Mr President, the buck stops at your table, and history right now records that you presided over the killing of your citizens, and you proceeded to threaten them in your distasteful speech afterwards. You acted neither like an elder, a Nigerian statesman or a President.
Nigeria has come a very long way as a democratic entity in 16 short years, and the promise of democracy is only just beginning to yield its first bud. Nigeria is not a changed country because a new president was sworn-in on the 29th of May, it is a new country because catalysts in positions of authority demonstrated exceptional leadership in the days leading up to and succeeding the 28th of March, 2015.
On this day, June 16, 38 years ago, about 20,000 students from across schools in Soweto, South Africa took to the streets to protest the injustice in the South African education system. These protests were in concert with the nationwide outrage against the oppressive Apartheid regime. As those children stared down bullets and police batons, they demanded for an education… Read More »Day of the African Child
I was barely five years old when I first encountered the Curse, or Corps or Corpse or whatever it is called these days. Little young boy that I was, I was fascinated by the very smart uniforms, head caps and yellow boots that hung in the corner of my dad’s rom (who knew that those dusty boots were called jungle… Read More »Intrigues of the Nigerian Youth Slavery Curse
The tale of Nigeria’s journey from June 1998 till date is like the tale of the child whose birth was heralded with joy, whose infanthood gave so much promise, whose future was as bright as the mid-day sun, but who never really outgrew his diapers. This is the very sorry tale of a sickly infant who has retained the world’s… Read More »The Child Who Never Really Grew
Every Nigerian who has had the privilege to travel out of the country (whether to Ghana or Russia) knows the pains of being a Nigerian, and every Nigerian who has a relative who has enjoyed such privileges has at least heard about the countless headaches and embarrassments that Nigerians are condemned to suffer out of the borders of their fatherland,… Read More »Pains we live with
The last twenty days in Nigeria have been days of untold torture for all those who hoped against all reasonable hope that the Nigerian contingent to the 2012 London Olympics would return with a medal. Considering our history at the global games, no one harboured expectations of a rain of medals, but no one equally thought that we would not… Read More »If the Olympics came to Nigeria…
Over the last couple of months, I have found myself having to make repeated analyses of the state of education in Nigeria – focusing mainly on primary and secondary education. Hardly any Nigerian is unaware of the decrepit state of school facilities across the country or the woeful results that are reported every year when senior school students take external… Read More »Nigerian Education: What Works?
Over time, Nigerians have proven to be very patient people; they understand that there will always be a wide hollow between the fortunes of the average citizen and those of the political elite. They have lived through military regimes in which successive dictators have stashed away so much of the nation’s wealth in foreign personal accounts and determined by free… Read More »Moving Nigeria Forward (VI): Silencing the Wolves
When the announcement was made on Monday July 23 that Pastor Tunde Bakare, presiding overseer of Latter Rain Assembly, convener of the Save Nigeria Group and former Vice-Presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), had been summoned by the State Security Service (SSS) on account of statements he made in his church sermon on Sunday, Nigerians did what… Read More »Moving Nigeria Forward (V): Freedom of Opposition
Only a few weeks ago, President Goodluck Jonathan made a very difficult decision by his own standards and hosted a media chat, where he fielded questions from members of the national media and attempted to address some of the concerns of the Nigerian people. Whether or not he really answered any questions at all remains a debated issue, but he… Read More »Moving Nigeria Forward (IV): Respect to the People
In an ever-evolving world, it is not entirely strange to look to the past to garner inspiration for moving forward, but it is quite unsettling to persistently agitate for the glory days in history. This exactly is what Nigeria has grown to personify at the moment. Very little in the present gives satisfaction to the older generation or the new… Read More »Moving Nigeria Forward (III): Back to the ’70s