Tag: Prof. Sunny Awhefeada

Analysis & Opinion: A Christmas Without Christmas

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By Sunny Awhefeada A new sociology, virulent, irascible, unrelenting and pervasive, is out there attempting to subject our past, including our very recent past, to erasure. The drastic occurrences and, even radical, changes of the last twenty years have turned the world into a strange phenomenon that we suddenly didn’t know. We have become victims of our own tendency to outdo the order of nature. The pursuit of knowledge, advancement in science and technologies and their attendant discoveries have become a double-edged sword dangling over humanity’s feeble neck. The world…

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Analysis & Opinion: A Nation Astray

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  By Sunny Awhefeada Dele Giwa, the unforgettable journalist, preempted our today when he wrote in the mid-1980s that Nigeria had reached the stage of unshockability! Members of his generation would have applauded him for his insight, sublimity of thought and verbal dexterity. True, the 1980s was the high watermark of the tendencies that birthed today’s crises and woes. Nigeria attained independence two decades earlier and despite her promising beginning as carrying the promise of the Black race, she tottered into a bloody internecine conflict that raged for thirty months.…

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Analysis & Opinion: Urhobo Progress Union @ 90

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  By Sunny Awhefeada   The Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) was founded on the 3rd of November 1931 in Warri. This means that the UPU is ninety years old. At ninety, it is Nigeria’s oldest surviving socio-cultural organization. It was not Urhobo Progress Union in the beginning. It was Urhobo Brotherly Society. It was so called in order to reflect its mandate of fostering fellow feeling, brotherliness and unity among the Urhobo people. The name mutated into Urhobo Progress Union in 1935, and it has since remained so. Its motto…

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Analysis & Opinion: Night Approaches

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  By Sunny Awhefeada Night remains a disturbing metaphor in the construction of experience whether fiction or factual. The human mind has configured night as providing the ambience and frame for whatever is evil. A dominant and frightening feature of night is darkness, a phenomenon that has frightened humanity from time immemorial. Night is imagined and constructed as a time of transition during which an unseen mortal combat takes place in the spiritual realm. Night has horrors that are better imagined. It is also configured as the time witches meet…

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Analysis & Opinion: The October Youth Uprising

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By Sunny Awhefeada (This piece was first published on 23rd October 2020 in the wake of the #ENDSARS protests) The month of October remains the most significant in Nigeria’s history. It was at the dawn of its first day in 1960 that we were set free from colonial bondage and pronounced an independent nation. The import of that day remains inscribed in the consciousness of every Nigerian. Growing up, many songs were composed for us to sing about that day as primary school pupils. Our social studies lessons and later…

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Analysis & Opinion: Obscene Opulence Amidst Crushing Poverty

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By Sunny Awhefeada Nigeria has always been a classic case of the interminable play of contrasts which literary connoisseurs will call irony, oxymoron or paradox depending on the intensity or manifestation. What is apparent from the Nigerian experience since independence in 1960 is that the country has been sustained by a corrosive system of opposites which is lubricated by oddities and absurdities. Nigeria is so endowed, yet so poor.   The citizens are among the most intellectually endowed in the world, yet they are being led by the nose. Her…

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Analysis & Opinion: Babangida: We Will Not Forget

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By Sunny Awhefeada   Last Tuesday, precisely 17th August, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (rtd), Nigeria’s former military president, joined the octogenarian bracket as he clocked eighty years on mother earth. On a personal note and as a human being, I was happy for him and his family. I congratulate him and wish him well. However, the event does throw up a lot of contention about Nigeria, Nigerians and the place of Babangida in our national history. There was a deliberate attempt to manipulate our history, but that attempt collapsed like…

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Analysis &Opinion: “We Are At War”

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By Sunny Awhefeada I must begin by ascribing the patent of the title of this piece to Dr. Walter Ofonagoro, one of those exceptionally gifted men who put their talent at the disposal of the antithesis of good. Ofonagoro belongs to a mendacious heritage constituted by men of his ilk. They are the worthy sires of the Garba Shehus and the Femi Adesinas of today. For the Woke generation, the name Ofonagoro will not ring a bell, although it pops up on when searched on Google.   The generation which…

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Analysis & Opinion: Power As Intoxicant

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By Sunny Awhefeada   Power exhibits a character that hinges on what structuralism codified as binary opposition. The duality of the essence of power bestrides the two extremes of good and evil which ironically are divided by a very thin if not nebulous line. Power, when deployed for good has an unquantifiable propensity to multiply and positively affect all. A destructive reverse of equal magnitude becomes the case when power is directed towards an evil end. Philosophers and politicians have across the ages understood these creative and destructive essences of…

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Analysis & Opinion: Peter Ekeh: Ane Iprofu Whunure

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  By Sunny Awhefeada A somber ambience was what defined 17th November 2020 for me. It was in that tamed atmosphere that my phone vibrated in its silent mode. The message it delivered was dejecting. The caller simply said “ane Iprofu whunure”. Simply translated to read, “they said Prof has died”. Of course I didn’t need to ask which Prof died. The Prof that has been central to our activities at the Urhobo Historical Society (UHS) was the legendary Professor Peter Ekeh. I went limp as I related the message…

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