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A Stranger in their Midst: A Memoir (2nd Edition)
Charles E. Archibong was elevated to the bench of the Federal High Court of Nigeria in 2002—the primary superintending forum of Nigeria’s federal system, with jurisdiction over the executive activity of the federal government and all its agencies.
This book details matters that came before Archibong during his time as a Federal Judge. His characteristic approach to adjudication was a decided bent toward speedy conclusion of proceedings before him. These cases ranged from the abduction of a sitting state governor, the recall of the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate, a trial of activists of the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), to pushing through trial a civil claim against federal authorities over publication of an air accident report, oil magnates and communication czars tangling with their creditors. The stories are told with the skill and pathos of an excellent writer.
Things reach a climax when Justice Archibong collides with senior lawyers engaged on behalf of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to conduct a major criminal trial, and about the same time the Judge gets caught in the crossfire of feuding political bigwigs litigating for the control of party political structures. These conflicts will lead to the premature termination of his judicial career.
₵135.00 -
My Footprints in Ghana’s Black Gold
This memoir — part historical and part autobiographical — traces the author’s involvement with the final phase of petroleum exploration in Ghana, a journey that took over a century, beginning with the first onshore well in 1896. It has been a most interesting journey, with many twists and turns.
In the early days of the existence of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, there were various myths and half-truths about the presence or absence of commercial quantities of oil and gas in the basins of the Ghana.
- Nigeria was draining Ghana’s oil and that all that was required was for Ghana to buy powerful machines and begin to pump and drain her own
- Ghana would never find oil until the gods of Nzemaland and the Volta Region had been pacified
- The GNPC Model Production Sharing Agreement was too stringent on contractors
A major seismic interpretation of the Cape Three Points sub-basin of the Western Region, in 1992, would turn out to be the watershed of this new brave phase of exploration in Ghana.
The book was finally launched in Ghana in April 2022.
Hopefully, going to the heart of the matter should help future generations of ordinary Ghanaians, politicians and explorationists understand what it took to make Ghana a petroleum producing country, just in case the country was afflicted by the “Dutch disease.”
₵120.00 -
Southern African Liberation Struggles 1960-1994 (Contemporaneous Documents, 9 Volumes)
These 9 volumes are the most comprehensive historical record of the liberation struggles in southern Africa. Comprising 2.4 million words in 5,394 pages, they record interviews with liberation fighters and supporters in the Frontline states and the extraordinary sacrifices they made so that Africa could at last be free. With the fall of the South African apartheid regime, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) identified the need to record the experiences of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, from 1960 until that final liberation in 1994. To that end, SADC launched the Hashim Mbita Project – named after the last Executive Secretary of the OAU Liberation Committee.
The research covered liberation movements in the countries which engaged in liberation wars, the Frontline states and Extension countries; and the Research Project team comprised members from the SADC mainland states of Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland. The support received from other regions is documented: Anglophone West Africa, Francophone Africa, North Africa, East Asia, Canada and the United States, Cuba and the Caribbean, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Nordic Countries, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Non-Aligned Movement: India, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Sri lanka; Organisation of African Unity and United Nations.
₵3,000.00 -
The Mkapa Years: Collected Speeches (3-Volume Box Set, Hardcover)
This collection of speeches, in three volumes, by the third President of the United Republic of Tanzania, Benjamin William Mkapa (1995–2005), will serve primarily as reference documents to the vision of what he attempted to achieve in his ten years of leadership. His tenure as a leader came at a time when Tanzania’s economy was in dire condition. The legacy of the command economy, which had been in place for much of the 1970s and 1980s, was still felt. There was resistance to change to adopt a market economy, evident in the political tensions and debates about privatisation, an approach following Structural Adjustment Programmes, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that had led to stagnation of the economy, high inflation, deteriorating health, education, communication, and transport sector services, as well as general gloom in the country especially among the poor. The bold steps he took during the first half of his administration did not immediately endear him to the public. However, in the ensuing years, slowly but steadily, positive results were achieved, and the social cost of change that the people had endured was appreciated. Relations with development partners and the multilateral agencies that before he took office had sunk to the lowest ebb were restored, and Tanzania, which was no longer unfit to borrow, received the largest debt relief ever and henceforth. Tanzania was on its way to new growth potentials and a vibrant private sector-led economy.
These collected speeches tell this story and tell it well, in great prose laced with wit and quotations from world political and literary sources, which is an evidence of his erudition as a literature student and journalist.
₵850.00 -
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.
₵75.00 -
Weep Not, Africa
In this book, Dr. Nii Amu Darko proposes a rare template for political economy suitable for the multi-ethnic African state, both in terms of political organization and sustainable economic development. Essentially, he combines the constitution and manifesto of the African Reform Movement (ARM) into this book as a roadmap for realizing Africa’s arrested potential. Dr. Darko proposes the creation of the new African with a new mindset that would go on to create a new society based on love, hope and faith. The ARM manifesto is the refreshing plan of action for the revolution to attain the elusive true independence by ending imperialism in all its forms, gain true independents and foster opportunities and prosperity for all. To paraphrase Nkrumah, Darko expounds the notion that “the independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of its economy from Finance Capital.”
₵70.00Weep Not, Africa
₵70.00 -
An Ethnographic Study of Northern Ghanaian Conflicts: Towards a Sustainable Peace
Conflict in Northern Ghana appears to be increasing in amplitude and frequency and its effects are getting more devastating. It is the view of this book that The Government of Ghana and civil society organisations involved in aspects of conflict management have approached peace issues in the region with an inadequate understanding of the local issues that divide and unite the people, or using sufficient resources to preempt conflict.
In 2003 The Mole V summit was held in Damongo to discuss strategic directions for comprehensive development and poverty reduction in Northern Ghana as a mechanism for supporting conflict management.
It is the aim of this publication to contribute to the proposed plan by suggesting past and current conflict management resources and mechanisms which could be employed. The suggestions are informed by surveys, which are outlined in the book, of particular conflicts in the three northern Regions of Ghana between 2006 and 2008 – their histories, causes and efforts and their resolution.
₵55.00 -
These Bones Will Rise Again
What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true spirit of a nation?
In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert Mugabe’s rule.
In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the ‘coup that was not a coup’, the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women – her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.
Chigumadzi successfully nests the intimate charge of her poignant personal story in the sweeping historical account and mythology of Zimbabwe. – Brian Chikwava, author of Harare North
Chigumadzi’s exploration of personal, family and national history reincarnates in stark, vivid images, many of those interred in the shadows of her country’s ‘Big Men’. – Tsitsi Dangarembga, author of Nervous Conditions
₵80.00These Bones Will Rise Again
₵80.00