Aside from the ruling class in the north, south, west, and east of the country, nobody else is benefitting from the country. ―Ebuka Onyekwelu Sixty years is too long, but apparently, too short a time within which Nigeria can decide the identity it wants to take on. For six decades after Nigeria’s independence, basic questions of nationhood remain unanswered; Nigeria is yet to resolve issues surrounding its identity. Most recently, the recurrent question remains if...
Inhumane sharia punishments, including flogging, amputations, and stoning, have long embarrassed the federal government of Nigeria. That is happening now, with the 120-month prison sentence handed down by a Kano sharia court to a thirteen-year-old boy, Omar Farouq, and the death sentence handed down by the same court, again for blasphemy, on a twenty-two-year-old musician, Yahaya Sharif, for a song he shared on social media. A third, Mubarak Bala, a self-proclaimed atheist, has disappeared in police custody....
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a September 22 UN General Assembly (UNGA) speech, made continued French military involvement contingent upon Mali’s restoration of civilian rule. He was blunt: “They (the junta) must put Mali on the irreversible path of returning to civilian power and organize rapid elections.” And, “France […] can only remain engaged on this condition.” As he has in the past, Macron was also clear that France has a low tolerance level for popular demonstrations against...
For 50 dormant years – roughly, the period between Muhammad Ali’s heyday and the Miami Heat donning hoodies after Trayvon Martin’s murder – athletes, as a general rule, steered clear of politics. Teams and leagues liked it that way, as did sponsors. Why take a stand if it might cost you a customer? Fans seemed to like it that way, too. In a national survey conducted in 2016, after Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem to...
Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congolese-origin activist in France, first attracted social media attention by seeming to steal an artifact from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris to protest slavery, colonialism and the alleged French theft of Africa’s cultural patrimony. The attempted theft was carefully staged for live streaming. The museum authorities stopped the theft. In July, he repeated his protest at a museum in Marseilles. It was also live-streamed. Diyabanza is now back in the news because he, along...
It could have been minority’s win because of the absence of majority participation. ―Ebuka Onyekwelu The just-concluded governorship election in Edo state was a clash of powerful political forces and no doubt part of the buildup to the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria. But most importantly, the victory in that election belongs to the people of Edo. The less than six hundred thousand Edo voters, who matched their words with action, went out to cast...
Seven years ago, my student and I at Penn State built a bot to write a Wikipedia article on Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s play “Chitra.” First, it culled information about “Chitra” from the internet. Then it looked at existing Wikipedia entries to learn the structure for a standard Wikipedia article. Finally, it summarized the information it had retrieved from the internet to write and publish the first version of the entry. However, our bot...
With COVID-19 vaccines currently in the final phase of study, you’ve probably been wondering how the FDA will decide if a vaccine is safe and effective. Based on the status of the Phase 3 trials currently underway, it is unlikely that the results of these trials will be available before November. But it is likely that not just one but several of the competing COVID-19 vaccines will be shown to be safe and effective by the end...
On September 2, Boko Haram (ISWA) militants reportedly killed 10 Nigerian soldiers in Borno state. Such bloodshed has become so commonplace that it often fails to garner much interest. International news outlets spilled little ink to report the incident. Nevertheless, the failures of the region’s militaries—as well as the Lake Chad Basin Commission’s Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF)—to combat Boko Haram merit greater attention from policymakers and the international community. The widespread and persistent human rights abuses...
In the face of apparently soaring levels of crime and violence, the Nigerian government has launched a community policing initiative. Abuja has set aside N13 billion (about $35 million) to fund the launch and is recruiting some 10,000 constables, according to Nigerian media. The Chief of Police for Ekiti state is hinting that the new constables will be deployed in the areas from which they come. Locally based, the constables would develop ties with community leaders and,...
