Olaniran News Network ONN

2020 ENDSARS Protesters In light of his planned astronomical hike in petrol prices euphemistically called “subsidy removal” in 2023, which his opponents also promised to implement and caused Nigerians embrace as inevitable and desirable, I foretold the imminent social convulsion that is gathering momentum across Nigeria now.  “I can assure Tinubu that if petrol price hikes deepen people’s misery, he’ll have a tough time governing,” I wrote in my April 29, 2023, column. I followed this up with more than half a dozen columns on the same theme. When you remove subsidies from an all-important product like petrol that literally regulates every facet of life in a country like Nigeria, which also has the dubious honor of being in perpetual competition with India for the status of the world's poverty capital, and then follow it up with a massive devaluation of the national currency even when the country is hopelessly import-dependent, you unleash existential demons that compel vast swaths ...

Akpabio Last Wednesday, Nigeria’s upper parliament became a grammar class where semantics, syntax and structure are examined. His Excellency, the Senate President of Nigeria, Godswill Obot Akpabio, suddenly became an emergency interpreter and lexicographer. Akpabio’s interpreter’s dilemma reminds me of Field Marshal Gerald Templer. A senior British Army officer, Templer was best known for the implementation of strategies that heavily contributed to the defeat of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) during the Malayan Emergency of 1949 to 1960. On the instruction of Prime Minister Winston Churchill to temper communist insurgency among the Malays, Templer arrived a Malayan village where some communist guerillas were getting assistance from villagers. In anger, Templer burst out, “You are a lot of bastards!” His interpreter reported this to the people in Malay as, “His Excellency informs you that he knows that none of your mothers and fathers were married when you were born.” Templ...

Wole Soyinka  Nigeria’s Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka is 90 years today. As the world celebrates this global icon, the Federal Government of Nigeria has bestowed on him a special honor by naming a monument, The National Arts Theatre after him. As encomiums are being poured on him, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has this to say: “He is one Nigerian whose influence transcends the Nigerian space and who inspires people around the world. Since his youth, he has been a vocal critic of oppression and injustice wherever it exists, from apartheid in South Africa to racism in the United States. Soyinka always speaks truth to power. “Beginning in his 20s, he took personal risks for the sake of our nation. His courage was evident when he attempted to broker peace at the start of the civil war in 1967. Detained for two years for his bravery, he narrated his experience in his prison memoir, "The Man Died." “Despite deprivation and solitary confinement, his resolve to speak truth to po...

  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 o...

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 cultu...

  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...