The Nation Newspaper

Tag: speaks

  • Ema Edosio speaks, as Kasala comes to cinema

    Having toured some film festivals in and outside Nigeria, Kasala, a ghetto sensation film by Ema Edosio, will take its chance at the Nigerian cinema, as a flick that balances  art appreciation with commercial edge when it opens to the big screen soon.

    Deploying the odds to touch all aspects of cinema success, Edosio’s use of the camera to tell a simple story is phenomenal, and she is more optimistic than ever that neither low budget nor lack of artistic understanding by some audience is a burden.

    “I strongly believe that there’s a shift happening in Nollywood, and the reason I say this is because there are lots of filmmakers like us who have deciding to make stories that matter to Nigerians and also affect Nigerians. The recession in Nigeria shows attraction for this kind of stories and I am determined to make more of this kind of stories,” Ema says.

    One would better understand Ema’s conviction when they see the film, because they would somewhat see themselves and their coming-of-age experiences in ‘Kasala’.

    The film follows four boys living in a Lagos suburb, a community like Ajegunle, Makoko and Mushin that will hit many with nostalgia as the story of TJ, an aspiring musician and his three other friends unfolds.

    TJ’s uncle loves his car. When TJ and his friends take it for a joyride and crash, they know they’d better get it fixed before he (Uncle)gets home. When they turn to famous Lagos street hustles and get-cash quick schemes, things start to get really crazy.

    Kasala, a local parlance for ‘trouble’ is what this film is all about from start to finish. This one long day’s struggle by the four friends in a close-knit community is the center of the story that affects their individual families, neighbors, a despicable gang, a mechanic, a panel beater, a butcher, food vendor, a lotto spot… name it – everything and everyone that makes happenstances in a community what it is – the good, the bad and ugly.

    Interestingly, this potpourri has something for everyone, despite a tight budget.

    Edosio reveals: “It is a very small budget but I really wanted to make things come to life. I shot, produced, directed and edited it to make it happen. We didn’t have a millionaire budget, but with determination, this film has travelled to about 18 film festivals. We have also been invited to London by the Royal African Society to close their festival.”

    It was a project that was meant to succeed from the start, because the filmmaker, who had worked with BBC knew what the world wanted.

    “I worked with the BBC and did a lot of documentary for them and going into this communities rather than the narratives about people in such communities being sad, the world has something new to learn because as portrayed in the movie, there’s a sense of pride among these Nigerians from the low income area and I wanted to show this aspect of Nigeria,” she said.

    According to her, the movie is also a tribute to Lagos “because in order to survive in a city like Lagos, in order to survive in Nigeria, it’s a constant struggle, and it shows the tenacity of Nigerians. It goes against the lazy youth narrative where you see young boys in their day-to-day lives, even though the society in some ways has failed them.”

    As the movie – one of Nigeria’s bests in the year so far comes to the cinema – cinema operators who had thought it would be too artistic for their audience must have reevaluated the interest of film enthusiasts in Nigeria.

  • Don Jazzy speaks on getting married soon

    Popular music producer and singer, Don Jazzy, who recently posted a video in which he was seen dancing at a wedding ceremony, has revealed that he is getting married soon. He also used the opportunity to inform his soon-to-be bride to note that he is not a good dancer.

    “If you ever think you can’t dance,” he said in the video which he shared, “Just remember this. You can’t be that bad. I decided to start going out more.

    “Came all the way to this wedding maybe I will see wife. Everybody was taken sha. But dear future wife, just know that I will embarrass you with my dance moves forever. Take me as I am. I don talk my own.”

    Responding to the post, Banky W, who married last year, said the internet will go bizarre when Don Jazzy eventually walks down the aisle.

    “Lol the day you eventually marry ehh… no be only internet wey go break, na full earth quake.”

    Jazzy replied, “@Bankywellington hahaha I don’t want the internet to break sef. It will stay intact to witness pure happiness. Joining you soon bro, don’t worry.”

    Recall that Don Jazzy, days after the purported engagement of super blogger, Linda Ikeji, ‘broke’ the internet, as the Mavin Record’s boss, did not take the news kindly.

    It was reported that in the past, Jazzy had somewhat expressed his crush for Ikeji,  and shortly after her engagement hit the news mill, he uploaded a photo of himself weeping while his friends consoled him in a photograph that went viral.

    Jazzy, 35, was said to have often joked about marrying Ikeji who is older than him by two years.

  • Oodua Foundation speaks for the Yoruba

    The strange happenings in the new National Assembly in Abuja, especially the weird manoeuvrings accompanying the election of the President of Senate, have left many Yoruba people wondering. Yoruba people voted massively for the Buhari promise of change. Do these crooked deeds in the Nigerian Senate signify the end of the change? Yesterday, Oodua Foundation spoke out on these fears. They are my people and they have asked me to feature their statement in my column today. Here it goes.

    We Oodua Foundation, a Yoruba think-tank organization with members in countries across the globe, and with headquarters in the United States, have been closely observing and analyzing the developments in the Nigerian Federal Government since the swearing in of President Muhammadu Buhari. Our conclusions compel us now to speak up clearly for the Yoruba nation of the Nigerian Southwest.

    We do not speak for any political party; we do not belong to, support or oppose any. We respect the voices of all Yoruba groups and individuals. Our organization exists only to promote and protect the interests of the Yoruba nation.

    We the Yoruba people of the Southwest, by political tradition and culture, cherish truth, liberty, equity, justice and fair-play as fundamental basis of governance. These are the age-long cardinal principles that have defined our Yoruba nation’s political tradition for centuries, and we Yoruba people remain committed to them as pillars of order, peace and stability in society.

    As one of the largest nationalities in Nigeria, we have dutifully demonstrated our commitment to these principles, and to Nigeria’s success and prosperity, in all our contributions to the making of Nigeria. In that light, we have consistently and persistently proposed since the late 1940s that, because Nigeria is a country of many different nationalities, the only way to structure Nigeria for stability and success is to show careful respect to Nigeria’s various nationalities large and small and, therefore, to structure Nigeria as a proper federation in which each of the constituent units shall enjoy the right level of autonomy to manage its own unique concerns, competently promote its own development, and strongly make its own kind of contribution to the progress and prosperity of Nigeria.

    Since the culture of elective representative government was begun in Nigeria, we the people of the South-west and our leaders have sought partnership with the leaderships of other ethnic nationalities based on mutual respect, justice and the greatest good of Nigeria and Nigerians. In that light, many eminent political leaders of ours patriotically served in the leadership of political parties led by leaders of other nationalities. We also demonstrated this commitment to Nigeria’s success with open-mindedness when, in the final preparations for Nigerian independence in 1959-60, our foremost political leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, offered the position of Prime Minster in the Nigerian Federal Government to another leader from another nationality, while he himself was willing to accept for himself a lower position of Minister of Economic Development in the Federal Government. It was also in the same spirit of preserving and advancing Nigeria that our leaders worked with other nationalities to create the All Progressives Grand Alliance (UPGA) in the midst of the great crisis rocking Nigeria during the first years after independence.

    In terms of socio-economic development, we Yoruba of the Nigerian South-west have always loyally demonstrated great ambition for Nigeria’s progress, prosperity and power in the world. We have always regarded our well known ambition for socio-economic progress as our kind of service to Nigeria, our kind of contribution to the progress and greatness of Nigeria. We never desire or attempt to exclude other Nigerian nationals from our successes. Since we instituted Free Primary Education in our region, countless thousands of children from other parts of Nigeria have come to benefit from our free schools. Our tradition of hospitality towards non- Yoruba nationals, our culture of religious tolerance and freedom, and the economic and business opportunities liberally provided by our many urban centres, all have made our South-west the destination for millions of Nigerians migrating from their own homelands.

    However, for all our nation’s contributions to Nigeria, what we the people of the South-west have relentlessly been rewarded with is hostility, resulting in betrayal, as well as efforts to pull us down. Soon after independence, the powers of the Federal Government were maliciously employed to disrupt our South-west, generate conflict in our region, and eventually imprison our topmost political leader on totally trumped-up charges of treasonable felony. Even our other leader, Chief Ladoke Akintola, who took the step of forming an alliance with the group controlling the Federal Government, never enjoyed the full loyalty or respectful confidence of his apparent allies; and eventually, he ended up being violently killed.

    Still, in spite of this sordid record of Yoruba experiences in Nigeria, when civilian elective politics was revived in Nigeria again by 1979, Chief Awolowo embarked on a massive effort again for Nigeria’s progress and prosperity. He worked with forward-looking Nigerians from all parts of Nigeria, and created a political party with an enormously ambitious agenda for Nigeria’s greatness. And when, as presidential candidate, he needed to choose a running mate, he persuaded his party to let him choose a promising professional from among the Igbo nationality which had been the most viciously hurt nationality in Nigeria – his reasoning being that such a step was necessary for healing a major part of the wound which the Igbo nation and Nigeria had suffered. But what did Chief Awolowo and all who worked with him get for their great ambition for Nigeria and their titanic efforts? By employing a patently crooked formula, the Federal Government of the day robbed his party of victory.

    About 15 years later, in 1990-2, Chief M.K.O Abiola invested his resources mightily in yet another effort to bring Nigeria together and heal the scars of yesteryears, scars that had been wantonly inflicted on the citizens and peoples of Nigeria through years of military repression. His reward for his great efforts and sacrifices was that his body was brought back home from Abuja.

    Still, years later, when it seemed as if a citizen from the minority Ijaw nation, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, was on the verge of being robbed of his constitutionally legitimate right of succeeding to his late President, the people of the South-west and their leaders supported him powerfully through street demonstrations and global campaigns. Unfortunately, throughout President Jonathan’s six-year presidency, the people of the South-west were treated with hate and spite.

    We in Oodua Foundation, and informed people all over the world, have watched in the past three years as a section of the Yoruba political leadership has worked and sacrificed to knit together the current alliance with the core North, again out of the Yoruba ambition for a stable, strong and  just Nigerian society. Those efforts have now produced a solid possibility of a Nigerian Federal Government dedicated to the welfare of all Nigerians, dependably set against the cultures of corruption, ethnic chauvinism, and process manipulations, a Federal Government capable of leading Nigerians out of poverty into a new era of prosperity and national dignity and greatness.

    We Oodua Foundation and the entire Yoruba nation therefore hopefully expect positive outcomes this time around – even in spite of some disturbing happenings in the new government in the past two weeks. And we urge both sides in this alliance to stay fully loyal to their dedication to change, especially to obviously needed change in the structure of the Nigerian federation.

  • Picture that speaks a thousand words

    Not too long ago, a picture over 20 years old went viral on the internet. It was shot right in Dodan Barracks, Lagos in 1994, and in it, the usurper military dictator, the late General Sani Abacha, in his military attire – though not uncommonly un-bereted yet quite unusually unspectacled – welcomes to the famous seat of power, the late Chief MKO Abiola who is clad resplendently in his usual embroidered agbada, buba and sokoto, with his long famous cap to match. For one who had just won the freest and fairest election in the political history of Nigeria, the irony is more than cruelly etched in the loudly-silent question: “who between the de facto despot and the demure democrat should be the welcomer to the seat of power and who should be the guest to it?”

    Yet, it is clear that whereas one was an opportunistic upstart crow beautified with the feathers of our democratic martyrs, the other was a selfless visionary prepared to sacrifice his all to reclaim the stolen mandate of his people.

    Right behind this fiercely contrasting duo in this frozen past, no less laden with the history of days gone and the prophecy of things yet to come, are two of the most trusted personal aides of the usurper-despot and the unyielding democrat: one is the notorious man of infamy, the Chief Security Officer to the late Abacha, Major Hamza Al-Mustapha – the de-facto to the de-facto – walking behind Chief MKO; and the other, a young, unassuming, bespectacled Bola Ahmed Tinubu, majestically walking behind Abacha as if to tactfully close-mark the untrustworthy General the way Al-Mustapha digs the heels of his innocent principal.

    Whoever posted this picture on the internet has saved himself a thousand words because the picture is its own thousand words; it speaks loudly of our not-too distant political past, even as it eloquently foreshadows a future we never had the gift of prophecy to apprehend: that the man trusted by the late MKO Abiola to watch his back when he went to the lions’ den to insist on his mandate is, after all, our democracy’s future avenging angel, the sword of Damocles one day to fall on the fattened vultures of our captive political aspirations.

    Who would also have thought that in the little obscure, unassumingly harmless character, Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, tucked behind Abiola in the picture, would be the most notorious operative of Aguda House, the de facto Head of State who would torture, maim and kill to keep an aberrant junta in place.

    This is the picture that speaks a thousand words; the picture that proves both time and history are the greatest conspirators, as they both have a way of playing on the psyche of the short sighted man. We are optically illusioned always to look one way, but the blurred and the dimly lit objects that time and history choose not to magnify often are the veritable mustard seeds of a future full of marvel. Watch again in the picture as young Tinubu walks behind Abacha with the solemnity of a golden child that has an uncanny foreknowledge of his future role both as the man chosen to right political wrongs yet in the womb of time, and as the anointed angel to give final rest to the troubled political spirit of his fallen liege and godfather.

    Tinubu has proven himself a worthy son of his proud political lineage. He had been with MKO long before the days of NPN and he was there when the Aare Ona Kakanfo threw his hat into the political ring at the Jos convention of the SDP. He was one of the brains behind the famous Epe Declaration, after which he fled abroad to avoid Abacha’s murderous rage.

    Tinubu, with the late Enahoro, Wole Soyinka, General Alani Akinrinade (Rtd.), Kayode Fayemi and others, sustained NADECO abroad after its virtual demise at home under the asphyxiating disposition of Abacha’s junta. He, with Kokori and others, led the oil-workers strike that crippled Lagos to keep the spirit of June 12 alive. Tinubu was the first person MKO would ask for from me when he had his first day in court on a charge of treason. Tinubu, ironically, was also the first person to call me from London when he heard Abiola was assassinated.

    I remember even in the heat of the pandemonium of MKO’s sudden death, Tinubu still had the equanimity of mind to instruct that I tell Kola Abiola and MKO’s physician, Ore Falomo, to insist on a UN-backed post-mortem to confirm alleged poisoning of his late political mentor; nor did he, thereafter, leave to stray uncatered-for the biological and political orphans of the late MKO – he has nurtured many to the abundant.

    Now that the prophesy has come to pass and the son has, at last, exacted the political pound of flesh to avenge the spirit of his late father, let the son proceed to do the other needful; namely, restore late Chief MKO Abiola to his rightful place in the political history of Nigeria. Let June 12 as a date be recognised as a veritable political watershed in the democratic learning process of this country; let the late icon have to his name an enduring monument of history as his memorial and let the corrective regime of Muhammadu Buhari elevate Abiola posthumously to the highest honour in the land, i.e. the Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR). He deserves it!

    The journey depicted in this picture of a thousand words may have ended tragically – justifiably for the usurper-despot and undeservedly for the ill-fated, heroic democrat, nonetheless, they both have their distinctive places in history; whereas Abacha’s name lives in infamy, Abiola’s lives in the memory of lovers of duty, honour and country.

    Thus away from the thousand words that this picture manifestly evokes, are yet many more that only those who saw it all and have a sense of history can give flesh to. Even as society seems to move and carry on as if nothing momentous happened years ago, history appears to tap us on the shoulder, urging that we do not forget “it” so that “it” too – when our due season comes – will not forget us. Let us lift the memory of our forebears who selflessly gave their yesterday so that we would have this promising today.

    Let the last few syllables of the one thousand words contained in this picture be given their full vent. Let Abiola take his rightful place in the history of our democratic odyssey. Tinubu alone was in the right spot in that history; only he can write it.

     

    • Lisa Akerele, veteran journalist and former Political Assistant to the late MKO Abiola, is Atunwase of Ijesaland.

  • Suntai speaks with Jonathan, Sambo, says Suswam

    Taraba State Governor Danbaba Suntai on Tuesday spoke with President Goodluck Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo. He also received Benue State Governor Gabriel Suswam in New York, where he is recuperating.

    The North America correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Suntai was beaming with smiles and excitement as he spoke with the top Nigerian leaders and interacted with Suswam.

    Suntai is at the Sea View Hospital Rehabilitation Centre and Home, where he is recuperating from the injury he suffered after the aircraft he flew crashed near Yola, the Adamawa State capital, last October.

    Suntai, who was described by Suswam as gaining more weight, on sighting his guest and wife, Yemisi, immediately stood up for a quick handshake and an exchange of pleasantries.

    The two governors later joked and held conversations about happenings in the country.

    Within the period he was with his visitors, Suntai also had telephone conversations with President Jonathan and Vice President Sambo.

    “When he saw me, he greeted me, he smiled. You know, we have a name we call each other. I call him, Mallam Suntai; he calls me Alhaji Suswam. When I called him Malam Suntan, he burst into laughter.

    “He was quite excited seeing me, because the last time I saw him was when he was in Germany. At that point, he was still in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

    “We shook hands (on Tuesday), he stood up; we cracked jokes, we discussed generally. Like I said, I made a phone call to the vice president, who spoke with him.

    “I was quite excited that I met him in very good condition. We held discussions about the country, about his health. My interactions with him showed he has recovered substantially. We are just waiting for him to actually get back to Nigeria and resume work.

    “For someone whose condition was quite critical from a plane crash, it is a miracle, because people hardly survive plane crashes.

    “That he survived and that he had recovered thus far is the mercy of God. I think he is taking it easy too and thanking God for what God has done for him.

    “But generally he was eager to know how the country is and I just briefed him on politics and development in the country generally.

    “I called the vice president and he spoke with him as well. I strongly believe that once the doctors give the go-ahead, he will come back home. This is because he is strong and doing some things by himself.’’

     

  • Kalu Ikeagwu speaks for Nollywood

    Kalu Ikeagwu speaks for Nollywood

    SPOTTED recently at a music forum was actor Kalu Ikeagwu. The actor who came to show support for his counterparts in the music industry at the just conclude world press conference of the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON) expressed his desire for a copyright society for the movie industry.

    The tall frame, light skinned actor said, “It is not only in the music industry that we have issues of infringement of intellectual property because right now I feel like fish out of water because all that’s being discussed here is about music, music and music”.

    Passionate about his industry, Kalu asked if it were possible for the association, COSON to look into Nollywood regarding issues of intellectual property. Backed by Alex Okoroji, both actors were spoke passionately speaking of a copyright organization for the movie industry.

    Though they didn’t get a reply in the affirmative, chairman of COSON, Tony Okoroji however promised to work with some individuals in Nollywood to achieve the feat for the movie industry.