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.

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:

Flooding: Lagos, Ogun residents count losses

 

By Linus Obogo, Segun Ajiboye, Miriam Ndikanwu and Oziegbe Okoeki

30/06/2012

Call it a day of rage and bedlam and you may not be wrong. It was a day the heavens’ violent and relentless yawning left residents of Lagos and Ogun States at the mercy of nature’s cruel hands.

All across the two states, the story bear a familiar refrain. Flood, flood and flood everywhere. While the rains came as a welcome relief from the baking heat that endured between January to April this year, its present offering has come, rather as a pill too lethal to swallow.

With residents displaced from their homes and roads taken over by flood waters, this is one gift nature has unleashed with a tinge of vengeance. And since Thursday, from Lagos to Ogun State, virtually everyone has been counting his loses and lamenting his anguish, just as every home has equally been counting its misery.

Azazi’s troubled tenure By Linus Obogo, Assistant Editor

 

 When he was appointed On October 4, 2010 as the new National Security Adviser by President Goodluck Jonathan, succeeding retired Colonel Kayode Are, there was so much expectation from Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi (rtd).

Azazi, a former Chief of Army Staff and later Chief of Defence Staff, took over from the acting NSA, Colonel Kayode Are (rtd), who held the position temporarily following the resignation of Gen. Aliyu Mohammed Gusau.

His appointment was in keeping to Jonathan’s promise to overhaul the nation’s security apparatus following the October 1 Independence Day bomb blasts in Abuja.

Arab wind of change cannot blow in Nigeria –MT. Mbu

Ambassador Mathew Tawo Mbu, former Nigerian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, took a look at the gale of civil uprising sweeping across the Arab world and laughed off the chances of a similar occurence in Nigeria, insisting that the peculiarities of Egypt and its sister Arab nations are far removed from the situation in Nigeria. In an Interview with LINUS OBOGO and OMONIYI SALAUDEEN, he said, “The development in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world must not be equated with the happenings in Nigeria. Any attempt to ape the civil evolutions in the Arab countries in Nigeria will spell catastrophe.”

You’re a failure*Akinjide sums up the Obasanjo years: •Says OBJ is neither leader nor statesman…But no regrets saving him from

By Linus Obogo
Saturday, September 15, 2007
In an irreconcilable opposite to Williams Shakespeare’s submission in Julius Ceasar that the evils that men do live after them, while their good deeds are often interred with their bones, former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s outlawry, while in office has continued to resonate in his life time, since his grudging and resentful exit from power.
In what seems a postscript of Obasanjo’s eight years in office, now regarded as a tale of unmitigated disaster with unwholesome consequences, the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN), has declared the ex-president as a monumental failure and wished that Nigeria never experiences characters like Obasanjo as leaders again.

Wicked! How El-rufai Caused Ekwensi To Die Heartbroken - Politics

BY LINUS OBOGO


Even as he bade his long goodbye at age 86, January 4th, frontline author, late Chief Cyprian Ekewnsi probably did so with a heavy heart, despite his literary accomplishment. A sad victim of Mallam Nasir El-Rufai’s hysterical land revocation drive, while as FCT minister, the late literary icon, before he breathed his last on November 4th, 2007, literally went down on his knees severally, not minding the age gap, before the former minister, begging to be allowed his only property in the federal capital territory, an undeveloped plot of land, which ownership El-Rufai revoked in 2006, in a manner that was not only befuddling, but challenged logic and common sense.
Acquired in 1992, the plot of land (Re: Certificate of Occupancy NO. FCT/ABU/AN: 2233), which is located at 272 Utako District, Cadastral Zone B5, according to available documents Saturday Sun chanced into, was paid for after due diligence, when the late foremost writer was federal director of Information and later, chairman of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria.