Tag: Festus Adedayo

Bisi Akande: Beatifying Buhari in a season of the butcherbird By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

As former governor of Osun State and pioneer Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Bisi Akande, got ready to launch his autobiography in Lagos last Friday, a day before the launch, one very unAfrican event occurred in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Christophe Joseph-Marie Dabiré, the West African country’s Prime Minister, presented his letter of resignation to the country’s president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. It was accepted. Dabiré threw in the towel on the heels of persistent demonstrations against his government’s inability to stop the bloodletting Burkinabe faced…

Dowen College, cults and the beast in our children’s hearts By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In the last one week in the American and Nigerian cities of Michigan and Lagos, 1983 Nobel Literature winner and British author, William Golding, was literally woken up from the dead. Golding, novelist, playwright and poet, wrote the highly celebrated novel, Lord of the Flies. If you underestimate the holy writ’s admonition that foolishness resides (is bound up) in the heart of a child, then you need to read this Golding’s 1954 debut novel. Woven round myriad thematic concerns, chief of which was the innate bestiality in man, Lord of…

Oba Dokun Abolarin’s 15 years on the throne By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

In this age when Nigerian traditional institutions are fast becoming the preoccupation of charlatans and those whom esophagus drives to the throne, one traditional ruler in Yorubaland stands out. He is Oba Adedokun Abolarin, the Orangun of Oke-Ila in Osun State. Installed the Orangun in 2006, Oba Abolarin will clock 15 years on the throne on Wednesday, December 8. My path and that of the royal father crossed in 1999 on the reconstituted editorial board of the Nigerian Tribune newspaper. On the board, which had the late Dr. Chris Uroh…

Lai Mohammed’s subterfuge by moonlight By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Last week, as Minister of Information and Orientation, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, was engrossed in his theatrics on television over the Lagos EndSARS panel report; I was wrapped in sobriety as I listened to Manchester-based UK pop group of artists called the Hollies. Renowned for being one of Britain’s leading musical groups of the 1960s and into the mid 1970s, especially with their unique and distinctive blend of a three-part vocal harmony style, Hollies’ renown got catapulted to the zenith through their highly evocative song entitled He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My…

Who deserves pardon: Saro-Wiwa or Buhari? By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

At No 9, Rumuibekwe Road in Port Harcourt on November 10, 1995, the devil sat in a corner, having a saturnalia. No one could see him. He wore dark goggles, donning the uniform of a five-star Army General, wrapped up in a huge celebratory mood. His arch-enemy, Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists had just been hanged at the Port Harcourt Prison. Inside No 9, Rumuibekwe, family members sat on the hood of parked disused cars, weeping profusely, others holding their heads in anguish. By that instant the…

Lagos collapsed building: That this house may not fall By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Many atimes, Providence speaks to human beings in anecdotes. Unfortunately, man is too blind to even behold the foot of his nose; too lost in pursuit of earthly existential scrambles that the lessons of these stories are most times lost on him. Traditional Africa located the power in relating life experiences, as well as the experiences of living and non-living beings, especially those of animals, to the life of existing man. For centuries, not only did humanity learn to live by minding the landmines that consumed its recent and ancient…

Diezani’s underwear and Buhari’s Mecca prayer for peace By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

A photograph forcefully elbowed itself into the media space during the week that just ended. It was that of President Muhammadu Buhari looking heavenwards, his two hands spread in total supplication to God, his countenance sober. He had arrived the Islamic holy city of Makkah on Thursday to perform the Umrah (lesser Hajj). Makkah, which houses the Mosque of the Holy Prophet Muhammed, is regarded in Islam as the second holiest mosque in the world. According to the president’s Media Man Friday, Garba Shehu, Buhari reportedly spent quality time embroiled…

The Ladigbolu and Asenuga-Olubanjo model By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Two books engaged my attention last week. Incidentally written by women whose passion for the written word and unquantifiable bother for the regressing values in the Nigerian society are nonpareil, the books synchronize with my belief that, to rescue Nigeria from her current morass, each Nigerian must go to their homes and families and reconstruct the Nigeria of their dream there. Don’t Mess With Their Flowers and Akin and the Fake Doctor, the latter published by renowned University Press, products of the hands of Bukoladeremi Ladigbolu and Modupe Asenuga-Olubanjo, are…

Reincarnating Constable Ifeanyi at the Lekki Toll Gate By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Oga, mek we kill am!, the gangling police constable had told my father. This was sometime in the early 1980s and the scene was the ever-busy Ilesa-Akure expressway, in the old Oyo, now Osun State. My father, an Inspector in the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), headed the Ilesa Signals Corps of the police. However, short of officers to lead police patrols, in the light of the ever-bludgeoning criminal activities in the Ife-Ijesa zone of the time, the Divisional Police Officer authoritatively yanked the Inspector from his signals unit office drudgery.…

Widowed prematurely by Boko Haram By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

“I lost my husband four weeks ago to Boko Haram.” That was the message sent to me last week on WhatsApp by Angela, as I used to call her. Terse as it was, it bore the shattering impact of a two-tonnes bomb. Its massive boom and the doom it left in its trails deposited shrapnel of despondency in my heart. Its impact was deafening as it hit my ear lobe like a thunderbolt. How does this young, widowed lady, barely a year old in marriage, a First Class graduate of…