Civics Weekly Online

By Razaq Adedeji Jimoh FILLED with inciting quest to make a difference from the past, the Ooni of Ife, HRM Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi, Ojaja II, would probably have thought his forebears did not get it right with their cultural art of polygamy that was never even exclusive to the royal family, but stood out as one inevitable peculiarity of the royal palace. He could not have been a stranger to the king’s exclusive right to the Yoruba eulogy in salutation – Esin Oba a je’ko pe – but his Majesty would seem to lack the depth of its etymology. He therefore found the legacy of Alarede – the Western creed of monogamy – a superior culture beneath which the tradition of his regal birth must be trodden. Thus so at incipient of his coronation, he threw his hat into the ring and set to wrestle with nature, since nature makes the ambience of culture and tradition. The battle began to manifest in the eventual controversy that ceaselessly built up around his marital life until his culture con...

By Razaq Adedeji Jimoh THOSE who can remember a Chief Ebenezer Obey’s evergreen lyrics of the late 1970s – Babu Lukudi – should be apt to grasp its metaphor here. Obey, then a rising juju music star had his bulging tommy to show for evidence of his good time. But, according to him, this was maliciously taken for the sign of a brand of money ritual – Lukudi . When a ‘milled news’ of N2million gift to Civics Weekly by Her Excellency, Princess Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire (OFR), eventually filtered into the snooping ambience of the media’s management, the immediate impulsive sense to make of it was an imaginary drop of the money from enigmatic messenger of the rumour miller. In today’s Nigeria where the profession of journalism and basic business of media have become synonymous with poverty, anyone in the sector would be highly grateful for any gift of such sum as a mystic show of a potent lukudi . Yes, call it a rumour; you will yet be boxed into a corner with the aphorism that in eve...