Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III: A Sultan for All Seasons, by Azu Ishiekwene
It was five years on Tuesday since I wrote a tribute to the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III, who was 65 at the time. Our paths first crossed after he was named Sultan following the tragic death of his brother, Muhammadu Maccido, in the 2006 ADC air crash in which 93 persons were killed. […]
Arresting the Power of Darkness
Imagine you are at a meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan. Suddenly, some policemen come in to arrest him. The President refuses to alert the National Guard. He does not call the army. When one of his Secret Service details tries to defend him, the President restrains him.
Chinua Achebe: The lynch mob comes Out
Publication, this past week, of Chinua Achebe’s memoir of Biafra, There Was A Country, had the Awoist camp up in arms. The Awoists – followers and defenders of the legacy of Chief Awolowo- have expended a lot of verbal grapes on the person of Chinua Achebe. It felt like a dangerous mob unleashed on one of the world’s most important cultural icons. All Achebe did was tell the truth about Awo.
Judicial ‘murders’and Nigerian politics – 2
Time was when a lawyer could predict the likely outcome of a case because of the facts, the law and the brilliance of the lawyers that handled the case. Today things have changed and nobody can be sure….Nowadays, politicians would text the outcome of the judgment to their party men before judgment is delivered and prepare their supporters ahead of time for celebration”. Chief Afe Babalola, SAN, in PUNCH, September 23, 2012, p 9 in an article titled Toying with corruption in the temple of justice.
The soul speaks
A long time ago, I attended a concert for peace in Africa. International and local artistes were billed to perform. If memory serves me correctly, a lot of the American ones didn’t show up but quite a lot of the African ones did. My assessment of the concert was that it was abysmal; the arrangements were at best poor and the cheapest seats turned out to be the best as the VIP section was so far removed from the stage. One needed hearing aids and binoculars to hear the music or see the artistes. It started out late and most of us were understandably upset that the superstars we were promised didn’t come.
The case for atheism (3)
Given the very real probability that the critical, self-replicating, molecular Rubicon was crossed on the basis of natural mechanisms without any supernatural intervention, no serious scientist should doubt the validity of Doolittle’s argument that life on earth (at all levels in its evolution) developed in stages, each stage built on the stabilising, catalytic and replicative power of the stage before it.
