Olaniran News Network ONN

  Prof Akin Adesina Charismatic and ebullient African Development Bank President, Professor Akin Adesina has tasked the governments across the globe especially African countries on the social contract between society and government. Speaking at the Chatham House, the policy center for global affairs in London, Adesina highlights the importance of government playing its roles while enforcing compliance with citizens paying taxes.  He emphasized that the government has a responsibility to provide infrastructure to the people with the taxes they pay. If the the people play their parts paying their taxes, the government owes them a responsibility to play its own part by providing basic necessity of good roads, potable water, good hospitals, adequate security and so on. Adesina berates the situation where an individual has to fix his own road, provide his own borehole, electricity with solar power, provides his own security and still pay taxes to the government that abdicates its own respon

Bayo Onanuga Bayo Onanuga the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy has released his attack on the New York times over its report on Nigeria’s economic downturn that imperils the growth of the country through bad policies. Ruth Maclean and Ismail Aiwal of the New York Times in their story titled, ‘Nigeria confronts its worst economic crisis in a generation’ berates the economic stagnation of the country that predates Tinubu’s emergence as President. Taking to his X page formerly known as Twitter, Onanuga says, “the story published on June 11, reflected the typical predetermined, reductionist, derogatory, and denigrating way foreign media establishments reported African countries for several decades.” Calling the report “jaundiced, all gloom and doom, Onanuga says the report failed to see the positive side of Bola Tinubu’s administration especially the ameliorative policies being implemented by the central and state governments to cushion the effects of th

  Prof Kperogi Nothing in my adult life has made me more ashamed to be a Nigerian and more inclined to completely divest my emotions from Nigeria than the readoption of “Nigeria, We Hail Thee,” a colonially created national anthem whose first stanza drips wet with the spit of racist condescension, gender exclusion, and stodgy, ungainly archaisms.  First, it’s inexcusable national self-humiliation to discard a home-made national anthem, irrespective of its defects, for one that was made by an imperialist whose influence we’re supposed to be independent of. That instantiates a phenomenon that social anthropologists call cultural cringe.  First propounded by an Australian scholar by the name of Arthur Phillips in the 1950s to describe Australia’s complicated cultural relations with Britain and the US, cultural cringe is the deep-rooted inferiority complex that causes psychologically damaged, formerly colonized people to inferiorize and disdain their own country and its culture and to uncr

  Sanusi & Kwankaso Kano’s Muhammad Sanusi II has been rethroned the exact way he was initially enthroned and dethroned: in the melting pot of the politics of vengeance and recrimination.  And he just might be dethroned yet again by this, or another subsequent partisan government, given Sanusi’s infamous incapacity to rein in his tongue and to understand the wisdom in restraint and tact, which his position requires of him—and, of course, the juddering, hypocritical contradictions between what he says and what he does. Recall that when he worked at the UBA, Sanusi had derided then Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso as a scorn-worthy “rural aristocrat” who “surrounds himself with provincials and places key posts in the hands of rural elite.” He characterized the Kwankwaso administration as “the classic comedy of the Village Headmaster in a village council.” Kwankwaso was so incensed by Sanusi’s boorishness and Kano urban condescension that he threatened to pull out the Kano State Governme

Lasisi Olagunju  Those who allowed themselves to be distracted slept last night as free people; they woke up this morning in slavery. So, please refuse to be distracted. As you discuss the president’s strange choice of anthem over people’s hunger, pay due attention to everything his government is doing. Pay more than ordinary attention to the local government autonomy case at the Supreme Court. That is a case with a potential to determine (or undermine) your freedom, the health of our country and the safety of our democracy. Why is fox suing hawk in defence of chickens? Autocracy incubates itself in populist confusion. The case is about that. We need vibrant states to checkmate the behemoth in Abuja. We need the local governments to drive development at the grassroots. The rapacious Federal is the elephant unsettling the room. Think of an imperial president with very rich 774 ‘liaison officers’ sitting as council chairmen across the country. Think of a federal government with limitless