Adéwálé Májà-Pearce’s Shine Your Eye: In Search of West Africa is published by Hurst.
The new MOWAA building in Benin City.
Given Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage – Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ìfẹ́, Benin – it’s not surprising that it has 53 national museums, although it’s hard to say how many are currently functioning. In 1996 I visited the Owo Museum in Ondo State, attached to one of the oldest palaces in West Africa, only to be told by the...
Within days of the military coup in Niger on 26 July, the president of Nigeria, Bolá Ahmed Tinubú, threatened war if his ‘brother’ wasn’t restored to power. Mohamed Bazoum wasn’t restored and Tinubú didn’t invade, though he did cut off his country’s electricity supply to Niger. He also closed the thousand-mile border between the two...
Seven years after Nigeria won independence from British rule in 1960, the country descended into a two-and-a-half-year civil war during which between 500,000 and three million people died, mostly from starvation. In the words of Ọbáfẹmi Awólọ́wọ́, then the federal minister of finance, ‘all is fair, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see...
There is a doctored photo doing the rounds on social media that pretends to show Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú, Nigeria’s president-elect, and Babájídé Sanwó-Olú, the re-elected Lagos State governor, on the back of a motorbike carrying a ballot box. It’s based on a real photo of two agbèrò, or hoodlums, who snatched a box from a polling booth during the state elections on 18 March. The caption is real, too: ‘Grab it! Snatch it! And run with it!’ Tinúbú instructed his inner circle at a meeting in London in early December, much to the amusement of those present, one of whom approvingly shouted ‘Jagaban!’ (‘warrior’), the title Tinúbú appears to treasure above his many others.
There is now strong evidence that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was in cahoots with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú would be Nigeria’s next president come 29 May, the handover date. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which was supposed to upload the results in real time and so end once and for all the incessant rigging that has plagued Nigerian elections, failed to work in the 25 February presidential ballot but not the concurrent votes for the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Men who get their memoirs published are generally confident enough to report, gleefully, their victories over particular opponents, and to try to explain any defeats. There is another sort of...
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