A couple of months ago, history walked on its two legs into my feeble embrace. When it did, I never knew it was Providence’s own way of anticipating Nigerian Aso Rock’s nauseating historical revisionism. History’s embrace had come by the way of a terse mail I received from foremost online medium, Premium Times. The newspaper had been sent an enquiry from a South African British author on February 7, 2025, “wanting to make contact with one of your Op-Ed writers, Festus Adedayo.” The enquirer described himself as “an old Africa hand (who) lived and worked in Nigeria…(who) also wrote (a…
Author: Editor-in-chief
Is there morality in politics? Or, should there be morality in politics? Governors of Akwa-Ibom and Delta States, Umo Eno, Sheriff Oborevwori and ex-governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa, are of the opinion that there isn’t. Or, there shouldn’t be. They made this known last week in epistles that should be fittingly entitled, “An ode to betrayal and betrayers”. Like blabbering kid thieves caught stealing from a pot of soup, Eno and Okowa waffled pitifully, in a manner that beggars belief, on why they abandoned/abandoning the PDP, a faithful political kin, which threw them up from obscurity to prominence and…
It was almost impossible not to be infected by the joy writ large on the face of the One-party state Villa-fawning group this past week. It was akin to winning a tombola. The Mauritanian-Nigerian ex-spokesperson for the Arewa Elders Forum and until of recent, Special Adviser on Political Matters to the President, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, would not allow these elated countrymen the benefit of a hard-earned Saturnalia. Momentarily, he made sitting comfy on a stool a punishing exercise for the group. As he tendered his letter of resignation from government, fire billowed from Baba-Ahmed’s mouth like Sango, the Yoruba god of…
The acting National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Iliya Damagun and other notable leaders of the main opposition party are perfecting plan to join the ruling APC. A close aide to Damagun revealed to Abuja correspondent during a telephone conversation bothering on the state of the nation. Details later…
At his ancient ‘imperial’ home in Molete, Ibadan last Thursday, I wrote in the condolence register: “He was a man, like French philosopher, Voltaire, who had trapped inside a single skull the brains of generations”. When I met Victor Omololu Sowemimo Olunloyo (VOS) for the first time in 1995, the facade of scales that decorated my eyes about him began to drop. If you followed the 1983 Nigerian elections, especially in the old Oyo State, you couldn’t like VOS. Gradually, on meeting him visiting the newsroom of the Nigerian Tribune, all negative typecasts of him began to thaw and flow…
In July, 2006, John Street, Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the United States’ University of East Anglia, received a call from Wilfred Ngunjiri Nderitu, Chairman of the Kenyan International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). Nderitu wanted Street to be an expert witness in a trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Simon Bikindi, a Rwandan musician, accused of inciting genocide via his songs during the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi war, was on trial. Bikindi, a Hutu from Gisenyi, same region where assassinated Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, whose airplane was downed shortly before the…
Sorry, I digress. Gradually, the Nigerian presidency is putting finishing touches to its own sculpture of a village liar, Ìbídùn, it is busy carving. Or writing itself into the pathetic biblical story of an early Christian community in Jerusalem which witnessed a lying couple by the name, Ananias and Sapphira. Ìbídùn was the proverbial woman who, determined to make deception an art, walked close to a popular masquerader at the marketplace. Amidst the din of wild dances and celebration, Ìbídùn saluted the masquerader thus: “it has been quite a while!” In a masquerade cult shrouded in secrecy, where identity of…
On April 23, 1971, the New York Times did a feature on Haitian tyrant, Francois Duvalier, infamously known as Papa Doc. It reported Duvalier as getting Haitian children indoctrinated with a political catechism which parodied Christians’ The Lord’s Prayer, thus: “Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, Hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done at Port‐au‐Prince and in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and never forgive the trespasses of the anti patriots who spit every day on our country; let them succumb to temptation, and under the…
“Everything is my business. Everything. Anything I say is law…literally law.” Barbara Geddes, et al in their How dictatorship works (2018) quoted Malawian dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as having once said the above. In Nigeria of a little more than a week ago, they all came in quick successions: A National Assembly where libido ran riot; a son who said his father was Nigeria’s best president; a corps member who condemned that same father as terrible and that president, when he wakes up and looks at the mirror, like Banda, sees himself as “the law”. In the hands of Bola…
An ancient Yoruba anecdote narrates the destructive nature of the tongue. Its moral is specifically targeted at leaders who take unconscionable decisions as dictated by their fleeting passion. It is the tragic life and reign of King Odarawu. Odarawu was an Alaafin in the old Oyo Empire. His brief reign in the late seventeenth century, after he succeeded his father, Aláàfin Ajagbo, made him the first Alaafin to be rejected by the Oyomesi, Oyo Empire’s council of state. Odarawu was a prisoner of his tongue and fiery temper. These led to the brevity of his rule. His vile anger and…