‘Have your President call my President’ | Sonala Olumhense
“Those are just rumours, Excellency. Many of them are our friends, and they have told us they never did any such thing. It is just like Sani Abacha; he never looted anyone, that is just a name. But believe me, if you send us the ventilators, we will soon be curving the flat all over Nigeria.”
How to govern Nigeria | Ali Muhammad Garba
Start with a ‘populist’ programme and make plenty of noise to affirm your campaign promises and resonate with the electorate. A bit of noisy razzmatazz on Boko Haram, funding for agriculture, some high profile arrests on corruption charges and, more importantly, painting the opposition and critics black. Hammer on the point that you are not a thief.
Is your country a glorified colony? A ten-point test | Chuma Nwokolo
You cannot tell whether you live in a colony simply by looking at your constitution. Constitutions have lots of dead letters: rights that are there in writing but dead-on-delivery. To help you decide the colonial status of your country, we put together this rough-and-ready ten-point test.
The search for greener pastures│Seun Akioye
I arrived in London in the winter, no jacket, no money save 20 pounds. I was armed with the book 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene — it actually belonged to Adeola Akinremi. I reckoned, by the time I had practised at least 20 of the laws on the white people, I would be rich and famous. As I struggled inside the cold on my way to Woolwich, I was planning which law I would deploy on the editor of The London Telegraph newspaper. I must get a job with that paper and I would start the next day.
My Lord, tell me where to keep your bribe│Niyi Osundare
My Lord; Please tell me where to keep your bribe. Do I drop it in your venerable chambers; Or carry the heavy booty to your immaculate mansion. Shall I bury it in the capacious water tank; In your well laundered backyard. Or will it breathe better in the septic tank? Since money can deodorize the smelliest crime.
How Buhari could deliver Justin Trudeau│Tunde Asaju
Canadians are spoilt rotten! They have a handsome prime minister that they insult daily. Early this year, a minister appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused gestures to be lobbied to give a judicial soft-landing to a Canadian company – SNC-Lavalin, accused of bribing corrupt officials to do business in Libya. The Minister in question, 48-year old Jody Wilson-Raybould leaked the gesture and later resigned. Ingrate eh? I thought so too. She flatly told the man who appointed her that she felt uncomfortable carrying out her boss’s orders. Just negodu the insolence!
How to be a Nigerian Scholar in the West│James Yékú
You are “in the abroad” and your views must be seen by these irrational colleagues you have left in the dark as the absolute and irrefutable truths. After all, their research is a mere survivalist response to a parlous postcolonial state you are so generous to theorize in your peer-reviewed essays. Yours is the finest example of scholarship and your prestigious location is the desired Mecca those at home dream only about.
How to write about Africa│Binyavanga Wainaina
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book.
Nigerian Tailor Victims Support Bill 2019│Elnathan John
A bill for an Act to cater to the millions of traumatised victims of tardy Nigerian tailors, to establish a Tailor Crimes Commission, Tailors Victims Support Commission and the Tailors Victims Support fund, to criminalise and provide punishment for tardiness by tailors and other matters related thereto.
Opinion: Laugh if you like. But we need satire more than ever│Owen Jones
It is all too often those at the bottom of society who are demonised and derided. There’s too little punching up. Where is the scrutinising – and yes, ridiculing – of the poverty-paying bosses, the tax dodgers, or the bankers responsible for economic disaster? Satire can be brilliantly effective at encouraging us to challenge the way our society is run. It is a more crucial element of our democracy than we perhaps think, and we should fight to bring it back to the prime-time slots it deserves.
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