This is a synopsis:

Elder’s Corner is musical journey through pivotal moments in the colorful history of Nigeria as told through the lives and careers of the nations foremost music legends. It is a story about the eroding effects of colonialism, bitter ethnic clashes, politics, oil, power, money and their combined effects on a nation that recently celebrated its 50th year of self rule.

Click here to support the project.

1. FT has a special report on Nigeria at 50. It is worth your time.

2. The BBC also has a special reports page on Nigeria at 50

3. Still with the BBC, some Nigerians are interviewed on how they will be celebrating the 50th independence anniversary

4. Have you seen the official Nigeria at 50 website? See what Akin has to say about it here

5. The series of articles to celebrate the anniversary on NigeriansTalk runs till tomorrow

Image via Wikipedia

Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary is on October 1, 2010. To celebrate it, we are running a series titled Nigeria@50 at the groupblog NigeriansTalk. The first in the series, titled One Nigeria: Nigerian Unity 50 years Post-independence, was written by Kola of KTravula. The second is titled Nigeria at 50: Academic Medicine, and was written by Seye of Square One. There will be at least an article a day till October 1.

Follow and join the discussion at NigeriansTalk.org.

The Economist interviews Dele Ogun, head of the Genesis Project, on the political situation in Nigeria.

Apparently, nobody knows.

Check this out:

The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has described the records of the country’s crude production and export as unclear, saying that after 58 years of oil production, the country does not know exactly the quantity it produces.

Speaking at the presentation of a research report on the Nigeria Extractive Industry in Abuja weekend, Chairman of the Board of NEITI, Prof. Asisi Asobie, said despite all the inroads made by the country to expand operations in the oil industry, it had not been able to get operators to tell the truth about the actual oil volumes produced.

“After 58 years of producing oil, Nigeria does not know how much was being produced. It is regrettable that we have not been able to get oil companies to tell Nigerians exactly what they produce. The sector is shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Read the full piece here.

The concluding paragraph of Peter Akinlabi’s Beyond Gadaffi: Nigeria, Federalism and Other Quicksands:

We can intellectualize these things all we want, but there are no more startling discoveries to be made as far as the causes of violence in northern Nigeria are concerned. Olakunle Abimbola’s getting a lot of verbal bashing (sentimental fool, people like you will rot in hell, among other verbal stabbing), because he dared to damn political correctness and nail the issue home to its proven veracity. If the self-indulgent Katsina legislator that was throwing empty verbal darts at Gadaffi on TV the other day had expressed such outrage at the Jos carnage similarly on air, may be we would have been on the way to true consideration of a federalist identity. Struggles for economic and political empowerment might still be less unwieldy within the federation of this crazy quilt if we de-emphasise the factor of religion as basis for ethnic and territorial identity and for violent mobilization in the northern Nigeria.

The whole article is worth reading.

My friend and sociology lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Oka Obono:

Nigeria was furious. It recalled its ambassador, told Libya off, and escalated what could have passed for hot air into substance for a diplomatic war. It forgot that its own security forces had failed to maintain peace in the affected area; that they were so busy passing blame among themselves for past failures that they did not detect nomadic herdsmen slipping past their dragnet to kill more Christians – and their babies.

Nigeria’s response amounts, therefore, to pretentious posturing. The focus should be inward, especially as some celebrated southern religious leaders agree with Gaddafi in principle that Nigeria should be divided. They differ only with regard to the number of countries that should be carved out of it. Gaddafi sought two. They seek six.

The dissolution of Nigeria at this point sounds like a game of Ludo between players who punctuate the clatter of dice on glass with “seeki-one… seeki-two…seeki-three…” The process of disintegration should be more complex than that. As the saying goes, the job of carving up an elephant for the entire community should never be left to apprentice butchers.

Seeki-six. Southern religious leaders agree with Gaddafi. Shall we recall all their pastors for “urgent consultations”? Only last week on the BBC, a certain Nobel laureate described Nigeria as a “failed state”, noting that the country was on the verge of breaking up. Shall we recall his Nobel Prize?

What then was the ruckus about? Nigeria’s ethno-religious diversity cannot be denied by any right-thinking observer. De facto divisions explain the adoption by national political parties of zoning formulae that guide the distribution of those to be elected, selected, appointed, or anointed into sundry offices. They explain the creation of bodies like the Federal Character Commission, Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board and National Youth Service Corps; adoption of quota principles in university admission; exclusion of information on religion and ethnicity from the 2006 Nigerian Population and Housing Census as a means of avoiding controversy; and, above all, the morbid Monopoly that some faceless handlers are playing with Yar’Adua’s body.

These are the hallmarks of a divided polity. To overcome them, governance should focus on the rights of citizens, not aggregate ethnicities. If democracy advances security, health, wellbeing and the pursuit of happiness at individual levels, the lines of sectional divisions would disappear.

I agree.

Africa is a different place from how it is often portrayed in the popular media. Thanks to sound economic policies in many countries over the past decade or so, Africa has been able to withstand this crisis much better than has been the case in the past. The fact that the crisis hit Africa anyway does not mean that the policies were wrong. On the contrary, those policies helped to buffer Africa from the worst of the crisis, and they should now be strengthened. All three national leaders with whom I met—President Kibaki of Kenya, President Zuma of South Africa, and President Banda of Zambia—conveyed to me their strong sense of the policy agenda ahead.

Read the whole article.

Would ordinary Nigerians have felt Yar’Adua’s absence? Since the experience of the Nigerian state for most Nigerians is limited to demands for bribes by officials and policemen, the government and who is running it is of little consequence to them. Everything positive in their lives is achieved by themselves in spite of the ruling elite and their officials, not because of it. Many might say that Nigeria would be better off without a government at all.

I wrote something along those lines sometime ago. Read the whole post here.

Hat-Tip Roving Bandit.

So, apparently, the Nigerian president has decided to return home, only a few days after the vice president was named acting president. Interesting.

NEXT reports that the president’s ambulance arrived in Aso Rock, Abuja, the presidential ‘grounds’ about 4 hours ago.

See this Aljazeera report for some background to the story.

So, what happens to the acting president? Who will be ruling the country?

There seems to be no end to drama in Nigeria. It is amazing – and this has to be said over and over again – how much Nigerian leaders, in their confusion, have managed to sort of keep it together and get the state going. Somehow. The book on this period in Nigeria has to be written.

Let us wait and see how this develops.