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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What Trump’s Comeback May Mean for Africa, By Farooq A. Kperogi

A few weeks ago, I spoke at a symposium in my university here in Georgia on the implications of the U.S. presidential election for the African diaspora. To the bemusement of my audience (who were a mix of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters), I explained the curious phenomenon of African support for Donald Trump, […]

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Tinubu’s Tragic Trial of Nigeria’s Malnourished Minors, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Nigeria is doddering on the edge of never-before-seen economic desolation, but  President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration’s major preoccupation is not to bring ministration to a badly hurting nation but to prosecute harmless, impoverished, malnourished, and undernourished minors of northern Nigerian origin who, months ago, joined millions of Nigerians to protest for their right to a […]

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Nigerians will miss Tinubu after he is gone, By Farooq A. Kperogi

I fully anticipate that most Nigerians will figuratively call for my head after reading this headline. How could it be that a leader who has inflicted such profound and unrelenting hardship upon the populace, and who appears utterly disinclined to offer even the smallest relief, could ever be missed? (Tinubu’s wirepullers at the World Bank […]

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World Bank’s 15-Year Death Sentence on Nigeria, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The World Bank’s Senior Vice President by the name of Indermit Gill, who is originally Indian, incited mass panic in Nigeria on October 14 when he said Nigeria would need to sustain its current soul-sucking, agonizingly punishing, and self-destructive “reforms” for “at least another 10 to 15 years to transform its economy.” Gill’s speech at […]

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Tinubu, Remi, and Akpabio Mocking Nigerians’ Hardship, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The torment of incessantly escalating petrol prices and the consequent surge in the cost of everything have plunged Nigerians into a precipitous decline in quality of life. This dire situation is exacerbated by insensitive, almost mocking remarks from those responsible for inflicting this pain. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, aptly nicknamed “T-Pain,” recently stated from London […]

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Tinubu: Overfed Father of Starving Children, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The unfailingly abiding emotional investment I have in the wellbeing of common people springs forth from my experiential and mediated identification with the twinge of hunger and misery that poverty breeds. As people who read my columns know, my father, who died on December 31, 2016, was an Arabic/Islamic Studies teacher at a government-owned primary […]

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Zanga-Zanga and Tinubu’s Crumbling Northern Alliance, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The 10-day nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that end today, known by the   reduplicative compound “Zanga-Zanga” in Hausaphone northern Nigeria, have ruptured the coalition that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu managed to build with a portion of the northern Muslim political establishment since 2014, which put Muhammadu Buhari in power in 2015 and 2019 and him in 2023. […]

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Tinubu: A Tyrant in the Making, By Farooq A. Kperogi

President Tinubu’s self-serving speech–which basically sang his own praises, said he’d heard the people’s anguished cries but won’t do anything about the cries and then threatened that the people shouldn’t cry for much longer or they’d be crushed– signposts the making of an unfeeling tyrant. If the people close to him don’t stop him and […]

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Protests: Tinubu’s Real Troubles Are Just Beginning, By Farooq A. Kperogi

In light of his planned astronomical hike in petrol prices euphemistically called “subsidy removal” in 2023, which his opponents also promised to implement and caused Nigerians embrace as inevitable and desirable, I foretold the imminent social convulsion that is gathering momentum across Nigeria now. “I can assure Tinubu that if petrol price hikes deepen people’s […]

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Sanusi Lamido and Kano’s Royal Ding-Dong, By Farooq A. Kperogi

Kano’s Muhammad Sanusi II has been rethroned the exact way he was initially enthroned and dethroned: in the melting pot of the politics of vengeance and recrimination. And he just might be dethroned yet again by this, or another subsequent partisan government, given Sanusi’s infamous incapacity to rein in his tongue and to understand the […]

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The 2019 Tinubu Speech We Ignored is Biting Back, By Farooq A. Kperogi

At the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium on March 29, 2019, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then only a powerful but unofficial pillar of the APC, gave us an ominous presage of his administration that we all either ignored or sniggered at but which is now eerily materializing. “If we reduce the purchasing power of the people, we […]

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Minimum Wage, Maximum Deceit and Moral Cowardice, By Farooq A. Kperogi

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 […]

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BBC, Betta Edu, and Her Ministry of Corruption, By Farooq A. Kperogi

The 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. […]

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Tinubu’s Anti-People, Reverse Robin Hoodist “Courage”, By Farooq A. Kperogi

President 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 […]

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North and Tinubu’s Back-to-Lagos Moves, By Farooq A. Kperogi

When 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 […]

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