Category: OP-ED

If words could make the dead turn in their grave, the founder of the Oodua People’s Congress, Dr Frederick Faseun, would have rolled over last week, caught between amusement and surprise at a remarkable statement during the first anniversary lecture of his passing. On that occasion, former President Olusegun Obasanjo warned that the country risked another civil war if President… Read More

I have heard many people argue that First Class has become cheap in Nigerian universities. They posit that some universities now distribute it as ‘pure water’ and that private universities are most guilty of this unwholesome practice, as some of them use it as a business strategy to keep attracting students. A lecturer at the Department of Chemistry, University of Abuja, Dr Ben… Read More

INTRODUCTION My name is Comrade Deji Adeyanju, a human rights activist and I write this memorandum to the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Committee’) ahead of the planned public hearing to discuss the Protection from Internet Falsehood and Manipulation Bill, 2019 (hereinafter referred to as ‘the bill’), in an attempt to draw… Read More

‘Up Nepa!’ Those words seem to be one of the first that every kid learn to speak in Nigeria, which ironically prides herself as the Giant of Africa. Right from when I was born in the mid 1980’s, I doubt if I have experienced twenty-four hours of uninterrupted power supply in my ‘dear’ country. The electricity situation is so terrible… Read More

The Lekki-Epe Expressway was constructed by the Lateef Jakande administration in the 1980s but was finally completed by the Mudashiru Lawal and Mike Akhigbe administration in 1987. The Bola Tinubu administration put forward an audacious PPP, which led to the pioneering of a 30-year Lekki-Epe Expressway Toll Road Concession, Nigeria’s first ever Public Private Partnership project.  The project was for… Read More

The Yoruba people of South Western Nigeria, described by one English Language dictionary as the fun-loving people of the Southern part of West Africa have a habit of greeting people over everything. Whatever the matter is, they just like to greet, and they will go to any extent to design a message around any event. If the sun is high… Read More

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. –W.E. Yeats Again, again, and again, they come in the middle of the night. Not because they fear recognition and exposure, but because the dead of night is a more effective period  when… Read More

Every day in Nigeria, unspeakable barbaric acts far exceed the imagination of best seller absurdist novelists and comedians. In a well choreographed events after events, we see a nation on implosion suicide hastened by “accelerated decomposition.” Day-in, day-out, we see a government with energetic authoritarianism in the execution of presidential powers that leads to abandonment of civil rights and rule… Read More

Reflections on the current “insecurity” and “threatening state failure” in Nigeria – and what the Nigerian Left can do – recently led me, in a tortuous manner, back to a formulation on revolutionary intervention which I thought I had transcended long ago. We shall first discuss the formulation and then come to “insecurity” and “threatening state failure”. The formulation was… Read More

“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” – Thomas Jefferson. The history of the press in Nigeria is one that can be incorporated as a course for study in the country’s tertiary institutions due to the fact that it has been hailed, abused, encouraged and oppressed by the clergy, nobility… Read More