While conceding that there are a number of exceptional people in the civil service, the culture over the years has been such that the least talented people were the ones being recruited to make, shape and implement policies for the country. Nonetheless, Adio’s prognosis equally harped on the need for Nigeria as a country to brainstorm and reach a conclusion with respect to an irreducible minimum package of social protection, which the state needs to extend to citizens. He mentioned areas such as nutrition, healthcare, education and security as some of those areas Nigeria as a country would have to decide it would spare no expense to ensure they are taken care of.
IN tackling Nigeria’s difficult contemporary history, most of the 2025 LABAF sessions adopted the inter-generational approach. It was apparent that there was a dire need to ensure memory of the country’s difficulties and the roles of diverse actors were well documented. Apart from the preponderance of youthful literary voices, LABAF 2025 ticked the box for being an exciting and riveting arts and culture fest. The deftness of festival themes gave depth to the conversations, while ensuring the intellectual exchanges remained lively. Creatively, difficult questions arising from Nigeria’s chequered past and its uncertain trajectory were engaged with solutions and next steps deeply explored. Hard issues like corruption, bad governance, lack of accountability were analysed through the lenses of fictive and non-fictive texts. Interestingly, the manner the festival explored the quest for social change, while creating a nexus with the significant developments from the past, was, to say the least, spot on.
As always, the elephant in the room remained Nigeria’s abysmal record of dysfunction, inefficiency and corruption. There was also a big focus on the low capacity of the Nigerian State to deliver desperately needed social goods and services. LABAF 2025 attempted the approach of grabbing these elephantine topics by the scruff of their necks. This would be gleaned in the fact that the selected keynote speaker for the colloquium, Mr. Waziri Adio, is a journalist who made the transition and served in a key government agency responsible for transparency and accountability in the extractive sector. This dual experience, combining the interrogative qualities and navigating the bureaucratic logjam of public service, put him in good stead to provide a balanced perspective about the governance crisis, which hobbles Nigeria’s potential. Adio’s prefacing thoughts for the colloquium titled; Change: Imagining Alternatives, explored the difficult issues and questions of why Nigeria, in spite of its enormous human and material potentials, continues to fail its citizens.
The colloquium similarly engaged the hard questions of social change, democracy, and the inherent dangers dictatorship poses to the civic will. It subsequently generated ideas relating to the pathways for ensuring accountable governance. Adio, a former Executive Secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI), shared practical experiences about the challenges activists, journalists and ardent critics, who make the transition to become officials in government face. He painted the picture of a broken and dysfunctional system, which has the tendency to eclipse even the best-intentioned changemakers. The keynote speaker elicited a nuanced approach regarding how to fundamentally rethink and change the direction as well as the outcomes of governance in Nigeria.
Although not yet wizened by the vagaries of serving in the public sector, the former Thisday Editor, now Director of AGORA Policy, a think tank, advocated for systemic change. He cautioned against the reliance on charismatic or messianic individuals, who are expected by society to go into the governance system, take on the motley crowd of evil doers and deliver the goods. He reckoned that this approach, while it may work in some instances, will not bring about the broad changes across the institutions of the state and society. He gave an example from personal experience of how even the citizens, whom the change seekers are fighting for, can become a cog in the wheel of progress. He narrated that as a result of his principled stance against nepotism and influence peddling while in public office, it is now difficult for him to show up in his own community. This is the case because many in his community had the notion that his appointment was the time for them to benefit from the national cake. His alienation from his community is therefore the price he has to pay for not sacrificing national trust on the altar of his immediate community’s interest.
This led him to conclude that it is clear that the agency of exceptional individuals who would move into the dysfunctional system to shake it up and get things changed was not a sustainable and effective pathway to follow. Adio forcefully advocated a fundamental rethinking of Nigeria’s governance system, not just from a philosophical point of view, but also at the conceptual and practical levels. He made allusions to the critical issue of the capacity of the state, which, when lacking, makes it largely incompetent and incapable of delivering the desired change.
Of course, this decades-old lack of capacity of the state to play the historic role of the Leviathan precipitates consequences in terms of poor quality of human life, chronic insecurity and the myriad of other malaises, which make Nigeria hellish for its citizens. Still on the question of the capacity of the state, Adio made a comparison with countries of similar status to Nigeria. In this case, India and Pakistan were held aloft as countries which have capacitated themselves through rigorous attention to the character of the civil service. Sharing a personal anecdote, the keynote speaker recalled that a schoolmate from Indian who was preparing for promotion examination in the civil service, approached the task like it were the biggest deal.
This, he noted, speaks to the level of rigour and seriousness those countries place in ensuring the state and its functionaries have the required capacity to deliver social goods and services. In Nigeria, the keynote speaker reckoned that the reverse had remained the case for decades. While conceding that there are a number of exceptional people in the civil service, the culture over the years has been such that the least talented people were the ones being recruited to make, shape and implement policies for the country. Nonetheless, Adio’s prognosis equally harped on the need for Nigeria as a country to brainstorm and reach a conclusion with respect to an irreducible minimum package of social protection, which the state needs to extend to citizens. He mentioned areas such as nutrition, healthcare, education and security as some of those areas Nigeria as a country would have to decide it would spare no expense to ensure they are taken care of.
FOLLOWING the keynote, the subsequent conversation focusing on the books of Abdul Oroh and Babafemi Ojodu was one of the most engaging of the festival. With the sub-theme, They Won the Epic Struggle, But Is This What We Signed For? Ojodu’s Adventures of a Guerilla Journalist and Oroh’s Demonstration of Craze generated a lot of fireworks. It was a moment for journalists and civil society activists to go down memory lane and re-document the dark and sanguinary days of military dictatorship in Nigeria. With his hectoring and penetrating style, the session moderator, Kunle Ajibade got the panellists to pour out their hearts about every bit of significant detail, which defined those despotic years of Nigeria’s history. A spellbound audience listened to Ojodu and Oroh’s horrific stories of detention and exile. Some of the anecdotes and remembrances were comedy gold.
Yet there were many more details of the exploits of the journalists, which got hearts pounding on account of enormous risks they took and the psychological traumas they had to endure in the fight for democracy. Ojudu recalled how he kept himself tethered within the bounds of sanity, while in solitary confinement by plucking his beards and counting the black and grey strands. Oroh recalled his frequent recourse, even years after, to sleeping on cold floors, a strange behaviour that followed him from the days of detention. The former Executive Director of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) also retold the story of the five-million-man march, which was called to counter Sani Abacha’s two-million-man march. On the hilarious side, Oroh recalled how he used a French newspaper to cover his face in order to evade state security agents looking for him on a plane. After the goons left, he kept on pretending he was reading the paper until Pat Utomi reminded him that he (Oroh) could not put away the paper as everyone knows he could not read a word of French!
ABOVE all, the beauty of the festival was also apparent in the corporate footprint of the Nigeria LNG (NLNG) company. The LABAF Reader’s Assembly session dedicated to Oyin Olugbile’s Sanya, a disruptive mythical novel, which delved into Yoruba cosmology. The novel, which won the Nigeria Prize for Literature, demonstrated the company’s unwavering commitment to creativity and the arts. Nathaniel Olawonyin’s performative reading of the work was one of the highlights of the session. NLNG through its corporate affairs manager was also present to prent prizes to literary critiques and reviewers who competed based on their submissions and reviews of the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Added to the other exciting activities was the celebration of culture icons who clocked ages 60 to 90. The 80s club has four celebrants — Oba Gbenga Sonuga, theatre director, administrator; Dele Jegede, professor of fine art and art historian; Ola Balogun, director, filmmaker; and Olanrele Bamidele, professor of theatre arts, academic – all of whom clocked 80 in the year. In the 70s category are the writer, medical doctor,Wale Okediran, and the linguist, language technologist, Tunde Adegbola. The 60s club has the largest with 13 honourees, including Dr Sola Balogun, theatre artiste, academic; Ben Chiadika, actor, film director; Oyin Onime, photographer, culture entrepreneur; Tade Adekunle, theatre artiste, marketing professional; Francis Onwochei, actor, filmmaker; Babatunde Obalana, Theatre artiste, administrator; Olatoun Gabi-Williams, journalist, literary activist; Atunyota Akpobome (Alibaba), comedian, culture entrepreneur; Kingsley Ogoro, filmmaker; Segun Arinze, actor, Voice-Over Artist; Muyiwa Kayode, marketing and branding professional; and Reuben Abati, journalist, public intellectual.