Tag: Prof. Sunny Awhefeada

News Feature: HRM KING DUKU II @ 70

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Human experience as embedded in philosophy is similar everywhere. How life is lived, values and culture may differ from race to race and age to age, but there are some verities that hold for all of humanity in the way our world is viewed and lived. Human values and their measures remain the same hence what is considered good is good and bad is bad irrespective of colour, clime and time. In literature as in philosophy, humanity has had to be confronted with truths that point to…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: Adamu Must Go! Ngige Must Go!!

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada That Nigeria has regressed, some say irretrievably, since 2015 is not in doubt. Citizens are daily confronted and assailed by the raw and harsh realities of monumental misrule and the gross incompetence that has become the defining feature of the ruling elite. The citizens’ plights are hourly reinforced and made worse by indices of failure of governance and state capture which add up to grave disillusionment. Those who forced themselves on the hapless masses, beginning from 1999 till date have refused to live up to the ideals…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: For Abednego Ekoko, For Johnson Barovbe

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Today’s intervention is dedicated to two personages who unknowingly shared similar destinies and walked paths that were similar in more ways than one. I came to know both men in my adult years when I had become old enough to observe, evaluate and reach tentative conclusions. I doubt if they knew each other well as their association was something that can be classified among those phenomena that occurred happenstantially. I am referring to Professor Abednego Eloghene Ekoko and Chief Johnson Modika Barovbe, both of whom joined their…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: What Is New Or Happy About The New Year?

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Once upon a time the thought of the end of one year and the approach of another elicited joy and expectations. In between the outgoing and the incoming year is a moment of transition that was marked by stocktaking, conviviality, merriment, then sober reflections and resolutions. We truly felt the transition from an old year to a new one and we were all happy or so we thought as children? My earliest concrete memories of the old and New Year phenomenon were formed in Evwreni, then a…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: A Christmas Without Christmas

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada A new sociology, virulent, irascible, unrelenting and pervasive, is out there attempting to subject our past, including our very recent past, to erasure. The drastic occurrences and, even radical, changes of the last twenty years have turned the world into a strange phenomenon that we suddenly didn’t know. We have become victims of our own tendency to outdo the order of nature. The pursuit of knowledge, advancement in science and technologies and their attendant discoveries have become a double-edged sword dangling over humanity’s feeble neck. The world…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: A Nation Astray

Admin

  By Sunny Awhefeada Dele Giwa, the unforgettable journalist, preempted our today when he wrote in the mid-1980s that Nigeria had reached the stage of unshockability! Members of his generation would have applauded him for his insight, sublimity of thought and verbal dexterity. True, the 1980s was the high watermark of the tendencies that birthed today’s crises and woes. Nigeria attained independence two decades earlier and despite her promising beginning as carrying the promise of the Black race, she tottered into a bloody internecine conflict that raged for thirty months.…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: Urhobo Progress Union @ 90

Admin

  By Sunny Awhefeada   The Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) was founded on the 3rd of November 1931 in Warri. This means that the UPU is ninety years old. At ninety, it is Nigeria’s oldest surviving socio-cultural organization. It was not Urhobo Progress Union in the beginning. It was Urhobo Brotherly Society. It was so called in order to reflect its mandate of fostering fellow feeling, brotherliness and unity among the Urhobo people. The name mutated into Urhobo Progress Union in 1935, and it has since remained so. Its motto…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: Night Approaches

Admin

  By Sunny Awhefeada Night remains a disturbing metaphor in the construction of experience whether fiction or factual. The human mind has configured night as providing the ambience and frame for whatever is evil. A dominant and frightening feature of night is darkness, a phenomenon that has frightened humanity from time immemorial. Night is imagined and constructed as a time of transition during which an unseen mortal combat takes place in the spiritual realm. Night has horrors that are better imagined. It is also configured as the time witches meet…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: The October Youth Uprising

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada (This piece was first published on 23rd October 2020 in the wake of the #ENDSARS protests) The month of October remains the most significant in Nigeria’s history. It was at the dawn of its first day in 1960 that we were set free from colonial bondage and pronounced an independent nation. The import of that day remains inscribed in the consciousness of every Nigerian. Growing up, many songs were composed for us to sing about that day as primary school pupils. Our social studies lessons and later…

Read More

Analysis & Opinion: Obscene Opulence Amidst Crushing Poverty

Admin

By Sunny Awhefeada Nigeria has always been a classic case of the interminable play of contrasts which literary connoisseurs will call irony, oxymoron or paradox depending on the intensity or manifestation. What is apparent from the Nigerian experience since independence in 1960 is that the country has been sustained by a corrosive system of opposites which is lubricated by oddities and absurdities. Nigeria is so endowed, yet so poor.   The citizens are among the most intellectually endowed in the world, yet they are being led by the nose. Her…

Read More