Olaniran News Network ONN

 APC/OYETOLA'S "O'LULE" PETITION AND THE "PEPPER DEM" REPLIES OF INEC, ADELEKE AND PDP   MR. GBOYEGA OYETOLA Outgoing GOVERNOR,  OSUN STATE I think I can take a moment now to give an insight into and share my personal thoughts about the election petition filed by Governor Oyetola and his APC to challenge the outcome of the Osun 2022 Governorship election successfully conducted by INEC, thereby challenging the victory of the PDP's candidate, Senator Ademola Jackson Nurudeen ADELEKE at the said Osun 2022 governorship polls. For reason of strategy, technical plan and most especially keeping faithfulness to the admonition of the highly revered Learned Silks leading the Team of counsel for INEC, ADELEKE and the PDP, I have held my peace ✌and kept silent all the while, despite pressure from some quarters calling on me to share my personal view on the petition filed by Oyetola and his APC. I think the replies filed by the respective respondents are now in the p...

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is dead. Details later…

Lasisi Olagunju  Olúségun Obásanjó's mother told him at the very beginning that if pounded yam is not much, it must be made hard and tough (iyán tí kò pò, ó gbodò yi). Read his biographies. Ashabi Obasanjo Bankole had only him and his sister, Adunni. Her hearth had enough embers, her mortar and pestle had diligence but her yam was small and she knew it. So, she did extra work in the making of her Olusegun's pounded yam. The result is the mouthful which Nigeria has had of the soldier since 1975 – or rather, since he journeyed into the army in 1958. I am not sure if I meet Obasanjo tomorrow I will greet him. At least, if I can avoid him, I will. And that won't be because I was not trained to greet elders. I will avoid him because this elder I greeted twice in the past and twice I got the same response: He snubbed me – and you know what snub means: ignore, rebuff, repulse. Those are not nice words. On each of those occasions, what I felt was that the sun should not ignore a vi...

  Owei Lakemfa THE news went round. The Federal Government and striking lecturers in the country’s public universities organised under the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, were meeting on Tuesday, August 16, 2022. Not a few hoped that the six-month strike by the lecturers would be resolved. But the outcome was as disappointing as the cavalier way the Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, presented the report of the meeting to the nation. Also, it does not appear that the Buhari government is dealing honestly with the country on this issue. Let us examine two contradictory claims made at a press conference in the Presidential Palace by Minister Adamu a day after the botched meeting. First, he said: “All contentious issues between government and ASUU had been settled except the quest for members’ salaries for the period of strike be paid, a demand that Buhari has flatly rejected.” The brazen claim here is that all contending issues between government and the lecturers ...

 TO MEND A BROKEN NATION: THE EASTER METAPHOR (ON NIGERIA): (Easter Message by Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, Diocese of Sokoto, April 17th, 2022) 1: Hello brothers and sisters in Christ, men and women of goodwill everywhere, I send you hearty greetings and felicitations as we celebrate the risen Christ. Easter is here again. For all Christians, Easter is a metaphor for our lives as individuals, families, communities or nations. Easter is a metaphor for how shame, scandal, powerlessness, weakness, and opprobrium suddenly transform into glory, honour, pre-eminence, laudation and applause. It is a fulfilment of what the Master himself had foretold when He said, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (Jn. 12: 24). And the Psalmist had said, ‘Those who sow in tears will sing when they reap.’ (Ps. 126:5). 2: The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are central to the Christian faith and yet, as St Paul s...

 Yesterday, at the installation of the new Olubadan of Ibadanland, I took my time to listen to his cognomen, with studied interest. I came out of the encounter first, with laughter, then shock and trepidation. His Royal Majesty’s praise chants describe him as “omo o toro obe, toro abe; boo bun mi l’obe, bun mi l’abe nitori abe dun j’obe lo” Roughly translated, this means, the child of he who begs for soup and begs for sex; he says if you don’t have soup, hesitate not to give me the taste of sex because sex is sweeter than soup. Such cognomens and songs give indications of traditional African society. They reveal, not strictly the promiscuity of pre-colonial Africa but even other sins they committed like killing one another for killing sake. Take for instance the cognomen, oriki of the Iloko lineage of Oyo Yoruba. Iloko proudly dances to chants of lines like omo abe’nilori fiyoku bun ni, translated to mean, one who cuts off somebody’s head and then forgives the victim after the act....

 Chinua Achebe’s tortoise folktale in his highly celebrated Things Fall Apart, among other motifs, excoriates an act of betrayal as evil. In having Ekwefi, one of his characters, narrate the proverbial cunning and treachery of the Tortoise to her daughter Ezinma, Achebe attempted to paint a moral canvass suggestive of the fact that traitors always take fatal leaps that eventually lead to their unraveling. Like the tortoise, they break their shell carapace. This is Ekwefi’s narration: There once lived Rauf Aregbesola  a very avaricious Tortoise whose greed knew no bounds and which eventually became its tragic flaw. One day, with the general awareness that birds were planning a huge feast in the sky, Tortoise met the Chief of Birds and pleaded with him to get his bird colleagues to make him partake of the feast. But the wings with which he would fly became a challenge. After pleading passionately with them, reluctantly, the birds agreed to each donate feathers to him so that he ...