Tag: Festus Adedayo

Binani, Buhari: Hurt, guilt and forgiveness By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

President Muhammadu Buhari, on Friday, asked Nigerians who he might have hurt in his near-eight-year misrule, to forgive him. Similarly, a section of the social media is asking for forgiveness for Aishatu Dahiru, popularly known as Binani. Dahiru is the woman who, before the April gubernatorial election re-run in Adamawa State, was considered a political exemplar and one who typified the assumed political purity of the female gender. Very few narratives of the concept of hurt and forgiveness are as gripping as the grisly story of Father Michael Lapsley. As…

Is Soyinka, the god, unraveling? By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Kongi, Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate, a deity before whom many Nigerians tether goats, sprinkle oil, pour libations and offer ekuru of appeasement, is going through ferment. It is a period comparable to that low moment which, the Yoruba say, when big misfortunes wrestle one down, smaller travails defecate into one’s mouth – Ti iya nla ba gbe’ni san’le, kekeke a ma g’ori eni. In an elegy to Adegoke Adelabu who died in a 1958 road crash, his NCNC political party bard, Ilorin, Kwara State-born Odolaye Aremu, narrated his sudden death and…

Portable and eccentricity of stardom By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In the course of my research into the work, Ayinla Omowura: Life and Times of an Apala Legend, I came to the conclusion that stardom and eccentricity are intertwined. One of my sources told me that one day in the late 1970s, Omowura, the late Yoruba musician, as a litigant in a matter that took place in an Abeokuta, Ogun State High Court, walked into the courtroom clutching a half-smoked wrap of burning marijuana. The judge was so scandalized that he shouted, “Get out of here! Where do you think…

The fiction of an interim government By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Some huge, evil men surround a big, black pot. It is apparent that a food is being cooked. The men strung round their waists black cloths like priests of a dreadful god. Their torsos are naked like the day of creation. Their countenances are scary, with eyes dilating like pebbles immersed in crimson syrup. The sweats that glide down their barrows are crimson-red too. Underneath the black pot are logs of firewood with billowing charcoal-black fumes and red flame. As one of the men heaves the lead off the black…

The CJN on wheelchair By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

“If you are unlucky not to have a representative in the judicial council, even if you are innocent, you can be found guilty – B’eyan o l’eni ni’gbimo, bo ro’jo are, ebi lo mi a je.” This very profound saying of the Yoruba, translated into a pithy musical line in one of the tracks of Alhaji Ayinla Omowura, late Yoruba Apala musician, point unmistakably to the fact that corruption and favouritism predate colonialism in Africa. When you jointly read this line and D. O. Olagoke’s 1962-written play entitled The Incorruptible…

Now that we have arrived Rwanda By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Just before genocide broke out in Rwanda in 1994, a broadcaster on the Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) had said: “Someone must … make them disappear for good … to wipe them from human memory … to exterminate the Tutsi from the surface of the earth.” That statement, among others, from that Kigali-based radio which broadcast from July 8, 1993, to July 31, 1994, became the tinder that set Rwanda on fire. By this time next week, the 2023 Nigerian general elections would have been concluded. However, like…

My Bola Tinubu odyssey By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Since Wednesday, March 1, 2023, as Persians, Carthaginians and Romans did in penal sanction, I have been literally hung up for crucifixion. It began the moment Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, announced ex-Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu as winner of last Saturday’s presidential election. Diatribes, sarcasms and mild verbal whiplashing were reserved for me. Like ice cubes, rebukes of me got generously intermixed with cognac of victory celebrations.   It reminds me of celebrated Nigerian journalist, May Ellen-Ezekiel’s piece, Over Cognac, in her column in the Quality…

Of coup, interim government and allied nonsense By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

At times like this, two works of literature are my abiding refuge. One, written over a century ago, speaks to the melee both in the APC and Nigeria as a whole. It is a poem entitled ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats. It was written at a time similar to that of present Nigeria. It was a time when it looked like the world was coming to an end. The casualties of the First World War were benumbing and overwhelmingly high. The deaths of millions from the pangs of…

Buhari’s new Naira notes and death of Penkelemes’ musician By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In 1984, Nigeria happened to Ayanyemi Atokowagbowonle. Atokowagbowonle was a musician whose style was unique, his delivery peculiar and he was the official musician of the stormy petrel of Ibadan politics, Adelabu Adegoke, a.k.a. Penkelemes, of the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC). The then-new head of state, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, had just violently seized the reins of power in Nigeria. That year April, Buhari had ordered the colours of all banknotes in circulation to be changed. The currency trafficking prevalent at the time and stolen funds by…

Nigeria at Point Zero By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

I am peering at the viral video of the naked young man inside the banking hall as I write this. His manhood dangles like the pendulum of the Grandfather Clock of colonial Nigeria. He is totally naked, even as he shouts that he needs to withdraw cash from the bank. I am aghast and disillusioned at the same time. I do not know what to think. My mouth is wide open, saliva gliding majestically as it drooled off my lower lip. Before now, I saw a similar video. It was…