Olaniran News Network ONN

  Festus Adedayo  SKITS literally crack ribs with laughter. The line separating fact from fiction or faction (fact and fiction) in skits is paper-thin. An instance was a skit cobbled together in Addis Ababa on January 11, 1976 at an OAU Extraordinary Session on Angola. This high-octane skit was documented by General Joe Nanven Garba in his Diplomatic Soldiering (1987). Garba was a Langtang-born Federal Commissioner for External Affairs under Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo. Self-titled ‘Field Marshal’ Idi Amin Dada, the notorious Ugandan despot, was then the OAU chairman. It was also a time when African Heads of State were locked in acrimonious relationships. That conference was where Dada, a title-besotting despot, added “Dr.” to the list of his titles. Present were African leaders whose memories evoke mythical remembrances, like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Leopold Sedar Senghor, among others. At some point, Dada interjected Heads of State delivering their speeches. He said

  Simon Kolawole When Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, the president-general of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo, died last month, it reawakened a topic I had been ruminating over for decades. I had been following the trajectories of politicians who aspired to be president of Nigeria at one point or the other and I had been genuinely startled by how many ended up as active members or leaders of ethnic associations. I have been asking myself for years: what changed? Why did they — having desired to lead a country of 250 ethnic groups and two dominant religions — decide to return to their ethnic cocoons? I am not interested in judging them, by the way; I am just trying to understand what happened to them. Chief Olu Falae, former secretary to the military government and minister of finance, twice aspired to be president of Nigeria — in 1992 and 1999. But the last phase of his public career is as a champion of ethnic nationalism. He is a frontline member of the Afenifere, the Yoruba group. If Afenifere’s ide

  Festus Adedayo  Undoubtedly, the political matrimony between President Bola Tinubu and Northern Nigeria is at Talaq stage. Talaq is the Islamic unilateral repudiation of a marital union. There are no sobs, no wails. No dabbing of the face with a handkerchief. But, the dusts provoked by the matrimonial dislocation hang notoriously in the sky. Even bystanders miles away can see them. The marriage is only 15 months old but the couple’s patience for each other is rope-thin. As our elders say, right in the presence of the kolanut seller, irreverent worms slide inside his pods. A matrimony celebrated with pomp and ceremony is now a chaotic market row. The gluttonous cat has eaten the poisonous meat of a toad. A post on X late last week even claimed that “Northerners have (begun) Al-Qunut prayers against Tinubu…Al-Qunut prayers (are) done…to eliminate evil.” There is a litany of allegations hung on the neck of the seismic marriage. It ranges from prostitution, abandonment, betrayal to batte

Abimbola Adelakun   Since Sunday, when the president finally addressed the country in response to the ongoing #EndBadGovernance protests, analysts and critics have not stopped rewriting his speech. They think he should have proposed more than the usual platitudes he blandly delivered, and I agree. He offered neither reprieve nor concessions, just vaunted some chest-thumping achievements that have had little bearing on the reality of those for whom the initiatives were allegedly designed. For a man whose managerial prowess was sung to the high heavens, Bola Tinubu serially comes up short in anticipating and responding to national issues with the panache of someone who is interested in his job and invested in seeing tangible outcomes. His lack of charisma makes him come across as a man who will shrug off failures because he has invested no real stake in success anyway. But beyond trying to resolve what is wrong with his administration, is it possible to get into the president’s mind and