Olatunji Ololade

Lagos

Associate Editor at The Nation

Multiple Award-winning Journalist, Multimedia Specialist, Editor

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Articles

Ghosts of Hurti - The Nation Newspaper

1 week ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

Even vultures do not feast on their young. Yet in Hurti, Nigeria nourished on the blood of her children. The narrative is bloodcurdling: severed throats of innocent children, salty tears of sorrowing mothers, and decapitated fathers who bled out. The victims’ fates invoke the mindless grief of a nation too brutalised to feel empathy. Yet Hurti’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back. The horror that befell the hamlet on April 2nd is no accident of history.
In April, Hurti kids were fed to the blade

1 week ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

How a hamlet’s pain became Nigeria’s shameThe terror of moving on: Child survivors of genocide spiral in throes of trauma – PsychiatristAt least 52 children, adults murdered across Bokkos council, 1,820 displacedCulprits will be prosecuted – President Tinubu, NSA RibaduThere was no pity on the edge of the blade that butchered the Mangut boys. There was no mercy in the heart that furnished the knife.
The joyless parable of Mr. Whiner

2 weeks ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

Mr Whiner is Nigeria’s worst nightmare. A kindred spirit with the dubious patriot; while the latter devastates the country with bad politics, Whiner fulfills the role of a mortician. He is the proverbial pallbearer who spirits out a coffin at the first scent of roses. In Whiner, we encounter a parable of the Nigerian soul.
Genocide, not wordplay

3 weeks ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

In Hitch 22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens recalls his conversation with a genocide survivor in Rwanda. She lamented to him that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood, early mischief and family lore; no sibling or companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, friendships, kinships, gone.
Nigeria in age of economic reset

4 weeks ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

The bounty winds have changed course. Across oceans and continents, the pillars of the old world buckle under the weight of new contradictions. Power is roaringly shifting, as nations once constrained by historic fetters jostle for inadequate pickings. Does Nigeria stand a chance in the unfolding world order? What are the chances of transforming hardship into strength, turning away from borrowed dreams and building something enduring from within? America is retreating.
Her right-handed serve to glory: On Aishat Raji’s becoming

1 month ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

Aishat Raji enchants the tennis court. Not from electric chants or thunderous applause, but from the sheer astonishment of her being. Just 14, she saunters into the Games arena shorn of symmetry but with the sovereign gift of a single right hand that swings like a poet’s plume. Raji is a product of grit. Her left hand—once part of her whole body—got severed by the cold blade of tragedy in 2014.
Nightmare in nirvana

1 month ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

Winter in Chicago had always been unforgiving. The temperatures plummet and the wind-chill becomes a silent, deadly adversary. For Marcus Faleti, the cold proved fatal. On January 1, 2017, at exactly 12:09 a.m., the 58-year-old succumbed to hypothermia and alcoholism, the temperature biting through the meagre layers of his existence. The wind-chill that night registered at 18 degrees. It was a lethal cold that Faleti could no longer fight.
Do not die in their proxy wars

1 month ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

For the love of country is still their sexiest lie. The curvaceous plague of coalition politics. Every desperado cops a feel – the scorned ministerial hopeful, the tamed party rebel, losers at the 2023 polls. All partake in the prurient rite. They all identify as patriots, too.
Freeloaders’ creed

1 month ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

It is a curious thing, isn’t it? The ease with which a society can hold out its palms, demanding honey from the hive it has not tended. Once again, I find myself at the front seat of this perennial circus—a boisterous affair where the ringmasters are the very citizens who brazenly dodge taxes, yet demand effective public services. It is the Nigerian penchant for freeloading, a national pastime disguised as survival. The story is as old as the first misstep of our fledgling republic.
Orphans of the republic

2 months ago | thenationonlineng.net | Olatunji Ololade

History will never be kind to the staff of the Federal Scholarships Board (FSB), who dared starving and homeless scholars abroad, to come back home and flog the education minister. Beyond his contempt for the state-sponsored scholars cum recipients of the Bilateral Education Agreement (BEA), subsists an inordinate lack of tact and sensibility, perhaps. Another tragic manifestation of systemic and human failings.