Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe  was born in Yola, Nigeria, in 1960. After a career as a magazine editor in Nigeria, he moved to the US to be the founding editor of African Commentary, an award-winning magazine published by the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. A visiting writer-in-residence and assistant professor of English at Connecticut College, Ndibe  has contributed poems to An Anthology of New West African Poets, edited by the Gambian poet, Tijan Sallah.

He has also published essays in a number of North American, British and Nigerian magazines and writes a weekly column for the Guardian, Nigeria’s most respected daily newspaper. Arrows of Rain is his first novel. With it, he says: ‘I felt I was grappling with an important human drama that just happened to be set in Africa... I wrote it while I was out of Nigeria. It would have been a different book if I had written it while in the country more angry, less meditative.’

Last week, President Goodluck Jonathan extended the charade that is Nigeria’s feeble, failing fight against anarchy by replacing Inspector General of Police Hafiz Ringim with a new man named M....
Those who last April hailed President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan as a consummate democrat and people’s man must now solve the puzzle of how their man shed his tame demeanor for the armor of...
Last Saturday, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan addressed Nigerians for the second time in as many weeks. This time, he attempted a multi-pronged defense of his decision to remove fuel subsidy. It...
Last week, President Goodluck Jonathan finally made his most direct response thus far to Boko Haram’s plague of violence. The president’s declaration of a state of emergency in designated...
Last Sunday, Nigeria made another bloody bid for global infamy as bombs detonated in churches in Abuja and elsewhere in the country. At the time of this writing, the death toll stood at more than...
In his days on the stump, former US President Bill Clinton was famous for telling hapless voters with stories of woe, “I feel your pain.” Mr. Clinton, who grew up poor – raised by...
Last week a Nigerian attorney friend of mine who is based in the U.S. forwarded a report to me of the sentencing of former Governor Rod Blagojevich to fourteen years in prison. Mr. Blagojevich, a...
It seems fairly settled that the Goodluck Jonathan administration and his cohorts – in the business as well as political sectors – are dead set on removing so-called fuel subsidies in a...
A telephone call startled me awake at 3:41 a.m. last Saturday. Still gripped by sleep, I fumbled in the darkness until I palmed my phone. “Hello?” I slurred, my tone testy, ready to chide...
In addition to being one of the world’s most extraordinary writers, Chinua Achebe – the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana Studies and Literary Arts at Brown...
In his essay, “Going to the Territory,” the late novelist Ralph Ellison famously made the accusation that “Americans can be notoriously selective in the exercise of historical...
Biafra is back in the news in a big way, thanks, in large measure, to the recent death of Steve Jobs, co-   founder of Apple. In a bestselling authorized biography written by Walter...