OjuOponIfa

Before The Nigerian Prize  By Odia Ofeimun Unlike Professor Olu Obafemi, President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, I do not take the Word as an egg which cannot be reassembled once it is broken. The truth is that the word if it is an egg, was already broken. All that we do as writers is to train it in support of life, scooping it, beating it, refining and spicing it, to educate taste, thus making and adding meaning, nutritious meaning, to existence. How well we do this is dependent on how we use imagination — the heart, mind and will, that is part of our being homo sapiens.  Those who do not care about the meaning that they make, who therefore think of deconstructing before they have learnt to construct, are the ones who tend to put the world in trouble. They tell the rest of us that we can always leap before we think. They seek to, and because they fail to assemble the egg that is already broken, they see the world as a free-wheeling place where anything goes. Hence, ...

ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN PROMOTION OF CULTURE AND TOURISM June 07, 2010 "...the crucial job of information management of our various cultural and tourism agencies will no longer be left in the hands of non-professional, untrained, over red-taped or overcooked civil servants who have no clue what the role of the media is in the promotion, packaging, and presentation of aspects of our cultural and tourism products and ideas to the larger public -- local and international." (Being a paper presented by Jahman Anikulapo at a Workshop on Review of Parastatals under Ministry of Culture and Tourism) I LIKE to open with two preambles: both of which will suggest where my conclusion is headed. I would be a fraud to pretend that anything I say here before the gathering is NEW. In fact, I should be sanctioned if I or any other person make such a claim. There is nothing I am going to say today that had not been said in the past about how best to engage the media as an instrument of articulati...

Religion and The Sanctity of Space of Social Interaction:  A personal narrative on the Situation in South-West Nigeria (Chapter in a book, CONFLICT: What has Religion got to do with it? -- An African-European Dialogue ; pub. Woeli Publishing Services, Germany; 2004) By Jahman Anikulapo PREAMBLE The title and content of this piece have been inspired by a speech delivered by the South Korean Ms Irene NG, a former magazine editor, who later became a Member of Parliament, at a workshop for journalists in South Korea in 2002. Ms Irene, in her speech, Walking The Middle Line, which was basically a narrative of her personal experience as a journalist dealing with matters of inter-groups relationships, uncovered some uncommon roots of conflicts among groups of divergent orientations and ideologies. She suggested ways by which a communications worker or any social worker and, by extension, the larger society could effectively navigate the vast and precarious landmine wrought by differences ...