A video shows Nigeria’s military head of state, Major General Ibrahim Babangida, launching the Association of African Petroleum Producers in Lagos, Nigeria. January 1987. The African Petroleum Producers Organization (APPO) is the current name of the organization.
The world’s first scientist to identify the gene encoding the enzyme that causes sleeping sickness (Trypanosoma) was Professor Andrew Jonathan Nok (1962-2017). This scientific discovery paved the way for the creation of DNA-based vaccines to prevent the disease, which mostly affects 60 million people and animals in rural areas of East, West, and Central Africa. Prior to being named commissioner of health and human services by Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai in July 2015, Nok served as dean of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria’s Faculty of Science. A cabinet upheaval later transferred Nok to the Education Ministry. Professor Nok, 47, was one of five applicants for the vice-chancellor post at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria in 2009. Despite supposedly receiving the highest score of 86%, he was allegedly rejected for the job due to his ethnicity and religion. Born in Nok village, Jaba Local Government Area, Kaduna State, on February 11, 1962, Professor Andrew Jonathan Nok attended Government Secondary School in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, and LEA Primary School in Kaunda. He was accepted to Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria in 1979 when he was sixteen years old, and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry in 1983, a master’s degree in 1988, and a doctorate in 1993. In 2003, he was promoted to professor. At the age of 55, Andrew Jonathan Nok passed away on November 21, 2017.
Six unsuccessful attempts to become president of Nigeria were made by Atiku Abubakar in 1993, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019, and 2023. Moshood Abiola and Baba Gana Kingibe defeated him in the 1993 Social Democratic Party presidential primary. In the 2007 presidential election, he ran as an Action Congress candidate and finished third behind Muhammadu Buhari of the ANPP and Umaru Yar’Adua of the PDP. In the 2011 presidential election, he ran in the People’s Democratic Party’s presidential primary but lost to incumbent Goodluck Jonathan. Before the 2015 presidential election, he joined the All Progressives Congress in 2014 and ran in the presidential primary, losing to Muhammadu Buhari. He rejoined the PDP in 2017 and ran as the party’s presidential candidate in the 2019 election, although he lost to incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari once more. After defeating Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike in the primaries, he was selected as the People’s Democratic Party’s presidential candidate once more in May 2022, this time for the general election of 2023. Bola Tinubu defeated him in the general election, but Abubakar joined other opposition candidates in calling for a rerun.
In a conversation in 1977, Professor Wole Soyinka and Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo, the military head of state at the time, highlighted their strong bond. These two have a tense relationship and are frequently kept apart even though they have the same Egba roots and lineage. Both Soyinka and Obasanjo are outstanding writers and public figures, but they are weak when it comes to politics, claims Gani Fawehinmi. Because of their ancestry, both men—Obasanjo from his paternal roots and Soyinka from his maternal heritage—have ties to Egbaland. Both of them grew up in and around Abeokuta; in the middle of the 1940s, Soyinka enrolled in the Anglican-run Abeokuta Grammar School before moving on to Government College in Ibadan.In the meantime, Soyinka was already enrolled at the University of Ibadan when Obasanjo started attending Baptist Boys High School in the early 1950s. We are aware that in August 1967, their paths intersected once more.According to their versions, Soyinka asked the two guys to meet one evening in Ibadan. Both sides have contested the specifics of their conversation, but it is certain that whatever they talked contributed to General Yakubu Gowon’s decision to place Soyinka in solitary prison for 22 months during the Civil War. One of the most vocal members of a group of Nigerian activists who worked tirelessly to discredit Obasanjo’s chances of receiving serious consideration for the position of UN Secretary General due to his human rights record as military head of state, Soyinka may have had the opportunity to repay Obasanjo 25 years later. A few years later, they were somewhat linked by fate to oppose the Sani Abacha dictatorship. One man left to fight against the dictator overseas, while the other remained to put up with Abacha’s oppression. In the end, Soyinka would be just as critical of the Abacha regime as he was of the second OBJ administration. In a statement released in July 2003, Soyinka charged that the Obasanjo administration was trying to hide the identities of Bola Ige’s killers and that the ruling party was harboring “a nest of murderers.” Soon later, Obasanjo sent back his own letter in response. The choice to lead the Pro-National Conference Organization (PRONACO) in place of Obasanjo’s Sovereign National Conference marked the pinnacle of Soyinka’s opposition to the Obasanjo administration. Femi Fani-Kayode famously protested on the President’s behalf after Soyinka further insulted him in January 2006, saying that “it is always very difficult to reason, debate or have any form of meaningful discussion or dialogue with any person that does not believe in God. As you can see, Wole Soyinka abandoned the notion of a Christian God and, in his own words, “gravitated towards a deeper knowledge of the orisha, which represents the Yoruba pantheon, very similar in many ways to the Greek pantheon” after growing up as a devout Anglican. The spiritual perspective he found was “more honest than a kind of unicellular deity of either Christianity or Islam,” he claims. Even when he abandoned the monogamous responsibilities of his Baptist upbringing, Obasanjo never completely escaped the centripetal force-field of his Baptist roots. This was true even when he supported the use of “juju” to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1980s. One may argue that he veered off course for a while, but his imprisonment from 1995 to 1998 was a kind of spiritual turning point. Since then, he has authored at least three Christian treatises: “Women of Virtue: Stories of Outstanding Women in …