The Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) has unveiled the details for the 2025 Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF). The 27th edition of the flagship event is scheduled to run from November 10 to 16. Festival Director and CORA Programme Chair, Jahman Anikulapo, affirmed that the theme will be “Change: Imagining Alternatives”. The festival will take place at two main locations: Freedom Park and the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, both on Lagos Island.
“Our subject, this year, is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second, quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy. The 62-programme of events during the festival hopes to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world headlined by Herdsmen killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives and dramas in which hope, doggedness, the will to win, is a key subject,” said a statement from the LABAF Prog directorate.
The statement continues: that “the focus of the festival remains Literacy Campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions, hence the 62 events that would be held in the course of the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using the various disciplines of the arts – literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc – to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening and consequently empowering (3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.
“The ultimate aim is to explore the artistic and cultural resources of the nation to help develop its human capital resources for the benefit of the entire society.”
“The festival is an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except to vendors with merchandises,” said the Program Chair, explaining that since its birth in 1999, the festival has been intentional about remaining open-air and free-access because it was “conceived as CORA’s contribution to the spread of literacy towards boosting the capacity of the human resources of the nation, and by extension the African continent, to grow its economic potentialities.”
Of the 62 events featuring in the festival, the CORA only conceived and is running only 60 per cent, the rest 40 per cent are by partner organisations that have remained the pillars of the festival’s sustenance, survival and success in the past 27 years of existence.
The lead partner is Freedom Park, which in the past 15 years has provided its vast lush green ambience as the home of the festival; next is the Children and the Environment, CATE, which for 20 years has consistently staged the Green Festival — the children-adolescents segment; and there is the Events by Nature, which in past decade, has anchored the CORA Youth Creative Club, CYCC. The two-year old CORA BookTrekkers anchors the youth literary segment.
Other partners include the various associations in the literary and art disciplines, including the Association of Nigerian authors, ANA; Poets Essayists and Novelists, PEN; the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, NANTAP, the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists, SONTA, the Society of Nigerian Artists, SNA, the Pan African Writers Association, PAWA, among others. There are also individual artists who have become part of the DNA of the festival programming content, including the well-travelled performance artist, Jelili Atiku. The 2025 edition enjoys the partnership of the year-old management of the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History – the fast emerging leader Lagos culture hub located at Onikan, Lagos.
The LABAF operating team is composed mainly of youths in their 20s to the early 30s, who are aggregated under the name CORA Volunteers Corps – these are mostly fresh graduates and undergraduates of tertiary, and allied training institutions in the country. The CVC is supervised by a Board pf Trustees and Governance comprising of eminent art and culture practitioners, including the doyenne of Nigerian stage and screen, Dame Taiwo Ajai-Lycett, the renowned architect, Theo Lawson, the astute art manager, Ms Iyabo Aboaba, the well-garlanded theatre and film producer, Bolanle Austen-Peters, the renowned visual artists, Ndidi Dike, Nkechi Nwosu-Igbo and Olu Amoda, the retired culture bureaucrat, Augustus Babajide Ajibola, former Federal Director of Entertainment and Creative Industries, and other equally renowned artists, lawyers and culture workers. It is chaired by the revered poet, art patron and businessman, Chief Kayode Aderinokun, former chairman of Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, with the popular soil-scientist, art patron, founder of CORA, Toyin Akinosho as Secretary-General.
