Baba Aye's

It was the great Afrobeat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, or Abami Eda, for those that used to gyrate to the soul-lifting rhythm of his comprehensive show at the Africa Shrine, many years back, who sang that evergreen song; Teacher. He was of the opinion that government is the teacher of citizens, while “culture and tradition” are the teachers of government, but finally declared to the teacher that; “make you no teach me, I go know. Person you teach finish, yes, abi e don die o”. Looking closely at where most governments in the so-called Third World get their teachings from (and many countries in Europe are now getting similar lessons, in the “post-crisis” classes of the Great Recession), one cannot but see the rather surly faces of the two evil twins of Bretton Woods; the IMF & the World Bank. The lessons they teach come in the high street language of neo-classical economics, but at their crux are diagnoses and prognosis that they claim are unfaultable. The main reasons why cou...

The murder of Osama bin Laden by the United States government at Abbottabad in Pakistan on May 2 was a drab farce, after the tragedy of 9/11 and its aftermath (and coming in the wake of the Arab awakening it does seem rather placid). The US government in its self-imposed position as the world policeman invaded the territory of Pakistan to kill Osama within what Barack Obama described as the longest 40minutes of his life. An unarmed bin Laden, as the US reported, was shot dead for putting up resistance. With what, whence he was unarmed? Your guess is as good as mine. But just perhaps the Uncle Sam realised an Osama bin Laden’s trial could bring much more embarrassment for it than the justice it took to him. The farce was not over with the murder. After Islamic rites for the dead, the corpse of the bearded Sheik of terror was bundled with a huge stone and “buried” in the North Sea to become food for fish. This is the American story about Osama’s death. The Iranian state declared it has...

Introduction The 2011 general elections in Nigeria have come and gone, leaving a lot of questions behind, the answers to which will shape the emerging future of the country. The elections were staggered, with those for the National Assembly held on April 9, the presidential ballot, which not surprisingly was the most contentious, held on April 16 and polls for governors and states houses of assembly held on April 26. The general elections have been declared as the freest and fairest in the history of the country since Independence in 1960 by the mainstream national and international media and elections observer groups. This is despite sharp bursts of violence, the bloodiest of which were in the immediate aftermath of the presidential elections, in several states in the northern parts of the country. In the wake of these, more than 500 persons lay dead and some 60,000 were displaced. There had been, bomb blasts and associated rampages during the national assembly polls as well with no...

Introduction It is very easy to forget nowadays that the earliest trade unions were actually combinations of workers who had skills in some trade or the other, but whom were then sucked into informal labour relations by the employers who had big machines and factories. These workers had no contracts of employment, worked for up to 18hours in some cases in the mines and factories and were exploited to their bone marrows. They then came together towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century, in Britain, to form what was then called “trade clubs”, which had to be secret so that they would not be arrested or even killed by thugs loyal to the employers. The same situation occurred although in a different context, with the origins of trade unionism and trade unions in Nigeria. It has been established that the first trade union in Nigeria was the Mechanics Mutual Aid and Improvement Association, existed 29 years before the Nigeria Civil Service Union which ma...