Aare afe babalola biography of martin
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Lere Olayinka's Post
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Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi: On Justice, a Just Society and The Nigerian State
By Tunji Olaopa
The feud between elder statesman, Chief Afe Babalola and civil rights activist, Mr. Dele Farotimi, is perhaps the most significant discourse that postcolonial Nigerian state has thrown up for the moment, one in a class of those grand defining disputations that surely will gather dust which will take some time to abate. And it is one case that is fraught with all sorts of legal, jurisprudential, moral and political traps and complexities that speak to more than the trivial interventions—leveraged around the David and Goliath motif—that are attending the matter. Those who have been able to go beyond the surface of the case will agree that it goes to the very foundation and founding of the Nigerian society, and the fundamental objective of crafting a good and just society for Nigerians. That the issue revolves around the dispensation of justice immediately alerts us to the deep insinuation about the idea of social justice itself, and how the conception of fairness could be written into the very fabric of the Nigerian society.
And yet, the complexity of the case is what makes it a case that is too critical for a public servant like me to dabble in.
(Un)fortunately, my intellectual
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MOULDING NIGERIA INTO A NATION (2)
MOULDING NIGERIA INTO A NATION (2)
“55 years of independence has not changed the issue that matters to the National Election of Nigeria. It would take much more than a slogan of “unity in diversity” to remove ethnic identities and idiosyncrasies which had become deeply entrenched with a psyche of the average Nigerian”.
Last week I referred to the book titled “State of Africa” written by Martin Meredith to highlight the fact that Nigeria is not alone in Africa as far as diversity of its citizens is concerned and that other African Countries with whom Nigeria shares a common colonial history have the same features. In a list containing the ranking of countries according to ethnic diversity of its peoples prepared by James Fearon, Nigeria is ranked 18th with a score of and in ethnic and religious fractionalisation respectively, with a score of “1” signifying the highest degree of diversity and “0” being the lowest. African Countries such as Cameroon (6), Ghana (13), Uganda (4), South Africa (8), Tanzania (2) and Liberia (5) were all ranked as being more ethnically diverse than Nigeria. As a matter of fact 17 of the top 20 most ethnically diverse countries are all in Africa. This is obviously due to a shared common heritage of