edo. His administration has been dismal and sloppy in meeting his ambitious electioneering promises to the people. Apart from a bit of urban renewal, the government has failed in the provision of infrastructure and amenities across the state. Joblessness and youth agitations are rife. Crime is fast engulfing the state, thus questioning what the governor has done with the humongous amount set aside as security vote on monthly basis. Urban-rural drift has escalated than before even as the governor’s promise to create 200,000 jobs is…

Wednesday, 23 October 2019 05:25

Kegame’s Rwanda - Femi Mimiko

A lot has been written on Rwanda, including how differently the Western world reacted to that blight on human civilization that was the genocide of 1994, and its equivalence in the Balkans. Former US President Bill Clinton was man enough to later admit that failure to lead the world to put an immediate end to that incidence, was one of his greatest regrets. While the world watched, the lot fell on Paul Kegame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front to move in from the bushes, and stop the genocidal madness. The man led his country away from the horrors of that…

Wednesday, 23 October 2019 05:24

Tech companies are destroying democracy and the free press - Matt Stoller

As the presidential election approaches, the cracks in the digital facade are once again showing. Facebook just removed an “I Love America” page, run by Ukrainians, which pushed recycled pro-Trump imagery from the Internet Research Agency, the Russian group that tried to influence the 2016 election. As it turned out, “I Love America” wasn’t state sponsored — the Ukrainians were just running the page for the advertising money. A similar page with falsified content, “Police Lives Matter,” is now run out of Kosovo. These two phony Facebook pages illustrate the crisis of the free press and democracy: Advertising revenue that…

Tuesday, 22 October 2019 05:55

For Aisha and her in-laws - Lasisi Olagunju

"Your office is not recognized by law. Funds not approved." A former Aso Rock official told me last week that President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote this in a file there in response to intense pressures from his wife, Stella, that she must 'work' as the First Lady. But the matter did not die there. For women, there is no end to a demand until it is supplied. There must always be a way through any iron curtain. The spirit of women walks on rivers and runs through canals to get at anything and anyone. My people praise them as the silence…

Monday, 21 October 2019 04:44

Ending short-termism by keeping score - Klaus Schwab

As finance ministers gather in Washington, DC, for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s annual meetings, they will face no shortage of urgent matters to discuss. Fears of a global recession, the US-China trade war, the fallout of the Brexit talks, and a dangerous debt overhang make this the most stressful economic juncture in a decade. These issues must be discussed, and we should all hope that they can be resolved with minimal damage. But they should not deflect attention from even more pressing long-term challenges: achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030; delivering on the…

Sunday, 20 October 2019 06:17

As Lagosians Rage: Sanwo-Olu, how now? - Bolanle Bolawole

"When France sneezes, Europe catches cold" – Metternich. Lagosians are in a rage and going by the saying of Metternich above, what do you think should be happening right now to the governor of the State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu? France in the above quote equates to no less a personality than Napoleon Bonaparte. Once Napoleon took control of France with a coup d’Etat and proceeded to attempt to create a French empire encompassing much of mainland Europe, every Napoleonic move became a source of great concern to Europe. No matter how unfeeling the powers-that-be may be, there is no way the…

Sunday, 20 October 2019 06:16

A postmortem on Dele Giwa's mangled body - Festus Adedayo

Since that dark Sunday morning on October 19, 1986 when renowned journalist, Dele Giwa, was parcel-bombed by a God-knows-who, Nigerian journalism, Nigeria and government-journalism relationship have not recovered from that nightmarish experience. And in diverse regards. First, because it was a novel manner of assassination, the killing of Giwa opened the floodgate for subsequent demystification of the oppression of journalists in Nigeria. For the Ibrahim Babangida military government which was the first suspect in the killing, Giwa’s death demanded new methods of arresting critical journalists without slamming any chains around their feet. Babangida thereafter sent for Antonio Gramsci, Italian activists…

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Thursday, 17 October 2019 06:27

Are there elders in Buhari’s household? - Abimbola Adelakun

President Muhammadu Buhari built his brand on three myths: self-discipline, fiscal discipline, and military discipline. These myths became the national millstone when fate dealt Nigeria a diseased hand during the night of December 31, 1983 and ushered in Buhari into the presidency until August 1985. His quicksand morality has been an ever-present conundrum. From his first coming till the present time, Buhari has variously talked down on Nigerians about their indiscipline. When it comes to understanding Nigeria’s issues, Buhari’s mind can neither accept nuances nor complexities beyond the nostrum of discipline. He believes if he could intravenously inject us with…

Thursday, 17 October 2019 06:26

Between Aisha Buhari and Fatima Daura - Niran Adedokun

Fatima Mamman Daura’s Monday interview with the Hausa service of the British Broadcasting Corporation is as audacious as it is revealing. Until Fatima picked up the gauntlet, there were widespread aspirations to put a face to the name First Lady Aishat Buhari mentioned as having recorded and then went ahead to release the video that saw the President’s wife fuming. She did Nigerians the favour of resolving that contention. Fatima’s admittance of the deed may itself have been prompted by Aisha Buhari’s confident and most likely strategic revelation that she was the subject of this video, which hitherto generated a…

Thursday, 17 October 2019 06:24

Sex predators: Is castration the answer? - Bolanle Bolawole

Increasing cases of rape and defiling of little children in Ekiti require urgent attention. The amendment being sought may include imprisonment and medical castration of offenders, among others not stipulated in the existing law – Mrs Bisi Fayemi, First Lady, Ekiti State. The human mind works in a mysterious way that confirms that man is more than the Matter that Marxists say it is. Man, truly, has a spiritual essence. One of our Marxist lecturers, a professor, was driving one day on a long haul up North and, out of nowhere, thoughts of a classmate of his in his secondary…

Sunday, 13 October 2019 05:55

UNILAG and the sex narrative in the Villa - Festus Adedayo

Sex and sexual narratives took over the information highway for the better part of last week, causing a very serious gridlock. My Alma-mater, University of Lagos, launched the traffic. Kiki Mordi, a journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation, (BBC) had undertaken an undercover operation of finding out what the colour of sex was on Nigerian university campuses. Her findings were as shocking as they were revealing. UNILAG lecturers, whom Mordi encountered, failed the litmus test and got dragged down the cliff by the lurid revelations of their sexual indiscretions. In the same week, the virus of sex sneaked into the…

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