Tag: Festus Adedayo

The President is a sick man By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

On April 4, 2021, I wrote a piece with the title The President is a sick man: Buhari’s Secret Therapy Inside the ‘Oneida.’ It was a lamentation of President Muhammadu Buhari’s knee-jerk and off-the-cuff jetting out of Aso Rock Villa like a wandering evil spirit. At the drop of a hat, Buhari flew to the United Kingdom to attend to his health. But for the removal of Buhari’s name and its substitution with ‘Bola Tinubu,’ this piece is almost a complete cyclostyle of that Buhari piece. In 1849, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse…

Michael Adeniyi Koleosho: Tribute to Babalaje By Festus Adedayo

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Today, Saturday 19 October, 2024, the body of Chief Michael Adeniyi Koleosho, popularly known as Babalaje in Oyo State political circle, was committed to mother earth. Today, the soil of Saki, a border town of which he was unarguably the most consequential political mascot for about half a century, opened its arms and received the remains of Babalaje into its bosom as an eternal consort.   A couple of days after Koleosho breathed his last on September 2, 2024, the paramount ruler of Oke-Ogun and the Okere of Shaki, Oba…

Did a ring kill Ayinla Omowura? By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Obviously, because I am the unauthorised biographer of Ayinla Omowura, the musical enfant terrible of Yorubaland of the 1970s, I have been inundated by requests to lend a voice to an ongoing debate which has spiralled in Omowura’s hometown of Abeokuta, the capital of Ogun state. The debate stemmed from a claim by a man who said that, for four years, he investigated the “mysterious” death of the Yoruba Apala music lord and “unearthed startling revelations” therefrom. Rather than the popular and legal affirmation that Omowura was murdered in a…

Examining the President’s T-Pain alias By Festus Adedayo

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In Arabian folklore, the genie is a spirit depicted as being imprisoned inside a bottle or oil lamp. No matter how impregnable the walls of its captivity are, the moment it is summoned, the spirit comes out and grants the wishes of the one who invoked it. Trust them for their gift of incredible ingenuity, in the thick of their daily pain, Nigerians trip above their existential woes to summon the genius within them. Their latest invocation is a perfect-fit moniker which they affix to their president’s lapel. To them,…

Wike’s Nigeria feeds citizens’ bodies to pigs By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

Nigerians and indeed, the world, watched aghast last week as a South African grisly movie reel began to roll. Full of all the elements of a movie, it was however a real story. The cast was two black women who, on August 17, were shot and fed to pigs by a white farmer. The victims, Maria Makgato, 45 and Lucia Ndlovu, 34 were scavenging for edible food in consignments of recently expired or soon-to-be-expired produce on a farm located near Polokwane, a South African northern Limpopo province. The expired edible…

The Wayo imprisonment of Bobrisky By Festus Adedayo

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On February 18, 1947, the Daily Service newspaper published a story whose theme, like the ancient Secretarybird, has remained with Nigeria ever since. It is a story of the affinity between sex and corruption. Son of Alake of Egbaland and a no-nonsense judge, Justice Adetokunbo Ademola, then of the Lagos Santa Anna Magistrate Court, presided over the matter. After the wotowoto of the prosecution and defence, Ademola sentenced a female welfare officer, Ayodele Potts-Johnson, to six months imprisonment, without an option of fine.   Potts-Johnson’s crime was demanding and collecting…

Kabiyesi Ladoja @80, By Festus Adedayo

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A blight that critics hold against newspaper column writers is that sometimes, our shots go off tangent, disenabling us from achieving precision. In the process, they claim, we mis-profile our subjects, literally calling the King’s Mother (Iya Oba) the Monkey Mother (Iya Obo). My reply to them is that, column writers are not infallible because they are columnists… Full stop! My reply is a timid parodying of Justice Chukwudifu Oputa’s locus classicus statement about the Supreme Court. I can’t go the whole hog and delve into its second stanza due…

I think Tinubu was right By Festus Adedayo

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One by one, three Nigerian former military rulers, Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, arrived at Babangida’s Hilltop Mansion in Minna, Niger State, last Sunday. So did former National Security Adviser (NSA), General Aliyu Gusau. The Minna meeting had every trapping of African witches assembling at the coven. Like owls, a pervasive symbol of African witchcraft, did they fly to and perch on their Minna assembly nest at nocturne? Yoruba attribute the kind of powers this trio had/have to witches. They eat the head from the arm and…

Good night, Omodewu By Festus Adedayo

Emporium Reporters

On Thursday last week, in Ibadan, Oyo State, I was at the wake and tributes service in honour of Isaac Ajiboye Omodewu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) Oyo State Chairman. The news of his passage on August 18, 2024, in New York, USA hit his home state almost immediately it occurred. It was like a thunderbolt, a blow to many who knew his dove-like character. It was a moment to cower at the feet of the invisible hand of death that plucked a friend, a gentleman personified. Omodewu was laid…

Ruto in Davido’s Marriage of Anansewa By Festus Adedayo

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Nigeria of the 1950s and early 1960s had very many interesting personalities. Western Region had its fair share of such. One of them was a man named Suara Sobo Akande (Sobo is pronounced as Sorbor). He was a prominent transporter who held the transportation industry of the time by its jugular. An Ibadan man of the Opo Yeosa clan who lived in an area now known as Ring Road, Suara Sobo was wealthy and had a fleet of lorries in his pool. As a trade logo, Suara Sobo’s lorries always…