Human Interest

a word cloud of gen z slangs

Word of the Year 2024

If you are already “vibing”, millennial-speak for “losing oneself in great music or conversation”, or feeling “shook”, the colloquial noun or verb for “surprise”, then welcome to the evolving vocab world of young adults fostered by the Internet. From activism to fashion, sports, and dating, the language topography is changing, leaving older adults in a trail of incomprehensible slang

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An image mix of Police force PRO Muyiwa, NLC President Ajaero, British national, Andrew Wynne, and some #EndBadGovernance protesters

Ghost of the Witchfinder General

It’s not the business of police officers, the state security service or special advisers to run the government. That’s not their job. They cannot abridge the people’s freedoms in a quest for ascendancy. Those who breach the law in exercising their liberty should not face the justice that reminds us of Hopkins’ England but a process consistent with modern progressive society, one that Tinubu was voted to uphold.

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an image depicting okuama community burning along with the images of the deceased soldiers with a main focus on Col AH Ali

The Okuama Dead: Story Behind the Grief

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

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a group of students with bandits behind

The Famished Road to Kuriga

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

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an image of Keren-happuch in tears in front of a school building

A School Crime Scene That Won’t Go Away

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).”

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a man feeding a baby and a woman on her ipad seated on a couch

What Does It Mean to Be A Father Today?

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

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