About two years ago, a student met me on campus and asked me if he could slide into my DM. “Slide? DM? What do those words mean here?” I curiously asked, not angry yet. Then he said DM means direct message and he wanted to know if he could reach out to me on WhatsApp. What a way to talk to one’s lecturer! Earlier today, I was ... Read more

Endgame. A seven-letter word that sounds like the last beat of a drum in a musical piece. Endgame! A word that conjures the image of two Goliaths strutting about, intent on choking the life out of a David. Yet, in this instance, David appears to have pinned the Goliaths to the wall. Endgame! A word with two seemingly contradictory meanings: a game ... Read more

To produce one living Nigerian today, biology required a spectacular ancestral relay race. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so forth, doubling backward until the arithmetic reaches 2,048 ancestors in the eleventh preceding generation. Added together, the listed generations total 4,094 ancestral positions. Strictly speak ... Read more

You may have observed that the impulsive reaction of people in extremely vulnerable situations is a frenetic call on the name “Jesus.” People, not Christians, were advisedly referred to because there have been stories of self-styled atheists and animists hysterically calling on the Name amid flight turbulence or when life throws a curve ... Read more

Quite often, democracy is presented as the ideal system of government for every nation. Across Africa, elections are held regularly, constitutions guarantee fundamental rights, and governments proudly describe themselves as democratic. Yet, despite these outward symbols, many African countries continue to struggle with authoritarianism, electoral v ... Read more

When Google was officially incorporated as a company on September 4, 1998, few people imagined that it would fundamentally change how the world accessed information. Even before then, its underlying search technology had been taking shape through the "BackRub" project, which began in 1996. Today, it is almost impossible to imagine research, journal ... Read more

A story has been circulating widely on social media about an elderly Nigerian who claimed that he entered prison at the age of thirteen and regained his freedom only at sixty. According to the account, what began as a minor incident involving the accidental damage of a vehicle eventually resulted in decades of imprisonment without trial. He narrate ... Read more