By Bolanle BOLAWOLE “WHEN A house suffers from problems in its foundation, you can do one of two things: Continue to paper over the cracks until the house finally collapses on everyone’s head. The other option is to quickly pull down the house in an orderly and supervised manner, so that a better foundation can […]
By Bola BOLAWOLE (Published in the TREASURES column on the back page of the New Telegraph newspaper edition on Wednesday, 10 June, 2026). EARLY THIS year, Dr. Foluso Falaye, the National President of my alma mater – Owo High School Old Students’ Association (OHSOSA) – sought my intervention on a matter that he had been […]...
By Bola BOLAWOLE (Published in the TREASURES column on the back page of the New Telegraph newspaper edition of Wednesday 3 June, 2026). A FRIEND and an avid reader of my columns, who is also a professor in one of the country’s first-generation universities, asked if I could publish what you are about to read. […]
By Bola BOLAWOLE If I am to tell, I will say that Nigeria’s problems revolve around her sacred cows. Each and everyone of this country’s problems – be it corruption, insecurity, bad governance, infrastructure deficit, rigged elections, name it – they all revolve around and are traceable to sacred cows. If only we can find [&helli...
By Bola BOLAWOLE MICHAEL JACKSON has now arrived in Jamaica for a meeting with Bob Marley. Read on! “Kingston, Jamaica, October 23rd, 1978. 8:30pm: The exclusive Pegasus Hotel’s penthouse suite was buzzing with quiet conversation when Michael Jackson walked through the heavy wooden doors… Michael had an agenda beyond social pleasantries. He wa...
By Bola BOLAWOLE “Anything you can do/I can do it better/I’m the toughest (I’m the toughest)/And I can do what you can’t do/You’ll never try to do what I do/I’m the toughest/I’m the toughest” (1978) – Peter Tosh. GROWING UP in the late sixties, seventies and early eighties, we were regaled...
By Bolanle BOLAWOLE IT HAS been quite a while since I travelled in Ekiti state. I used to, on a weekly basis, between 2016 and 2018 when the then governor of the state, Peter Ayodele Fayose, extended an invitation to me. Taking off from Lagos (when the Lagos-Ibadan expressway was still a nightmare) and braving […]
By Bola BOLAWOLE THESE ARE interesting times in Osun state aka “State of the Living Spring”, with governorship elections already slated for August 8, 2026. Noted for its world-class tourist attraction called Osun-Osogbo festival, the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, located in Osogbo, the capital of the state, was recognised, in 2005, by UNESCO as a...
By Bola BOLAWOLE JAMAICA-BORN reggae sensation, Jimmy Cliff, is dead, aged 81. His “House of Exile” (1974) and Tracy Chapman’s “All that you have is your soul” (1989) are my best of all times. Cliff’s “Have you heard the news?“ (1976), in which he dragged Nigeria’s name in the mud over a business deal with […]
By Bolanle BOLAWOLE “ARE REFORMERS-rulers jinxed? Why do they often suffer the dire consequences of the misrule of their predecessors? Sultan Tuman Bay the Second, the Mamluk reformer-ruler of Egypt; Emperor Louis XVI, the reformist Bourbon ruler of France who got caught up in the French Revolution of 1789; Mikhail Gorbachev, the reform...
