Category: OP-ED

In the fight against COVID-19, the war between biology and economics has just expanded to the nationalist front, spilling over with the ferociousness of a zero-sum game. Madagascar President, Andry Rajoelina, believes that the reason why the world is not giving his country’s miracle herbal formula the accolade it deserves is because of its African origin.  If COVID-Organics had been… Read More

That the Gombe State Government is boastful of being among the states not owing workers’ salaries as an accomplishment is an egregious disappointment, to say the least. The population of Gombe State is roughly three million. The state’s 60,000 workforce out of its three million population passes a chilling message that merely two per cent of the population is employed… Read More

“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”      – Frantz Fanon “On April 29, 1945, Italians found the executed dictator Benito Mussolini strung up like a prosciutto in a Milan square, his mutilated body the proof that his tyranny had ended.  Four days earlier, Italian partisans, fighting alone and with Allied forces, had… Read More

When my mobile telephone rang around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, I knew, before checking it, what news I would receive: the death, at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH), of James Kolawole Kwame Crentsil, popularly known as Comrade James Crentsil in and outside Calabar and in and outside the Nigerian Socialist Movement. He died at the… Read More

Nigerians in an online poll conducted by SaharaReporters have rated President Muhammadu Buhari’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic as ‘poor’. Buhari has in recent weeks come under increasing criticism for his handling of nationwide lockdowns, decision on inter-state movement, palliatives and more. Of the 15,100 respondents on Twitter, 75 per cent stated that he had done a poor job in… Read More

Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, tells a story of Okonkwo, the main character, who was banished from his village of Umuofia for accidentally shooting a young man. When it was time for Okonkwo to return, after seven years in exile, he instructs his wives and children to prepare a huge feast for his mother’s kinsmen in a gesture to… Read More

We Africans at home and in the diaspora quite recently had to react with righteous indignation at the effrontery of two French doctors, who on TV in France, suggested that a possible vaccine for COVID-19 be tested in Africa on Africans.  The reaction was immediate; it was strong and unanimous from the world of the black peoples from around the… Read More

The Kanem-Borno Empire is one of the ancient empires on the African continent. As far back as the 10th century AD, it got to the zenith and was an extremely prosperous city which attracted traders and tourists to its city walls. The reigns of Mai Idris Alooma, Mohammed El-Kanemi took the empire to its apotheosis as wealth untold poured into her.… Read More

I must confess to having been once possessed of the intellectual indolence required to embrace the asinine belief, that Nigeria’s problems, and more particularly, my interests as a “Yoruba” man, would be resolved by a breakup of the “Nigerian federation”. I was ideologically committed to the creation of a Yoruba nation, and at a minimum, I was happy to accept… Read More