Fifa asked every nation to name a stadium after Pele but I would like Nigeria’s presidential candidates to go further and initiate a process asking local governments to create a town called Lidice 

Ayo Akinfe 

[1] Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic where all its male inhabitants were executed in 1942 by the Nazis as a reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich 

[2] All 173 men from the village who were over 15 years of age were executed on 10 June 1942. A further 11 men from the village who were not present at the time were later arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others who were already under arrest

[3] Out of a total 503 inhabitants, 307 women and children were sent to a makeshift detention center in a Kladno school. Of these, 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps. Seven children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families, while the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were gassed to death

[4] Approximately 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal. Broken down, they were 192 men, 60 women and 88 children 

[5]  In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in Great Britain led by Barnett Stross, a doctor, who in 1945 became a local MP, founded the organisation Lidice Shall Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war

[6] Soon after the razing of the village, towns and quarters in various countries were renamed. They took on the name Lidice to show Hitler that he could not erase the name from the map

[7] For example, San Jerónimo Lídice in Mexico City, Barrio Obrero de Lídice and its hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Lídice de Capira in Panama. A neighbourhood in Crest Hill, Illinois, US was renamed from Stern Park to Lidice. A square in the English city of Coventry, devastated by Luftwaffe bombing, is named after Lidice, while an alley in a very crowded area of downtown Santiago, Chile, is named after Lidice 

[8] What makes Lidice unique is that the village was rebuilt from scratch, with a new town now overlooking the old site. Were this today, I am sure the United Nations would ask every nation to create its own Lidice 

[9] If you ask me, every single one of Nigeria’s 774 local government areas should be asked to build a Lidice in 2023. A new purpose-built and modern town with modern trappings where we can relocate villagers and dwellers of inner city ghettos to as part of an urban development revolution 

[10] I take the view that this process should be kick-started in Borno, Niger, Taraba, Katsina, Adamawa and Bauchi states where towns should be built around cattle ranches. These are our six biggest states in terms of landmass, so could actually afford to accommodate Lidice cities of up to 1m people