Facts emerged weekend that the mobile communications giant, MTN Nigeria and Pay TV darling HiTV have thrown their weight behind Opa Williams’ talent hunt show tagged: “Thousand Laughs Hunt- Comedian Next.”

Talk about Niger Delta people, the things that come to mind are oil, militancy and youths restiveness occasioned by many years of exploitation of the oil rich region. But that does not take away the fact that apart from oil the region can still boast of producing some of the finest brains in the different areas of human endeavor.

Following the controversies that trailed the non emergence of a winner from the nine short listed poets for the 2009 NLNG prize for Literature which somehow strained the relationship between the writers and the sponsors of the Africa’s richest poetry prize, Liquefied Natural Gas of Nigeria (NLNG), the company last week at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs(NIIA) Victoria Island organized what it tagged a ‘Dialogue with Writers’ to look for the way forward.

Following his recent appointment as the Acting Director of the National Troupe of Nigeria, Martin Adaji, last week in Lagos at a Press parley with journalists outlined programs of action to help promote and propel the activities of the Parastatal forward.

THE news came as a good development, one which does not happen frequently in the industry, when MultiChoice Nigeria in partnership with the Cable News Network International (CNN) announced a two-day media workshop to enhance the skills of journalists plying their trade in Nigeria.

IT was indeed a Valentine gift to Arts and culture lovers and numerous customers of Mega Plaza Shopping complex as Cameroonian artist and designer, Catherine Pittet in partnership with Mega Plaza presented a special exhibition of unity tagged, Valentine Art Exhibition – an exhibition of Art works and paintings of Cameroonian and Nigerian Artists at Mega Plaza, 14, Idowu Martins Street, Victoria Island. The exhibition which featured about 50 works of arts mixed with fashion show opened on February 12 and will end on February 21, 2010.

One of the public faces of contemporary literary scholarship in Africa, the reasons why Professor Nwachukwu-Agbada maintains an exulted status in African literary criticism range from his awesome prolificity to his incisive and indepth consideration of the most germane issues in African literature. In this interview, he handles in characteristic manner some of those issues.

It was a gathering of eminent personalities at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Victoria Island venue of the public presentation of the book, Tenants of the House written by Dr. Wale Okediran, a medical practitioner, writer, politician and former ANA president and former member of the House of Representatives as his friends, associates and lovers of book converged for the sole purpose of identifying with a worthy cause.

Late Afrobeat master, Fela Anikulapo Kuti had something mystical about his very engaging musical career. This mysticism that defined the life and musical times of Fela popularly addressed as Abam eda has given birth to all kinds of scholarly investigations both by scholars of popular culture and scholars of music, who through their different accounts try to unravel the Fela mystique.

Energetic and high-spirited, the fact that she was AWF’s Guest Writer on January 30, 2010 couldn’t have escaped the attention of anyone who walked into the venue as a first time attendee. Eugenia would easily have been picked out from the teeming crowd as she greeted guests and passed compliments at friends; who gathered at the Pen and Pages Bookstore, Abuja venue of the event.

Humans are visual creatures. We devour graphic information to feed our senses, and most of the times we enjoy it. Lately, videos, photographs and illustrations full of shock values are flooding the globe. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then buckle up.

After a very exciting and successful 2009 literary season which featured readings by national and international writers, creative writing workshops, weekly critique sessions and an acclaimed and widely patronized national literary contest, the precocious Abuja Writers’ Forum (AWF) is set to kick-start its 2010 literary calendar with a trio of writers billed for the First Quarter Guest Writer Session.

The recent attempt by a Nigerian youngster, Farouk Abdulmutallab, to bomb an American Delta airline on December 25, 2009 has no doubt brought Nigeria in confrontation with world power, USA. The commotion has even resulted in former American attaché to USA embassy in Nigeria, Ambassador, Princeton Lyman telling Nigeria that it is fast becoming irrelevant in the world.

It is now five months since the issue of looted African terracotta was raised in connection with the exhibition entitled “African Terra Cotta: a Millenary Heritage”, at the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva and brought to the attention of all concerned. A group of renowned scholars alleged that many of the objects on display had been looted from Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

In his book, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ernest Emenyonu captures aspects of Ekwensi’s disposition to film in the 1950s. For instance, beyond revealing how Ekwensi “wrote and broadcast plays and stories for the BBC Overseas Service” , Emenyonu demonstrates how “once in 1954 his voice was ‘dubbed’ on to the sound track of the film Man of Africa, which was shown at the Venice Film Festival that year” .