Iyabo Arinola Ifeoma Awokoya's Blog

A tribute to Cousin Mohammed Fawehinmi who departed planet earth in the twinkling of an eye on the 11th of August 2021. Ability in Disability I must confess that I have struggled with this call made by our God to bring Mohammed (Mo) home to himself. All my Christian instincts tell me that God did this for good because all His deeds are good and that though His ways are not our ways, He brings everything to perfection. I trust and believe, but the hurt is nevertheless deep. Mo’s death has made me so low in spirit,  and when I spoke to my daughter about my feelings, she advised that I write my thoughts down in a tribute to Mohammed and that it would help me process my emotions and find peace. So here I go. Hopefully, this piece will succour those who mourn their loved ones in this pandemic era and in particular, give comfort to those who have lost loved ones who are classified as especially vulnerable. A portrait of Mo as a child, teenager and young adult I am 8 years older than Mo. He w

A coup and a secession:  On February 23, 1966, barely a month after first coup d'etat in Nigeria which took place on the 29th of January 1966, an Army officer of Ijaw descent, who was born in Oloibiri in 1938 and was from Kaima in present day Bayelsa, named Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro, declared the Niger Delta Republic (NDR) as an independent nation. He was just 27 years old and was at that time a student at the University of Nigeria Nsukka.  Adaka Boro was a radical through and through. He was a student union activist, who had once taken the Nigerian Government to court to challenge the 1963 Constitution. He trained a motley group of young men literarily behind his father’s compound and declared them as his army that would fight against the Nigerian forces and steer the NDR into independence from Nigeria. He called his ‘army’ the Niger Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF). As was to be expected, his secession was short-lived. It lasted a mere 12 days.  Adaka Boro It is instructive that the se

Theatre of the Absurd -Part 2 Marginalisation? Let us examine history. The best point to start analysing a topic is to go back in history for context. The cry of marginalisation is not a new phenomenon and this cry among the Igbo ethnicity, is a recurring lament. Permit me to say from the onset that I am a firm believer in Nigeria as a unit and I do not have enmity in any part of my bones for any ethnic group. I embrace Nigeria. That said, I am also a realist and an analyst, and I believe that if Nigeria is going to be able to move forward to greater unity and development we must speak frankly about the “who”, “what”, “where” and “when” of events in history that led us to this day and this periodic resurgence of agitations for secession. We are in a sense of déjà vu here.   The amalgamation of the three regions into one nation of 1914 The premise for the argument that we were never one nation is cited as the ‘unholy’ 1914 amalgamation of the 3 regions by the colonial masters. It is t

The President asked a question: Can they say that I have not been governing according to the Constitution? In the practice of law, lawyers are always delighted when such an open question is asked, because it is an opportunity to take up the gauntlet that has been thrown and score damning points in a case, especially if you have facts to controvert the assertion.   The President left his flanks open in that speech and since that day, I have been waiting for the rebuttals to come from those who have been in arms against him. You see in cross-examination, we always caution that a lawyer must never ask a question that he does not already know the answer. So if the President opened himself up, surely his traducers should jump at the opportunity to nail him.   Like I said, I have perused the media, and read and heard the chatter and the anger on SM, but I have not seen one person take up the challenge. And why is that so? Why did the traducers decide to do what they do best-deflect. Why leav