Olaniran News Network ONN

  The 39th President of the United States, Mr Jimmy Carter who had been in hospice care since February 2023 at his home in Plains, Georgia is dead.  Carter, the first US president to reach his 100th birthday died on Sunday December 29, 2024. Born in October 1, 1924, the longest-lived President  served as the 76th Governor of Georgia and later served as President from 1977 to January 1981. Carter, according to Wikipedia was “born and raised in Plains, Georgia, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 and joined the U.S. Navy's submarine service. He returned home after his military service and revived his family's peanut-growing business. Opposing racial segregation, Carter supported the growing civil rights movement, and became an activist within the Democratic Party. Carter served in the Georgia State Senate from 1963 to 1967.” President Carter was defeated by a wide margin in the 1980 presidential election by President Ronald Reagan and since leaving office, Carter ...

  Odusanya Let's begin on a personal experience with my meeting one-on-one with President Jimmy Carter. I was invited to a private dinner alongside 'Waziri' Abubakar Olusola Saraki, of the blessed memory, a Nigerian politician, who was the Senate leader in the Nigerian Second Republic, Nasir El-Rufai, the then Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and others at residence of the Ambassador by my friend, the then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States of American Embassy, Mr. Tim Andrews in the early part of 2002.   From my personal experience and observation at the dinner, I saw in Jimmy Carter, a former President at about age 78 who provided Americans with an ideal model of post-presidential life. In fact, I personally consider him to be America's greatest former President. He emerged as the champion of good governance, human rights and worked for several charitable causes - of course, funded by the Carter Presidential Center at Emory University in Atla...

  Kemi Badenoch Kemi Badenoch, Britain’s Leader of Conservative Party and the Leader of Opposition, has gone through severe stress and strain since she first described Nigeria as a country plagued by “fear, insecurity, and corruption”, while reflecting on challenges of growing up in Lagos. She was accused of the denigrating the country of her parents.  Not even David Cameron who back in 2016 described Nigeria as “fantastically corrupt country” received the type of criticism that trailed what some considered as an unpatriotic assault on Nigeria. But if Badenoch, whose brand of ‘saying it like it is’ and promises to tell ‘hard truths about her country’ does not feel intimidated by a section of the British press who described her as “ever-out-raged Kemi” and a “passionate defender of free speech – apart from any criticism of her” (John Crace Feb 19), she is not going to be cowed by some self-proclaiming patriots, Nigerian journalists whose tantrums include describing her as one “...

  President John Mahama They share the same name; John and they share the same triumphant fate.  Like President Donald Trump of the US, former Ghanaian President John Mahama has staged a come back from defeats he suffered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. A former communication minister under President Jerry Rawlings, Mr Mahama later became Vice President under the late President Atta Miller from January 7, 2009 to July 24, 2012. He later rose to become president following the death of Mr Miller the first Ghanaian president to die in office. Mr Mahama was sworn in as President on July 24, 2012 and served till January 7, 2017. He lost his bid to win in the 2016 presidential election and suffered another defeat in 2020. He did not give up.  Mr Mahama later contested in the 2024 election and was fielded as candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). He won 56.3% of the votes against Mr Mahamudu Bawumia, candidate of the New Patriotic Party who polled 41.3...

  Bashar Al- Assad President Bashar Al-Assad, the sit-tight Syrian genocidal dictator who was in office for 24 years has been booted out. Few weeks ago, the grip of power had started to slide out of his hand as his soldiers deserted him when the rebels advanced towards Damascus after grabbing one city after another. Rebel commander  Abu Mohammed al-Golani  said, “the future is ours” as widespread jubilation erupted in Damascus. Assad came to power in year 2000 but the country has been mired in 13 years civil war with destruction of over 500,000 lives and properties and displacement of citizens.  Assad relied heavily on Russia and Iran, the two countries instrumental to his continued power grasp for years but both Iran and Russia with enough troubles of their own could not save him especially Russia that has been bogged down by exhaustion from devastating loss of massive casualties of over 600,000 soldiers to Ukraine. The Russia that flexed its muscles with the Wester...

   Babalola & Farotimi When 95-year-old legal luminary Afe Babalola weaponized the Nigerian police to arrest and detain activist Dele Farotimi over alleged defamation in his book, Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System, he inadvertently succumbed to the notorious “Streisand effect.” This is the same phenomenon I previously wrote about in relation to former First Lady Aisha Buhari, whose dramatic abduction and torture of a university student over a tweet about her weight transformed a fleeting commentary into a nationwide cause célèbre in December 2022. Farotimi’s arrest has catapulted his book from obscurity to Amazon’s Best Sellers list, a trajectory likely unintended by Babalola. The very passages Babalola sought to suppress are now illuminated under the unforgiving glare of global attention, which ensures that they will be dissected by countless eyes rather than languishing in relative anonymity. In his obsessional bid to silence Farotimi, Babalola exemplifies the adag...

Prof Kperogi  I fully anticipate that most Nigerians will figuratively call for my head after reading this headline. How could it be that a leader who has inflicted such profound and unrelenting hardship upon the populace, and who appears utterly disinclined to offer even the smallest relief, could ever be missed?   (Tinubu’s wirepullers at the World Bank have essentially declared that Nigerians must, at the barest minimum, endure this misery for not only the entirety of Tinubu’s possible two terms but for an additional seven years thereafter.) But, one must ask, who could have ever predicted that Nigerians would miss Presidents Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari, to cite two recent examples? A video trended on social media about five weeks ago of a man who, on President Muhammadu Buhari’s last day in office, sunk to his knees and supplicated to God to never let Nigerians miss Buhari.  “When Jonathan became our president, we were missing Yar’adua,” he lamented. “When B...

  Mr Bayo Onanuga Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy has descended heavily on the Guardian Newspaper over its lead story expressing anger over economic hardship that majority of Nigerians are grappling with. Responding to the newspaper, Onanuga calls it irresponsible to compare the regime of Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the military regime. The newspaper in its lead story titled  "MISERY, HARSH POLICIES DRIVING NIGERIANS TO DESPERATE CHOICES" could not hide its fang for an alternative to Bola Tinubu’s draconian policies that have driven Nigerians into abject poverty. According to the publication, “Nigerians were exhilarated with the return of democracy in 1999, but 25 years on, the buccaneering nature of politicians, their penchant for poor service delivery, morbid hatred for probity, accountability, and credible/transparent elections, among others, are forcing some flustered citizens to make extreme choices, including calling for military intervention in go...

Wike And Fubara If today’s Federal Government had known its limits, it wouldn’t have suffered the disgrace it suffered in Rivers State at the weekend. The election it struggled to frustrate eventually held. And I see it as a victory for federalism and one major step in our forward march to defeat the current forces of resurgent unitarism.” Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s 1947 book, ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom’, opens with three quotations. The first tells the reader: “This above all: to thine own self be true…” It is from William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. It simply says do not deceive yourself – like the one with a sore in the right leg but who nurses the healthy left. The one who deceives himself suffers deception from the gods. The second quote, from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, is a warning that “Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.” In today’s English, it says those who cover their faults always end up being shamed by them. The third quotation enjoins you to “fight all opinions contrary...