Azu’s new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It, is an idea whose time has come. No other person is more suited to write this book than Azu, a media management guru, content producer, and columnist who has made his mark nationally and internationally
The Book After Trial of Nuhu Ribadu Read More »
Sanusi and Bayero fancy themselves as the centre of the drama. They’re not. Both men and their supporters are grist in a huge and complex power mill grinding through the heart of the politics of 2027 and beyond in the North. Whoever wins now will still yield the throne to pay a future debt
The Pathologies of a Throne Read More »
Oil money, mixed with militancy and violent local politics in the area, has created and nurtured private armies with money, weapons, and political clout comparable to rogue states… But politicians don’t mind. In their desperate search for solutions to the problem of oil theft and also to consolidate their political hold, they have indulged the private armies. Officers deployed in the area are left to invent their own ways of serving two masters – the state and the communities on the one hand and the powerful private armies on the other
The Okuama Dead: Story Behind the Grief Read More »
Politicians who shed crocodile tears for a living visit crime scenes like Kuriga twice in their lifetime. They visit unfailingly during election campaigns and then grudgingly – more for the camera – at a time of grief, like this. Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani, for example, was in Kuriga on Thursday, shortly after the students were kidnapped… It was as if was going to a war front
The Famished Road to Kuriga Read More »
As Keren-happuch’s mother’s story goes, the night after she took her daughter home, the girl became gravely ill. She had to be taken to Queen’s Clinic, Area 6, Abuja, where urine and virginal swap tests had allegedly revealed dead spermatozoa, apart from a piece of festering condom also removed from her inside. When her personal effects were retrieved from Premiere Academy, she had marked a place in her Bible, “What I always feared has happened to me (Job 3:25).”
A School Crime Scene That Won’t Go Away Read More »
My father would not be surprised, for example, that I didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had to write something. I got that from asking several sources I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember, I never could ask him his age. What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable. Mucking about asking him about his age would have been crossing a line
What Does It Mean to Be A Father Today? Read More »
She was having weight problems and had undergone liposuction, a process which she later described as one of the darkest periods of her life. To come through that period and announce a plan to challenge the world’s record holder, a task that would test even the very fit seemed like a bridge too far. Yet, Hilda was willing to try
On Eve of Transition, Nigerian Chef Cooks Up A Storm Read More »
“A senior advocate of Nigeria, Olumide Yinka-Fusika, on a live TV programme was obliged to recommend the outsourcing of the force. While that may sound extreme, only few would argue that the quality and structure of the force is serving anyone other than a privileged few who pay for special police protection and their bosses who profit not just from this elite indulgence but also from other sordid purposes in which they deploy policemen”
Why they shoot friends and spare the enemy Read More »
At an age when his mates are dodging bullets and running scared with nothing on their backs in the midst of the chaos that Borno, a Boko Haram hotbed in Nigeria’s North East has been for nearly two decades, Musa is building things, literally, with his bare hands.
Amidst chaos, 13-year-old boy vows to rebuild broken bridge of hope Read More »
It was about this time eight years ago, wasn’t it? I’m talking of course of when you took what was perhaps the most audacious, some may even say, most controversial political decision of your career at the time to run for the Presidency.