Before I put finger to keyboard, Godwin Emefiele – known to his friends as Mefi – ate his words. How it must have hurt his ego. Ouch! Or did he shout Yee!!! Some of us knew he would buckle before he would buckle up. He kept all on tenterhooks. But we knew it was coming. No one is congratulating him because he did no one any favours by that. The poet Robert Burns said, “suspense is worse than disappointment.” We are not going to thank him for the miseries. …
Lionel Messi always inflicted me with a binary disease. I love him, but not his country. Any time I saw him play, he revived the maestro of my boyhood fancy: Haruna Ilerika. He is small, just like Haruna. He is a leftie, just like Nigeria’s former number nine who clutched Africa player of the year honours twice. He enjoys the dribble run, cuts through defences like a tailor through satin (fans often called Ilerika Tailor), browbeats marque defenders, executes an economy of schemes, pearls passes that even his opponent envies,…
NO word or concept captures a political season like love. Yet, no word is more ignored. We brandish such nuggets as “connect,” “grassroots,” “network,” “structure,” “empower,” et al. But they all disguise what the Bible levitates as the queen of all virtues. Apostle Paul describes it as the fulfilling of the law. Jesus says it is the one quality by which others can know his disciples. For the politician, it is why they wake up and go to sleep, or do not go to sleep. They crave the peoples upraised…
To define a bandit may come easy to most Nigerians. He is the fellow with guns, sometimes in hoods, often in the hunt, utters swear words and threats, hoots in forests, snorts in huts, kidnaps boys and girls, looms over schools, is a bigot, brings down planes and derails trains, darkens highways with hails of bullets and corpses, skewers the police, razes down prison walls, snarls with blood on his hands, defiles the nubile, casts his shadow on the presidency, browbeats senators, governors, generals and ministers and commands a huge…
The Peter Obi Support Network (POSN) has slammed All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, accused him of wishing the Labour Party Presidential Candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, and his supporters dead. POSN in a statement issued on Wednesday observed with dismay that Tinubu has refused to condemn the obituary column written by one of his aides, Mr. Sam Omatseye, and published on Monday by Tinubu’s newspaper, The Nation. Omatseye had in the article published in The Nation Newspaper wished the Labour Party Presidential Candidate, Mr.…
Sam Omatseye, the Delta state-born chairman of the Nation Newspaper, ignited a firestorm with his graceless piece, Obi-tuary, in the August 1, 2022 edition of the paper. There has been an avalanche of cringing over the article steeped in half-truths and absolute falsehoods. It is an article that is filled with bile as it is vile; tasteless, gangster-like, and morbid. Reading the1,329 worded write-up is like wading through a field of putrid. It ranks foul as it is revolting. The piece, as in Omatseye’s style, is couched in…
I read Sam Omatseye’s piece titled OBI-TUARY with a lot of disgust, pity, and disappointment. For the record, Sam is supposed to be a seasoned journalist who should know the negative implications of junk journalism. I used to respect him in those days as a fearless, incisive, and cerebral columnist. However, I later observed that Sam is anything but altruistic because his writeups started wearing unrepentant ethnocentric and parochial garbs which gave him away as a divisive ethnic bigot and a man that lacks integrity. In life, one…
Opinion pieces are meant to be intellectual engagements, which usually mirror the maturity, depth and inclination of the writers. Some end up educating; some even entertain; some pontificate; while others analyse with or without proffered solutions. Alas, one of the tragedies of the Nigerian communication environment is that some fine, illuminating writers find themselves, now and then, being sucked up into pulling people down in the name of politics. This is when the otherwise good writers are in a personal conflict, striving vainly to justify the unjustifiable. At this time,…
After hiding under the shadows of his votaries, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo took off his veil. On the ordinary level, it was the unveiling of his ambition for the number one post. But for others, including this essayist, he did not just unfurl a dream. He cracked the calabash. He was, by that singular act, challenging his mentor to a duel. For some of us who did not believe it was true, the announcement was a theatre as a giddy act because it began as a furtive play.…