News, Events, Entertainment, Lifestyle, Fashion, Beauty, Inspiration and yes… Gossip! The Only Place It Happens!
I’ve stopped bothering to listen to or read Muhammadu Buhari’s speeches for quite a while now not only because I’ve given up on the regime he leads but also because he has some of the most inept speech writers Nigeria has ever had, particularly in the last two years. But a portion of the speech […]
Continue ReadingIt emerged late last week that Communications and Digital Economy Minister Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami (or his agents) possibly instructed Zamfara State governor Bello Muhammad Mutawalle to place an advertorial in the Daily Trust to congratulate Pantami on his “promotion to the Rank of Full Professor of Cybersecurity” by an unnamed university. (In the advertorial, Mutawalle repeated […]
Continue ReadingThe attack on and abduction of military officers at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) are at once unprecedented, humiliating, and dispiriting, but they are not in the least shocking because they merely represent a predictable pattern of Nigeria’s tragically progressive declination into the low-water marks of extreme precariousness in the last six years. I perfectly […]
Continue ReadingMuhammadu Buhari is a magnet for both extravagantly flattering myths and stubborn falsehoods. Here are the top five: 1. Muhammadu Buhari’s very name is wrapped in a curious omission. In most parts of the world, people’s last names are usually either their family name or their father’s first name. Not for Buhari. Muhammadu (which his teachers […]
Continue ReadingTwo concessions are necessary before I make my points. One, while advocacy for self-determination is not criminal and is protected by international laws to which Nigeria is a signatory, calls for violence, instigation of violence against security officers, or machinating a plot to violently dissolve sovereign polities are criminal and have no legal protection anywhere […]
Continue ReadingAs I pointed out in my Facebook and Twitter status updates in the aftermath of Muhammadu Buhari’s June 10 interview with Arise TV, Buhari’s thought-processes, whenever they’re publicly expressed, are often so devoid of basic rhyme and reason that to even try to make sense of them is a painfully senseless waste of one’s senses. […]
Continue ReadingFears of “Fulani domination” have endured since Nigeria’s founding but, more than ever before, there is now an insanely unhealthy obsession with the Fulani in Nigeria’s South. The Fulani are not just routinely reviled with genocidal rhetorical venom, all manner of devious, supernormal political power is ascribed to them. In the service of the reigning […]
Continue ReadingAttorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami aroused people, particularly from the South, to seething fury when he said on May 19 during a ChannelsTV interview that Southern governors’ May 18 resolution to ban open grazing in their part of the country would be synonymous with northern governors banning the sale of spare parts in their […]
Continue ReadingThis is a difficult column to write because although scores of people have importuned me to intervene in the controversy regarding Communication and Digital Economy Minister Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s utterances before he came into government, my wife, who knows Pantami is my friend, pleaded with me to stay out of it. But I would […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who has watched Bola Ahmed Tinubu closely and dispassionately can’t help but notice that the man is not well. He is a walking psychedelic calamity. His endless verbal miscues and nonverbal cues constantly conspire to construct the profile of a man who is battling a troubling internal turmoil, who is held hostage by disablingly […]
Continue ReadingDanladi Umar, the notoriously vain and sickeningly skin-bleached chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, was caught on camera on March 29 physically assaulting a security guard identified as 22-year-old Clement Sargwak. Umar flew into a tempestuous rage because Sargwak besought him to not park his car at a spot that obstructed traffic in Abuja’s Banex […]
Continue ReadingOn March 2, 2021, Peoples Gazette, the gutsy online newspaper that has now become famous for meticulously evidence-based muckraking, reported that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which is now AGF Abubakar Malami’s dutiful poodle, requested the Code of Conduct Bureau to furnish it with former Lagos State governor Bola Tinubu’s asset declaration forms possibly preparatory […]
Continue ReadingIt is by now evident that although President Joe Biden appreciates and identifies with Nigerians (certainly in more ways than Donald Trump did), he has nothing but stone-cold disdain for the inert, isolated mannequin in Aso Rock that pretends to be Nigeria’s “president.” Biden’s first call to an African president (on March 3) after his […]
Continue ReadingIn the United States and Canada, February is celebrated as the “Black History Month.” As I often do when the circumstances permit, I will dedicate most of this month to sharing my thoughts and perspectives on the experiences of Black people in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in the United States where I’ve lived for nearly […]
Continue ReadingI initially resisted responding to Professor Toyin Falola’s trending essay titled “IS THE DIASPORA NOW ABOUT RUBBISHING THOSE AT HOME?”— which he wrote partly in response to the guest column I invited Professor Moses Ochonu to write— for three reasons. One, the article was so atypically self-aggrandizing that I thought the Professor Falola I’ve known since 2004 couldn’t […]
Continue ReadingPastor Tunde Bakare’s trending video on Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for which he is receiving caustic flak from the Nigerian online commentariat, isn’t the deodorization of Tinubu’s smelly underbelly that many people say it is. It is, on the contrary, an effective denunciation of Tinubu and a deep, lasting, strategic delegitimization of his “omo Eko” bona fides. In […]
Continue ReadingWhen it emerged on Thursday that the hundreds of schoolboys that were abducted from Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, were released, I was so relieved that I gave the Buhari regime an unusual pat in the back in my social media updates. “The release of the #KankaraBoys—I don’t care at what cost—is one of the […]
Continue ReadingThe last few weeks have seen a curious resurgence of the preposterous conspiracy theory that Muhammadu Buhari has been dead and that it’s his body double that lives in Aso Rock. Readers of my column have invaded my email and social media inboxes with persistent requests for me to illuminate the ambiguities surrounding the existence—or […]
Continue ReadingIt’s now two years since the Buhari regime launched its “NexlLevel” agenda. In a November 24, 2018 column titled “APC’s ‘NextLevel’ of Fraud, Incompetence, and Sorrow,” I predicted most of what is unfolding now. Read it below: APC’s embarrassing “NextLevel” reelection campaign has erased all lingering doubts that the Buhari presidency is a veritable graveyard […]
Continue ReadingAs of the time of writing this, all indications point to a decisive Electoral College win for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Donald Trump, who stays sleepless at nights to rage-tweet insane inanities, had in his characteristic juvenile schoolyard bullying called Joe “Biden Sleepy Joe.” Well, Trump’s infantile nickname for Biden is ironically fitting in […]
Continue Reading