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Wole Soyinka Slams NBC For Banning Eedris Abdulkareem’s Protest Song

Published

8 months ago

April 13, 2025

Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has condemned the recent ban placed on a song by Nigerian musician, Eedris Abdulkareem, describing the development as a return to the culture of censorship and a threat to the right to free expression.

In a statement issued from New York University, Abu Dhabi, on Sunday, Soyinka criticised the action and its wider implications, saying it echoed past attempts to stifle artistic and socio-political commentary in Nigeria.

“Courtesy of an artist operating in a different genre – the cartoon – who sent me his recent graphic comment on the event, I learnt recently of a return to the culture of censorship with the banning of the product of a music artist, Eedris Abdulkareem,” Soyinka said in the piece posted on PM news.

He expressed irony in suggesting that the ban did not go far enough, stating, “It is not only the allegedly offensive record that should be banned – the musician himself should be proscribed. Next, PMAN, or whatever musical association of which Abdulkareem is member, should also go under the hammer.”

Soyinka noted that he had not listened to the banned song but stressed that the issue transcends content and concerns a fundamental democratic principle.

“It cannot be flouted. That, surely is basic. This is why I feel that we should look on the bright side of any picture and thus recommend the Aleshinloye cartoon – and others in allied vein – as an easy-to-apprehend, easy-to-digest summation of the wisdom of attempting to stifle unpalatable works of art or socio-political commentary,” he said.

He also pointed out the irony that censorship often benefits the targeted artist.

“The ban is a boost to the artist’s nest egg, thanks to free governmental promotion. Mr. Abdulkareem must be currently warbling his merry way all the way to the bank. I envy him,” he added.

The literary icon warned that such censorship was not only counterproductive but also dangerous to democratic development.

“We have been through this before, over and over again, ad nauseum. We know where it all ends. It is boring, time-wasting, diversionary but most essential of all, subversive of all seizures of the fundamental right of free expression,” Soyinka said.

He warned that it creates “a permissive atmosphere of trickle-down power,” where state authorities feel emboldened to clamp down on dissent.

Soyinka’s statement also touched on broader issues of impunity and mob violence in Nigeria, lamenting the recent lynching of 19 youths in Edo State.

“My heart goes out to friends, colleagues and families of victims and traumatised survivors of this senseless slaughter. Our thirst for justice must remain unslaked,” he said.

Referencing the 2022 killing of Deborah Samuel in Sokoto, Soyinka criticised the culture of impunity, saying, “Identified killers were set free to gloat, and paste their photos on the Social Media… in full daylight glare, in the presence of both citizen voyeurs and security forces.”

He called for accountability, warning that “as long as the culture of impunity is given the sheerest strain of legitimacy in any given cause, such gruesome assaults on our common humanity will continue to prevail.”

Soyinka concluded by urging the relevant regulatory body to reverse what he described as a “petulant irrationality,” warning that any government that only tolerates praise-singers “has already commenced a downhill slide into the abyss.”

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OPINION: Gumi And His Terrorists

Published

8 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Editor

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OPINION: Christmas And A Motherless Child

Published

9 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Editor

By Lasisi Olagunju

If we were Christian in my family, Christmas would have been for us a mixture of joy, mourning and remembrance. But still, it is. When others celebrate Christmas, I mourn my mother. We call it celebration of life; it is a forever act that undie the dead. She died just before dawn on December 24, 2005. But she lived long enough such that even I, her second to the last child, enjoyed her nurture for over forty years. She died happy and fulfilled. She was extremely lucky; she even knew when to die.

A mother’s death strips her child naked. With a mother’s exit, the moon pauses its movement of hope; morning stops arriving with its proper voice. For me, since it happened 20 years ago, dawn still breaks as forever, but nothing raps my door to announce a new day and the time for prayers; no mother again chants my oríkì. No one, again, softly drops ‘Atanda’ by my door before sunrise. Nothing sounds the way it used to. No one again wets the ground for the child before the sun fully unfurls its rays.

History and literature, from Rousseau’s idealisation of the “good mother” to Darwin’s notion of “innate maternal instincts,” framed motherhood narrowly; yet she inhabited it fully. She bore and reared in very inclement weather; she thought and questioned, endured and, quietly, shaped lives in her care beyond the ordinary. She was a princess who knew she was a princess. Like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s princess in ‘A Little Princess’, her voice – outer and inner – shouted an insistence that “whatever comes cannot alter one thing.” Even if she wasn’t a princess in costume, she was forever “a princess inside.” The princesshood in her inheritance ensures that her father’s one vote trumps and upturns the 16 votes cast by multi-colour butterflies who thought themselves bird.

Sometimes quiet, sometimes shrill, she showed in herself that the true measure of a woman lies in the fullness of her humanity, the strength of her mind and character, and the depth of her influence. She embodied all these with grace until her final breath.

Geography teaches us that harmattan is dry, cold, hash, unfriendly wind. The harmattan haze of Christmas is metaphor for the blur the child who misses their mother feel. It hurts. The day breaks daily with silence performing the duty the mother once did. What this child feels is hurting silence where her song caressed. In the harshness of the hush, the child remembers how mornings were once gold, how a day felt owned simply because she announced it. Without her, time still moves, but it no longer rises to meet the child with its promise of warmth.

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When a mother dies, her child’s gold goes to rust and dust. Because a mother is the cusp that scoops to fill her child’s potholes, in her death something essential goes missing. And it is final. Everything that was a given is no longer to be taken for granted; nothing is henceforth granted; everything now makes bold demands, even illness speaks a new language. Fever comes creepy and no one reads the child’s body before they speak. Across the wall at night, other women sing their children to sleep, the tune that reaches the motherless is far from the familiar; it is unfaithful.

A child without a mother is what I liken to walking helplessly in a windy rain. No umbrella, whatever its reach and promise, is useful. Again, living is war. When wronged, or terrified by life, the child who has no mother discovers how far they can walk without refuge; they daily face bombs without bunkers.

For the one without a mother, each victory, each success; each survival; every loss, every defeat, asks for a sharer and a witness who is no longer seated where she used to.

Winning can be very tasteless. It is a very bad irony. The muse says that when a child is motherless, joy, when it appears, arrives incomplete; good news, when it comes, comes and pauses at the lips – in search of mother, the one person it is meant for.

Motherhood and its echo teach that a mother’s loss, like a father’s, is erasure, loss, negation, unpresence. It is permanence of loss of love and security.

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The child remembers that in their mum’s lines were elegant, restrained refinements that moved from the gently lyrical to the aphoristic. But they are no more. The old sure shoulder to lean on has slipped away, thinning into memory.

The orphan learns early that those who say, “I will be your mother,” are not always mothers, and those who say, “I will be your father,” are rarely fathers. For the orphan, it is a cold, cold-blooded world.

And yet, the child soon finds out that the mother’s exit has not emptied the world; it has simply rearranged its content.

In the new arrangement, the mum becomes a mere memory kept going in inherited habits, in routine and practice, in the instinct to call a name they know will not answer – again.

“Each new morn…new orphans cry new sorrows…” says Shakespeare in Macbeth. Every forlorn child fiddles with the void. But the muse insists that children that are counted fortunate do not simply outgrow their mother; they outlive her absence and grow new muscles and new bones; they learn slowly to carry and endure what cannot be put down.

News

FG Declares Public Holidays For Christmas, New Year Celebrations

Published

9 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Editor

The Federal Government has declared December 25, 26 and January 1, 2026, as public holidays.

Announcing this on behalf of the Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, the ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Magdalene Ajani, said the holidays are to mark Christmas, Boxing Day and the New Year celebrations respectively.

Tunji-Ojo called on Nigerians to reflect on the values of love, peace, humility and sacrifice associated with the birth of Jesus Christ.

The minister also urged citizens, irrespective of faith or ethnicity, to use the festive period to pray for peace, security and national progress.

According to him, Nigerians to remain law-abiding and security-conscious during the celebrations, while wishing them a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

See the full statement below:

PRESS STATEMENT

FG DECLARES DECEMBER 25, 26, 2025 AND JANUARY 1, 2026 PUBLIC HOLIDAYS TO MARK CHRISTMAS, BOXING DAY AND NEW YEAR CELEBRATIONS

The Federal Government has declared Thursday, 25th December 2025; Friday, 26th December 2025; and Thursday, 1st January 2026 as public holidays to mark the Christmas, Boxing Day and New Year celebrations respectively.

The Minister of Interior, Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, who made the declaration on behalf of the Federal Government, extended warm Christmas and New Year felicitations to Christians in Nigeria and across the world, as well as to all Nigerians as they celebrate the end of the year and the beginning of a new one.

Dr. Tunji-Ojo urged Christians to reflect on the virtues of love, peace, humility, and sacrifice as exemplified by the birth of Jesus Christ, noting that these values are critical to promoting unity, tolerance, and harmony in the nation.

The Minister further called on Nigerians, irrespective of religious or ethnic affiliation, to use the festive season to pray for the peace, security, and continued progress of the country, while supporting the Federal Government’s efforts towards national development and cohesion.

“The Christmas season and the New Year present an opportunity for Nigerians to strengthen the bonds of unity, show compassion to one another, and renew our collective commitment to nation-building,” the Minister stated.

Dr. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo also enjoined citizens to remain law-abiding, security conscious, and moderate in their celebrations, while cooperating with security agencies to ensure a peaceful and safe festive period.

The Minister wishes all Nigerians a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

SIGNED

Dr. Magdalene Ajani

Permanent Secretary

Ministry of Interior

December 22, 2025.