Hoha! (Pointblank)

""It is no hyperbole that Anambra will provide the litmus test for democracy, and the existence of Nigeria as a single entity. We witnessed how Anambra was handed over as a private fiefdom of political godfathers by a former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. We saw how a President connived...and personally managed the stealing of a governorship mandate."

-------Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka on the fate of the nation as the upcoming off-year election in Anambra State draws closer.


"Things fall Apart was the balm, keeping us alive in the face of tremendous suffering in prison” – Nelson Mandela to the BBC after release from jail. When an art transcends time, and touches the people from Japan to Iceland, Kenya to Chile, then that art or literature is an enduring treasure. Those are the creations of gifted artists. Achebe is one of the few world geniuses and certainly and unquestionably, one of the the best ever novelists. His ‘Things Fall Apart’ was extraordinary in the ’50’s and fifty years later, quite as profound as ever."

Ruth J. Simmons, President, Brown University on the Chinua Achebe Colloquium held at Brown University.


"Despite the multi-billion dollar or multi- trillion naira budgets, Nigeria, with a population of over 140 million, is still grappling with 103 public and private universities, in addition to dozens of polytechnics and colleges of education, while the USA, with a population of about 300 million is having over 5,700 universities and Japan with a population of about 127 million, has over 1,200 universities. Out of over one million candidates that sat for the universities entrance examinations yearly in recent times, only about 300,000 were offered admission yearly by the universities and about 50 per cent of this figure graduate on annual basis with poverty/unemployment passports issued to them. Our health sector is also nothing to write home about. Tens of millions of Nigerians are still drinking acidic water from unprotected sources. Our agriculture is steadily drifting towards pre-subsistence level. The Malaysians and Indonesians, who came to us in the 1960s and 1970s, so as to be taught the secrets of palm tree cultivation, weeding and harvesting, have not only mastered them, but also they have mechanised the palm industry, which now earns them billions of dollars annually and feeds millions of their skilled and unskilled nationals."

-------Emeka Umeagbasi, Chairman, Board of Trustees, International Society for civil liberties and the Rule of Law on why Nigeria needs a 'radical' revolution speaking to journalists on the state of the troubled nation.


"Most, if not all of the indices of failed states, declare Nigeria well on its way to joining that disreputable club. Nigeria boasts a government unable to deliver basic social services. It is plagued by corruption so endemic and monumental it is hard to separate it from state policy. It lacks the capability or discipline to prevent threats to public safety and national integrity and is assailed by active challenges to its legitimacy. The latest disaster of a re-run election in Ekiti state, meant to correct the errors of the first, proved an even greater show of shame."

-------Ogaga Ifowodo, Poet, Lawyer and PhD candidate, Cornell University on a "yea" and "nay" debate on whether Nigeria is a failed state published by BBC News.


"It is obvious, all the signs of a state heading for failure - where a constitutional authority increasingly shows an inability to provide basic services like guaranteeing security to life and property, maintenance of economic and social services, infrastructure and food security - are not evident. On the contrary, for the first time in the country's history, Nigeria is attempting to address its economic and social infrastructure inadequacies. The economy has never been more open to new investors and the government recognises the imperative for private-sector investments in critical infrastructure such as power, transportation and energy."

-------Waziri Haruna Ahmadu, former Health and Agriculture Secretary, and adviser to the ailing President Umaru Yar'adua on why he thinks Nigeria is not a failed state.

Nigerian Jungle Blues and Friday Cartoons

The Federal High Court in Asaba has quashed the 170 charges the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) preferred against former Delta State Governor, James Ibori, alleging that he mismanaged huge public funds while in office.The case, instituted two years ago, ended on Thursday when Justice Marcel Awokulehin, who said he trod “the part of caution” struck it out. He arrived in court at 9.30 a.m. and began by recounting how the suit went from the Federal High Court, Kaduna to Asaba. MORE @ DAILY INDEPENDENT


“In the event of any need to engage in politics of succession, it is the position of ACF that the provisions of the Nigerian Constitution remain the only effective guide for the process,” the group said in a communiqué at the end of separate meetings of its National Working Committee, NWC, and the National Executive Council, NEC, in Kaduna yesterday. MORE @ VANGUARD


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Ehirim Files Mind Power from the University Presses and other Publications

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With The President By Taylor Branch, Simon Schuster, New York: 707pp; $35.00

"Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton's point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicsns at Clinton's theft of their 'small is better' programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argument alive resource. The climatic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and substitution of work requirements; a decision on which Branch comments too briefly.'"

-------David Bromwich, The New York Review of Books


Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the age of Jim Crow by Raymond W. Smock, Ivan R. Dee/Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

"The co-editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers reconsiders the man who rose from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had achieved in American history. Mr Smock sees him as a field general in a war of racial survival, his 'compromise' a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. 'A masterwork of concision and compacted power.'"

-------Donald L. Miller, Library of African American Biography.


Boxing: A Cultural History by Kasia Boddy, The University of Chicago Press; 492pp, $29.95

"At nearly five hundred densely packed pages...boxing would seem to include everything that has ever been written, dipicted or in any way recorded about boxing... As Kasia Boddy's masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean -- oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged -- in the very quantity of data she has amassed. To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens -- hundreds? -- of inspired mini-essays."

-------Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books.


Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton; Louisiana State University Press, $45.00

"Hamilton, a former fereign correspondent and public servant who is currently dean at Louisiana State University's Manship School Mass Commubnication, spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. Where else might we stumble across a reporter's account of the Battle of New Orleans? Or the Senior James Gordon Bennett's sharp-edged view of the coronation of Queen Victoria?"

-------James Boylan, Founding Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and Professor Emeritus of Journalism and History at the University of Massachusetts, Armherst.


The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700; by Patricia Badir, University of Notre Dame Press, 320ppm $40.00

"[Badir's] fascinating narrative traces the evolution of the Magdalene from the Reformation to the Restoration and raises provocative questions about the mnemonic function of religious art, the power of beautiful images in an iconoclastic culture, and the place of effect, longing, and embodiment in aProtestant poetics."

-------Huston Diehl, University of Iowa

D-Day: The Battle of Normandy by Anthony Beevor, Pengium, London, 608pp, $32.95

"With Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor reinvented grand narrative history for the late 20th Century, combining, as Orlando Figes put it in the Sunday Telegraph 'a soldiers understanding of war with the narrative of a novelist.' Now he brings that characteristic combination of skills to bear on the D-Day landings and the subsequent battle for Normandy, when the largest invasion fleet the world had ever known converged on Nazi-occupied France."

-------London Review of Books

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans, Little, Brown & Company; New York: 580pp, $27.99

"The 'Vanished Times' of the subtitle speak to an era when journalists made things, part of a complicated daily manufacturing apparatus of typesetting and printing that always ended in the satisfying plop of a physical object...No one was more satisfied than Evans, who saw in newspapers a route out of those humble, stout beginings that crop up again in narratives that hew to the Great Man theory of history. (It made sense that Evans would go on to write 'The American Century' and 'They Made America,' works that suggest history was made by those with their hands on the levers of wondrous machines).'"

"Harold Evans remains one of the great figures of modern journalism...His auto-biography is both gripping and timely."

-------The Economist

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race in America by Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers; University of Virginia Press, $22.95

"This stimulating discussion brings needed historical perspective to 2008's election season brouhaha over then candidate Obama's longtime minister, Wright, who was lambasted for making what we were widely considered to be racially divisive remarks from his pulpit after September 11."

-------Publishers Weekly

Nigerian Jungle Blues and Sunday Cartoons

Even though those who profess to be close to President Umaru Yar’ Adua are going on as if they have all been briefed to talk only about the weather, medical experts have thrown more light on why the President may be spending a long time in his hospital bed. Sunday Sun sources said all the talks about the President returning soon are just proceeds of spin doctors’ imagination.Playing politics with President’s health “Some people are just trying to hide behind a finger while trying to play politics with the President’s health. When next anybody tells you the President is returning soon, ask the person when last he spoke with Yar’Adua. If he or she says they saw him, ask him how many life support machines are in the President’s room. MORE @ SUN NEWS ONLINE


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Nigerian Jungle Blues and Saturday Cartoons

At least, three choice properties believed to have been acquired by the immediate past governor of Sokoto State, Alhaji Attahiru Bafarawa,with alleged stolen public funds, have been traced by the Economic and other Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC). The buildings are one each in Abuja, Bafarawa (the ex-governor’s home town) and London. He was arrested in Abuja last Wednesday by operatives of the EFCC as he left a meeting of the evolving Mega Party. MORE @ VANGUARD


SOURCE: BLACK NEWS


"Uni-Port undergraduates defiled by ex-militants." SOURCE: PUNCH


SOURCE: GUARDIAN

News Desk (West Africa Update) Monday, December 7, 2009

Guinea's military leader, Moussa (Dadis) Camara, talks to troops before the arrival of Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, at the airport in Conakry, Guinea, on Oct. 5. (Schalk van Zuydam/Associated Press)
Guinea president awake in hospital after shooting
Guinea's military strongman, shot last week in an assassination attempt and airlifted to a hospital in Morocco, is able to speak but is unlikely to return home soon, a government official said Monday. Guinea's foreign minister Alexandre Cece Loua said President Moussa (Dadis) Camara is alert and in possession of his mental faculties and his condition is "encouraging," an upgrade from earlier in the day when Camara reportedly was uncommunicative. READ MORE...


FELA! to Appear on 'The Colbert Report' 12/7

Fela!, the new musical based on the life and music of groundbreaking African composer, performer and activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, will perform on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" on Monday, December 7 at 11:30pm EST. Host Stephen Colbert will interview Fela! Tony award-winning director & choreographer Bill T. Jones, followed by a performance of "Zombie," led by Sahr Ngaujah and accompanied by the world renowned Afrobeat band Antibalas. This booking marks the first Broadway production ever to appear on the popular satirical pundit show. Fela! is currently in performances at Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre. Tickets are available through www.Telecharge.com, by calling (212) 239-6200 or in-person at The Eugene O'Neill Box Office, located at 230 West 49th Street. READ MORE...

Africa Confronts Unchecked Piracy on Both West and East Coasts
Almost all the attention on and, hence, resources for combating piracy in African waters have of late been focused almost exclusively on the waters off the Somali coastline. But a recent bloody attack is a reminder that the Gulf of Guinea on the opposite side of Africa can be equally dangerous – if not more so – even if it does not grab headlines as have spectacular heists like last week’s capture of the Greek supertanker MV Maran Centaurus. The Greek ship was transporting more than two million barrels of oil destined for the United States.

UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs Must Raise $368 Million

The United Nations says it needs $368 million for humanitarian work in West Africa in 2010. The West Africa division of the U.N. Office of Humanitarian Affairs has launched an appeal for $368 million to continue its work in the region in 2010. The money will go towards financing 129 projects, as diverse as child malnutrition in Sierra Leone and sanitation in flood-prone areas of Senegal... READ MORE...

Naija Dailies Cartoons

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Ehirim Files Reads from Africa and other African-Related Publications

Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds: South Africa and the United States by Mark Kende; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 317 pp, $35.99

"A fascinating, original, and genuinely important book, illuminating not only the South Africa and American constitution, but constitutional theory and practice in general."

--------Cass Sunstein, Head of the White House/s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.


Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, Weaver Press; Harare, 296pp $30.95

"Becoming Zimbabwe is the first comprehensive history of Zimbabwe, spanning the years from 850 to 2008. In 1997, the Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Morgan Tsuangiral, expressed the need for more open and critical process of writing history in Zimbabwe... a profoundly new history of Zimbabwe that tears apart all of the old certainties."

-------David Monroe, Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, and author of the World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony


Genuine Intellectuals: Academic and Social Responsibilities in Africa by Bernard Nsokika Fonlon; Lang Ripcig, Cameroon: 172pp $27.99

"Bernard Fonlon... believed in public service with selfless dedication and unwavering integrity... He was educated in the classical mould of Europe, yet he remained close to home in his daily life."

-------Professor Aliko Songolo, UC Irvine


Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men by John A. Rich, MD; M.P.H. The Johns Hopkins University Press

"John Rich, who has devoted so much of his career to the study of violence -- especially in men of color -- challenges us to see beyond the injuries and the anger and to hear and appreciate the plight of these men and to understand that they, like us, seek a place of safety in their lives."

-------David Satcher, MD, Ph.D., 16th Surgeon General of the United States

Nairobi to Shenzhen By Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo

"As with the president's best-selling memoir, 'Dreams From My Father," Ndesanjo's book delves into growing up as a mixed-race child and into a psyche shaped by an erratic father. 'My father beat my mother and my father beat me,' Ndesandjo told the Associated Press...'I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting.' Although strictly autobiographical, the novel skips over the part where the protagonists half brother is elected president of the Uniterd States. 'I didn't want to take on any strong political themes in this book,' Ndesandjo said. His mention of the president: 'I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job.' Barrack Obama Sr. died in 1982 and the half brothers did not know each other as children.'"

-------Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy by Joseph Zulaika; The University of Chicago Press, $20.00

"This is by far the best book on terrorism I have read for many years. In its systematic deconstruction of counter-terrorism ideology and its call to take terrosrist subjectivity seriously, this is a book of tremendous importance. Terrorism is incredibly rich in analysis and insight - I have no doubt that readers will be mining it for new ideas for many years to come."

-------Richard Jackson, Abenystwyth

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America byHilary J. Moss, The University of Chicago Press, $37.50

"I cannot think of any other book that is like Scooling Citizens, which makes an important contribution both to the historiography of African Americans and to the history of education in America. Well-written and well-argued, this book is an original contribution to scholarship."

-------Shane White, author of Stories of Freedom in Black New York

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yurus, with Karl Weber; Public Affairs, 282pp, $14.95

"This has been the message for the past twenty-six years of Muhammad Yurus, the Bangladesh economics professor, Nobel Prize winner, and recent recipient of the United States Medal of Freedom, who founded the Grameen Bank. Gramir pioneered the concept of micrcredit, the granting of small loans to people who otherwise would have no access to money to run a business. These, historically, have been the poorest of the poor; in Bangladesh, Grameen now even loans money to street beggars."

-------Sue Halpern, a scholar in residence at Middlebury. Her most recent book is "Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research."

Race, Incarceration, and American Values by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Temmie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant; Boston Review?MIT Press, 86pp, $14.95

"The most dramatic effects of this incarceration are concentrated on the most disadvantaged -- those who are not only African-Americans or Latino, but also poor, uneducated, and living in highly segregated ghettos. While roughly 60 percent of black high school dropouts have spent time in prison, only 5 percent of college-educated African-Americans have done so... The correlation of race and crime in the publics mind reinforces prejudice that affects every African-American."

-------David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Highlife Music in West Africa by Sonny Oti, Matthouse Press, Nigeria, 288pp

Dancing With Life: Tales from the Township by Christopher Mlalazi, Amabooks Publishers, Zimbabwe, 2009, 88pp

"Christopher Mlalazi may well be the most promising young writer in Zimbabwe today."

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 477pp, $30.00

"Armstrong's rise was not easy. He performed about 300 nights a year and lived out of a suitcase. In the early days, he bounced back and forth between Chicago and New York, endured Jim Crow humiliations during tours of the South and struggled to pursue music without getting overwhelmed by the details of running a jazzchestra. (Eventually, he turned the business side over to white managers.)

Still, after revolutionizing jazz of black 1920s, Armstrong was in the vanguard of black entertainers who crossed over to white mass culture, leading an integrated band, appearing in movies and becoming a regular first on radio and then on television."

-------Scott Martelle, an Irvine, California-based journalist and critic reports from New York for the Los Angeles Times Book Review

Nigerian Jungle Blues and Sunday Cartoons

Akure – THE Police in Ondo State, yesterday, quizzed the senator representing Ondo Central, Chief Gbenga Ogunniya and three members of the House of Representatives for allegedly being in possession of two boxes containing already thumb printed ballot papers during the bye-election into the Akoko South-West / South East constituency of the state. The three Reps are: Messrs Gbenga Elegbeleye (Akoko North East / North West); Temitayo Fawehinmi (Ondo East / West) and Emmanuel Adedeji (Ile-Oluji / Oke Igbo / Odigbo). MORE @ VANGUARD


The President Barack Obama administration is worried and has continued to engage the Nigerian government on these knotty issues, the 2011 general elections, and the electoral reforms, which have been in fits and starts because of disagreement between the two chambers of the National Assembly.These worries, perhaps, explain why the Council on Foreign Relations engaged a visiting delegation from the Senate last week. MORE @ GUARDIAN


Demining officials inspecting some of the bombs

The 30 month old Nigerian civil war ended in 1970. But 39 years after, more lives are still being lost through unexploded bombs and land mines that were abandoned by both sides (Nigeria and Biafra) involved in the conflict. In this interview with our Correspondent, CHIDI NKWOPARA, the Chief Consultant of Humanitarian De mining Services, Dr. Bala Yakubu, contracted by the federal Government to defuse the bombs speaks on the issue. MORE @ VANGUARD



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News Desk (Late Edition) Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009

The Yar’Adua we saw in Saudi, by Saraki, Yuguda

ABUJA— Governors Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State and Bukola Saraki of Kwara State who visited the President in Saudi Arabia, returned to the country, yesterday, and declared to their colleagues in the Governors’ Forum that President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, who is undergoing treatment in a Saudi Arabian hospital for heart ailment, is responding well to treatment... READ MORE


Ban names Ibrahim Gambari as new head of joint UN-AU force in Darfur

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seeks to appoint veteran Nigerian diplomat Ibrahim Gambari, who has most recently served as his top envoy to Myanmar, as the new head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur, it was announced today. Mr. Gambari’s appointment as the Joint Special Representative of the mission, known as UNAMID, will be effective 1 January 2010... READ MORE



Nigerian Cabinet Backs Yar'Adua Amid Calls to Quit

ABUJA (Reuters) - Nigeria's cabinet unanimously agreed on Wednesday there were no grounds on which to seek the resignation of President Umaru Yar'Adua, rejecting calls for him to step down or prove he is fit enough to govern. At least nine Nigerian newspaper front pages carried a statement, which they said had been signed by more than 50 public figures, calling on Yar'Adua to resign immediately or allow a medical panel to determine his ability to rule... READ MORE


Delta Explores Partnership With Nigerian Airline

Delta Air Lines Inc. is mulling a partnership with a Nigerian airline that could result in joint marketing efforts between the two carriers as they seek to build business in Africa's most populous nation. Delta, the only U.S. carrier currently flying directly to Africa, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Nigerian Eagle Airlines, a domestic carrier operating out of Lagos. Both sides have committed to exploring commercial collaboration... READ MORE


Sirius Petroleum Identifies Marginal Field Opportunities in Nigeria

Sirius Petroleum Plc announces that it has identified its first marginal oil field opportunity. In the circular sent to shareholders on 23 July 2008 when the Company embarked on its new strategy, Sirius announced that it proposed to raise between £500,000 and £2,000,000 in order to pay for technical, legal and financial due diligence on potential acquisition targets. Now that the Company has progressed identification of its first opportunity... READ MORE