If we will rather die than give up the fight, will unborn generations hear our names long after we are gone and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, and how fiercely we loved our country? – Ayo Oguntola, Gender and Human Rights Advocate 

A Heart Wrenching Story 

An old woman runs towards the waves of the sea. Her head is filled with thoughts of getting a soft place to fall. She hopes that the strong currents will provide a soft place for her departure. After all, she has nothing else to live for.  Her will to live was shattered when Ciroma, Chukwuma, Adekunle and Ogehenetega, were sent on the sojourn of ghosts by a government that swore to protect them. As tears streamed down her cheeks, she asked the crowds and passers-by who wanted to stop her. “Where are my children?” she kept asking them. “Wetin I dey live for, my world don vanish, wetin remain?” (Why am I alive, my world has vanished. What else is left?) “Chaiiiii! Chinekeee! Osemudiaaa!, why you do me like this”?  (God, why have you done this to me?). Her lamentations run before her as uncontrollable tears trickle down her face. She couldn’t be stopped on her quest to be reunited with her children for a possible last time.

A Call to War

Their offence was to heed a clarion call, in solidarity with other youths. A call to protest and kick against Systematic Injustices, Wanton Corruption, Unabated Police Brutality, Extortion, Robbery, Unlawful Arrest and Detention, Extrajudicial Killing, Indiscriminate Torture. They hoped to push for Social Change, their resolve unflinching; their spirits tough. The widespread knowledge of the problem’s systemic roots has made the clamour for positive changes – a systemic revolution – both popular and non-negotiable.

A year ago, vibrant young men and women organised themselves at the barricades for days and nights across the country. The waves of a systemic revolution were sweeping through the country. The old who couldn’t join actively threw in their weight of support passively and covertly, sending words of encouragement from behind the lines. For the very first time, in a densely religious – and not very spiritual country like Nigeria – religious leaders from different religions showed their unalloyed and open support for the protesting youths. Similarly, the ethnic lines that divide Nigerians were seemingly blurred.

Public figures who usually would not participate in such activities showed their support and joined in a campaign that soon became a movement defying local borders by canvassing recognition from Nigerians in the diaspora, international organisations and the international comity of nations. Likewise, the Feminist Coalition (unpopularly called the “Feminist Coven”) pulled their weight as the vehicle of administration that managed funds, legal, medical and security issues.

The barricades became a Mosque on Friday as Muslims observed their Jumaat Prayer and non-Muslims shielded and join them in prayers. On Sunday, the Christians conducted a unified Church Service, non Christians were in attendance and shielded them as well. All these at the barricades. Never in the history of the sovereign Nigeria, not even the infamous “Ali Must Go” in 1978, the June 12 nor the #Occupy Nigeria Protest in January 2012, has this special bond, love and harmony been openly displayed.

As the bond and unity of purpose grew amongst these youths, they stayed up for almost a fortnight at the barricades shunning their daily bread and “urgent 2k”. They resolved to face their fears and confront their demons head-on because their future was far too important to be left in the hands of lifeless leadership, economic parasites and oppressive law enforcers. They mustered the courage to do what other generations failed to do. They tried to make sure unborn generations did not inherit a virus-infested and corruption-ridden society. Their mantra and name, the #Soro-Soke (speak louder) Generation indicating that they are the Woke Generation.

An Army of Songs versus an Army of Guns

Sadly, the #LekkiTollgate, the headquarters of the nationwide protests, became a Slaughterhouse on Tuesday, 20-10-20, as unarmed civilians were confronted with well trained and fully equipped Armed forces. They came with a vast arsenal to ‘fistfight’. Protesters were shot at, while they clutched national emblems like the Flag. As the Nigerian army tried to silence them with stray bullets, leading to smoke and fire, and the aftermath of the stampede left many protesters injured, and others dead. Among those who died were the children of the unnamed Old Woman. The Lekki Tollgate, an epicentre of commercial and productive activities, became the theatre of blood and home of an unrestricted massacre, #LekkiMassarce.

Media footage released after the sudden disappearance of Oghenetega, clearly stated their simple demand. “We want a Nigerian Society Where the Child of a Nobody, Can Become Somebody Without Knowing Anybody”. While weeping and hysterically smiling, the Old woman asked “were they asking for too much”? “Does it mean every youth with an iPhone, high-end laptop and luxurious car is into cybercrime?” This left bystanders speechless. They were unable to provide a rational explanation for the whereabouts of the ‘Fantastic Four’ – dead or alive. Footage recorded from an Instagram-Live Video showed where one of the children of the Old Woman identified as Adekunle, groaning in pains and agony said: “if they ever tell my story and if I don’t make it through the night, let it be known that I died fighting for freedom”. Men rise and fall, but let it be known that we did our best and died for liberty, so generations could read and tell our stories and remember us as heroes.”

The Old woman wouldn’t stop running, regardless of the brute harshness of the sea. In a loud voice, she said “take me home, I see a piece of Heaven waiting for me, I feel so heavy and I no longer feel alive”

“Oh no!” She screamed, “Take me home, home is where I belong, I can’t take this anymore”.

Truly, the mighty have fallen and the weapons of battle perished!

The blood of Adekunle, Oghenetega, Ciroma, Chukwuma Mustn’t go in vain.

Today, 20-10-2021, we have run a full circle. 365 days ago, young heroes were bled at the city wall of Lekki. After many months, the silence is deafening, we have been chasing after ghosts. The question “WhoGaveTheOrder?” has remained unanswered. No one has claimed responsibility. The Lagos reconciliation panels have turned out as predicted – A sham, and an effort in futility. The #EndSARS wasn’t intended to be a month or a week’s campaign but a social change tool to usher in the New Order in the country.

There was a Country

The resounding question is “how better have we fared since the #EndSARS?”. Unfortunately, we aren’t doing much better. We now find ourselves drowning in inflation with the prices tripling while the naira has only diminished in value and purchasing power. The government boldly speaks of borrowing to service debts. There are increasing levels of insecurity, secessionist agitations and Separationist movements have sprung up across the country, under the watchful eye of the General

Today, as we remember our loved ones who lost their lives as well as those who sustained injured, as we hold our candles on the anniversary of the struggle, My question to you is the same as Paul’s question to the Romans

“Shall we continue in sin and ask for the grace to abound? I ask you today; Shall we continue with this same analogue, backward thinking, greedy rulers filled with gluttony and ask for Nigeria to thrive?”

This is a call to action. I charge you to get your PVC, register to vote and let us come together to drive the Nigeria of the youth that we dream of.

A Prayer for the Bereaved

We pray for the bereaved families to find peace, succour, healing and tranquillity.

May our Maker Heal our Land!

God Bless Nigeria.

The post THE ECHOES OF THE VOICES OF OUR SILENCED HEROES RING LOUDLY AS GONGS FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS. appeared first on ThePalmWineWriter.

the city of medieval global power and influence,

Africa, the land that gave birth to damsel Lake Victoria, the beauty of the great lakes region,

Africa, where is thy spear?

The son of wealthy Mansa Musa, the prince of the Benin Empire,

the son of Emperor Haile Selassie,

the land of the Cape of Good Hope Zulu personified!

Africa, where is thy spear?

Oh, the magnificent continent, set between two beautiful oceans

of Indian and Atlantic! the land of diamond, gold, salt, beautiful oils and ointments,

Africa, you gave and never borrowed,

You were fruitful,

Africa, where is thy spear?

The continent of beautiful cultures, dances and festivals and great

carnivals of strong princesses,

the land of the brave Northern Sahara star, Queen Amina,

the land of historic Queen Sheba and warrior Queen Idia,

Africa, where is thy spear?

Africa, where is thy spear?

Where is your cocoa, rubber, oil palm, yams and groundnuts?

Africa, where is your strong agile hand of productivity?

Are you now prodigious? Are you still valiant, courageous and conquering in nature?

Africa, where is thy pride and spear?

Africa, the land of Ubuntu, the father of Kwame Nkrumah,

Africa, oh, you produced Mandela and Kofi Annan, the father of Julius Nyerere,

Africa, you gave us the spirit of Ujama!

Africa, where is thy spear?

Where is thy spear?

Do we need to remind you of the battle of Adowa?

Oh, Italy is alive to tell the story,

Where is Ethiopia your brave son?

Remember El Kanemi, your son, Ashanti Kotoko of the Gold Coast,

Africa where is thy spear?

Africa, where is thy spear?

The indomitable spirit of the Cameroons and its green luscious forests,

Dakar, is cold, fresh from breeze of the Atlantic,

Africa, are you not nearly there?

Assuredly, Morocco is thriving, Kigali your son has risen,

Accra your son is up and Gaborone is lightened up,

Cape Town remains beautiful

Africa, where is thy spear?

Africa where is thy spear?

The great River Niger, the Limpopo, Zambezi, the Nile and Mediterranean Sea pass

through your beautiful bowels,

Africa, your own the resources at Mambila plateau,

and the entire Congo archipelago belongs to you,

Africa the father of the Gulf of Guinea, you are priceless.

Africa get up, set up on the journey to stardom.

Africa where is thy spear?

A tribute to David Diop (1927-1960),

Author of Africa my Africa

The post Africa Where is Thy Spear – A Poem by Taiwo Akerele appeared first on ThePalmWineWriter.

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”
– W. B. Yeats

I hear voices and I meet frequently with words. Each of whom has poured their souls into my ears as they squeeze through the walls, gates and crevices of my mind. I have developed a relationship with each word and at their
behest, I have placed them delicately, side-by-side, as I try to show them my utmost respect.

I learned that my father, like I, endured this uncanny fascination with words. I believe this was an impregnable
sign to devote myself to poetry. So, I write because I am compelled to hold on to an intrinsic part of myself.

“Omogbolahan Bello has crafted something unique where tradition confronts modernity and spirituality intersects with the questions of daily existence. The result is deep and beautiful!” – Uzezi Ologe

 

“Profundity unveils itself in esoteric dimensions, culminating in experiences through which the fingers of time have tinkered. This brilliant collection is not just entirely enthralling; with soulful engagement, it mildly guides the mind into unleashing its harness. Logue is a debut worthy of literary honours.” – Carter Ford

 

Download Logue Here:

Logue – The Unexpected Voices of City Masquerades

The post Logue – The Unexpected Voices of City Masquerades appeared first on ThePalmWineWriter.

“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership…. The Nigerian Problem is the unwillingness or liability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility; to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership” – Chinua Achebe (The Trouble with Nigeria)

(A Cursory Reading of ‘Nigeria: A New History of a Turbulent Century’ by Richard Bourne)

In August 2017, a few months after I enrolled for my PhD degree at the University of Ibadan, I got funding from the University’s Postgraduate School to attend the 30th West African Linguistics Conference at the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. This was my first outing as a budding academic. Little did I know how much that experience will shape my engagement with rhetoric and discourses of power in my work. I find it worthwhile to share some insights that I gained from that platform to shape the ongoing conversations on restructuring in Nigeria and as a retrospect of a book review event I attended at the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP) that year.

I must say that the experience at Winneba was an exhilarating one, especially for an academic neophyte like me. The conference which was themed Language as an Integration and Development Factor within the West African Region brought together African linguistic experts of indigenous and international extractions in a single room (and sometimes classrooms too), to brainstorm on innovative strategies for preserving African linguistic heritage and scholarship as well as, engage the prospects of deploying language as a medium of development. It was there that idea of political linguistics first resonated in me.

In a paper presentation titled, “Language as Political Metaphor: Deconstructing the Change Mantra in Nigeria’s Political Lexicon”, I argued that flamboyant linguistic lexicons and catch-phrases have been deliberately and derisively misapplied by politicians in their speeches or press interviews to obfuscate the intelligibility of the common man, and thus shield themselves from social accountability and complicity in misgovernance. As was expected, I got a lot of critical feedbacks which got me thinking about re-conceptualizing the paper, and even my doctoral research, along a multidisciplinary plane (as most doctoral students in this 21st Century should do too) but perhaps, most resounding of all was Nancy Henaku’s post-presentation comment about the dialectics of power and hegemony in African political rhetoric, which according to her, situates and structures social relations along particular ethnic, gender and class divides (see works by Foucault, Derrida, Van Dyke and Edelman for early insights on the concepts of discourse and rhetoric). What this means is that the potency of nation-building and development efforts, especially in desperate times such as these when we are confronted with the national question, lies in the sensitivity and viability of our leaders’ body language. Their willingness to not just talk-the-walk, but also temper-the-talk; develop-the-walk; and walk-the-talk will ultimately deliver the anticipated change. Sadly, this remains to be seen in Nigeria.

As I flipped through the pages of Richard Bourne’s classic on Nigeria (Nigeria: A New History of a Turbulent Century published by Zed Books Ltd., republished for Africa by Bookcraft) some two months after my return from the Winneba conference, I felt a wind of nostalgia surge through me and I couldn’t help but ignore the not-to-do list I was working with that day to skim through the 275-page volume that sat comfortably on my palms. Glancing past the glossy cover page, I suspended my sceptic instincts when I read an excerpt of Toyin Falola’s comments on the blurb page. If anyone alive now should say the first thing about Nigeria’s history, it should be him (he’s literally Nigeria history’s living legend), and for him to have talked about the book in such a manner, there must really be something else about Nigeria than (post)colonial historians had told us. I quickly dabbled to the folder I created for African writers on my laptop to cross-reference the book with that of Toyin Falola’s and I sure found something. Bourne’s chronological assortment of landmark events in Nigeria from 1914 to 2015, interspaced by 25 years for each chapter, was a novel attempt at re-imagining the discourse on the 1914 amalgamation that seems to have dominated interventions on Nigeria’s continued corporate existence, in recent times.

In the first chapter, the author opens up conversations about what is known as the ‘1914 amalgamation experiment‘. It was interesting to discover that the key argument for ‘One Nigeria’ according to Fredrick Lugard in a speech he delivered in Lagos (and likely the banalest one) was to provide for a unified railway policy (can you imagine that? and think that Nigeria is yet to have a coherent railway policy, more than a century after), Lord Lugard argues that there was a need for a railway system:

“which will prove, not only a new departure in material prosperity but also that the coming years will increase the individual happiness and freedom from oppression and raise the standard of civilization and comfort of the many millions who inhabit this large country …” (page 3).

 

This singular event was soon to arouse a cacophony of lies and contradictions in the succeeding period after independence. What really caught my attention in this chapter was the author’s referral to Lugard’s political and linguistic brilliance, who had married a skilled journalist and propagandist – Flora Shaw, and was himself a historian who wrote his own autobiography, deployed his intellectual prowess to advertise his ideology in Northern Nigeria to the natives of Nigeria and the British imperial government. Despite the opposition he faced from educated natives, he still succeeded in entrenching the indirect-rule system, a system “which did not leave traditional structures unchanged’, in the North and parts of the South. When he left office in 1919, Lugard reported to the Parliament that his re-organizational strategies were what brought about the end of slavery, separate despotisms, and peasant injustice in the North; barbarism, witchcraft and fetish worship in the South; as well as indiscriminate killing of twins and primitive savagery in the East, all which were the former hallmarks of pre-colonial Nigeria. Those were the supposed gains of Fredrick Lugard’s restructuring campaign.

Nigeria is now 107 years since the Northern and Southern Protectorates were amalgamated and is yet to hear the last of the restructuring debate. Several political and constitutional *confabs have been convened to arbitrate among the disparate voices dispersed across the 923,700 square kilometres landscape of Nigeria, all to no avail. The bane of the Nigerian tragedy has been linked to the incoherence of her leaders in communicating and delivering their electoral promises. This is not difficult to discern, a simple interrogation of most political aspirants vying for elective offices at each level in Nigeria would reveal the mediocre mindset that has come to characterize our political space. A case in point was a 2014 gubernatorial debate facilitated by the Graduate Students of the Department of Political Science, the University of Ibadan for candidates vying for the governorship position in Oyo State. It was quite interesting to know that not only are most Nigerian, and I dare say African, politicians averse to intellectual debates, they are almost completely at loss on what governance is about (what else can be said of an aspirant that promised to provide ‘ice-cream’ for educational institutions if elected into office? Who does that?). Needless to say, there is no better safeguard to determine the quality of a political aspirant’s proposals for office than the quality of the campaign speeches made by such an aspirant, and except, of course, his/her political antecedents (even this may fail sometimes). That was, perhaps, why a politically inexperienced conservative republican like Donald Trump ‘trumped’ a veteran liberal democrat like Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential debates. Who would have imagined that ever happening in the United States – a bastion of liberal democracy in the world?

What politicians of the Nigerian ilk should probably do before setting the agenda for restructuring the country is to undergo rigorous training in public policy analysis and development communication at a specialised institution focused almost exclusively on governance and policy education. Doing that might serve the dual benefits of re-orientating the political class on the dynamics of leading political transformations in a transition economy such as ours, and help them leverage politics to create a conducive ambience for trans-regional dialogues on national unity and development. Without this, it would be unrealistic, to put in the words of Richard Bourne, to suppose that a change of government alone would have any miraculous result for Nigeria.

As Nigerian politicians justle for power ahead of 2023, it is high time they move beyond highfalutin rhetoric and crass mediocrity, at least for once in Nigeria’s post-transition history

*confabs refer to the 1994/1995 Constitutional Conference and the 2014 National Conference

You can read a more detailed review of the book by LSE’s Bronwen Manby here

You can follow my essays and blog posts here

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