Politics Governance

Analysis & Opinion: To Win Is To Win The People

March 16, 2023 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Adversity is an uncommon teacher. Embedded in the lessons offered by adversity is a rare kind of wisdom attributable only to philosophers. Adversity confers on the victim the equanimity that comes with profound and pure thought. It elevates the mind as it cultures the tongue. Those old enough during the crises occasioned by the June 12, 1993 election can attest to how adversity turned the undeclared winner of that election, Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (MKO) Abiola, into a philosopher who minted quotable quotes and wise sayings that…

News Feature: The Race To Chatham House

January 21, 2023January 21, 2023 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada, It is saddening if not depressing that more than sixty years after Nigeria attained independence the country is yet to plot her destiny and define her character. We remain an uncertain people floundering and lost in a vast and turbulent ocean. Growing up and reading social studies, history and government textbooks as well as listening to inspiring lessons from our teachers my generation felt a profound sense of pride in our nationalists and how they pursued out the nationalist struggle that birthed our independence in 1960. We…

Analysis & Opinion: As We March Into 2023

January 13, 2023 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada, Chinua Achebe was not just a reputable novelist, but he was a philosopher and thought leader who envisaged an experience that was in sharp contrast an alternative to our present ordeal. Although, he didn’t outline his vision for Nigeria in an outright manner, a perceptive reader could glean his idea of what a nation ought to be in many an Achebe treatise on our country. In his refreshing and thought provoking 1983 monograph, The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe ranged on the side of Nigerians to counter…

News Feature: And We Survived 2022

January 13, 2023 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Nigeria remains a case study of the kind of paradox that can only be birthed by absurdism. Samuel Beckett despite his acclaimed genius would have found it hard put to envision the Nigerian condition in a dramatic sketch. I doubt if any human imagination has the capacity to imagine the scale and depth of the Nigerian condition. When the world celebrated the turn of the millennium in the year 2000, Nigeria was enmeshed in the crises of a hunted past from which it is yet to free…

Education: Ogo Ofuani @ 70

September 22, 2022September 22, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada, My class in the Department of English and Literature at the University of Benin resumed in the early days of 1992. Having stayed at home for an unusually long stretch of time, our eager feet saw us rushing to UNIBEN, as it was and still known, to resume as fresh men and women, popularly called jambites. It was a trying moment for many reasons. The screening process was complex, tedious and tasking if not daunting. The Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB) had conducted two…

Education: With ASUU For Nigeria

July 28, 2022July 28, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada The lad clad in a neat sky blue school uniform could not have been more than eleven years of age. But his conviction, innocent as it was, rang true and it was enough to tug at the heart of a Hitler, Mussolini. Idi-Amin or Abacha. Together with his school mates, this unknown school boy, yes the cognomen unknown is the buzz word in today’s Nigeria, joined other people of goodwill to protest against the Federal Government’s insensitivity to the plight of Nigerians in the provocatively shoddy manner…

News Feature: HRM KING DUKU II @ 70

April 15, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Human experience as embedded in philosophy is similar everywhere. How life is lived, values and culture may differ from race to race and age to age, but there are some verities that hold for all of humanity in the way our world is viewed and lived. Human values and their measures remain the same hence what is considered good is good and bad is bad irrespective of colour, clime and time. In literature as in philosophy, humanity has had to be confronted with truths that point to…

Analysis & Opinion: Adamu Must Go! Ngige Must Go!!

March 10, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada That Nigeria has regressed, some say irretrievably, since 2015 is not in doubt. Citizens are daily confronted and assailed by the raw and harsh realities of monumental misrule and the gross incompetence that has become the defining feature of the ruling elite. The citizens’ plights are hourly reinforced and made worse by indices of failure of governance and state capture which add up to grave disillusionment. Those who forced themselves on the hapless masses, beginning from 1999 till date have refused to live up to the ideals…

Analysis & Opinion: For Abednego Ekoko, For Johnson Barovbe

February 25, 2022February 25, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Today’s intervention is dedicated to two personages who unknowingly shared similar destinies and walked paths that were similar in more ways than one. I came to know both men in my adult years when I had become old enough to observe, evaluate and reach tentative conclusions. I doubt if they knew each other well as their association was something that can be classified among those phenomena that occurred happenstantially. I am referring to Professor Abednego Eloghene Ekoko and Chief Johnson Modika Barovbe, both of whom joined their…

Analysis & Opinion: What Is New Or Happy About The New Year?

January 9, 2022 Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Once upon a time the thought of the end of one year and the approach of another elicited joy and expectations. In between the outgoing and the incoming year is a moment of transition that was marked by stocktaking, conviviality, merriment, then sober reflections and resolutions. We truly felt the transition from an old year to a new one and we were all happy or so we thought as children? My earliest concrete memories of the old and New Year phenomenon were formed in Evwreni, then a…