Sunday, September 9, 2012

FESTAC: Town in need of moral salvation -Written By Linus Obogo, Assistant Editor

Welcome to FESTAC Town. This was the landmark at the First Gate that clearly offered a hint of where Nigeria’s Festival of Arts and Culture village was situated. That was 35 years ago.
Today, the landmark has not only disappeared, but the very gate that once welcomed its residents and visitors alike has been ripped bare of any directional compass, having progressively transformed into a garage for commercial motorcyclists, popularly called ‘Okada’. 
The once posh and highbrow estate was built by the government in 1977, during the country’s first oil boom, to quarter tens of thousands of participants in the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. After the festival, it was to later serve as a satellite for the country’s middle class. This was so until the late 1980s.
With the death or rather, the disappearance of Nigeria’s middle class, FESTAC Town also suffered vicariously and in turn, lost its plum and upscale status. Like a similar fate that has befallen the country, FESTAC has weathered corresponding socio-economic vagaries and sadly, morphed into a juvenile, ramshackle colony of social and economic vermin.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Why I couldn’t make it back to the Senate –Folashade Bent

By Linus Obogo, Assistant Editor


Doctor Folashade Grace-Bent is a politician and former senator who represented Adamawa South Senatorial Constituency of Adamawa State from 2007 to 2011. In this interview with Linus Obogo, the former Senate Committee Chairman on Environment opens up on the forces that conspired against her return to the senate, the overbearing influence of the governors on parties’ affairs, as well as her regrets in bringing about the current leadership in the state. Excerpts: