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Opinion

Wednesday, 05 December 2018 05:10

Young leaders aren’t the solution. They’re wreaking havoc on the world - Richard Cohen

The Black Death of the 14th century killed as much as 60 percent of Europe’s population. A cause of the disease was the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but lacking microscopes, many at the time turned a keen eye on the Jews and killed them by the thousands. Still, somehow, the plague persisted, with the old and children dying off, but young adults often hanging on. What followed was a goodly amount of war. This is what young men tend to do. Barbara Tuchman made that point in her 1978 book about that squalid century, “A Distant Mirror.” Young men having grown…

Sunday, 02 December 2018 03:50

Interrogating Buhari’s Abraham descendancy - Festus Adedayo

President Muhammadu Buhari got Christian faithful scampering for their bible and Sunday School lessons during the week that ended. In an article he published in the UK-based Christian Times, while taking a swipe at his accusers who claim he is Islamizing Nigeria, the President submitted that he too is a descendant of the biblical Abraham. He likened himself to Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the Osogun (now in Iseyin Local Government, Oyo State)-born slave. Crowther, who lived between 1809 and December 31, 1891, you will recall, was a linguist (having translated the bible from English to Yoruba and its dictionary) and…

Sunday, 02 December 2018 03:49

The extraordinary life and times of George H.W. Bush - George F. Will

At the beginning of his long and well-lived life, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in politics was always prosaic, acquired, by way of a grandfather, the name of a British poet and priest (George Herbert, 1593-1633). He acquired much else from family inheritance. The future 41st president was descended from a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — from financier George Herbert Walker, whose name is on golf’s Walker Cup — and from a U.S. senator: his father Prescott, of Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wall Street investment house whose partners included Robert A. Lovett, a future secretary of…

Thursday, 29 November 2018 04:20

The Nigerian Left and the Constitution - Edwin Madunagu

For some time in the early part of Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979-1983), several groups in the Nigerian Left debated what the movement’s relationship with the opposition People’s Redemption Party (PRP) should be. Several Leftists had been involved in the formation of the party while several more joined after formation. But the bulk of “hard core” Leftists, particularly Marxists, remained outside the party which, today, would be described as “radical left-of-centre”: left-of-centre on account of its ideological placement and radical in its methods. Of the 19 states into which the country was then divided, PRP controlled the governments of two: Kaduna…

Sunday, 25 November 2018 04:04

Jonathan, Buhari and their toads of Boko Haram war - Festus Adedayo

Sometime in year 2000, being his next of kin, I received a scraggly letter by post from the Nigerian Army that my younger brother Bankole, then of the Sokoto Battalion, had been killed in the Sierra Leonean war. A part of me was killed too. Till today, neither his corpse, his entitlements nor any other solitude did we, his family, receive from the Nigerian Army. Riled and disconsolate, I remember writing a piece in the Sunday Tribune then entitled My brother, the soldier hero where, parodying Mazisi Kunene the Zulu poet, I told God He had drawn a battle line…

Friday, 23 November 2018 05:58

2019: As the whistle is blown ... - Jideofor Adibe

Whistle for 2019 has finally been blown as Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) lifted the ban on partisan politics and campaigns on Sunday, November 19 2018. The same day President Muhammadu Buhari unveiled his campaign manual, which he called The Next Level. Mr Atiku Abubakar, PDP’s presidential candidate also unveiled his, known as #TheAtikuPlan - the following day. The campaign documents of the two parties are likely to come under greater scrutiny in the coming days as the two parties try to de-legitimize each other’s campaign promises. Already, APC, through its own carelessness, seemed to have offered its opponents the…

Friday, 23 November 2018 05:57

Pass the books; hold the oil - Thomas L. Friedman

Every so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?” I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask. Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women. I always…

Monday, 19 November 2018 04:44

Reclaiming community - Ian Buruma

Economics teaches that the measure of an individual’s wellbeing is the quantity and variety of goods he or she can consume. Consumption possibilities are in turn maximized by providing firms with the freedom they need to take advantage of new technologies, the division of labor, economies of scale, and mobility. Consumption is the goal; production is the means to it. Markets, rather than communities, are the unit and object of analysis. No one can deny that this consumer- and market-centric vision of the economy has produced plenty of fruit. The dazzling array of consumer goods available in the megastores or…

Sunday, 18 November 2018 05:07

Buhari the dead and his body double - Festus Adedayo

The notorious rumour in circulation on Nigerian streets sounds every bit like a citation from a James Hadley Chase. Chase had a pleasant notoriety with his crime fiction novels that hold you spellbound. With a gloating slide to it, the rumour is trending, with celebrated gusto, about the “death” of the man Nigerians elected into office in May, 2015. On the social media, in whispers and grisly jokes on the streets, a “man in the know,” who argues with the persuasive acumen of a salesman, suddenly emerges from the blues and clinically volunteers how Muhammadu Buhari passed on in the…

Friday, 16 November 2018 05:13

Elections 2019: factors and projections - Edwin Madunagu

The most important factor in the coming elections is that Muhammadu Buhari, incumbent President of Federal Republic of Nigeria, a powerful chief executive of state, is a candidate. He is seeking re-election into the office of President. That this is not a trivial or idle observation can be seen from a recent historical contrast, namely, that in the 2015 general elections, Goodluck Jonathan, then incumbent President, was not the most important factor in those contests. He was not the most important factor because he was a weak chief executive of state at the time of the contests and in the…

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Friday, 16 November 2018 05:12

Alleged Buhari double and the spirit of public inquiry - Jideofor Adibe

This week’s reflection is on a trending story that began when President Muhammadu Buhari returned from his 104-days of medical treatment in UK in 2017. Many were surprised that on his return, Mr Buhari, who was a subject of several extremely negative rumours during his medical sojourn in the United Kingdom, came back looking younger and more boisterous. So not unsurprisingly, his return triggered several conspiracy theories: is this really the sick Buhari that we were told was brain-dead or are we being fooled? Some of the theories to explain the ‘new’, younger and more boisterous Buhari included that he…

Wednesday, 14 November 2018 04:08

From economic crisis to World War III - Ian Buruma

The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the…

Monday, 12 November 2018 05:01

Grappling with Globalization 4.0 - Ian Buruma

After World War II, the international community came together to build a shared future. Now, it must do so again. Owing to the slow and uneven recovery in the decade since the global financial crisis, a substantial part of society has become disaffected and embittered, not only with politics and politicians, but also with globalization and the entire economic system it underpins. In an era of widespread insecurity and frustration, populism has become increasingly attractive as an alternative to the status quo. But populist discourse elides – and often confounds – the substantive distinctions between two concepts: globalization and globalism.…

Sunday, 11 November 2018 04:37

As Oshiomhole’s cup runneth over… - Festus Adedayo

Who you align with is a major factor in wars. Warriors, both in contemporary and old times, know that if your alignment is faulty, your fall will be as calamitous as Lucifer’s. Warriors thus choose their alignment carefully and meticulously. Take for instance, Ngqika, warrior and one of the leaders in Southern African history. Believed to have been born in 1779, towards the 18th and 19th centuries, internal feuds rent the polity of his Xhosa kingdom, resulting in a supremacy battle between him and Ndlambe, another warrior. This was at a time when White supremacists’ power was probably at its…

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