Tag: Festus Adedayo

France, your Queendom is falling! By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Zimbabwe-born medical doctor and activist, Arikana Chihombori-Quao’s viral video which hit airwaves last week evokes the music of iconoclastic Jamaican reggae musician, Peter Tosh. The video explains the rebellion going on in the Sahel against France. In Tosh’s system-bashing, anthem-of-resistance song, a call to action against the evils of colonialism and oppression, the coup in Niger Republic and France’s decades of paternal oppression against French-speaking Africa gets graphic detailing. His Mystic album, especially the track Babylon, your Queendom is falling, is pregnant with powerful lyricism that is unpretentious against colonial…

Abbey at 70 By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

The headline of this piece is almost a heresy. Unbeknown to him, our boss at the Tribune Newspaper House, Imalefalafia, Abiodun Oduwole, Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (FNGE) was known and called by his junior staff as simply Abbey. We however dared not bring this appellation to his attention. Abiodun Oduwole, Editor-in-Chief of the Tribune newspapers in the 1990s, was identified by that funkivised inflection of his name by his junior staff like me. Those who belonged to his school called him EiC, the shortened form of his…

Tinubu’s lost war in Niger as Sigidi By Festus Adedayo

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Yoruba have a way with the Sigidi, whose closest modern translation is the robot. So when the Sigidi – a moulded clay effigy – at the height of its self-destruct, asks that it be taken to the river to swim, Yoruba say a catastrophe is in the offing. They render this as, Sigidi nse’re ete, o ni ki won gbe’hun l’odo lo we. Just as the modern robot is credited with the power to take some human actions, the Sigidi too, in the belief of the Yoruba, could. It was…

The hell awaiting Davido and Asisat Oshoala By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

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…

The Niger coup, Emefiele and the president’s friend, Asari By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Africa slumped again last week into the hands of its traditional enemies. The continent has not been the same since midnight of January 13, 1963. On this day, a band of military putschists, led by Etienne Gnasingbe Eyadema and Emmanuel Bodjolle, shot and killed the civilian president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio and his wife. Togo then became the first of such violent takeover of men in Khaki in the French and British colonies of Africa, thus breaking the symbolic hymen of the innocence of Africa. The wave of democratization in…

Breakfast with Yebo Gogo, Kole Omotoso By Festus Adedayo

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In 2018 when news sieved in that that constellation of emeriti, Prof Bankole Ajibabi Omotoso, had crept into Akure, Ondo State, our association, Ooye Development Initiative, (ODI) bated him like mousetrap does mice. Was Akure big enough to contain that hippopotamus-statured literary giant? I wondered. I, perhaps, was the most excited of the lot. I had read Omotoso’s works with doting wonder and imagined if he wasn’t a gnome or some genie. So, this day in September, as we drove towards the then pot-holes ridden Oda road to honour an…

Tinubu as “Sobia” in need of Oluganbe leaf By Festus Adedayo

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Initial applauses from Bretton Woods and some local economists that greeted the economic reforms of the Bola Tinubu presidency were deafening. The reforms were termed bold and courageous. The most surgically painful of them, which drilled deep down into the marrows of Nigerians, was the removal of fuel subsidy. In a country that is almost totally dependent on PMS, the unbearable pains of the people reached ear-shattering decibel. Cars disappeared from the roads. Costs of transportation are tearing the roof, with rife social dislocations. Rates of crime have since been…

Stoppage of Isese Festival in Ilorin By Festus Adedayo

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A little over a week ago, Professor Wole Soyinka turned the attention of Nigerians from their current harrowing economic existence to one of the tyrannies that religion inflicts on them. Prof was apparently in his elements. For decades, he had fought battles of willful violations of human existence in various guises. Young Yakubu Gowon was one of the experiments Soyinka conducted on his intolerance for governmental tyranny. Gowon’s government had detained the comparative literature professor for two years in the wake of the civil war on allegation of hobnobbing with…

Mmesoma’s wrong was being Igbo By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

If you diligently analyze social media’s initial reactions to the allegation that Mmesoma Ejikeme forged her Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination result, it would be difficult not to conclude that her race was her wrong. That she was wrong to have been born Igbo at a critical time like this. Or that the politics of her race was her albatross. Ejikeme has attracted so odious comments to herself, similar to one who willfully pelted on herself a mound of excrement. Only on Friday, an Anambra state committee of…

Osun’s Sallah scuffles and Abuja’s dog meat By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Two issues engage this piece today. Each of them is reflected in animal imagery. The first has a dog as the totem of its analysis. The second too is better explained by the bestial engagement of rams. Let us begin with the latter. Last Wednesday, Osun state witnessed a bestial ram fight. Children in, especially northern and western parts of Nigeria, grew up to see the perennial rituals of ram – called agbo in Yoruba – fight. By the way, ram flaunting during Id-el Kabir celebrations is more than part…