Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August 18, 2024

Nigeria as shock-horror skits | By Festus Adedayo

Skits literally crack ribs with laughter. The line separating fact from fiction or faction (fact and fiction) in skits is paper-thin. An instance was a skit cobbled together in Addis Ababa on January 11, 1976 at an OAU Extraordinary Session on Angola. This high-octane skit was documented by General Joe Nanven Garba in his Diplomatic Soldiering (1987). Garba was a Langtang-born Federal Commissioner for External Affairs under Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo. Self-titled ‘Field Marshal’ Idi Amin Dada, the notorious Ugandan despot, was then the OAU chairman. It was at that conference that General Muhammed delivered his famous and powerful speech he entitled “Africa has come of age.” In it, he called for an African self-determination, as opposed to a provocative letter written by American president Gerald Ford opposing Soviet-backed MPLA. It was also a time when African Heads of State were locked in acrimonious relationships. That conference was where Dada, a title-besotting despot,