Lindsay Barrett and Mia Mottley: The Pull of the Diaspora, by Owei Lakemfa
Lindsay Carlton Eseoghene Barrett was a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican when he came from Britain to Nigeria in July 1966 on a few weeks’ visit. Those weeks have stretched to over sixty years, with the playwright, poet, journalist and photographer becoming one of the best-known Nigerians. He was eighty-five years on September 15, and not unexpectedly, I […]
At last, Trump shoots straight
AMERICAN President, Donald Trump was four when the Korean War broke out in 1950. In three years, the war sucked in more than 40 countries, most, under the United Nations, UN, banner. Two and a half million people died in the war. America suffered 36,568 dead and 103,284 injured. All the countries returned home except America which today, maintains 23,468 combatants in Korea. This is 68 years later.
Nigerians are loyal to the Army and President
IT was like a coup announcement when on December 4, the Nigeria Army broadcast it had ousted the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF, from the North-East where the country is flushing out Boko Haram terrorists.
We are all migrants, we’re unstoppable
FIVE thousand, five hundred angry marchers tramped through the streets of Brussels on Sunday protesting against the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Their claims include that the Pact would encourage migration and criminality. They also claim that the Pact blurs the distinction between legal and illegal migration. For them, it is time Belgium shuts its borders against migration of any kind.
Case against the Nigerian elite
THE Nigerian elite leading the country to the February, 2019 general elections have reduced the contest essentially to personal squabbles and a contest of insults rather than ideas. This is not unexpected as in almost all cases, the colonialists created for us, zombies as elite. An elite class incapable of basic reflection, one that accepts foreign dictation and is alienated from the people it leads. In turn, the people are alienated from the state; they do not have the same attachment or loyalty they had to their pre-colonial societies. So a corrupted culture has developed in which people see the elite from their communities who loot the national treasury, as heroes bringing back their share of the ‘national cake’. In many cases, the thieves are given chieftaincy titles, turbaned or knighted.
Zionism and Justice: The Bongani Case
IF the famous Williams Shakespeare had written his 1596-99 play, Merchant of Venice in this generation, he would have been accused of hate speech, condemned, sidelined and declared a racist. That is because the play centred on a greedy and conscienceless Jewish money lender, Shylock, who insisted on slicing a pound of flesh from a debtor despite offers to pay him double the money he had advanced.
