Reporting News and opinions
It was 2008. The country was being asked to choose a president, and Clinton’s famous campaign advertisement presented the image of sleeping children, a ringing telephone in the White House and a question: Who do you want answering the phone?
Call it childhood naivety, youthful idealism or a need to believe in something, but for a long time I believed that the line in Nigeria’s national anthem that goes “The labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain,” actually meant something. Not a lot, mind you, but something. It had to mean something because every society on earth had heroes – icons to look up to because they laid the foundation for tomorrow.
The late Sam Mbakwe, first civilian governor of Imo State and a man whose impatience with mediocrity remains legendary, once declared that he would gladly invite the British back to rule Nigeria for another fifty years. Other politicians have echoed the sentiment over the decades, usually after another round of epileptic power, collapsed roads, or the discovery that the latest “transformation agenda” had transformed mainly the bank balances of its authors. The quip is usually delivered with a sigh, half-joke, half-confession: better the colonial taskmaster who at least kept the trains roughly on time than the indigenous ones who treat the national timetable as optional reading.
So far, so dazzling. We have been unchained from the desk, from the camera, from the petrol pump, and soon, apparently, from the steering wheel itself. Progress has been relentless, elegant, and profitable.
Utopia (full Latin title: Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia) is a seminal 1516 work by Sir Thomas More (1478–1535). It is one of the most influential books of the Renaissance and the founding text of the modern utopian literary genre. Understanding its historical context reveals it as a sophisticated product of its time—blending humanism, social criticism, travel literature, and political philosophy—while also serving as a subtle mirror to the anxieties and aspirations of early Tudor England and Europe.
