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By Ogaga Ifowodo A  YEAR  to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the benediction of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America reached for a brush, dipped it in white paint and freshened the racial colour line of which King’s predecessor, W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke so eloquently 60 years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk. I am speaking of the murder on February 26, 2012 of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American boy by George Zimmerman, a White-Hispanic American. [caption id="attachment_411397" align="alignleft" width="217"] Martin Luther King Jr[/caption] Martin had crossed the colour line by his sheer presence in Zimmerman’s gated community. Thus, though warned by the police not to follow Martin, Zimmerman would sooner damn the consequences, if any, than let a Black boy “get away” with the “crime.” An all-White jury acquitted Zimmerman. Martin’s murder echoes the slaughter of the 14-year-old Emmet Till in the apt...

By Ogaga Ifowodo The ugly spectacle of the “street fight” that broke out in the Rivers State House of Assembly on July 9 gives further and better particulars of our determination to forever make nonsense of representative governance and a fool of ourselves. In the even more shaming light of attempts at justification by a protagonist of the latest episode in our unending political theatre of the absurd, I restate my view that perhaps our political predicament lies in the insistence on practising democracy without democrats. And in far too many instances, with near-illiterates, which is worse — if comparatives make any sense at this point. “Honourable” Evans Bipi, one of the chief brawlers in the aforementioned incident, is currently the butt of jokes for confessing that he was provoked into violence when a colleague blasphemed Jesus Christ in the person of Mrs Patience Jonathan. [caption id="attachment_402954" align="alignnone" width="412"] Hon Evan Bapaka...

By Ogaga Ifowodo IT took Egypt only two years after its first taste of democracy to give the latest demonstration of Africa’s abiding paradox: every flower of hope is turned sooner, rather than later, into the weed of despair. On July 3, the Egyptian army deposed Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected president.  This followed four days of massive protests by crowds exceeding the multitudes that massed on Tahrir Square for 18 days in 2011 to force life-president Hosni Mubarak out of power. [caption id="attachment_402499" align="alignnone" width="412"] A sand sculpture of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, created by sand artist Sudersan Pattnaik. AFP[/caption] For a country whose politics is as fused with the military as its famous pyramids are fixed to the ground, the 2011 uprising was not just one more chapter in the so-called Arab Spring: it was something in the order of a tectonic movement.  And it raised expectations of the ...