Tag: Festus Adedayo

Fubara and the witches By Festus Adedayo

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Three Nigerian “witches” just got beaten by a midnight downpour. They are, Siminalayi Fubara, Nyesom Wike and Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in ascending order. Last Thursday, September 18, 2025, there was an initial apprehension in Rivers State over whether its reinstated governor, Fubara, was “coming home.” An earlier excitedness over the end of emergency rule got momentarily dampened. Apprehension however dissolved when Fubara’s nemesis, FCT Minister, Wike, proclaimed that indeed, Fubara was coming home. The frenzy over Fubara “coming home” was similar to “It’s coming home!”, a phrase taken out of…

Nepal bloodshed: Of Nigeria’s big masquerades and Gọntọ By Festus Adedayo

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Nepal, the Himalayan nation of 30 million people, boiled like water on a lit cauldron last week. As my people say, behind the logic of christening a woman at birth as “one who died with her glory,” (Kumolu) is a plethora of reasons. The bloodshed reminds me of the theme of resistance in the song of Ibadan bard, Tatalo Alamu. In one of his tracks, Alamu sang that the big masquerade (eégún) who walks into a gathering without recognizing the smaller one (gòntò) deserves the retaliation of non-recognition he gets.…

Goodlluck Jonathan’s betrayal and Askaris in Nigerian politics By Festus Adedayo

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Poor Goodluck Ebele Jonathan! Last Thursday, at the 70th birthday of his ex-Chief of Staff, Chief Mike Aiyegbeni Oghiadomhe, in Benin, Edo State, the former Nigerian president revealed the soft underbelly of Nigerian politics. At that event, Jonathan opened up a wound he had nursed since he lost the 2015 presidential election. It was his ordeals in the hands of political Askaris. “Politics in the Nigerian standard is about betrayals. I have witnessed a lot of betrayal during 2015 election,” he said.   Apart from politics, in liberation struggles, betrayers…

A “corruption-free Nigeria” and Brazil as hyena By Festus Adedayo

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Growing up, people of my generation matured into a fiery imagery painted of the wild and the animal world. We were fed on such frightening broths in folktales and fabulous novels like that of D. O. Fagunwa. They taught us that the wild is home of gnomes, predatory animals and human hunters who constitute a trinity in the forest ecosystem. One of the animals thus lionized was Ìkòokò, the hyena, one of Africa’s most merciless predators. He belonged to a family of wild doglike carnivores. The Ìkòokò was a wild,…

Death of world’s nicest judge By Lasisi Olagunju

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He was just a municipal court judge in a US city. Some years ago, he was asked: “In your 38 years of sitting on the bench, is there a case you still think about today?” This judge looked up, and did not hesitate before answering yes, there was a case, and he told the story: “I get upset even thinking about it. I felt crumbled at that moment. I’ve never forgotten that (case) up to this day and I was on the bench for 38 years… It was my first…

Is Èmil’ókàn audacity or incantation ritual? By Festus Adedayo

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A few weeks ago, an outburst of then aspirant for Nigeria’s presidential office, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, marked its third anniversary. On June 2, 2022, in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, Tinubu bit the bullet in what has now become an epochal ad-lib commentary. In a retort to attempts to deny him the Nigerian presidency, he had said, “Èmi l’ó kàn, ẹ gbé kinní yìí wá” – It is my turn, bring this thing. At a meeting with Ogun State governor, Dapo Abiodun, as well as leaders and delegates of the…

KWAM 1, eccentricity and cult of the Big Man By Festus Adedayo

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At the risk of being labeled thanatophobic – a preoccupation with death or its anxiety – the grim reality is that, last Tuesday, Nigeria’s music world would have lost veteran Yoruba Fuji musician, Wasiu Ayinde. Being Muslim, it is in order to say the man popularly known as KWAM 1 would have been buried same Tuesday or early Wednesday. He would have been killed over a mere tiff with an airline official over allegation of carrying liquour on board an aircraft. There is no grimmer way of putting the potential…

Tinubu’s Greek gift By Festus Adedayo

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Nigerian President Bola Tinubu did the unthinkable last week. As Nigeria hailed the women’s national football team for a hard-earned victory at the recent Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, (Wafcon) either excessively overjoyed, a manifest showboating, or an influence-seeking celebratory evangelism, Tinubu splashed gifts and cash rewards that lack precedent on the girls. As he hosted them at his presidential residence last Monday, Tinubu offered $100,000, (about N150 million) a three-bedroom apartment and a huge national award, the Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON), on all the 24-woman…

The rotten apples at Louis Edet House By Festus Adedayo

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Sometime in the early 2000s, at the cusp of Tafa Balogun’s glory as the Inspector General of Police, an oil magnate from a Southwest riverine area was arrested. He was travelling into the state capital from his riverine part of the country. It was at nocturne. The oil magnate, who moved like an Oba, was in a convoy of cars. Inside the car was a falange of private security persons. They were armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons. It was obvious that this Oba-like man was into oil bunkering…

Tinubu’s Chicago certificate as Afó’kéèmù By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Last Monday, as noiselessly as a phantom, President Bola Tinubu brought home his strange friend. While an Igbo proverb says the footsteps of a man cannot create a stampede, Alexander Zingman, the president’s Belarusian friend’s sloppy footsteps created more than a stampede. It was as though the great South African poet, Mazisi Kunene’s lines were being chanted to scare us. They reverberated round the length and breadth of Nigeria. “The madman has entered our house with violence/Defiling our sacred grounds/…Bending down our high priests with iron…” Kunene wrote. We could…