TELL Cover Page
One reminisces events of the dying 2015 with mixed feelings. To recollect the many odious happenings of the year is to push President Muhammadu Buhari to race hell-for-leather to mete severe justice to those who have degraded Nigeria so badly with unimaginable brigandage. Their names are: Theft, larceny, stealing, looting, pillaging and accessory to those crimes. These leeches, opprobrious and vile as they come, are even being fended in the name of human rights by those more catholic than the Pope.
Click here to download our magazines
We must thank God for rescuing us from the clutches of the evil elite that had ruled Nigeria for two decades before now. But we must be watchful because “security gives way to conspiracy”, says William Shakespeare.
This year we lost some great Nigerians who made immeasurable contributions to progress in the nation, socially, economically and politically. Anthony Molade Okoya-Thomas did not breeze through this world without leaving a mark in sports and administration. We lost some traditional rulers, one of them being a major factor in saving Nigeria from breaking to pieces after Aburi Accord. His breadth of knowledge was handy to Yakubu Gowon to tap to take a stand. Another sports promoter and administrator, Bolaji Oni, closed the chapter of death December 21.
Professor Esko’r Toyor, formerly Asuquo Ita, also died. He changed many lives intellectually in the socio-economic and political history of Nigeria. He taught me in one of those conversations in the Nigerian Youth Congress that Karl Marx came to his scientific socialism, influenced by the French Revolution, German philosophy and the British political system. His activities in the Congress and Labour Unity Front, LUF, with Michael Imuodu were constructive. In our last engagement with Yusuf Bala Usman, Sadiq Abubakar and Abidina Coomassie at Abuja in 1999, early in the life of the present democratic practice, he described America’s African Growth and Opportunity Act, AGOA as imperial preference, similar to British colonial economic paternalism. I agreed with him that we needed our own system and style.
Really, so many important persons died who shared the same ideology with one. What will I say of Uche Chukwumerije and Mohammed Dikko (MD) Yusufu their changeless belief in the strength of a Nigeria that could lead the world under a pilot with a patriotic vision?
Happily, all those patriots did not die hopeless because some saw the events of March 28 and the portents for great things to come, all being well, in the hands of Muhammadu Buhari…
WhatsApp us