Nigeria’s president-elect, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, and three other Nigerians have been named among the world’s 100 most influential people by Time Magazine. The three other people on the list are former minister of education, Oby Ezekwesili, bestselling author, Chimamanda Adichie and Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau.
According to Time Magazine’s website, Muhammadu Buhari made history in March by becoming the first candidate to oust a sitting Nigerian president through the ballot box. “Now he has to live up to voters’ expectations. From battling the Boko Haram insurgency to tackling endemic corruption, Buhari has many challenges ahead. The greatest may be overcoming his past as a military ruler who seized power in 1983. “Already, the born-again democrat is demonstrating the inclusivity necessary to lead a nation riven by ethnic and religious tensions”, the site said.
For Obiageli Ezekwesili, who champions the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, the magazine said it would have taken a long time to raise awareness about the girls taken by Boko Haram without her using her platform as a former minister of education. The site stated, “We need to remember that these girls are undergoing psychological and maybe physical torture. So, I love that the campaign says, “Bring back our girls,” and not “Bring back my child.” Everybody is in unison with the parents and relatives. Everyone is feeling their pain. Everyone will be ready to embrace the girls and offer them care and compassion if they are rescued or they manage to escape’’. “It has been a year, and the girls haven’t been rescued, but she has made a difference by speaking about it. Not just speaking but shouting. I know some people will say she is too loud-mouthed. The loud mouth is needed. People hear it.”
The magazine described the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as a rare novelist who in the space of a year found her words sampled by Beyoncé, optioned by Lupita Nyong’o and honoured with the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. “A MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipient, Adichie writes of the complex aftermath of Nigeria’s colonial history and her nation’s rise to prominence in an era when immigration to the West no longer means a one-way ticket. With her viral TEDxEuston talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” she found her voice as a cultural critic. (You can hear it rising midway through Beyoncé’s woman-power anthem “Flawless.”)
“She sets her love stories amid civil war (Half of a Yellow Sun) and against a backdrop of racism and migration (Americanah). But her greatest power is as a creator of characters who struggle profoundly to understand their place in the world”.
The fourth Nigerian on the list is the dreaded Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau. Boko Haram is a terrorist group that has been unleashing deaths, rape, kidnapping and causing untold mayhem in north-east Nigeria. The group has accounted for over 15,000 deaths displacing close to a million people.
