Tag: Festus Adedayo

Titanic’s crash and anger of Olokun, the Sea goddess By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

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 occurred. The robotic vehicle had found the debris of the submersible Titan on the…

A honeymoon with Tinubu By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

This season, President Bola Tinubu is harvesting big pods of cocoa from his plantation. His co-farmers are looking at him with concentrated envy. And jealousy. Exhilaration is in the air. In the last two weeks, he has shown tremendous energy to change the status quo. His sack of Nigeria’s CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, is exciting the Nigerian economy.   That Agbor, Delta state-born banker’s exit marked an end to one of the most turbulent eras in the CBN. Getting rid of him has signaled a very strong, positive impact on…

Circumstantial evidence says it’s murder, sir! (A factionalized – fact and fiction – account of murder in a hotel) By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Media frenzy over the death of Tim Goke, a 37-year old man whose remains were found in a hotel, had been very huge and unsettling. As Police Detective and Head of its Legal Division, Muhammadu Kura sat on the swivel chair in his office at Kam Salem Police Headquarters this Wednesday afternoon, he reflected on his encounter with the Inspector General of Police about 40 hours back. The media had literally dragged the IG off his fanny to begin to take drastic actions. The social media had already given its…

Joe Biden’s fall and a shaking Nigeria By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

America was a pitiable sight last Thursday. That great country was crouched on the bare floor. It fell like a huge hippopotamus. President Joe Biden’s legs were wrapped over each other like a malevolent viper that had just had its backbone yanked apart by an irreverent bullet. America looked helpless. The edges of Biden’s blue suit raised their hands up in surrender, leaving the world gaping through his now visible white singlet. The only thing on him that seemed unfazed by the fall was his blue fez cap. For the…

As Buhari conducts Tinubu round the Villa… By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Forget their pretensions and volte-faces, when outgoing Nigerian public officials wake up tomorrow, May 29, they will wake up into emptiness. That void cannot be filled by the wealth they acquired in office. Nor can it be impeached by Muhammadu Buhari’s reported haste to flee Aso Villa tomorrow. At the launch of a book on his administration at the presidential villa on Friday, the outgoing president had said: “I assure you, I have been counting the days; I am looking forward to Monday very desperately. I will use the weekend…

Lamidi Apapa’s missing cap By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Turbulent anger of Obidients landed on Lamidi Apapa last week. By the time their anger petered out, Apapa had lost his cap to a God-knows-who. Esu Elegbara, the trickster deity of the Yoruba people, it will seem, lives in caps. Though most of the exploits of Esu exist in myths, Yoruba constructed a pantheon of beliefs that implicate the Esu as divisive and full of tricks. One of such, sauced in mythology, was translated into a very sobering track by ace Yoruba Awurebe musician, Alhaji Dauda Akanmu Adeeyo, popularly known…

Soji Adesida takes a rude bow By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

April 28 was a particularly bad day for the Adesida royal dynasty of Akure. That day, their son, Anthony Adesoji Adesida, a.k.a. Stag, was killed during a brawl in the state capital. A prince and pastor, he had sought armistice between two feuding personalities at the venue of a party. One of them, consumed by deadly anger, had shoved him off violently. Stag hit his avuncular head on the naked, coarse floor. As his head made a jangling crack on the irreverent concrete cement floor, little did aghast onlookers know…

Will north, the Shrew, bite the APC’s nose? By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

The ongoing fight-to-finish for principal officers’ positions in the 10th National Assembly by the All Progressives Congress (APC) has only one fitting corollary: It is the famous mythic, destructive squabble between the Shrew, Squirrel and a seemingly impartial arbiter, the Tortoise. Unless carefully resolved, what appears to be a fancy of conquest by the APC, leading to the party magisterially pronouncing who would be its legislative Man Fridays, seems to have boomeranged full throttle at its teething stage. Only last week, the party’s National Working Committee, (NWC) in a peremptory,…

Tinubu, judicial corruption and Madman of Gadarene By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In Port-Harcourt, Rivers State last week as guest of Governor Nyesom Wike, President-elect, Bola Tinubu, promised to fight corruption. To delink judicial officers’ minds from corruption, Tinubu’s blueprint of fighting this goblin, he said, would be to incentivize judicial officers.   “You don’t expect your judges to live in squalor, to operate in squalor and dispense justice in squalor. This is part of the changes that are necessary. We must fight corruption but we must definitely look at the other side of the coin. If you don’t want your judges…

Nigeria’s Sudan question By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Africa is on its familiar route again. She has become the proverbial serial widow whose mourning and weeping the Yoruba express as “Iwo l’eni, iwo lana bi ekun ap’okoje“. In serial widowhood, the widow is seen as involved in matricide, until she proves otherwise. Each death of the husband courses tears down her cheeks and cries seem the only alibi of her innocence. Sudan is Africa’s most recent ground for exhibiting serial widowhood cries. Africa, like that widow, appears to have a prowess that killing her prime children and husband…