TURMOIL. That is South Africa’s state of mind. The manifestation of this, is violence at all levels; from the streets and campuses, through xenophobic attacks to last week’s battles in the hallow chambers of Parliament. The country is caught between Post-Apartheid Reforms that have in a quarter of a century, failed to deliver promised change, and implementation of the core principles of the 1955 Freedom Charter, a document which has been largely, side-stepped.

WHEN the news came that the newbie US President, Donald Trump, would call his ailing Nigerian counterpart, President Muhammadu Buhari, at exactly 3.45pm on Monday 13th February 2017, I was very expectant for several reasons.

I SAID when I wrote ‘Now that Yar’adua is back’ (02/26/10) that “Nigeria has become one huge Elizabethan theatre where clowns, harlequins and pantomimes now prowl the stage in an unending melodrama –sometimes more comic than Shakespeare’s ‘Comedy of Errors‘. And in this unfortunate milieu it seems we are no longer divided over issues. We are rather titillated by personalities.

Popular culture in Nigeria has ironically helped to enshrine many of our societal ills by converting them into norms and values. The lyrics of many artists today celebrate the “fast money lifestyle” which is symptomatic of a fundamentally corrupt society and glamourises disenfranchising behaviours which ordinarily, in other climes, social critics and the public themselves would have decried.

LAST week I referred to the book titled “State of Africa” written by Martin Meredith to highlight the fact that Nigeria is not alone in Africa as far as diversity of its citizens is concerned and that other African Countries with whom Nigeria shares a common colonial history have the same features.