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By Tayo Olaleye In a small mining town in the North of Nigeria a few years ago, 100 children died rapidly within days and weeks of each other. No[...]
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By government admission, some of the 150 private jets in Nigeria are used to ferry more than passengers; they are being used to fly huge sums of money out of the country. That, by itself should not be a surprise in the view of lawyer and activist, Femi Falana, who observes that most of the jets are owned by fuel [...]
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When, recently, in a circular to all staff, my employers forbade the speaking of "vernacular" in favour of the English language, my initial reaction was of extreme crossness. I guess at the back of this was a recollection of the distasteful responses associated with similar policies growing up. Overtly paternalistic teachers in the primary and secondary schools enforced this ban [...]
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by Kola Tubosun As part of my five-week blogathon on the five shortlisted stories in the 2013 Caine Prize, I present some thoughts on the first story: Elnathan John's Bayan Layi, first published at http://www.percontra.net/issues/25/fiction/bayan-layi/. ______ Bayin Layi is a story of street children, located this time, unlike those in Olufemi Terry's Caine Prize-winning Stickfighting Days, in a real and defined city. The violence they [...]
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by Kola Tubosun Fantastic news! Out of this year's five shortlisted stories for the annual Caine Prize for Writing, four of the stories are from Nigeria. This is unprecedented in the history of the organization. According to the announcement on the Caine Prize website, "The five contrasting titles interrogate aspects of things that we might feel we know of Africa - [...]
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A rejoined is necessary I have not written for NigeriansTalk in quite a while but after reading Salisu Suleiman's piece titled Private universities in Nigeria: Where are the 'big' men? I could not resist the need to comment on a particular part of his article. By the time I finished writing my comment, I realised I might well have broken [...]
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When, about 20 years ago, signboards announcing Heritage University sprang up around Kaduna, many thought the founders were setting the stage for the emergence of private university education in Nigeria, especially in the disadvantaged areas. Today, even the faded remnants of those signboards cannot be found. The much heralded Heritage University never took off. Nigeria's 170 million people have a [...]
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On Saturday morning, last week, in a conversation with friends on Facebook, I was reminded of Reverend Martin Niemoller's famous 1937 statement - more about this later. Over the week leading up to this conversation, I had had problems with the (lack of) quality of after-sales service for my car (from one of the country's leading car retailers). I complain [...]
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Book Review by Blessing Omakwu When I heard Chimamanda Adichie was writing a new book that drew heavily from hair and race as themes, I was excited for two reasons: first, because the bibliophile in me lives for everything Adichie writes; and second, because race and hair are familiar territory as an ex-member of the African diaspora in America. [...]
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Over 30 years after leaving office, former US president Jimmy Carter remains one of the most visible and respected international figures. By contrast, George W. Bush, who left office just four years ago, remains generally hidden from the public. While President Barack Obama called on former president Bill Clinton to help him campaign, neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney called [...]
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