Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria’s Military Coup Culture (1966 – 1976). Max Siollun. Algora Publishing; 268 pages; £22.51. Buy from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com The story of Nigeria begins rather blandly with a colonial administrative decision to ‘unify’ over 250 ethnic groups. Forty-four years later, the amalgamated region became a self-governing state with a vague idea of nationhood. It should have been [...]

The Nigerian National Honours Awards were plagued with rejections, errors, a presidency struggling for credibility and an embarrassing shortage of medals for awardees, we seem to be plumbing the depths of ignominy, shame and disgrace with our most prestigious events.

The citations for the awards won by NEXT newspaper reporters show that they did expose a seriously corrupt enterprise in out premier revenue industry and all those who matter either ignored or sanctioned it.

by Akin Akintayo
President Goodluck Jonathan gave a speech at an interdenominational service celebrating the 51st Independence anniversary of Nigeria and it was replete with utterly dreadful analogies – it was awful, awful, awful.

Reviewing WikiLeaks cables created 10 years ago and a Human Rights Watch Report published today, for all the media profile the anti-corruption crusade has had in Nigeria, it is sad to say the country is still considered highly corrupt, the system cannot seem to handle the workload and the alleged criminals have gummed up the judicial system completely.

Sometime ago in May, at a house party in a friend’s house – an artist, I found myself seated around a table with a few elderly women who grew up in Mississippi in the 60s. One of them is my friend’s mother – a seventy year old professor of history in my institution. The conversation they were having was about [...]

A husband’s murder of his wife brings into sharp focus our acceptance of the impunity of domestic violence and sometimes the preference of that for the sake of keeping a loveless marriage going to appease the needs for tradition and societal norms.

The figures are staggering when one reviews the profile of President Goodluck Jonathan on Facebook after a year, over half a million likes and comments, over 300 statuses and a keen eye on Nigerian issues as he engages the social media public.

Note: This post was written last week A more specific title would be ‘Nollywood for Child Rights, Women’s Rights and Against Human Trafficking’. For those of you who don’t know, I currently work with a non-governmental organisation and part of my job entails attending all sorts of meetings. Last week, I attended press conference at ActionAid on their new project, [...]

Making history history On June 12 2011, I wrote a piece titled Nigeria: Time to give June 12 a decent burial [1] for a number of reasons which already appear in that piece. Basically, June 12 1993 is an important date in Nigerian history, it presented the opportunity for democratic self-determination but the military junta of that time made the [...]