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President Bola Tinubu’s Senior Special Assistant on Social Media by the name of Dada Olusegun reportedly said on Thursday that had Nigerians elected former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as president, they would have been sweltering in the same snake pit of torment and economic decline as Argentinians are. Olusegun’s comment was informed by Atiku’s previous […]
Continue ReadingSorry, I digress. Gradually, the Nigerian presidency is putting finishing touches to the sculpture of a village liar, Ìbídùn, that it has been busy carving. Or writing itself into the pathetic biblical story of an early Christian community in Jerusalem, which witnessed a lying couple by the name, Ananias and Sapphira. Ìbídùn was the proverbial woman […]
Continue ReadingAs he settled in to deliver the judgment of the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on 2 April, presiding judge, Wilfred Kpochi, felt obliged to get one ritual out of the way. Glancing left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues on the three-person tribunal to confirm that the judgment he was […]
Continue ReadingToday, democracy has become the practice or an aspiration in many countries across the world. To speak briefly about its origin, it was in the ancient Greek city state of Athens in 508 BC that the statesman, Cleisthenes, reformed the constitution of the city state by transferring power from the hitherto ruling oligarchic aristocracy to […]
Continue ReadingIn 1979, the outgoing military administration of General Olusegun Obasanjo established the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA) to identify our country men and women (whether at home or in the Diaspora) who have made outstanding contributions to knowledge and creativity and grant them special recognition. The award is categorised under four fields of human endeavour: […]
Continue ReadingYears ago, I had an unforgettable experience of nearly witnessing a lynching at Iwo Road in Ibadan. It was a typical day, and while standing at a bus stop, a woman two paces away suddenly shouted that her purse had been snatched. She held the clothes of the man standing beside her. Before you knew […]
Continue ReadingNuman, the town that lends its name to one of the 21 Local Government Areas in Adamawa State in north-east Nigeria, is home to the Bwatiye (Bachama), a transnational identity group stretching into parts of Cameroon. Located in the basin of Benue River and one of its tributaries, River Taraba, Numan’s fecund lands play host […]
Continue ReadingA short four minutes, thirty three seconds video of what looks like Kogi senator, Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, worshipping at the Osun shrine in Osogbo is trending. If she is truly the one in the video, then her traducers better back off before the deluge comes with its fury. You do not beat the child of the […]
Continue ReadingThe killing last Friday of 16 Northern travellers along the Uromi-Ubiaja road in Edo state is an event that will live in infamy. Twenty-five travellers from Port Harcourt going home to the North, Kano specifically for the Eid el-fitri celebrations were intercepted by vigilantes along the way on the suspicion that they were kidnappers and […]
Continue ReadingThe Nigerian presidency is an energizing elixir. It has proven to be very effective in breathing life into dry bones. To old creaky engines, it gives deep cleaning; it replaces worn parts and upgrades the lubrication system. Olusegun Obasanjo went in there and got transformed from an imprisoned stork to a clean-shaven ladies’ egret. The […]
Continue ReadingIn recent weeks, we seem to have been wrestling with the very idea of democracy. After all, our political system has passed through the Westminster parliamentary system and over three decades of the Washington type presidential system. There is a prolonged assumption that we are indeed a thriving democracy and ought by now to have come […]
Continue ReadingI have a very close friend whose father made him an executor to his will ahead of his much older siblings in a large, but affluent polygamous family. That was rather uncommon in a typical African setting. It gets even more uncommon. The very detailed will gave mere stipends from a rather expansive estate to some of […]
Continue ReadingDuring an interview on Channels TV on Monday, Professor Wole Soyinka responded to critics who have been taunting him to “say something” about the present administration. In the interview, he said, “People should stop trying to work on my timetable for me. I had not swallowed an alarm clock. I don’t see why I should […]
Continue ReadingDemocracy is often cast as the antithesis of authoritarian rule — a beacon of liberty standing firm against the shadows of oppression. Yet, history tells a more intricate tale. Authoritarian regimes rarely storm the gates; instead, they slip quietly through the corridors of power, emerging not as abrupt usurpers but as offspring of the very […]
Continue ReadingAs part of its golden jubilee, the University of Calabar is said to have held a special convocation ceremony on Saturday, 22 March, 2025 where it handed out honours to all manner of persons. The Chancellor of the University is Aminu Ado Bayero, the deposed Emir of Kano. Present at that event also were Nyesom […]
Continue ReadingA passenger boards a bus. The city is a little rough but he has taken his customary precaution; there are two women on the bus. He turns into the gaze of a wiry man with a Bible and the man smiles and nods at him. He imagines he is a peripatetic evangelist biding his time before unleashing […]
Continue Reading“Everything is my business. Everything. Anything I say is law…literally law.” Barbara Geddes, et al in their How dictatorship works (2018) quoted Malawian dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, as having once said the above. In Nigeria of a little more than a week ago, they all came in quick successions: A National Assembly where the libido ran riot; a son […]
Continue ReadingIf anyone had told me in 2004 that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu would one day, as president of Nigeria, declare emergency rule in a state and suspend a governor because of a squabble between a godfather and his godson, I would have said: “Stop it! Tinubu would never do that!” But you should forgive me: […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Tinubu has dealt a fatal punch on Nigeria’s democratic prospects. As the head of the executive branch, he has injured the judiciary and subverted the legislature in what promises to be a dangerous drift towards authoritarianism. On the Rivers crisis, the Supreme Court ruled on the side of deploying democratic methods to resolve outstanding […]
Continue ReadingAt an acquaintance’s house some years back, a man walked in with two teenage children. After they left, my friend explained that he was the spouse of her deceased friend. Then, she went on to say that she had been trying to match-make him with a banker, who had not been responding positively to his […]
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