What is the most compelling, most impactful and most remarkable issue in the year 2015 that has just ended? In my estimation, it is democracy: its contents and discontents, its hopes and impediments, and the forceful manner in which these have compelled us afresh to focus on our circumstances and destiny as a people and a nation. In 2015, democracy [...]
Reuben Abati
ON THE GO
Christmas looks so different these days from what it was when I was growing up. It is so different it is almost unrecognizable. In this same country, in the 70s, Christmas was a season of celebration, but also of spiritual upliftment, joy abundant, hope, reaffirmation of faith in the certainty of Salvation, and the ritual of that which begins, and [...]
So much has been said about the December 12 confrontation between the Nigerian Army and members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria led by Sheik Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, the leader of the Shia in Nigeria. I guess the point has been well-made that there are faults on both sides. There seems to be a consensus, however, that the followers of Ali, [...]
There is never a scarcity of shocking events, revelations, encounters and experiences in the course of the interesting times we seem destined to live in. But nothing can perhaps be more shocking than a recent encounter I had with a young man. He had remarked quite innocently to my hearing that he wondered what all the noise was all about [...]
“Did they send you your own share of the bush meat?”“Bush meat?”“The lion in the zoo that became bush meat in Jos”“What’s my own inside? I don’t know any zoo worker in Jos and how could a lion that was allowed out of its cage and got shot end up in my stomach. The kind of things you say sometimes.”“That [...]
A day after the present set of Ministers took oath of office, Nigerians took to twitter to recommend books they think will be of use to them and provide necessary knowledge and guidance suitable for the discharge of their various assignments. Tolu Ogunlesi initiated the idea with the tag: #ReadingListNG, and a request that the name of Ministers should be [...]
You probably don’t know Sugabelly. I don’t know her either. But it is the twitter handle of a Nigerian lady: @sugabelly, who in the wake of the death of former Governor Abubakar Audu of Kogi State felt the urge to go public with her story. My foregrounding her/story as opposed to his/story, is further affirmation of an earlier submission that [...]
One of the finest persons I have been privileged to know is Odia Ofeimun: the man has a clean heart, he is completely incapable of malice, and in the face of all odds, he has a sunny view of life, add to that his incandescent mind, his absolute brilliance from which has poured forth a prodigious volume of poetry collections, [...]
“You look sleepy”“My brother, let’s just say I slept at a fuel station, looking for fuel.”“For which of the women in your life, because I hear these days, to please a woman in Nigeria, you must be ready to supply the three major things lacking in the land: money, fuel, and happiness.”“Leave that matter, please. My condolences on the death [...]
Aung San Suu Kyi writes in Letters from Burma: “I have never ceased to be moved by the sense of the world lying quiescent and vulnerable, waiting to be awakened by the light of the new day quivering just beyond the horizon…” That new day and awakening arrived on November 8 on Burma’s (Myanmar) 2015 election day and [...]
“Have you congratulated our new Ministers?”“I am still thinking about it, actually. I don’t know whether to congratulate them or to commiserate or to pity some of them. They have merged Ministries that need not be merged. Some Perm Secs are now floating. Six months and this is it?”“What kind of talk is that? You have come again oh”.“I wonder [...]
Professor Wole Soyinka was quoted saying his latest book is the “nastiest” that he has written so far. InterInventions: Between Defective Memory and the Public Lie: A Personal Odyssey in The Republic of Liars (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2015, 136pp) is quite close to being just that. But who knows if an even nastier book may follow as Soyinka embarks on the [...]
Democracy does not necessarily translate into the disappearance of crises and dilemmas, (even trilemmas, quadrilemmas or more) in a country, either developed, developing or perhaps evolutionary. Built into the fabric of the right to choose is also the right to make mistakes and so, across Africa at this moment, in Nigeria, Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire, Burundi, Guinea Conakry, Rwanda, the lessons [...]
The democratic experience in Nigeria has definitely been a continuing learning curve, and the more lessons we learn at various active centres: people, platforms and processes, the richer our democracy, the stronger the society evolves to deliver a brighter future for the sovereign. The greatest residue of our democracy in the last 16 years (1999–2015), I think, is the manner [...]
I have tried delaying the writing of this piece in the honest expectation that someone probably misquoted Chief E.K. Clark, when he reportedly publicly disowned former President Goodluck Jonathan. I had hoped that our dear father, E.K. Clark, would issue a counter statement and say the usual things politicians say: “they quoted me out of context!” “Jonathan is my son”. [...]
As spokesman to President Goodluck Jonathan, my phones rang endlessly and became more than personal navigators within the social space. They defined my entire life; dusk to dawn, all year-round. The phones buzzed non-stop, my email was permanently active; my twitter account received tons of messages per second. The worst moments were those days when there was a Boko Haram [...]
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