Tag: Chidi Amuta
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Will There Still Be Life Before 2023? – By Chidi Amuta
The period between now and May 2023 is Nigeria’s season of expectations and grave anxiety. Nigerians are expectant that the forthcoming general election will enable them as an electorate to renew our national leadership through the ritual of voting. On the other hand, the perilous state of the state has raised the level of anxiety…
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Did Buhari Really See Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials? – Chidi Amuta
No one sees Kigali and remains the same. In many ways, Rwanda embodies Africa’s real triple heritage: the curse of colonial injustice, the tragedy of African misrule and the possibility of redemption and real African renaissance. The capital, Kigali, is at once a place of past regrets, a theatre of recent blood- letting and indeed…
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Time to License the Vote Trade – By Chidi Amuta
The recent presidential nomination primaries of the two big parties and the just concluded Ekiti state governorship elections are united by a paradox. In both, Nigerian democracy recorded some dubious progress. An orderly and fairly credible electoral processes seems to have finally evolved. Correspondingly, however, the monetization of the electoral process hit the highest peak…
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Peter Obi and the Last ‘Big Men’ – Chidi Amuta
The outcome of our presidential nominations season has produced a new landscape of mixed blessings. The two major parties have produced rival contestants straight from the dark recesses of Africa’e political past. Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu are in many ways a throw back to the African ‘Big Man’ politician of the 1970s to 1990s.…
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Not Quite the Coronation – By Chidi Amuta
The aftermath of the APC presidential nomination convention is a landscape of political ruin. In the rubble lies the treasures and broken remnants of nearly everything both right and wrong with today’s politics in Nigeria. In the long hours of accreditation, patient waiting and painstaking balloting, we witnessed a growing culture of democratic forbearance among…
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Long Week of Power Bazaars – By Chidi Amuta
In a little over another week, a great deal of the political cacophony all over the country will have abated. The period will end with gatherings of Nigeria’s political tribes in Abuja. Their major achievement will be to lower the deafening decibels of our current political noise pollution. From then on, there will be no…
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Overcrowding the Presidential Doorway – By Chidi Amuta
Democracy was never intended to amuse nor was politics meant to offend. The ritual of periodic leadership renewal through elections was instead meant to be a serious business to guarantee the health of the polis. The Athenian and Roman senates were collections of people of knowledge and wisdom who were respected and also held the…
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Referendum on a Hegemony – By Chidi Amuta
We might as well sound the end time alarm bugle loud and clear. This is in the desperate hope that we can avert a national catastrophe. Whether we are Christians or Muslims, APC or PDP, Northerners or southerners, a common existential burden now hangs over us all. The future of the nation, our common heritage…
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Digital Sex and Make-Up Wonders – By Chidi Amuta
The first is an obsession with sex as a form of national sport that unites young and old alike both online and in real time. The other is a new fascination with externals, with appearance and make belief. The latter is marked by the emergence of make-up artists as mobile illusionists and new aesthetics wonder…
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PDP: Politics of survival and bad manners – By Chidi Amuta
Nigeria’s troubled opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), has scored a pre-election own goal. It has forced its presidential aspirants to retreat into factional enclaves . These are roughly: the Northern , Gubernatorial and Igbo formations.