WHEN BASHORUN JK RANDLE (scion of the illustrious Randle family of Lagos) handed over the property of his late aunt, Alhaja Munirat Muhammed, at 14A Bashorun Street, Ikoyi, to the Muslim community through the Lagos Central Mosque, many people who did not understand the symbiotic relationship between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria’s southwest, were confounded. Read More…
A thief is a thief whether he steals a golden crown or a cocoyam. The way we are now glamourising stealing and making celebrities of common felons, indicates that we are too far gone in our descent into amoralism. It wasn’t quite many decades ago when stealing was a shameful thing. There was something called Read More…
The vulture is a patient bird. That’s in the animal kingdom. Among humankind, the vulture of social media is the most restless and jumpy animal ever to walk the surface of the earth. In the forest, the bush or the desert, the vulture baits its prey until it drops dead. In real life among homo Read More…
Woe unto thee O land whose destiny is ruled by superstitions instead of production, thou shall continue to be vassals of the diligent, hewers of water and fetchers of firewood for the household of your former enslavers. Granted that the history of the black man has been tempestuous, but contemporary happenings indicate that the future Read More…
A LUTA CONTINUA! VITÓRIA É CERTA! (The struggle continues! Victory is certain!) That was our singsong in those heady student union days when our blood boiled with patriotic fervour as we challenged the excesses or inadequacies of our unelected military fiefs. That battle cry is so central to the raison d’être of student unionism that Read More…
REPEAT AFTER ME: I will not be anyone’s fool; not now, not tomorrow, not ever! The world inherited the word, Pandora, from the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod. In the poem, Works and Days, he told the story of Prometheus and Pandora. Prometheus had attempted to deceive the gods whose prefect was Zeus. In reprisal, Pandora Read More…
I WRITE IN DEFENCE of the Mosquito, even as I wish that it sucks fat instead of blood. Every misfortune has an ingredient of fortune if you look deeply enough. Call it a pest, a killer, or whatever else you may, the mosquito, which depopulates whole continents, is also, by some providential paradox, a defender Read More…
As Nigeria marks another birthday, we mourn with the families of victims who have supped with raw terror as some ring of inevitability begins to form around the serial violence enveloping the country on all sides. We are all potential victims. For once, this scourge, no matter its illogic, obeys the federal character principle. Death Read More…
CONTEMPORARY AFRICA COMPRISES countries cobbled together by colonialists for their own interest. In the case of Nigeria, British colonialism was, as playwright Ola Rotimi would put it, in the service of their ‘female king’. The two hitherto distinct halves of Nigeria (Northern and Southern Protectorates) have managed to stay together as one country for one Read More…
So much storm was generated by the defection of Femi Fani-Kayode from the PDP to the APC, a defection which came to public focus on the day some Nigerian soldiers were killed in Monguno, Borno State (with several others missing) after an ambush by militants from the Islamic State-backed faction of Boko Haram, the Islamic Read More…