Daniel Bwala’s Al Jazeera Humiliation, By Farooq A. Kperogi

I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 because of his impassioned opposition to the choice of Kashim Shettima as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public break from the APC, he came across to me as a voluble, ignorant and opportunistic careerist, not because […]

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Tinubu’s Türkiye fiasco spotlights his Age, Health and Wife, By Farooq A. Kperogi

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s state visit to Türkiye this week dramatized two uncomfortable realities: the visible toll of age or ill health on the president and the conspicuous absence of his wife in the intimate sphere of his personal care and public self-presentation. This was not supposed to be a problematic visit. Tinubu was in […]

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New York Times and Onitsha Screwdriver Seller’s Data, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The New York Times of January 18, 2026, published an explosive story showing how unverified and methodologically questionable data produced by a little-known Onitsha screwdriver seller who moonlights as an NGO activist, Emeka Umeagbalasi of Intersociety, traveled upward into US Republican politics and helped shape a narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, culminating in Trump-ordered airstrikes in Sokoto […]

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Wike Getting Awfully Close to Fighting Tinubu, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike revels in controversies, contentious public disputations, vituperative recriminations, and tensile political stress like a pig exults in mud. Peace and harmony bore him to tears. That is why he has an incrementally lengthening list of political spats with multiple people. His quarrel with Governor Siminalayi Fubara, his former […]

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Why is Matawalle Still a Defense Minister?, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Even the severest critics of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration admit that the last few days have seen what appear (at least on the surface) to be a visible, reinvigorated, if Donald Trump-induced, earnestness in the fight against the unchecked widening and deepening of the theaters of death and destruction in the country. The firing […]

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Is Former INEC Chair Yakubu Now an Ambassador?, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga said in his press statement today that former INEC chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu has been appointed an ambassador by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. But the list of newly appointed ambassadors circulating on social media names a “Mahmud Yakubu” from Ekiti State. If that list is accurate, two issues stand out. First, […]

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Nigeria’s Return To The 2014 Nightmare, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The events and atmospherics of the past few days in Nigeria feel eerily and frighteningly familiar. They are redolent of the disabling instability and helplessness (and more) of 2014 and 2015 when Goodluck Jonathan was president. Three crises are unfolding in near synchrony. One, there’s a resurgence of Boko Haram activities. Two, there’s an alarming […]

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Wike’s Weak, Wild, Wicked Week, By Farooq A. Kperogi

In Nigeria, elite oppression and callousness are often mostly abstract. Most people at the lower end of the social scale think and feel that many people in positions of power, comfortably ensconced in their sinecures, are haughty, self-impressed, and possessed of ice-cold disdain for them. But it is FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, more than anyone […]

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Why Tinubu is Afraid of Jonathan’s 2027 Comeback Bid, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Although former President Goodluck Jonathan hasn’t formally declared his intention to run for president, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appears to be already worked into a frenzy by the mere prospect of it, at least judging from the sensation of fright that drips from the statements of his spokespeople and close supporters. Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s official […]

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Obi’s Litigious Reflexes vs Adeyanju’s Burden of Truth, By Farooq A. Kperogi

In what irreverently humorous social media denizens are calling the battle between the “social media president” and the “Temu lawyer” (unflattering epithets to suggest that Peter Obi rules the Nigerian social media space while Deji Adeyanju is a baby lawyer who makes up for his inexperience through loud exhibitionism), Nigerian media law is about to […]

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“Wok, Wak, Wek!”—The African English Accent Showdown, By Farooq A. Kperogi

If you listen carefully to English spoken across Anglophone Africa, you’ll notice three unmistakable “accent capitals”: Nigerian, Kenyan, and Ghanaian. All other regional accents tend to branch out as derivatives or close relatives of this linguistic trinity. And nothing illustrates these fascinating differences quite like the word “work.” In Nigeria, it is pronounced emphatically as […]

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In 2027, Tinubu Won’t Win; The Opposition Will Lose, By Farooq A. Kperogi

If economic health, social vitality, and the raw pulse of public opinion were the only indicators relied upon to prognosticate the chances of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s reelection in 2027, I would say with cocksure certitude that he is condemned to be a one-term president. Not even the most hopelessly unthinking defenders of the Tinubu […]

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Tinubu’s Lagos-Centric Yorubaization of Nigeria, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Last week, in response to mounting, difficult-to-controvert, empirically impregnable accusations that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu disproportionately favors his Yoruba ethnic group in consequential federal appointments, the presidency circulated a list of Tinubu’s appointments to countermine the firmly fixed national narrative of Tinubu’s unexampled ethnocentrism but was compelled to withdraw it because it was embarrassingly error-ridden and […]

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Tinubu, Atiku, and Argentina: United by Pain, Divided by Rhetoric, By Farooq A. Kperogi

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 […]

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Tinubu as Yesterday’s Rebel and Today’s Tyrant, By Farooq A. Kperogi

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s demonstrably unconstitutional suspension of the elected leaders of Rivers State and his illegal imposition of a retired military lickspittle as sole administrator in the exercise of his otherwise constitutional privilege to declare a state of emergency in any part of the country is the latest addition in a long list of […]

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Nasir El-Rufai’s Scorched-Earth One-Man Opposition, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Like a stranded mariner gasping on the shores of irrelevance, former Kaduna State governor Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai writhes in the uneasy throes of power’s withdrawal. His disquiet, however, is less the quiet lament of a fallen statesman and more the tempestuous fury of a Shakespearean woman scorned. He has become fiery, irascible, indignant, and unrelenting […]

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Tinubu’s Iragbiji Surprise, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Among the shiny new universities President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has established is the Federal University of Agriculture and Development Studies in Iragbiji, Osun State. Now, Iragbiji, as legend has it, is Tinubu’s birthplace, which he has spent decades treating like a dark family secret. Could this be his way of finally coming out of the […]

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As foes and friends unite against Tinubu, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Although 2025 has only just begun, the Machiavellian maneuvers and the increasingly tensile, high-decibel political shrieks being emitted by politicians about the 2027 election might lead one to believe that the election will take place next year. Of all the political realignments that are forming preparatory to the 2027 election, it’s the unity in political […]

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What Ghana has taught Nigeria and America about democracy, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Ghana has taught both Nigeria and the US a masterclass in electoral integrity and democratic maturity in its just concluded election. For Nigeria, the takeaway is that electoral integrity is the cornerstone upon which trust and order rest. When an election is conducted with the meticulous precision of a weaver at a loom — its […]

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