Dr Obadiah and Mrs Margaret Mailafia Attend the Abuja Festival of Praise


The 11th Abuja Festival of Praise took place at the International Conference Centre in our Federal Capital in the evening of Saturday 22 December. It was a well attended event. We were all highly uplifted by the choir which comprised singers from various churches around the country. They included youths from Sabon Rai Don Kowa (New Life for All) choir as well as children from the School of the Blind Abuja. The blind singers were awesome, as were indeed, the other choirs. The highlight was the orchestral rendition of Handel's Messiah conducted by the internationally acclaimed conductor  Walter-Michael Vollhardt. Vollhardt came all the way from Germany. And he did not disappoint.  The Chair of the occasion was retired Head of State General Yakubu Gowon GCFR. The event is in its eleventh year and has been facilitated by retired General Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma. It was for me a great day. Handel's Messiah is among my favourite music of all time. Handel was a great composer who made millions from Messiah. The surprising part is that he gave all the millions he made to charity. He said he had no right to keep the profits he made from that piece of music because, in composing it, he "met the Saviour face-to-face".

For information, please follow the link:
https://intervention.ng/14110/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Requiem for Mother Dearest

Image
Where do mothers come from? I have always pondered this question. All humans come from planet earth, of course. But, what of mothers? They have this uniqueness about them that makes me wonder if they could only have come from earth like everybody else. For one thing, everybody that breathes on earth came out of a mother. Even the Pope, the President and the most powerful men and women on earth -- all those men and women of pomp and pageantry. Everybody must have done their plus or minus nine months in the womb of a woman. Every individual was nursed as an infant in the warm arms of a mother. Whenever you were hungry, mother was there. Whenever you felt fear, mother was there. Whenever you were in perplexity, mother was there. Mother was the one who would sacrifice everything to make you into a person of worth. My own mother was barely out of her teens when she married my father, a much older man. Mother was 19 when her first child was born. She said she was preparing for
Read more

The Tragedy of our Human Development

Image
  Poverty is a curse. It generates all manner of social evils. Poor housing and slums breed dislocated youths that become vulnerable to extreme ideologies. There is a direct correlation between hunger, unemployment and destitution on the one hand, and drugs and violent crime, on the other. There was the tragic case of the mother who sold her nursing infant to strangers for N70,000. Poverty destroys families, rips communities apart, strips people of dignity and corrodes the moral fabric of society. With a population of 198.5 million and a GDP of US$397.5 billion, Nigeria has a per capita income of US$2,050. Growth over the last couple of years has been negative in real terms. The projection for 2019 is 2.3%, even as our demographic growth is an annual 3.2 percent. Life-expectancy is 54 years, as contrasted to Japan’s 84 years. The average Japanese lives 19 more years than the average Nigerian. At the annual World Bank/IMF meetings in Bali, Indonesia in December last year, W
Read more

Biography of Obadiah Mailafia

Image
Majjidadin Ninzam Garkuwan Randa Dr. Obadiah Mailafia (born 24 December 1956) is a Nigerian development economist, international civil servant, central banker and statesman with over three decades of professional experience in academia, finance and international development. He is a former official of the African Development Bank Group and one-time Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) [1] . He was also the Chief of Staff of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) [2] , the 79-nation multilateral development institution based in Brussels, Belgium. Obadiah Mailafia is a polymath with interests in macroeconomics, development policy, military science, cosmology, political theory and the philosophy of mind; a public intellectual widely regarded as one of the thought-leaders of the New Africa. Early Life and Education Obadiah Mailafia was born among the Aninzo (Ninzam) [3] people at precisely 12.00 noon on 24 December 1956, in the hilly m
Read more