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On 9 June, 2026, the Presidency announced: “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has approved the establishment of a Presidential Task Force on Ebola Virus Disease Preparedness and Emerging Public Health Threats and ordered the immediate release of ₦10 billion as emergency intervention funding.” You remember that statement? Today is 20 July. Thank God there has been […]
Continue ReadingThe Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) were in the media yesterday (Sunday) urging President Bola Tinubu to replicate in the North the feat that rescued the Oriire pupils and teachers in Oyo State. I am with them. Their request is not a northern demand; it is a national obligation. No […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Tinubu’s Villa scriptwriters are supremely gifted. Go back and read Mr. Bayo Onanuga’s So Long a Letter on the Gbajabiamila-Adeyemi ‘feud’ over an agency that is simultaneously legal and illegal. The lengthy statement is a work of prose, daintily littered with repetition and refrain; rhyme and rhythm. Check out this excerpt: “On 27 […]
Continue ReadingBoldness, be my friend. Arm me, audacity, from head to foot.” Some live by that Shakespearean creed. They say aloud what society only whispers. They speak the unsayable, damn the world and make a difference. Northern Nigeria had the late Dr Yusuf Bala Usman. I think there is another one in Dr. Bashir Kurfi. Kurfi […]
Continue ReadingSometimes, a matter one thinks is pregnant with an elephant delivers only a rat. Last week, I was on my knees begging Northern Nigeria to save Nigeria from a catastrophe already visible on the horizon. The piece was a code, a shock treatment meant to reset a misbehaving social cell that has become dangerously comfortable […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Tinubu, in his June 12 broadcast, condemned terrorists and their work but told us not to “assign blame or point fingers” because “crime has no ethnicity.” Crime may indeed have no ethnicity, but that does not relieve us of the duty to identify the environment that breeds and sustains it. A desert does […]
Continue ReadingOn Friday, November 1, 1878, a decisive war was fought in the north-eastern corridor of Yorubaland. History remembers it as the Jalumi War. It was that one-day battle that permanently halted the southward march of the Fulani towards the sea. One of the bitterest engagements of that war was fought in a place called Iba, […]
Continue ReadingFor no reason beyond bad belle, Orishala urged Ogun to pull down Orunmila’s house. Why? Ogun asked. Orishala hinted that Orunmila had become a dangerous rival to his dominance in the pantheon of the gods. Like a hired killer, Ogun agreed. But how would he recognise Orunmila’s house? He had never been there. Orishala gave […]
Continue ReadingThe English Premier League ended yesterday with Arsenal crowned champions. But that triumph almost slipped away because, two weeks earlier, a stolen goal arrived disguised as a legitimate one. I watched the West Ham–Arsenal match of Sunday, May 10, 2026. It got me thinking about Nigeria’s past and coming elections. Deep into stoppage time, there […]
Continue Reading“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” — Aristotle. The Ass in the Lion’s Skin is Aesop’s story of a donkey who finds a lion’s skin abandoned in the forest. He wears it and begins […]
Continue ReadingAn old firm of architects with a rich history of project design and delivery sent a letter to the Sierra Leonean government on September 15, 1960. In that letter, the firm listed some of the projects it was handling in Nigeria. The multi-storey building called Cocoa House in Ibadan was on that list. But the […]
Continue ReadingIn a democracy, the joy of victory won through real elections has certain permanence. ‘On Your Mandate We Shall Stand’ was composed and sung for Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola because he submitted his ambition to a competitive process: he had a competent opponent, votes were cast, counted, and he won. The song, its defiance, and […]
Continue Reading“Where you have a warrior culture, you have heroes.” That is how the unusual character of Ibadan is explained on page 856 of Professor Toyin Falola’s 1,012-page history of the city. My eyes caught the line as I watched Saturday’s opposition political summit in the city. Opposition politics in Nigeria is post-apocalyptic, its script reads […]
Continue Reading“Even a corpse put in a coffin will defeat Tinubu in 2027.” ADC chieftain and northern politician, Buba Galadima, gave that promise at the ADC convention last Tuesday. He was wrong. The corpse, the coffin and the carpenter will be buried by Hurricane Tinubu in the election of next year, unless… Unless what? Unless they […]
Continue ReadingWar commanders die cheap deaths; farmers are murdered on their farms, traders in their shops, landlords vanish on their lands, tenants in their rented rooms; students abducted from their studies. What more must happen before we become what Italians would call “Paese dei Morti” (Country of the Dead); “Paese senza memoria” (country without memory)? When […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who has watched a hunting party in action will understand what is going on. What we have is a hunting expedition: beaters scour the bush, flushing the political parties—like duikers—towards INEC and the courts, where gunmen are properly positioned to take the killer shots. The PDP is in Bello Turji’s captivity; the ADC is […]
Continue ReadingIt is either Nasir El-Rufai is a very lucky man, or he is a very strong man. He was arrested by his friends, charged variously for multiple offences, none of the various courts has yet ruled on his bail application, but he arrived home in Abuja on Saturday. His jailers mourned with him and said […]
Continue ReadingI begin with Game of Thrones, a world not far removed from ours, where power, wealth, and revenge are the true currencies of politics. In Season 5, Episode 1, we hear this: Tyrion Lannister: What is it that you want exactly? Lord Varys: Peace. Prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the […]
Continue ReadingA mother sits her son beside her, looks into his eyes and tells him: “Son, listen to me carefully. I want to tell you some important things.” “Okay, Mom, what is it?” The boy replies and the lesson class becomes a conversation in morality. “First, always be kind. Speak gently and respect everyone, young or […]
Continue ReadingOur power minister, Adebayo Adelabu, is now mocked as the King of Darkness—Kábíyèsi Olókùnkùn. I laugh at his traducers. They are crowning the wrong monarch. The true emperor of darkness sits higher. For more than three years, the president has wandered luxuriantly through the bush of politics while abandoning the hard road of policy that […]
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