SHADOWS: Protest Essays on Africa’s Most Consequential Country (1999–2023), Volumes 1 and 2 by Eniola Bello, Cable Books, Lagos, 2026
Okey Ikechukwu
Overview of Volume 1
This book is the first of a 928-page twin volume work, which is a collection of 25 years of Eniola Bello’s opinion articles, presented here as seventy essays and arranged according to publication date. It tracks five successive administrations of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan, Buhari, and the early Tinubu period, showcasing the recurring crises of Nigerian governance under these respective regimes. Electoral fraud, executive-legislature feuds, corruption scandals, insecurity, fuel-price shenanigans, and the severe and persistent gap between constitutional promise, leadership claims about delivery and the lived experiences of Nigerians are all serially captured as they occurred in real time.
The author brings the entire collection together here as “Protest Essays” in two volumes which, indeed, they are. In going further to say that the collection is about “Africa’s Most Consequential Country”, he is telling us two things. The first is that he deems everything he has written in this book a protest against what is unacceptable in leadership and governance, even where it is purely descriptive of symptoms and consequences. The second is that the country under reference here is Nigeria which, with its huge population and profile as Africa’s most notable nation, remains a matter of concern to the world.
