Nigeria

Early in the morning of Thursday, 9 August—about 48 hours after armed detachments of Nigeria’s Secret Service operatives took over the National Assembly complex in Abuja—I sent a text message to a number of activist Nigerian Leftists.

I have constructed this definition from several sources including Comrade Eskor Toyo, Comrade Biodun Jeyifo, and Karl Marx himself. It is an ideological and political definition: simple, but not simplistic, and designed for popular education.

They are: constructing a unified organisation of the Nigerian Left; drafting a people’s manifesto; inserting into Nigeria’s electoral politics (as organised groups); and seeking electoral and non-electoral alliances.

In a previous piece on this subject (Notes on political alliances in Nigeria, 4 July 2018), I proposed that the following three broad objectives have propelled Leftist organisations, at home and abroad, to seek political alliances with non-Leftist formations: to fight or to prevent the emergence

Recently, I took issue with a Facebook feed of an image of a begoggled man hidden in layers of overflowing gowns, and a head crowned by a white turban. Nigerian women swooned over the handsome man whose covered up face they could not see in the photo.

Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven.

I found something interesting regarding cheating in the Bible—which my mother had me study from cover to cover—that curiously matches my Yoruba cultural beliefs.

It is a fact that for some of the participants, those involved in the struggle, many are finding it difficult to come to terms and accept the obvious realities of these changes when they seem to go against some of their assumed or preconceived notions of what the struggle should be about.

Most playwrights leave it to the directors and producers of the play to interpret it as they wish but Soyinka was worried that most experts were misreading the play.

About 10:30 p.m. in the streets of Milan, close to Porto Genova, a metro hub, but which seemed to be the middle of nowhere to me, I realised I had taken the wrong tram. After disembarking I try to get directions from the men I see, who are elderly but can’t speak any English.