Reporting News and opinions
Amen Edore Oyakhire (born 21 October 1945) was the Military Administrator of Taraba State between August 1996 and August 1998 during the military regime of General Sani Abacha. He was then administrator of Oyo State during the transitional regime of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, handing over to the elected civilian governor Lam Adesina in May 1999 at the start of the Fourth Republic.
In 2004, in the heart of Edo State, 27 people reportedly lost their lives in circumstances so horrifying that they read less like a contemporary news report and more like a medieval witch trial.
There is a particular cruelty in a medical report. Unlike a political speech, a budget forecast, or an election manifesto all genres of creative literature to which democratic publics have made a resigned peace a medical report carries with it the residual authority of science. When a doctor speaks, we are conditioned, in some prelinguistic way, to believe them. Which is precisely why what has happened to American presidential medicine under Donald Trump is so arresting. The clinic has been converted into a theatre, the stethoscope swapped for a megaphone, and the diagnosis subordinated entirely to the demands of the narrative.
Once the apparatus exists, point it wherever is politically convenient. The genius of the trick is that anyone who objects to the pointing can be accused of sympathising with the fear itself.
The paradox is that naming the losers, far from being politically fatal, may be the only durable form of political protection.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 