Biodun Jeyifo (1946-2026), by Obi Nwakanma
There are these times when uttering words feel too overwhelming, because words sometimes weigh like stones. Such moments are like now, when we must make offerings to the memory of a man like Biodun Jeyifo – BJ for short. At his death, I was too tongue-tied to make appropriate tribute. In these times, when vulgar […]
Buhari and the Biafrans
Dr. Chu S. P. Okongwu in his 2004 tributes to Ukpabi Asika, took an aside in his eulogies to emphasize the following: “The generation born after the civil war will not know that the former Eastern region, comprising East-Central State, South-Eastern state, and Rivers state, enjoyed a highly developed road network, with probably the highest quality road density in sub-Saharan Africa. These had been damaged or neglected during the war. Ukpabi Asika planned to reconstruct and modernize these.
Again,Biafra
The new Minister of Defence, Mr. Muhammed Dan Ali, has made what might be the first official statement by this administration on the new agitation by Biafrans for a separate country. Nigeria, he noted on his initial statement on assuming office as Defence Minister, is buffeted by “many indices of destabilisation.”
Buhari’s summary sacking of the Perm Secs was a mistake
President Muhammadu Buhari’s sacking of sixteen Permanent Secretaries, and appointment of seventeen new ones to replace them seems to me a mistake. The office of the president from which the announcement of this mass removal of the Permanent Secretaries was made, did not give any real details regarding the whys and the wherefores of this presidential action. But that is only part of the problem. Two questions ought to worry Nigerians about this move.
ORCH TAIRE (1933-2015)
Torch Oritsewenyimi Taire – his friends called him, TOT – was among many things, a man of great sensitivity: an aesthete – not in the mushy, pretentious way of the noveaux riche. A friend of poets and artists; a great lover of beautiful things. He had an eclectic mind. He was a truly renaissance man. I learnt from Torch Taire, more than a university could teach. He was a great repository of the lore of nation. He was friend to powerful men, and he was himself, without doubt, a powerful man. But you would never know it.
Time to abolish the monarchies
At its inauguration as a free nation, Nigeria established itself as a federal democratic republic. The founding fathers of this nation thought hard, and long about the options open to a multi-ethnic society such as Nigeria, and knew that it could not, like the Kingdom of Swaziland, be a constitutional monarchy, run on a unitarist model. In 1960, the federation of Nigeria secured political independence as a free nation under the British Commonwealth.
