CHIKE OFILI APPRAISES FIVE TOP RATED BOOKS
Chike Ofili Appraises Five Top Nigerian Books
Books by Nigerians THAT have most given me a delightful read in the last one year plus, this WORLD BOOK DAY.
I particularly love Bolaji Abdullahi’s ON A PLATTER OF GOLD: How Jonathan Won and Lost Nigeria (2017). This former Minister of Youths and Sports and Spokesman of the PDP that moved over to the opposition party, APC to help bring down his former boss from power, shocked me with with his very competent handle on the pen as he demonstrates great capacity for thought, research, balance of views as much as he could, and a brilliance of very skillfull writing. It was the most delightful book I read in 2019. The book is a revelation on Nigeria’s brand of politics and politicians and how they arrive at and pursue their inordinate ambitions and all the self-centeredness that drives the entire process.
ZIK: A Selection From The Speeches of NNAMDI AZIKIWE (1961) gives me continuous joy since I first bought and began reading it in 2016. It is the great writing of the Father of the Nigerian Nation and how his speeches at the different stages of his rising culminated in his nationalist struggles and independence for Nigeria. Each platform where he spoke and delivered some of his epochal speeches took him one step at a time to the top and the travails he had trying to get others to see how better to build an African nation of great pride.
Zik writes well and with a penetration of insight that often bother on the prophetic. He helps us to relive the national issues in the different segments of national life that he learns his clarity of thought.
TESTIMONY TO COURAGE (2019) edited by Chido Onumah and Frederick Adetiba is a book centred on marking the 60th birthday of a most remarkable, ethical and investigative Nigerian Journalist, Dapo Olorunyomi, who in accordance with his Yoruba surname, God has indeed been saving from harm’s way.
The moral courage of his life and his determination to keep making public servants in governance, in management and in various types of leadership to account for their deeds is quite eloquent and inspiring. The book fascinates me more for the intimate brilliance that all the writers from family, friends, colleagues and former teachers and seniors bring to bear to produce for us, snippets of his life that they encountered that turned the book into an anthology of biographies in a rainbow of beautiful pieces of writing.
FOR THE LIBERATION OF NIGERIA (1979) the collection of lectures, essays, reviews and columns written by the ultra-radical historian and scholar, DR. BALA USMAN is just as much a most refreshing read on Nigeria as Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s collected speeches. They are books you just don’t finish. They are books you keep reading and consulting.
Bought at an Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA Kaduna convention about five years ago when I saw a newly purchased copy of my pal, a lecturer from University of Keffi and Lafia. I demanded where he got his copy from and then went for mine. I had always wanted to own the thoughts of Bala Usman whom I use to see as a research student at Ahmadu Bello University, ABU where I did most of my undergraduate university holidays, using their rich department, Faculty and their Almighty Kashim Ibrahim libraries.
For the Liberation of Nigeria much mirrors the quality of thought and the boisterous and cantekerous character of the author as one who is constantly alert and keeps vigil on the goings on in the Nigerian society through his university window at ABU, and enduring the need to expose the manipulations of thoughts and conducts of scholars and national administrators of the Nigeria nation.
His analysis are rigorous and original in their seeming idealism of birthing a just society where his “masses” have a fairshare of its decisions by organised participation. He is a most eloquent spokesman for the undermined and purues his defence of them with a most rigorous conviction and advocacy at various levels of intellectual engagements. He writes with an admirable skill and mischief of an extremely confident person that taunts and poopoos his opponents and adversaries. He is a most enjoyable read on national and international affairs on a historical plane and interpretation.
OBU UDEOZO’S GARDENERS OF DREAMS Series (2017) I recently reviewed as critiquing the critic of a generation of poets. It is a book that sent me back into a re-examination of my creative craft as a poet. He examins the poetic craft of four poets of similar temper and thematic concern for fatherland in a manner that shows that he dug into those books and attempted to bring critical judgements to bear on them to the best of his ability in a cross-referencing with poets that have gone before them, and how both compare where they meet in a competent English that celebrates self and subject.
It was one of those books that almost made you think page by page for the kind of deep utterances uttered by the author, but more often those of others that he brings to bear on the subject. It was a good thing that somebody did such a huge series of works on poets born in the 1960s who began publishing from the 1990s.
I have enjoyed these books and I am bringing you words from them.
CHIKE OFILI was Lagos ANA Chairman
