Yoruba socio-political group, the O’odua Peoples Congress, has accused a former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, of being an agent of the Nigerian government among Yoruba Nation agitators.
The group made this known in a press statement by its Publicity Secretary, Yinka Oguntimehin, titled, “Defection: Be ready for more betrayers, OPC blasts Fani-Kayode says, “FG’s 4bn dollar loans have no economic value”, on Friday.
The OPC told Yoruba people to be ready to see many betrayers in the coming days, saying “more people like Femi Fani-Kayode abound within the South-West region”.
It described Fani-Kayode as a “political jobber with no ideology”, adding that he “has no measure of integrity”.
The organisation said the defection of the former aviation minister was “never a surprise because he had been romancing with All Progressive Congress stalwarts all over the country”.
Before rejoining APC, Fani-Kayode was one of the outspoken politicians in support of Yoruba Nation activist, Sunday Adeyemo, fondly called Igboho.
Also, Igboho had in a statement issued by his former media aide, Olayomi Koiki, in March 2021, said, “Chief Femi Fani Kayode is one of the stakeholders that identifies with us on the struggle of Yoruba Nation agitation. We have 100 per cent confidence in him (Fani-Kayode).”
OPC, however, urged Yoruba people not to be disappointed by the ex-minister’s move.
The statement partly reads, “You can’t trust a politician, Femi Fani-Kayode is just one out of the lot. He has no principle, and he is an agent of the government. So it is never a new thing to see him defecting from PDP to APC. Fani-Kayode has no measure of integrity and he is a political jobber with no ideology.
“Of what value is his defection to the APC? But the truth is Yoruba should be ready for more of Femi Fani Kayodes in our midst.”
The administration of President Muhammadu Buhari says it plans to appeal the judgment of an Oyo State High Court, which awarded N20 billion in damages against the Attorney-General of the Federation and the State Security Service in favour of Sunday ‘Igboho’ Adeyemo.
The AGF, Abubakar Malami, announced the regime’s decision to appeal in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Friday.
Yoruba Nation activist, Sunday Igboho, had sued the regime for N500 billion for violating his fundamental human rights following the SSS illegal invasion of his residence at the Soka area of the Oyo capital, Ibadan, on July 1, without an arrest warrant.
Igboho, in the suit filed by his lawyer Yomi Alliyu claimed his house and cars were damaged, and two occupants of the house killed by SSS operatives during the raid.
Malami’s lawyer had argued that there was no evidence before the court that the blood seen in the video clip tendered by Mr Alliyu belonged to a human being.
He also said nothing in the video showed the invaded house belonged to Igboho or linked the AGF with the invasion and had urged the court to disregard the exhibits and dismiss the entire suit.
Lawyer to the SSS, T. A. Nurudeen, aligned with the submission made by Malami’s lawyer. He insisted that there must be proof from a haematologist to show the blood in the video belonged to a human being.
Delivering his judgment, Ladiran Akintola, said the style and procedures adopted by the SSS during the raid was unprofessional and ruled that Mr Igboho had demonstrated his fundamental human rights were violated by the Buhari administration.
The judge also awarded N2 million as cost in favour of Igboho for instituting the case.
Malami says efforts were already in place to commence the process of appealing the judgment.
Abdulrasheed Bawa, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, on Thursday, said he cannot publicly mention those financing Boko Haram and other terrorism acts in Nigeria.
Earlier in the week, authorities of the United Arab Emirates listed six Nigerians among those funding terrorism. Asked about those funding terrorism in Nigeria on Channels TV, Bawa said he cannot discuss a sensitive national security issue on national television.
“If you are my adviser will you advise me to come on national television to tell the whole world regarding matters of sensitive national security issue?,” Mr Bawa asked. “Certainly, not. But what I want to assure you we are working tirelessly with other sister agencies to ensure that this country is free of terrorism.”
The Nigerian government had promised to publish names of those financing terrorism in the country. But has not kept its promise.
The Boko Haram insurgency has continued to ravage the country’s northeast corridor for more than a decade. While bandits have been deploying military-grade hardware to counter military offensive across the northwest.
Bawa, who caused a scare as he slumped while speaking at an event organised by National Identity Management Commission at the Villa earlier on Thursday, said he has returned to work after seeing his doctor.
“While giving my goodwill message during the program, I was a bit dizzy and I had to excuse myself from the stage,” Bawa told Channels TV on Thursday night. “And of course I went straight to the hospital where my doctor confirmed to me that everything about me is okay, except for the fact that I’m a bit dehydrated and I need to take a lot of water.”
He was Nigeria’s closest instance of the Renaissance Man: musician, sculptor, inventor, sportsman, architect, scholar, mythmaker, lay philosopher, folklorist, and culture ambassador/impresario. A true Jack of many trades who strove so hard to be master of all, he was a man of many capabilities , with a voice that was admirably polyphonic. His impulse was both idealistic and relentlessly pragmatic. Endowed with a vision that was acutely focused and seamlessly eclectic, he developed a practice that was proudly traditional and transgressively modern. This plural propensity, this borderless inter-connectedness are the defining characteristics of his vast artistic empire; for the rhyme and reason which power his music are but close cousins of the ones that energize his numerous undertakings, and the tempo of his countless dreams.
Victor Efosa Uwaifo was a doughty dreamer and daring doer whose operational philosophy was: do it different, do it new, do it well…. An artist of boundless curiosity and enormous energy, Uwaifo has blessed our world with works which ply the delicate interface between surrealism and realism, the doable and the done. How can one ever forget that sitting-room in his capacious Benin estate, shaped like a ‘sculpted’ airplane with its small oval windows and imaginary cockpit; or that salon car in his driveway fitted with a plane engine’s rotor blades instead of the usual automobile radiator fan – a feat which evokes telling intimations of the engineering experimentations of Professor Ayodele Awojobi, another Nigerian dreamer and doer?
From music to sculpture to engineering, and back to music again, and then you ask: where does Victor Uwaifo get his magic from? Just what is the secret behind his high-minded aspirations and multifarious achievements? Whence comes his pluck, then his pride? The answer to these questions is as clear as the Benin sky on a cloudless day: exemplary family pedigree coupled with the enabling influence of Benin culture, without doubt, one of the richest, deepest, and most resilient of its kind in the world. On every Uwaifo sculpture are fingerprints of ancient, unforgettable ancestors. In his very voice are tone-marks, reverberations, and echoes of maestros who sang when time was young and silence was golden. In the very air which sustains his being are the intimations and breaths of forebears who left but never departed. Uwaifo’s prodigious creativity had a soil to nurture its roots, a wind to spread its fame, a sky of limitless lore and sympathetic spaces to unfurl its wings. Our maestro never lost sight of his status as a vital link in this long chain of History and Culture, and his role as worthy legatee, inheritor, and propagator.
Siwo siwo siwo
Siwoooooooooooooo
Distinctively hearable in virtually every Uwaifo piece, therefore, is the riveting resonance of the Benin Song, its lungful laughter, its sorrowful tonality, its throbbing, threnodic intensity, its mythic memorability, its sombre reflectivity, the overwhelming force of its sonorous musicality that sometimes brings goose pimples to the listener’s body and/or tears to their eyes, the call-and-response rubric of the song which turns casual listeners into enthusiastic choral participants. As my father, himself an accomplished drummer and singer, used to say, you do not hear a Benin song with your ears; you hear it in your heart and your stomach, on its way to your mind.
The performative power and affective magic of this music genre took the Nigerian music scene by storm in the 1960’s, and many of us who encountered it in our early years have found it difficult to outgrow its stubborn ‘addictiveness’. There is just something in the seductive sonority of Uwaifo’s voice and riveting twang of his guitar that never leave the ears alone. Personally, a day hardly passes without my humming an Uwaifo tune, especially in the showers, or when I am at a knotty juncture in the creative process.
My first experience of Uwaifo’s magic occurred around Christmas in 1965 in that most famous of all cities, Ikere – Ekiti, at a party hosted by a fellow ‘Grammar School’ student, who happened to be a lovely princess of the reigning Oba. The party began on a happy, lively note as we teased the air with tunes by the leading highlife kings of the period: Rex Jim Lawson, Roy Chicago, Victor Olaiya, Eddy Okonta, Dele Ojo, I.K. Dairo. But just as our pleasure was heading towards a premature plateau, in came two colleagues who had just returned from Lagos where they had spent the first half of the Christmas holiday. They didn’t only come with a 45 RPM vinyl copy of a new Uwaifo record; they also came with a new way of dancing to it. As the stylus touched the glistening grooves , our overworked turntable erupted with Do Amen Amen Do. The atmosphere created by the new tune was nothing short of electric. The audience leapt to their feet, and the dance floor was filled to capacity. After three or four encores, the rave shifted to the flip side, and Eralo Gbengigialo took possession of the wind, then, the dancers.
The dance style imported from Lagos by my two colleagues was itself imported into Nigeria from Ghana. Kpanlogo, as it was called, was a drum-driven, gong-accentuated, rhythm-powered dance style thoroughly physical in its energetic joyousness and harmonious deployment of the entire body. Victor Uwaifo’s early music fitted so serendipitously into the kpanlogo dance pattern as if one had been invented for the other. To this day, I have never stopped wondering whether it was Kpanlogo which found Uwaifo, or if it was Uwaifo that went in search of Kpanlogo. But one thing is sure: with its vigorous danceability and rapturous rhythmicality, Uwaifo’s music demonstrates two of those characteristics so indigenous to Benin music in its social and spiritual realms. For over 10 years from the mid-sixties, Kpanlogo and Uwaifo’s music promoted each other in an interesting instance of mutual beneficence. Some of my colleagues still remember that bright afternoon in December 1965 when we encountered the Uwaifo magic for the first time, and how we became his lifelong fans and admirers.
Uwaifo’s music grew and developed over the years as new numbers dropped from his stable with melodious rapidity: Siwo Siwo; Oliha, Ebiss Ebiss, Sesese, Agege Ogigbo. The Maestro went from the fast-paced beats of the early days to the genteel, dancehall-like tempo of the likes of Joromi, the dramatic, myth-making narrativity of Guitar Boy, and the light, many-voiced rally of the Ekassa and Akwete series. The tribe of Uwaifo fans enjoyed an exponential increase. Gold discs (about a dozen of them) poured in as rewards of his genius. The nation welcomed a song type so modern in its traditional virtuosity.
Then, with his music career all set and steady, the man who all along had taught us so much about culture decided to go back to school himself. A fortunate University of Benin threw open its door to the Kingdom’s famous son and one of Nigeria’s most valued culture ambassadors. Student Uwaifo snapped up the B.A. with a dazzling First Class, followed up with an M.A., and topped it all up with a prestigious Ph.D. Thereafter, the University wasted no time in offering him a place as distinguished academic. Thus the life of Victor Uwaifo was a chronicle of aspirations searching, constantly searching, for fulfillment. Ever before his engagements at the University of Benin, our Melody Maestro was already a university person in sense and spirit; and his university was one with its universe securely steady and intact.
I saw Victor Uwaifo many times from a respectful distance, and he and I met only once. That was at the 1994 annual convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) which held at the University of Benin. Facilitated by the scholar-writer Asomwan Adagbonyin, that meeting, short as it was, brought me up close to the wit, charm, and easy manners of Nigeria’s Ultimate Maestro. Surprised and flattered by his open declaration before the ANA audience that he was dedicating his performance that night to me, I couldn’t help the onrush of powerful memories of that bright afternoon in December 1965 when I encountered his music for the first time. When I told him how much I admired the largeness of his soul and immensity of his gifts, his response came sharp and direct: ‘that admiration is mutual’. I was not sure if he ever knew how so deeply touched I was at his generous reply!
Siwo siwo siwo
Siwoooooooooooo
His personality was an example, his life story a parable. Here was a man with an unassailable belief that he could be whatever he chose to be. A practicing musician with a doctorate degree in Visual Arts; a practical philosopher who pondered the relationship between sound and light; a sculptor who conjured lifelike images out of clay and wood and bronze; a thinker who plumbed the deep structure of culture in tandem with its surface realities; a songmaster who deepened the mutual traffic between melody and memory; an archivist who never lost sight of the neglected Muse of the Nigerian museum; a proud man, ebulliently self-assertive, uncontainable by small spaces; a Guitar Boy who saw Mammy Water and never ran away; a Maestro who sang the endless song.
That was/is Victor Efosa Uwaifo: a culture-conscious, legacy- literate creative activist who has contributed so much to the restoration our cultural memory and propagation of our music. We hope Edo State in particular and Nigeria in general will reward his incredibly valuable life of dedication by making sure that his achievements never die, that his legacy endures. Let Nigeria banish her famous addiction to willful amnesia and ensure that the world does not forget the life and accomplishments of this remarkable man.
Rest in power, Victorious Uwaifo. Here below, that song which I sang for you many seasons ago when you were here with us on this side of the Great River:
FOR VICTOR UWAIFO
(In the background throughout, a medley of Uwaifo’s songs)
Siwo siwo siwo siwo…
Your voice nestles in the eaves of my memory,
Its red-earth vigour tremulous
Between sappy laughter and a silence
Which left its echoes in the larynx
Of throbbing legends
Wafting past the lyrical beauty of painted thresholds,
Through doors which breast the streets
Like defiant sentries, and shrines where once
Gods swayed through the portals of the sky,
Leaving their word and wand behind
Do Amen Amen dooooo
You sing of Dawn and mysty Stars
When Earth was music
And Rivers danced towards the Sea
With a chorus of capering minnows
Your melody came before the rhythm of the First Rain
Oh that haunting sonority,
That mellow magic in the elbow of a voice!
The guitar’s wailing incantations,
Rainbow drums which prompt
Every moment into an eternity of motions
Oserie….
So rivetting, the rhythm of your Red-Earth City
Rhythm of Clay, rhythm of Bronze
Rhythm of ancient hands proclaiming
Miracles of mask and meaning
Rhythm of the snail’s millennial sigh at Siloko Market
Echoing forests, pulse of the Panther
Skirted undergrowths dense with daring
And when my Hunter-Minstrel charged
His lips with a flute
Trees broke into a dance beyond recounting
Melody Maestro,
The universe glows in the melody of your magic;
Your athletic virtuosity, the prodigy of your gifts
Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s information minister, has deflected blame for the poor image the country endures internationally on activities of the media.
The minister asserted “whatever image problem Nigeria is suffering from today is mostly due to the unflattering portrayal of the country by the country’s media”.
“If one picks up most newspapers, watches most television stations or listens to most radio stations in Nigeria today, he or she will be right to think Nigeria is a country at war,” Mr Mohammed said at the headquarters of the News Agency of Nigeria on Thursday.
However, President Muhammadu Buhari has often drawn criticism for demarketing the country and its people before international media.
In 2018, Buhari, during an appearance with world leaders at a Commonwealth Business Forum in London, said the majority of Nigerian youth are lazy and uneducated.
In a recent interview with local broadcaster Arise News TV, Buhari doubled down on his belief that Nigerians are to be blamed for the country’s economic woes.
He told Arise interviewers that the youths should ‘behave themselves’ if they wanted jobs, as their criticism of his regime scares investors away from the country. He cited the #EndSARS protests which rocked the country in October 2020 as one of those activities that cast his regime in bad light.
In making the assertion, the president took no cognisance of his regime’s low human rights ratings and incoherent economic policy.
Mohammed said the media only gave perfunctory attention to the successes of the military in quelling separatist agitations in the South-East and South-West, and the current campaign against bandits in the North-West.
“Our security agencies have also successfully tackled the separatists in the South-East and South-West and the militants in the South-South.
“Unfortunately, these efforts have only been perfunctorily reflected in the reportage of the security challenges that we face.
“This is not only unfair, especially to those who are sacrificing their lives to keep us safe, it is unpatriotic,’’ he said.
Many of the military campaigns against self-determination groups have, however, been criticised by local and international rights bodies for blatant abuses.
Mohammed emphasised that the media must be fair in its reportage.
“We are not saying the media should not report on the security challenges we face.
“All we are saying is, be fair and report accurately the efforts being made by the State and Federal Governments to tackle the challenges,” he said.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has taken steps that appeared aimed at cracking down on AbokiFX, a popular forex publishing platform.
AbokiFX, which posts daily updates of the exchange rate on its website, was targeted in a letter CBN sent to commercial banks requesting transaction records of the website over an alleged breach of the National Intelligence Committee Act of 2004.
A spokesman for the CBN did not return requests seeking clarification about the move against AbokiFX throughout Thursday.
Nigerian media outlets have relied heavily on AbokiFX in recent weeks to publish frequent and steep crashing of the naira against American dollars at the so-called black markets.
CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, has faced criticism perceived incompetence has led to naira’s depreciation.
The naira has depreciated considerably against the dollar over the past two weeks. From N525 per dollar on September 1, it closed at N570 on Thursday, according to AbokiFX.
Barring a last minute change, a Professor of Physiology and former acting vice-chancellor of the Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo, Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, is set to be named as the institution’s 9th substantive vice-chancellor.
Mrs Olatunji-Bello is the wife of the Lagos State Commissioner for environment and water resources, Olatunji Bello.
Though the government is yet to make an official statement on the development, a highly placed source among the state’s cabinet members confirmed to reporters on Thursday.
The new development may have put an end to the many months of controversies that have trailed the processes of appointment of a substantive vice-chancellor for the university following the completion of a five-year single term of office by the 8th substantive vice-chancellor, Olanrewaju Fagbohun.
Backstory
The university had been embroiled in controversies surrounding the appointment of Fagbohun’s successor leading to the cancellation of two selection processes earlier conducted by the university’s former governing council.
As a result of allegations of manipulation and inconsistencies levelled against the then Adebayo Ninalowo-led governing council, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who doubles as the institution’s visitor, set up a visitation panel which recommended the dissolution of the governing council.
The panel also recommended reconstitution of another council and that the then registrar of the university, Olayinka Amuni, should embark on leave pending the conclusion of the selection process.
Amuni was accused of not properly guiding the governing council on the laid down procedures meant to be followed by the selection committee.
But critics accused the governor of scheming for the imposition of Olatunji-Bello. They cited her husband’s influence on the governor, especially “in connection with his second term bid.”
Bello is a close ally of Bola Tinubu, a political godfather and former governor in Lagos. Bello has been a regular cabinet member in the state since he served during the tenure of Tinubu.
A United Nations envoy has met Afghanistan’s new interior minister who was for years one of the world’s most wanted Islamist militants.
On Thursday, Deborah Lyons, head of the UN mission in Afghanistan met Sirajuddin Haqqani to fashion ways for the country to head off soaring humanitarian crisis.
Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman, disclosed this in a statement on Twitter.
“(Haqqani) stressed that UN personnel can conduct their work without any hurdle and deliver vital aid to the Afghan people,” he said.
Afghanistan was already facing chronic poverty and drought but the situation has deteriorated since the Taliban took over last month.
The plight of the Afghan people has been aggravated with the disruption of aid, with departure of tens of thousands of people including government and aid workers chiefly instigating the collapse of much economic activity.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, told an international aid conference this week that Afghans were facing “perhaps their most perilous hour”.
The UN mission in Afghanistan said that in the Wednesday meeting Lyons had stressed the “absolute necessity for all UN and humanitarian personnel in Afghanistan to be able to work without intimidation or obstruction to deliver vital aid and conduct work for Afghan people”.
The Taliban repeatedly targeted the United Nations during the two-decades-long U.S.-led military mission in Afghanistan that ended last month with the rout of the Western-backed government by the Taliban.
In one of the bloodiest incidents, Taliban militants killed five UN foreign staff in an attack on a guest-house in Kabul in 2009.
More recently, gunmen attacked a UN compound in the city of Herat in July with rocket-propelled grenades killing a guard, while protesters in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in 2011 killed seven UN staff.
The Haqqani network, a faction within the Taliban and for years based on the border with Pakistan, was held responsible for some of the worst militant attacks in Afghanistan during the Taliban insurgency.
The United States designated the group a terrorist organisation in 2012.
Haqqani, head of the eponymous network founded by his father, is one of the FBI’s most wanted men with a reward of $10 million for information leading to his arrest.
U.S. officials and members of the old U.S.-backed Afghan government for years said the Haqqani network maintained ties with al Qaeda.
The Taliban have promised not to let Afghanistan be used for militant attacks on other countries.
Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Abdulrasheed Bawa, slumped on Thursday morning and was rushed to the hospital in Abuja.
Bawa, 41, was speaking at an event at the Presidential Villa in Abuja when he suddenly collapsed on stage and was hastily assisted to his seat by other attendees.
He was then transferred to a hospital moments later. It was not immediately clear whether or not the EFCC chief, who appears young and energetic, had been nurturing any illnesses before today’s incident.
Bawa was complaining about widespread identity crimes across Nigeria in his speech before the incident.
President Muhammadu Buhari named Bawa as the Chairman of the anti-graft commission in February 2021.
The Federal Government has expressed its displeasure over the ongoing collaboration between separatist groups, Yoruba Nation and Indigenous People of Biafra.
The Presidency also expressed worries over attempts to disrupt the President’s visit to New York for this year’s United Nations General Assembly by the two groups.
Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesman, raised the alarm in a statement on Wednesday in Abuja, saying it was regrettable that Yoruba Nation advocates are in cahoots with IPOB which the regime has outlawed.
Shehu opined that it was wrong for agitators of Yoruba Nation to associate themselves with an outlawed organisation like IPOB to destroy the image of Nigeria abroad.
According to him, for Nigerian diaspora groups to use the world’s largest platform – the United Nations General Assembly – to garner attention to their causes is not unexpected.
”It was, however shocking, to see “Yoruba Nation” advocates yesterday unequivocally throw their lot in with Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
”IPOB is a designated terrorist organisation. It has now publicly revealed a 50,000 strong paramilitary organisation.
”It regularly murders security services and innocent civilians, with a significant uptick of violent attacks this year. And it is currently attempting to hold Nigerian states hostage with orders to stay at home under threat of terror.
“Without doubt, Nigerians and the entire world will judge Yoruba Nation by the company it keeps.
”No one can take this organisation seriously if it continues its IPOB association.
When their allies systematically trample human rights, it raises sober questions about their claims to uphold the values of the UN.
”The cooperation is a worrying development, once parsed with Yoruba Nation’s increasingly violent rallies in Nigeria.
”Actions and associations speak louder than words. Yoruba Nation’s talk of human rights promotion must therefore be ignored,” he said.
The Buhari administration summarily labelled IPOB a terrorist organisation in September 2017 via an ex parte ruling secured by Attorney General Abubarkar Malami at the Abuja Division of the Federal High Court.
State forces have since continued a brutal crackdown against IPOB operatives who have also continued to stage demonstrations which are sometimes deemed violent.
On the other hand, Yoruba Nation agitators, who have been holding largely peaceful rallies across the South-West saw their last rally in Lagos forcefully dispersed by state agents.
This was after the Ibadan residence of their leader, Sunday ‘Igboho’ Adeyemo, was invaded by officers of the State Security Service, killed two persons, arrested 12 and destroyed properties worth millions.
Igboho who fled the country afterwards was arrested in Benin Republic en route Germany.
He is still held in Beninese jail for visa related matters, amid diplomatic pressure for his repatriation to Nigeria.
IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, is also in SSS detention since he was repatriated from Kenya under conditions shrouded in secrecy.
Shehu, however, maintained that the Nigerian government would continue its work at the UN- to fight against corruption and illicit financial flows, and international cooperation.
He said: ”If we want to see stolen funds returned to their rightful home in Nigeria, the government must continue to campaign for and coordinate global action on asset recovery,” he added.
The Presidential aide assured that the Nigerian government would remain the leading regional actor in the fight against global terror – particularly against threats emanating from the Sahel.
He further revealed that the administration was implementing a programme of environmental sustainability to combat developments which destroys Nigerian communities in vulnerable regions.
”Only through the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development can we secure a prosperous future for Nigeria.
”As the largest country in Africa, the government takes its leadership role seriously and will continue to strive for continental unity, cooperation, and shared prosperity.
”Our expectation is therefore for the media to work with the government to focus attention on the core issues the President, the leader of the country has on his programme,” he said.
