“North Korea as a state was formed at the end of World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States drew a line across the peninsula. During the Korean War, the U.S. Air Force leveled the North, to the extent that American Generals complained there was nothing left to bomb. Ever since, North Korea has existed in a state of insecurity, with the totalitarian regime telling the population that the U.S. is out to destroy them. It is in this context that, following the collapse of its nuclear-armed benefactor, the Soviet Union, the Kim regime has sought weapons of its own. But he looks at what happened to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who didn’t manage to develop nuclear weapons, and Moammar Gaddafi, the Libyan who gave up his nuclear programme, and sees that he needs them to keep the U.S. at bay.” – Anna Fifield, The Washington Post, September 5, 2017
As we leap into the New Year and celebrate another birthday of Jesus Christ, the son of the carpenter, we pause as per our tradition to smoke out that ultimate actor who in the cascading human drama of 2017 threw to the trashes the abiding narratives, impacted on humanity, challenging, striding a new path all to conquer the normal.
In reconstructing the new chapters of our civilisation, he ceases to belong only to his peers. For his gargantuan contributions to mankind, he now would no longer be introduced as a Fellow of the Gynecologists’ Practitioners of West Africa or a Fellow Physician of the Order of Malta. If he is a writer, he ceases to be glorified as a poet. For his virtuosity and flaming luminosity, the triumphant Fellow has broken out from his limited space and peer worship. Like Mohammed Ali, Pele, like Jay-Jay, and, more recently, Messi, Ronaldo, they no longer belong to a club, to a country or even to a particular sport, a particular discipline or a particular profession. They belong to the world. Below, therefore, are some of our selected actors whose eclectic perseverance, ‘madness in a hurry,’ overwhelming transformative actions, reverberated and changed our 2017 world. Leading this magnificent pack is the good old Robert Mugabe, who gave the world a new narrative of soldiers overthrowing democracy and just stopping before the gate of the peoples Constitution and mandate.
There is the most prominent case of Marshal Kim Jong-un, the rocket man from North Korea. America the superpower has learnt to catch cold whenever Kim Jong-un sneezes. Kim Jong-un was a physics major who studied in Switzerland. From childhood, he had an obsession for the pure science of physics and was attracted to the friction and faction of matters. April 15, 2012, when he spoke on his grandfather’s centenary… “Onward towards final Victory,” the Korean Wosu, Marshal of the Armed Forces, Kim Jong-un, was unveiled. The young heir had been prepared to defend the hard-fought nationalism, repel imperialism. According to Kim Chang Sok, a department director of the Korean Ministry of Coal Industry, “It is the best way to respond with powerful nuclear deterrent to the U.S. imperialists who are violent toward the weak and subservient to the strong.”
Justice Peter Umeadi, he was the unanimous man of the year at Vanguard, 2008, after his landmark ruling that installed former APC Governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, as the governor of Edo State. In that landmark judgment, the facts read as follows: Gubernatorial election was conducted in Edo State as in other states of Nigeria on April 14, 2007. In the said election, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) fielded Prof. Oserheimen Osunbor and the Action Congress (AC) fielded Oshiomhole as candidate for the governorship election. The INEC returned the PDP’s candidate as the winner of the election, the result of the election and the return of the PDP candidate as the winner was challenged by Oshiomhole vid a petition at the National Assembly, Governorship and Legislative Election Petition Tribunal Edo State. The tribunal fully heard the petition and upheld it in its judgment delivered by Justice Umeadi on t March 20, 2008.
The tribunal made the following orders: (i) the first and second petitioners polled the highest number of valid votes cast in the election in Edo State on April 14, 2007. (ii) the first petitioner, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole is hereby declared as the elected Governor of Edo State of Nigeria, being the candidate who scored the highest number of valid votes cast and has satisfied the requirements of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 and the Electoral Act 2006. (iii) it is ordered that the certificate of return issued to Senator Osunbor as elected Governor of Edo State is hereby withdrawn and nullified. (iv) the second respondent is hereby ordered to issue the first petitioner, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, a certificate of return as the elected Governor of Edo State of Nigeria forthwith.
As expected, Osunbor and the PDP and INEC filed appeals at the Court of Appeal in a unanimous decision through the lead judgment delivered by the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Farouk Abdullahi, November 11, 2008, dismissed the appeal thereby confirming the judgment of the lower tribunal (see The day the Eagle Emerged, the Legal Works of Hon. Justice Peter Umeadi. Onitsha 2015).
My Lord, who has climbed to become the Chief Judge of Anambra State, is now the president of the World Jurist Assembly, recently elected at Aruba.
Mugabe, presently away from his Zimbabwean kingdom over which he presided for more than three decades, was the actor who was to hand over power to his wife. But then struck the Army after an intriguing two weeks of to and fro, his personality, past, as a guerrilla bush fighter who mobilised his people against white racism in Zimbabwe, saved his life. For the first time in the military’s intervention in African politics, the Army could not complete its military putsch.
Jimanze Ego-Alowes: the Sun Group is the most circulating of the Nigerian newspapers. The tabloid has over the years experimented, leaning on its entertaining and provocative reports, mixing it up with the Aristotelian school of writers. Those Philosopher Kings equipped with massive intellect, poetic employment of language, have lifted the Sun’s table to the summit. I thought my Wednesday Group were leaders, but now somebody is instructing me that the Thursday paper, where Dr. Amanze Obi and Jimanze Ego-Alowes are pushing the envelope is a must-read!
This year, the writer of the year garland belongs to the man who has continuously churned out books and may jolly well epitomise the modern-day life of a writer as described by Hillarie Belloc (1870-1959) in his Muir Book, “the life of writing has always been a bitter business. It is notoriously accompanied for those who write well by poverty and contempt, or fatuity and wealth for those who write ill.”