CRONJE. “Do you want Cronje?” “Do you have Cronje?” were questions some students asked on the streets of Lagos in 1977. Some question papers of that year’s West African School Certificate, WASC, examinations organised by the West African Examinations Council, WAEC, had leaked. Original and fake question papers of the examinations were being hawked. The students called the leaked examination papers, Cronje. It was imaginatively named after the Mr. John Ayite Cronje who was Registrar of WAEC from 1965 to 1971. I still do not know why it was called Cronje, and not Ike since the WAEC Registrar at the time of the leakage was the novelist, Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike. Also, leaked papers were called ‘Expo.”

By Owei Lakemfa NIGERIA is blessed with very intelligent and even religious people. Thus, in our National Anthem, we pray God to help us build a nation where peace and justice shall reign. But at critical times, such as the 2019 elections, many abandoned their intelligence and switched to the mode of the stupid; peeled […]

NIGERIANS who are alive today, should wish themselves happy survival because scores  of their compatriots have been  sent to untimely graves within the last five weeks in  election-related violence.

TODAY is International Women Day, a day dedicated to the liberation of women, and by extension, the emancipation of all humanity from discrimination and repression. Its observance is based on the 1910  motion by German liberation fighter, Clara Zetkin, at the Second International Conference of Working Women. The 2019 Women’s Day coincides with the 90th Anniversary of the greatest women revolt in African history, the 1929 Aba Women Uprising which the British colonialists sought to denigrate by officially referring to it as a ‘riot’.

GOVERNANCE after independence, was in a sense, chaotic. There was a virtual insurrection in the Middle Belt for which the military carried out annual punitive expeditions. Anarchism took over the West with people being roasted alive, and widespread arson. For this, it became known as the Wild, Wild West. Leaders of the opposition Action Group Party were either in prison or on the run. Corruption was said to be rife and when there were disputes over the December 1964 general elections, President Nnamdi Azikiwe was put under house arrest for declining to call Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to form government.