Month: May 2013

Poems are not fossilized insects, caught mid-buzz
in amber, shakespeared museum pieces
with the correct number of feet in the meter,
waiting to be dusted off and counted,
or fizzed in pop culture, orange soda shaken
and hallmarked to the singsong tick
of a driveled metronome.

It’s not about form anymore.
This playing tennis without a net
volleys inside what’s spoken–call it poetry
or pretty prose, the difference is felt in the bones,
strung by breath and assonance if we have ears for it,
or blood pulled by a moon in full perigee, and the surety
of knowing night sings to us in the voices of crickets,
certain as day shouts the hard blue of sky, broken
by sunlight and poured into valleys.

A Dali is no da Vinci, though his art filters light
like stained glass does sun, from somewhere under the canvas,
and van Gogh stars reel over the world

Yes, the BBC sent the snooty John Simpson to South Africa to do a bit of parachute journalism and be led around by the white “rights” group Afriforum (since when are they are a credible source?) to come up with this insulting question: “Do white people have a future in South Africa?” Read it here. The main claims of the piece (and a documentary broadcast in the UK on Sunday night) are that the white poor number about 400,000 (that would be about 10% of the white population), that there are 80 “white squatter camps” situated around the capital Pretoria, and that there’s a deliberate attempt on the part of the new government to neglect whites. These reports usually add attacks on white farmers into the mix as if there are direct links between these phenomena. And the BBC did that too. It’s a mashup of all the nonsense…

Given South Africa’s stated commitment to multilingualism, you might not think that a requirement from one of the country’s universities that its students learn an indigenous African language would raise much alarm. Yet alarm has nonetheless been the reaction from a few unexpected quarters to the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s announcement that all first-year students enrolled from next near onwards will be required to develop “some level” of isiZulu proficiency by the time they graduate.

On the 15th of May 2013, President Goodluck Jonathan declared a State of Emergency in 3 states in the northern region of Nigeria. Apart from the debate on the propriety or otherwise of the declaration (or “proclamation” as the constitution calls it), a lot of debate has also been had on whether or not a state of emergency can be declared with the Governors of the affected states remaining in office. With all the “sacred” opinions flying about, perhaps it is time to take an academic look at what a State of Emergency is.

What Is A State of Emergency?

A state of emergency is a proclamation by the government of a country suspending certain judicial, legislative or executive functions, or suspending certain rights guaranteed by the constitution, during times of civil unrest or natural disasters. The concept of the need for the state to have emergency powers can be…

By Nwachukwu Egbunike

About 10,000 souls have been grinded in Boko haram (BH) blender since 2001. These innocents did not stand in the way of the vampires who have declared a hate war on the Nigerian state. They had each woken that morning with the ambitions filled with hope, to strive to lay food on the table, to seek for a better future but sometime during the day, they had been sent on – with a first class ticket – an early encounter in the void unknown. With time, the detonation of bombs became a daily icing that the living began referring to the dead as numbers. This was the situation before the declaration of state of emergency by the government on the hotspots where Boko haram had almost established sovereignty and wishes to continue their blood bath.

Unfortunately, this aspect has been missing in the national conversation since the…

By Nwachukwu Egbunike 

In Nigeria, you must capture the essence of your being by the number of titles you been able to acquire over the years. “Former special assistant, formerly choir master, etc” expresses the clout of the bearer. And such is the current ruforufo fight between two former public servants of the Federal Republic. To think that they are throwing arrows at each other just because of an ordinary book, haba!

These two super intelligent warriors of a stale empire have taken to the streets and their disciples have since joined their fight. Wahala started with an autobiographical fiction that the twitter king’s pen wrote. In his accidental hagiography, he revealed the backsides of his former peers. And not only that, his book attacked the retired emperor, the former deputy emperor and all those who were in the inner kitchen. The only innocent one was the author.

Mallam Nasir El-Rufai is a saint. El-Rufai’s intellectual and managerial wisdom is unmatched by any living thing that has ever been in power in Nigeria. Those are the things we discover in his memoir, The Accidental Public Servant. TAPS is not only a celebration of an individual’s narcissism but a revelation of the destructive elitism on whose back this polarised nation suffers. But because TAPS documents the political tragedies we have witnessed since the coming of this present democracy in which the author was a privileged actor, we must repaint our triumphal arch to welcome this confession of an insider.

I won’t advise any hypertensive person to open the book, if not for the author’s inability to contain his large ego in this overtly expressive tome but for his exposé of the financial scams and abuse of power by the political elite who, despite declared differences and public opposition…