Tag: Festus Adedayo

Charlatanism at Chatham House By Festus Adedayo

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Egba, Ogun State-born indigenous African Sakara music exponent, Sanusi Aka, popularly known as S. Aka Baba Waidi, in two of his vinyls, illustrates my drift today. This he did in the albums recorded in 1959 and 1974 respectively. While the former was highly political, which he entitled Ibo fedira, (Federal election) the other was entitled Awon Orisha. The Awon Orisha track is a fabulous narrative of how some renowned deities in Yorubaland, in an ego clash and desirous of sorting out their supremacy battle, met with and had a conversation…

Qatar World Cup, alcohol and gays By Festus Adedayo

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A little over a week ago, on a Qatar Airways flight journeying to Doha, city of the current World Cup fiesta, I saw a film which clearly depicts the raging back-and-forth arguments between the Arab World and the West. A Betty Kathungu-Furet film, The Medicine Man is a Kenyan Swahili movie subtitled in English. It has as one of its major themes, the danger of orthodoxy and the barrier that a stagnated belief constitutes to human progress.   Lead character, Ben Muriithi, a medical doctor working in the State Hospital…

Asian Tiger moms and Nigerian Yahoo-Yahoo mothers By Festus Adedayo

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I was confronted by a very queer spectacle last week. In pursuit of our obsession with playing the game of squash, my friend, Tayo Koleosho and I went for a very exerting squash session in Columbia. Outside of the court was this Asian woman barking out instructions to her 14-year-old boy who was being coached by one of America’s top squash players. She was livid each time the boy erred and many times, stormed into the court to tell the boy how he should play. I was told she paid…

Day Ayinla Omowura and Ayinde Barrister dueled in Philadelphia By Festus Adedayo

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Bala-blu-blu-bulaba, All Progressives Congress (APC’s) festival of incoherences, should attract a writer. So also the celebration and justification of its impending fatality. Feeble and laughable as it may seem, Festus Keyamo’s Ananias and Saphirra role in this frightening reality too should not escape a dissection. I would have loved to ask Keyamo, in the words of Peter Tosh, “Where are you gonna run to” on judgment day? However, about the time of this meaningless waffle, I was presenting a paper entitled Between Ayinla Omowura and Ayinde Barrister: Conflicting Notions of…

An evening with Seinde Arogbofa and salute to Origunloye at 60 By Festus Adedayo

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Aside from the lofty things I had heard about him, mostly from my friend, Louis Odion, and his public interfaces, especially as a renowned author and member of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (ANA) I never had the privilege of meeting Afenifere leader, Bashorun Seinde Arogbofa, until last Tuesday. Having struck acquaintances on the telephone a couple of years ago, the 60th birthday ceremony of my kinsman and brother, great Akure irredentist, Olumide Origunloye, slated to take place in Akure, the Ondo State capital, on that same Tuesday, November 6,…

The abduction of Pa Reuben Fasoranti By Festus Adedayo

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In 1996, his car riddled with bullet holes inflicted by General Sani Abacha’s goons aimed at assassinating him, Yoruba Afenifere Leader, Senator Abraham Adesanya, had made a bullseye statement. That statement appeared to explain the raging furore among the leadership of the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group today. Adesanya’s father had twenty children. He was the only one initiated into the awo secret cult by the older Adesanya. As such, Senator Adesanya was known to be highly fortified with the powers of his ancestors. It was a time when the demonic Nigerian…

Abuja bloodshed warning and Nigeria’s Cassandra complex By Festus Adedayo

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Greek mythology, in the Aeschylus tragedy called Agamemnon, told the story of Cassandra. She was a pretty damsel highly sought after by the god, Apollo. The god promised that if Cassandra gave in to his advances, he would give her the power of prophecy. Though the damsel accepted the proposal and was immediately proclaimed blessed with the gift by Apollo, Cassandra refused to return the affection. Enraged by this insolence, since the god Apollo lacked the power to revoke a divine pronouncement, he placed a curse on Cassandra, to wit…

Oluwo, Wande Abimbola and the philistinism of culture By Festus Adedayo

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Sometime in the 19th century, as he stood in the ancient town of Ijaiye in present-day Abeokuta, Ogun state, an American missionary, Richard Henry Stone saw a young man by the gate of the mission premises. The young man was prepping himself for a war expedition, probably the Ijaiye war. The young man boasted to the people who milled around him that the vest he wore over his coat was so fortified that no bullet could pierce it. From the outwards, however, the vest was made of shells. The missionary…

Teni and Buhari By Festus Adedayo

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The National Honours Award have come and gone but its flakes are yet to subside. The most profound of its flakes came from a reaction to the quality of most of the awardees as stated by Buba Galadima. Galadima, an ex-associate of President Muhammadu Buhari, said last Friday on national television that in a saner clime, 440 out of the 470 award recipients ought to be in prisons on account of their “doubtful characters”. For me, this is a mathematical QED.   One other flake from the award was popular…

Death of workplace religion: The Polaris Bank mis-example By Festus Adedayo

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A letter was found in 2006 in the room of a Nigerian drug leader after his apprehension in Thailand. The note had read: “Almighty God in Heaven, I have the right to be rich. I have the right to be a millionaire and no country has the right to pass laws that interfere with my reaching my goal of being rich. Any laws that are designed to keep me from this goal are illegitimate”.   Stephen Elis, the late British historian and author of an expose on the history of…