• Waning Strength of Government: Essays on Nigerian Governance

    In Waning Strength of Government, Obaze draws on twenty-three of his various speeches, policy briefs, lectures and op-eds, to render exploratory essays that dissect some common patterns and trajectories that point anthetically to factors and conducts, which ought to constitute the strength of government, but don’t.  In so doing, he unmasks the prevailing weaknesses and waning strength of government – the attendant consequences, and their prevalence and implications for Nigeria.

    Such developments, with the attendant reversals, some nondescript and some dramatic, but replete with absence of resilience, leads the author to assert that democracy, “once characterized as probably the greatest expansion of freedom,” has come under assault from within its ranks, as shifts in geopolitics combine with ascendancy of non-state actors to undercut democracy.  Cognizant of the suggestion that the democratic system as conceptualized, has not just worked as expected, but is rather dysfunctional, the author asserts that nowhere is this consideration more evident and concrete than in Africa, Nigeria included.

    Waning Strength of Government piggybacks on the assertion that Nigeria’s “democracy is in reverse gear” and “the story is that of regrets and missteps.” Obaze employs an inquiry and excursion model using the flipside of McGeorge Bundy’s 1968 seminal book, The Strength of Government, to analyze leadership, political and governance challenges that continue to dog Nigeria’s nascent democracy.  The essays in this volume, which are clustered into four groupings; democratic imperatives; domestic development challenges; foreign policy dimensions and leadership and governance, explore some Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT), as well as general challenges and uncertain aspects of Nigeria’s affected democracy.

    In this very important work on Nigerian contemporary politics, leadership and dilemmas confronting the nation, the point is made severally, and vehemently too, that the strength of government is not about military capacity or use of force; but about the upholding the rule of law, consolidating democratic institutions and entrenching the social contract between the government and the governed.

  • A Good Mourning

    When a poem is beautifully crafted, images bop up and resonate, lines dance on the page, metaphors grip the reader and one is taken on a voyage of discovery. That was my experience while reading Ogaga Ifowodo’s latest collection of poems, entitled A Good Mourning.

    A Good Mourning

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  • Not My Time to Die

    “Reading Yolande Mukagasana’s book in French at the age of 15 changed my life.”- Gaël Faye

    Originally published as La mort ne veut pas de moi in 1997, this book was the first survivor testimony to be published about the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

    In 1994 Yolande was an unconventional nurse and mother of three who enjoyed wearing jeans and designer glasses. She ran her own clinic in Nyamirambo and was planning a party for her wedding anniversary. But when genocide started everything changed. Targeted because she was a successful Tutsi woman, she was separated from her family and had to flee for her life.

    Mukagasana’s gripping memoir describes the betrayal of friends and help that came from surprising places. Quick-witted and courageous, Yolande never lost hope she would find her children alive.

    Translated from the French by Zoe Norridge.

  • Ruffled Butterflies

    “Till death do us part…” Seemingly innocent transgressions like squeezing toothpaste or leaving pee on the toilet seat lie in wait to trip up these characters who in turn become so stifled by their partners that they can’t wait for death to part them.

    Some stories in this collection end with cliff-hangers, making room for self-reflection and numerous possible endings.

    These thirteen stories traverse various domestic issues that call for more meaningful steps than grumbling, as the Morgans, Olabisi, Kayode, Vera and John soon find out.

    Ruffled butterfly wings are used as imagery for the delicate family ties of everyday people who are sewn together in marriage. Suspenseful, dramatic, romantic and dipped in an amalgam of Nigerian and Western cultures, these relationships pass through crucibles with the couples spreading their ruffled, ripped mosaic wings to flutter and fly against all odds.

  • Bionic Evolution

    Long after humans abandoned the Earth, in a far-flung dystopian future, Zakari Nebula is abducted and experimented upon by forces darker than even his imagination. After physical and mental torture of the most horrific kind, the now-cybernetically enhanced abductees escape.

    Bionic Evolution is the story of the bonds they forge, and the battles they face, as they take one last stand for freedom, and their very own souls.

    Bionic Evolution is powerful, it is pacey, it is action-packed and the writer knows exactly what you need to keep turning pages as you follow his hero, a teenager who was kidnapped and turned into an android, as he and his fellow abductees learn to wield the new powers that come with their new bodies and take the fight to their abductors…

  • Sunbeams and Shadows

    Sunbeams and Shadows is a collection of eighty-six poems spread within three sub-titles that include Continuum, Silent Pixels, and Homage. The one hundred and ten page book is published by Origami, an imprint of Parresia Publishers limited, Lagos.

    The well-designed book is of fine quality and the poems gush with ripe innocence, a quality of true beauty. The poems talk about love, pains, philosophy, uncertainties and the absurdities of life. The collection’s romantic ambience is as effective as the lamentations therein.

  • The Anguish and Vigilance of Things

    In these poems, Richard Ali presents his life as a patient on a surgeon’s table and there are no, have been no themes, to his life, as these poems reveal. There have been only a series of glances, his eye resting on this or that, his poems becoming points of emphasis, seeking to undress and pare away adjective and lie alike. My son is not naked in these poems. But these poems are a testimony to what is laid naked. He is naked beneath these poems.

  • Winning with Wisdom: A Collection of Poems

    Winning with Wisdom is a collection of poems that are deep and soul lifting. In the pages of this book, you will understand the healing power of God, read about His benevolence and ask deep questions about debacles happening around the world. Victor Uwakwe outdid himself on this one.

  • Destiny and Politics: A Biography of Hon. Samuel Sallas-Mensah

    From a humble beginning as the son of a farmer in a relatively small town, Hon. Samuel Sallas-Mensah, four terms MP for Upper West Akim would perhaps have ended up as a farmer too. In those days, children took after their parents’ trades. Sallas got the chance to go to America and the entire course of his life changed. After a distinguished career in accountancy in the US and later in Nigeria, destiny led his way once more but this time to the country of his birth, Ghana, where eventually, a new career window opened in his life – politics.

    As a Member of the Consultative Assembly his accounting and financial acumen were in evidence as he actively contributed to the District Assembly Common Fund. And as a Member of Parliament he was instrumental in instituting the live television coverage of the sitting of the Public Accounts Committee – legacies to the nation that survive today.

    In this compelling biography the reader come face-to-face with this influential man of few words who is famed to have friends and access to both sides of the Ghanaian political divide. But what would Sallas be remembered for most, a politician, a chartered accountant or family man? More importantly, where else will destiny lead him to?

    “Crispy-delicious narratives, refreshingly-garnished insights. This fascinating biography of a patriot never finishes astonishing you with the twists and turns. But it is the authoritative revelations about a nation and its people that makes this book destined to be relevant to the politics of Ghana.” ~ Business & Financial Times

  • Gbesela Yeye or English-Ewe Dictionary

    The first Gbesela was published in 1910; the second, which was a reprint of the first without any alterations, in 1922. The present edition (1930) is a completely new book and is more than double the size of its predecessors.

    The Gbesela Yeye or New Interpreter is intended to serve both Europeans and Africans, and this purpose has governed its composition and arrangement. The Ewe reader will expect to learn from it the Ewe equivalent for an English word which he may come across in his English reading. or in conversation. In consequence the Dictionary should contain not only the English rendering of Ewe words, but should also try to explain at least the more important of such English words for which the Ewe language has not yet developed a precise expression, and for which circumlocution or approximation is necessary. The enormous difference in the development of the two languages makes it necessary very often to use in Ewe the same word or phrase for a considerable number of English expressions with their numerous fine shades in meaning, although, in justice to Ewe, it must be admitted that in certain respects the valent. Ewe language abounds in expressions for which English is hardly rich enough to offer an equivalent.

    For anyone who wants to acquire the language, the marking of tones is indispensable, as every one will be aware who has ever seriously tried to approach the language. In a Dictionary, where the words stand isolated, even the Ewe Reader will in many cases not be able to find out which word is intended, if the tones are unmarked.

    In books for native speakers of the language, however, that is to say in the national literature, very few tone marks are required, because the context explains what is intended to say. Both non-Ewe and Ewe speakers will find the arrangement helpful by which short phrases or sentences have been added to many words, showing how they are used. This is particularly desirable and almost indispensable in the mutual interpretation of two languages which differ so widely as Ewe and English. The Ewe word in isolation in very many cases conveys practically no meaning to the non-Ewe speaker, unless its construction and application are shown in examples.

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