If you were in Western Nigeria in the 1980s, you would remember a television drama with the title Fó’po mó’yò which featured Fadeyi Oloro, the hugely popular ‘venomous’ actor who died last week. May God rest his soul. Fó’po mó’yò is about the appointment and installation of a new king. It is about the intrusion (or injection) of the powerful, malevolent, poisonous outlaw, Fadeyi, into the mix and spanners thrown in the works. It is about a bitter, painful, violent struggle for power – and for peace, sanity and fairness. People die; reputations suffer – and then peace prevails in…
Author: Lasisi Olagunju
The 2023 presidential election in Nigeria is not the worst in human history. That dubious reputation belongs in Liberia where, in 1927, the then President Charles D.B. King scored 234,000 votes out of a total of 15,000 registered voters. The victor was also kind enough to give his opponent 9,000 votes as a mark of fairness and justice. That uncommon feat is naturally in the Guinness Book of World Records. We in Nigeria have not reached that enviable height. We will get there one day, soon. But we had a presidential election last Saturday in which the person who was…
The All Share Index (ASI) fell by 51.24 absolute points, or 0.10 percent, to close at 51,339.01 points yesterday as trading came to an end. To end at N27.685 trillion, the market capitalization also shed N28 billion. Losses in medium and large capitalized equities, including Zenith Bank, Champion Breweries, International Breweries, UPDC Real Estate Investment Trust (UPDCReit), and Lafarge Africa, had an impact on the downturn. According to analysts at GTI: Securities Limited, who were reviewing market performance, “Equities market closed negative with a prevalent sell-off trend. Throughout the week, cautious trading is what we anticipate. “While expected, the market…
A month from now, it will be over for the year 2021; a new year will be born. The Bantu people say the road does not tell the traveller what lies ahead. Is that also true here? I do not think so. We have trodden this crooked road long enough to know its offerings. Politicians whose sweet tenures end in 2023 are already struggling with the hands of the clock. They think the days are no longer long as before. They feel Time is moving rather too fast; they ask the day to slow down a bit. Those in dawdling…
There was a time in this country when one single person was acting prime minister, acting minister of finance and substantive minister of defence. How would a man perform the functions of those offices simultaneously without having an accident? It happened that during that interesting period, the question of purchasing a new office for the ministry of defence came up. The three-in-one minister rose to the occasion and he did it ‘perfectly.’ How he did it is recorded in his biography in these brazen words: “He negotiated and purchased the property. He then wrote this in the file: ‘As minister…
Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week has a very interesting definition of honour. He says it means “respect yourself (so that) others will come to respect you.” That is from his ‘Paradise’ – a ‘narrative reversal’ of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Every piece of writing – or speech – is a potential engenderer of reactions. I got calls and text messages throughout last week asking if I had seen the ‘rejoinder’ to my September 27, 2021 article from the spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed. I wished…
