Tag: Festus Adedayo

Inside the whoredom and harlotry preceding the 2023 election by Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In Russia’s 1998 St. Petersburg local assembly elections, incumbent Oleg Sergeyev had been a thorn in the flesh of totalitarian governor, Vladimir Yakovlev. Upon Sergeyev’s launch of his bid to replace him, Yakovlev waited till the election date to sting him with his amusingly ingenious strategy. On voting day, voters, the majority of whom were illiterate, were at sea when they found two of their adored candidate’s namesakes on the ballot – Oleg Sergeyev and Oleg Sergeyev. The former was a pensioner and the latter, an unemployed man, both of…

Emir Bayero, African Bigmanism And Audacity Of The Blue Blood By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

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,…

The Abba Kyari mascot we wear on our lapel By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

A lot has been said and written about how a suspended deputy commissioner of police, Abba Kyari, arrived at this disgraceful waterloo juncture of his life. Some have blamed a Nigerian society that is everything but rigorous in the process of arriving at who their heroes are. Many others have also blamed the shock of Kyari’s unraveling at the overall absence of heroes here. Kyari was a highly decorated police officer who society looked forward to. He received so many garlands for his alleged bravery, incorruptibility and patriotism, especially a…

Aregbesola, political treachery and the Ijebu-Jesa sermon By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Chinua Achebe’s Tortoise folktale in his highly celebrated Things Fall Apart, among other motifs, excoriates an act of betrayal as evil. In having Ekwefi, one of his characters, narrate the proverbial cunning and treachery of the Tortoise to her daughter Ezinma, Achebe attempted to paint a moral canvass suggestive of the fact that traitors always take fatal leaps that eventually lead to their unraveling. Like the tortoise, they break their shell carapace. This is Ekwefi’s narration: There once lived a very avaricious Tortoise whose greed knew no bounds and which…

Sofiat’s murder and our booming human body parts market By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

With the shock, anger, and general revulsion that followed the gruesome killing of 20-year-old Sofiat Kehinde, allegedly perpetrated by her boyfriend and three of his accomplices in Oke-Aregba, Itoko-Tuntun, Idi-Ape in Abeokuta, Ogun state on January 29, 2022, an end ought to have naturally come to our naivety about the pestilence that ritual killings for money has become among us. Or oughtn’t it?   Only yesterday, in the same Abeokuta, in an area called Leme, 43-year-old Kehinde Oladimeji and his wife, Adejumoke Raji, were arrested by men of the Ogun…

Atiku Abubakar and the sexual history of the Nigerian presidency By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In early 2014, the Zimbabwean public sphere literally caught fire. Rumours that the country’s former Prime Minister and the presidential candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change, (MDC) Morgan Tsvangirai, had suffered “a nasty blow from below,” euphemism for zero virility, spread like bushfire. At about the same time, the virility-restoring prowess of Emmanuel Makandiwa, a ‘miracle-working’ Pentecostal prophet, froze the stratosphere like snowflakes in winter. Estranged wife of Tsvangirai, Elizabeth Macheka, had lit the fire. In an interview she granted The Herald, which was entitled, Why I ditched Tsvangirai:…

Why Tinubu Must Never Be Nigeria’s President By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

So I was at the Alausa Governor’s Office in Lagos. Accessing the governor was like seeking needle in a haystack. His Press Secretary sent words up that an irritant interloper had come to ferret response to a newsmagazine’s damming expose on the governor. After hours of waiting, a commissioner (names withheld) sauntered in and met me where I sat immovably like Mount Kilimanjaro. “You can’t write that story,” he began in a steely voice sauced with veiled threats. “Go back to Ibadan. We will talk to your boss.” That was…

For Yemi Sonde, the microphone wizard By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Ace broadcaster and former President of the Freelance and Independent Broadcasters Association of Nigeria (FIBAN), Yemi Sonde, concluded his broadcasting peregnation last Tuesday. He had presented shows on countless radio and television stations, ranging from OGBC, BCOS, Eko FM and Ibadan-based Splash FM, among others and signed off to commence his own outfit which he named YES FM. At a radio show with which he wound up this journey of close to two and half decades on Splash, ace broadcaster, Seun Akinola and I had the honour of interviewing him…

Was Bola Ige’s murder avoidable? By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Could Chief Ajibola Ige, former governor of old Oyo State, ex-Attorney General of the Federation and foremost apostle of Yoruba’s recent ancestor, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, have escaped the gruesome death that took his life on December 23, 2001 if he had chosen the sobriquet “Demosthenes,” rather than “Cicero”? Ige’s gruesome murder and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding it have attracted mottled commentaries in the last 20 years. This was the crux of the intellectual spat that respected professor of Political Science, my Master’s class teacher at the University of Ibadan and…

That Wike, Fayemi banter By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

An interesting video went viral last week. It is a short exchange between the governors of Ekiti and Rivers States, Dr. Kayode Fayemi and Nyesom Wike. The video unearthed some revelations. One is that, Nigerian governmental elites are not all just about governance and the survival-of-the-fittest fights to neutralize one another. They also exchange banters and throw friendly broadsides. The age-long ideological binary of progressive and conservative crept out of the governors’ exchanges. While Fayemi spoke about the progressive political inclination of his party, Wike attacked him: You claim to…