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After three months of bootless committee meetings in the comfort of air-conditioned offices at the cost of one billion naira (President Bola Tinubu approved 500 million naira to “start with… first”) and about a month after the expiration of the last minimum wage approved in 2019, the Tinubu government has not been able to approve […]
Continue ReadingThe Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) aroused the rage of Nigerians this week when it revealed in its periodic newsletter called “EFCC Alert” (which it shared with news organizations on Monday) that it had recovered up to 30 billion naira of the money allegedly stolen by suspended Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation minister Betta Edu. […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Ahmed Tinubu is so inordinately inebriated by his IMF-motivated decision to remove subsidies on petrol that at every opportunity he has he brags about it in giddily superlative terms. For example, during a meeting with the Nigerian community in France on June 24, 2023, he couched his decision to impose the Tinubu fuel […]
Continue ReadingWhen my uncle called me over the weekend, he had no time for the customary conversational courtesies that typically preceded our phone chats. He was agitated and wanted to know straight away why President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wanted to relocate Nigeria’s federal capital back to Lagos. His questions were pregnant with anger, befuddlement, and a […]
Continue ReadingThe searing torment that everyday folks are going through in Nigeria right now is so dire, so unbearably extreme, and so unexampled in its rawness that even diasporan Nigerians like me who live tens of thousands of miles away from home can feel it not just vicariously but also experientially. The unending streams of requests […]
Continue ReadingThe Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), one of Nigeria’s most prominent pro-democracy NGOs, invited me to make a virtual presentation from my base in Atlanta to a national seminar it organized last Thursday on “targeted judicial reforms and enhanced judicial integrity in post-election litigation.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it, but here are the thoughts […]
Continue ReadingIn a predictable, premeditated, and carefully choreographed judicial charade, the Court of Appeal on Friday upheld the verdict of the Kano State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal that reversed the electoral triumph of NNPP’s Governor Abba Yusuf of Kano State. I sincerely hope this assault on justice isn’t the spark that ignites an inferno in Kano—and […]
Continue ReadingThe idea that the “judiciary is the last hope of the common man” is a banal, flyblown cliché that is habitually huckstered in Nigerian judicial circles and uncritically repeated in the Nigerian commentariat. But that’s mere hype. There has never been any moment, at least in my lifetime, when the judiciary was the unalterable guardian […]
Continue ReadingBoth pro- and anti-Tinubu news outlets and blogs are selectively reporting the documents that Chicago State University handed over to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday. Here are 6 non-partisan tidbits I discovered from poring over them: 1. Chicago State University’s Office of the Registrar affirmed that Bola A. Tinubu indeed attended the university “from August […]
Continue ReadingFormer Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai’s rumored withdrawal from consideration as a minister in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government because high-tensile inter-elite intrigues torpedoed his senate confirmation and caused the president to sour on him is the bluntest, crudest, most double-dyed political treachery I’ve seen in a long time. Sure, El-Rufai is a detestable, self-important, […]
Continue ReadingWhile Muhammadu Buhari and honchos of his eight-year ruinous regime busied themselves with a feverish last-minute plunder of the public treasury, Femi Adesina chose to deploy his waning symbolic resource as Buhari’s media aide to hatch a brassy plunder of a scholarly laurel. In a social media post dishonestly titled “HONOUR FROM ACROSS THE SEAS,” Adesina misled […]
Continue ReadingAfter failing to stop him from emerging as APC’s flag bearer in 2022 and mounting steep hurdles for him in the 2023 election, Muhammadu Buhari increasingly comes across as intentionally charting courses of action designed to provoke pre-inauguration confrontation with Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Or am I missing something? Take, for example, Buhari’s request to the National […]
Continue ReadingIn the last few weeks, I have read multiple impassioned and tendentious comparisons of Channels TV’s Seun Okinbaloye and Arise TV’s Rufai Oseni on social media. While Peter Obi’s supporters describe Oseni as Nigeria’s best broadcast journalist alive, Bola Tinubu’s supporters say Oseni isn’t worthy of being called a journalist because he not only isn’t […]
Continue ReadingI wasn’t born in the First Republic (i.e., 1960 to 1966) and hadn’t come of age in the Second Republic (i.e., 1979 to 1983), so when I say this year’s presidential election represents the most toxic brew of ethnic and religious chauvinism Nigeria’s democracy has ever had, I’m talking within the limits of my experiential […]
Continue ReadingI was awoken on this side of the world by news of the reversal by the Nigerian Supreme Court of Senate President Ahmed Lawan’s primary election loss. I was already mentally prepared for it after the same Supreme Court affirmed Godswill Akpabio’s fraudulent primary win a few days ago. It’s a well-planned judicial choreography. The […]
Continue ReadingIt was the exceptionally witty and satirical Senator Shehu Sani who first pointed out that the recoloring of the naira and the deathly, crippling scarcity that has come in its wake only a few days to the general election are akin to burning the entire forest while hunting down a rat. Many people missed the […]
Continue ReadingIt was always obvious to keen, disinterested observers that Bola Tinubu’s gamble in helping Buhari to ascend to power won’t pay off in the end; that his opportunistic political love affair with Buhari won’t be requited; and that the brittle, delicately thin thread that held their relational dynamic would snap sooner or later. I wrote […]
Continue ReadingSeveral weeks ago, my 80-year-old paternal uncle, who is a community leader, called me to ask whom between Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu he should vote and canvass support for. That was a strange request considering that in 2019 he resisted my entreaty to him to not vote or campaign for Buhari because of the […]
Continue ReadingIf the general election holds in February next year, one of three people will be declared president: APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu, PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, or Labor Party’s Peter Obi. Only a natural disaster, such as death, can change that reality. There is no foretoken of indications at the moment that can reveal with certainty which […]
Continue ReadingOvation publisher Chief Dele Momodu popularized the expression “owners of Nigeria” to denote a coterie of power brokers and traffickers of influence who habitually sit in conclave to teleguide the choice of political leaders, particularly presidents, and to whom everyday Nigerians are helpless political captives. Although they peddle influence and engage in elitist exclusion, “owners […]
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