Category: OP-ED

The past month has been revealing to the government and people of Nigeria. As the dust of the epochal youth protest tagged #EndSARS settles and the billows die down, everybody is taking note of the costs, what was done, what shouldn’t have been done and the possibilities ahead. For once, the young people have said it loud and clear to… Read More

Nigerians endured the notorious Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad for 18 years. The unit was disbanded on two occasions. The third time around, the power of celebrity is at play, writes Josephine Mahachi. It may be hard to believe that the very people Nigerians look to for their safety and security are those who cause them grief and pain. That has… Read More

“If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality, of condition.” So wrote, presciently, Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, in his seminal Democracy in America, published in… Read More

Whenever the full history of Nigerian literature is written, Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa (popularly known as D.O. Fagunwa), the Yoruba language novelist, would certainly occupy his rightful place as one of its pioneers. Although literate in the English language, Fagunwa chose to put his indigenous language in the limelight by employing it in the writing of his novels which not only… Read More

The topic for this discourse could not have come at a better time, when the voices of dissent are perceived as enemies of the government of the day and all efforts are mobilized towards crushing those voices. The recent case of the suspension of the arbitrary fine imposed upon Daar Communications, Channels Television and Arise Television by the National Broadcasting… Read More

The Academic Staff Union of Universities declared its nationwide strike on March 23, 2020 as a result of the Federal Government’s directive that staff in Federal Government-owned institutions should register for the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, which ASUU vehemently disagreed with. Failure of the FG to fulfill the 2009 agreement it had with ASUU, which is about the… Read More

Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Twenty-five years ago, this November, my brother, Ken Saro-Wiwa, was executed for his work to rescue our Ogoni land in Nigeria from further destruction at the hands of Royal Dutch Shell. Not a day goes by that I do not… Read More

The most exhilarating part of the US Presidential election 2020 is the fact that President Trump lost the election. It is what many observers thought would happen. They prayed for it. They wished it. In the end, that is what happened on Saturday, November 7, 2020. The major news networks called the election and announced Joe Biden as the President-elect… Read More

I am part of a generation of Nigerians, who have lived most of their adult lives under ‘democratic’ rule yet I wake up this morning feeling there is no difference between the Nigeria I grew up in and the Nigeria my parents grew up in. The sacrifices of the democrats, who bravely stood on the June 12 mandate to bring… Read More

In an inexplicable rush to appoint an unqualified candidate as Vice-Chancellor, Federal University, Otuoke, Bayelsa State has lowered the qualification bar to accommodate a ‘son of the soil’ Dr. Teddy Charles Adias who happens to be the current Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the university.   Dr. Adias’s Record of Service (copy attached) shows that he entered the service of the Niger Delta… Read More