Tag: by Festus ADEDAYO

El-Rufai, June 12 And Abacha Woken from the Dead, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

“Will Abiola be happy that the Lagos Landlord is waking Abacha from the dead by making Atiku Bagudu, Abacha’s bagman and the Chagouris, the goggled General’s financiers, the main engine room of his government? Perhaps, Colonel Frank Omenka will soon become the Chief of Army Staff?”   Yesterday, General Sani Abacha clocked 28 years in the grave. Abacha’s sudden expiration at the thick of his maximal and maniacal rule reminds Nigerians, especially those who were old enough in 1998 when he died, of how human beings should never play god.…

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The North Is Angry!, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

Northern Nigeria used to have a cult of power called the Kaduna Mafia. The Kaduna Mafia decided who would become the Nigerian President, which road to build, which to abandon, which industries to be cited and where. When it couldn’t help but hand the reins of power to the south, it determined which weakest link to exploit. The 1976 assassination of Murtala Muhammed and the handing over of power to Olusegun Obasanjo explains this. If the Kaduna Mafia was bothered about the north-centric disposition of Obasanjo, it could have defiantly…

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Akwa Ibom’s N32 billion Yamoussoukro Basilica, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

One single thread links Umo Eno, self-styled pastor governor of Akwa Ibom State, his predecessor, Emmanuel Udom and Felix Houphouet-Boigny. It is the religious bigotry and senselessness behind the Akwa Ibom International Worship Centre and the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire. While Eno and Udom constructed a worship centre said to have gulped a frighteningly high N32 billion, Houphouet-Boigny also constructed a monumental architectural edifice in his Yamoussoukro village worth $300 million between 1985 and 1989. Yamoussoukro was regarded as a provincial town that boasted…

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The Hell Awaiting Davido And Asisat Oshoala, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

When Pakistani medical student, Salman Ahmad, stood up to twiddle his guitar, to the delight of all, at a student talent show event in a Lahore hotel in 1980, he was oblivious of the raging silent war between religion, music and sports. As he sang, a Pakistani fanatic dashed to the stage, snatched Ahmad’s Gibson Les Paul guitar from around his neck and smashed it into smithereens. Nothing happened. The fanatic could not understand Ahmad’s temerity of playing rock music or music in general which Arabs potentates of the Islamic…

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Titanic’s Crash and Anger of Olokun, the Sea Goddess, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

A well-researched article that exposed the tough reality and secret World of the Ocean The world is in a mourning mood. After a fruitless five-day search for a missing deep-sea submersible vessel with five passengers on board, its wreckage was eventually found last Thursday. The five occupants on board were killed in the process. The search had been spearheaded by a robotic diving vehicle deployed from a Canadian ship. The five were on a voyage to see the century-old wreckage of the famous Titanic by the time this catastrophic implosion…

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Examining Uju Anya’s vitriol on Queen Elizabeth II, By Festus Adedayo

ADEOLA YUSUF

Like a prude confronted with sexually explicit images, the world didn’t hide its shock at Nigerian-born American professor, Uju Anya’s negative comments last week on the late British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. The world had waited with bated breath at manifest indications that Elizabeth’s last hours had come. Amid this apprehension, the associate professor of Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse at Carnegie Mellon University launched her salvo. It came in the form of a tweet that brimmed with bile and hate. She had tweeted: “I heard the chief…

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Alaafin: I’ve prepared my burial, By Festus Adedayo 

ADEOLA YUSUF

How was I to know that that meeting I had with the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, on March 2, 2022, was the last between a father and his son? In the last couple of hours of hearing of his passing, I have scrutinized, without success, memories of anything unusual in the sky on that day that probably spoke of the looming calamity that would befall the Oyo palace. The sky was the usual grey, without a foreboding countenance; the palace courtiers were the usual ensemble, spraying entrants with…

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Emir Bayero, African bigmanism audacity of the blue blood, by Festus Adedayo

Festus Adedayo

The spat between the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Aminu Ado Bayero and Air Peace, one of Nigeria’s major airlines, has once again, among other issues, brought on the front burner the twin issues of delay and cancellation of scheduled flights. More fundamentally, it has also peered searchlight into and serves as a throwback to the awesome powers enjoyed by Nigerian, African traditional monarchies, provoking in its wake a discourse of the relevance of the Nigerian monarchy. Embedded into it is the need to look at the African big man syndrome,…

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Sunday Igboho and allegory of Asantehene Golden Stool, by Festus ADEDAYO

Festus ADEDAYO

Queen Mother Nana Yaa Asantewaa was just a mother and farmer who spiced her vocation with being an intellectual, politician, and human rights activist. Living in a confederate Gold Coast, now Ghana, riven by a civil war of 1883 to 1888, the moment the British exiled Asantewaa’s brother and the King of Asante Prempeh 1 to Seychelles in 1896, a fertile ground was laid for a deadly rebellion against British rule in Ashanti land. Frederick Hogston, Governor-General of the Gold Coast, hastened the rebellion. By obstinately demanding for the Golden…

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