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Category: Monday

Wike/Basiru clash

“From my records, he isn’t a member of the APC. I don’t see which authority or temerity he has to be dabbling into APC affairs. I am the head of the national secretariat of the APC. So, he has no locus whatsoever to engage me in any official activity that concerns the APC, until he joins the party”.

These were the exact words with which the national secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ajibola Basiru reacted to scathing remarks against him by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FTC), Nyesom Wike. He had also asked Wike to resign from his ministerial position and face what he called, his obsession with Rivers politics.

The altercation arose after Basiru led the National Working Committee (NWC) of the APC to Port Harcourt, Rivers State during which they interfaced with Governor Siminalayi Fubara. In the course of that visit, the NWC members had reportedly endorsed Fubara for a second term.

Basiru equally cautioned the national vice chairman of the APC South-south, Victor Giadom for making derogatory remarks against the governor. Giadom had reportedly said at a political function that “Gokana is a no-go-area for anybody, be it the so-called governor”.

Basiru contended that it was wrong for anybody to hide under personal loyalty or political allegiance to denigrate a governor elected by the people. Giadom is said to be an ally of Wike.

Wike in reaction to the NWC visit to Rivers State warned Basiru to steer clear of Rivers politics. He alluded to those who go to Rivers State because they heard the state has N600bn allocation and accused them of going to the state to collect money only to open their mouths to talk anyhow.

“I say it here; take this message to your national secretary. Leave Rivers State alone. Go and ask those who have done it before. Please, don’t take our support for Mr. President for granted. You have to be careful with the statements you make”, Wike warned.

In the statement which Basiru personally signed (from which the introductory quote was lifted), the APC national scribe took strong exceptions to Wike’s allusion that he is interested in the N600bn allocation to Rivers State even as he queried his competence to dabble into the affairs of the APC.

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The issues raised by the APC national secretary on Wike’s current political leaning, highlights all that is wrong with the brand of politics played in this country. And in it can be located why it has been pretty difficult for significant progress to be recorded in deepening the democratic culture on these shores.

Wike has been a key member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) until the last controversial national convention of the party held in Oyo State when he was expelled. Even then, the group he leads has formed a parallel faction. They floated a factional national caretaker committee of the party which went to court to challenge the Oyo State convention. Until the issues in their litigations are resolved, he still remains a member of the PDP.

Since after his support for President Tinubu in the last presidential election, Wike had been embroiled in a running battle with some key leaders of the party for the soul of the PDP. He owes his current ministerial position to that support.

But the way he carried on with his group of four other former PDP governors (before Makinde pulled out) has not gone down well with others who feel his agenda is to decapitate the leading opposition party. As things stand, the PDP is a ghost of its former self as most of its governors have defected to the ruling party. The Osun State governor has pitched his tent in another party for fear of disqualification in the face of the series litigations by opposing factions with Wike at the centre of it all.

So, he remains a PDP member until the issues in court are resolved. As the crisis in the PDP raged on, some of its state assembly members in Rivers State defected to the ruling party. They were followed quickly by Fubara.

It was sequel to these defections that Basiru led the APC NWC to Rivers State. The altercation between Wike and Basiru is a fallout of events of that visit.

When Basiru said Wike is not a member of the APC and has no locus to engage him in the running of the party affairs, he was just highlighting the obvious contradictions in the current political posturing of the FCT minister. That role had before now given vent to allegations that the federal government has a hand in the crisis rocking the opposition parties and the slide to one-party system.

That is not all. By asking Wike to resign from his ministerial position and face his obsession with Rivers politics, the APC appears to be coming to terms with the incongruity in Wike’s current political posturing. Yes, he can hold his ministerial position.

But he cannot be the face of a troublesome faction in the PDP and at the same time seek to control the affairs of the APC government of Rivers State. Basiru was within his rights when he argued that Wike cannot challenge his job in the APC when he is yet to join the party. It is however curious that the APC is realising the duplicitous role of the FCT minister in the PDP in the last two years.

Not a few Nigerians had viewed with utter suspicion and dismay the double role he has been playing in both the opposition PDP and the ruling APC government. That suspicion came to a head when a couple of weeks back, Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State and Wike were embroiled in serious altercations.

The quarrel was sequel to the allegation by Makinde that Wike was attempting to weaken the PDP in support of President Tinubu’s second term ambition. He had alleged that Wike had during a meeting, openly offered to hold the PDP for the president ahead of the 2023 elections.

But Wike quickly denied Makinde’s allegation describing it as a blatant lie. He said there was no such meeting. We are faced with Makinde’s words against that of Wike with no evidence to determine their veracity or lack of it.

Even then, the body language and some utterances of the FCT minister have not helped matters. Not with recent unconfirmed reports that Wike is rooting for the former national secretary of the PDP, Samuel Anyanwu to fly the flag of the APC for the 2027 election in Imo State. Not with the impeachment notice to Fubara by the Rivers State House of Assembly last week.

Wike’s politics in the PDP is responsible for suggestions that the federal government has a hand in the PDP crisis. His politics in Rivers conveys the unmistakable impression that one man determines the electoral swing of a state. That is the impression we get each time people say this or that local government area is no-go-area. It is no credit to our democracy that Wike postures to be of considerable influence in the APC and PDP. His altercation with Basiru exposes all that. It is time for him to take a stand or be compelled to do so.

January 12, 2026
BJ at 80

It was a drama of an evening. It was more than a dinner for Professor Biodun Jeyifo. BJ, as he is fondly called, was marking his 80th birthday. He was not going to be generous to the man sitting next to him. Wole Soyinka, that is.

He launched a barb at the bard. The memory travelled about 60 years ago. He charged that Soyinka only taught class twice in the full year, in the end, BJ was given a miserly B. Kunle Ajibade loomed from the sideline and tried to see the virtue of it all.

If it was any consolation, Soyinka had invited him to abandon the English department and join him at dramatic arts. After a hesitation, BJ joined him and moved away from what Soyinka described as deadwoods.

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Soyinka defended himself as a teacher, going back to his father Essay, and how he has the teacher gene. If he was able to pummel him with a humilating B, Soyinka did two things. First, he made a case for BJ to make a first class.

WS made a fervent plea for BJ and wondered whether there was any essay that could match the authority of his voice and the rigour of his perspective. Soyinka made the point and won the day for BJ and became third to make first class in the history of the premier university.

BJ would make the point later that that he was himself not liberal with his marks. At a panel held earlier, I spoke of his generosity. In a last class, I recalled using the word antipodal. The class drowned me in an uproar and they thought I was a showoff.

‘I like that word,” said BJ.

I was vindicated. Ajibade and Ogoga Ifowodo made the point that BJ was stingy with his marks. It was paradox that he would complain of being shortchanged. There was a case of an essay written by Femi Macaulay. He scored him A- there was no such category as A-. He called Macaulay to his office and contended that the piece was not an a and not b+. he just would not let Macaulay be.

After his querulous issues with Soyinka. BJ confessed that WS gave him a note that opened his career in the United States.

Dr. Bisi Anyadike, who runs a school at Ife gushes about how BJ inspired her.

January 12, 2026
Sheriff the Taiwo

All the talk of defection today began with a man’s daring step. Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori broke the ice when he dumped the PDP. He is what, in Yoruba cosmology, may be called Taiwo. When twins are born, Taiwo comes first out of the mother’s womb as an exploratory act. He is sent to find out if this life is worth living. When he does not return, Kehinde, the other twin, after a wait, decides to join the brother or sister.

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The sheriff opened the door, tasted the other side, did not return or look back like Lot’s wife. Others followed in his footsteps. It is the audacity of the frontiersman. It has become almost routine for the APC, and the last at the time of writing, was Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State. He capped the whole of the north central with Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa and Niger states.

It is always good to remember who took the first step. When he did it, it was courage. When they do it now, it is routine. Sheriff was the shepherd. Others the faithful sheep.

January 5, 2026
Billionaire squatters

The picture of the coalition of the wounded a few days ago after Peter Obi’s next bus stop resembles the forty men who worked up a futile conspiracy against Apostle Paul. It was on false charges. They neither ate nor drank as part of their spiritual quest. They waited on God until they slay Paul. They tasted no morsel. A waste of palate. They also lay in a mockery of an ambush.

Well, it had a good ending. Paul lived so they could eat. They were too cowardly to die.

These so-called ADC men are not the types to neither eat nor drink. In fact, they are too fed to be fed up with the gourmet’s table. One of them, though, made a public farce in fancy clothes and pleaded hunger on television in a bash for billionaires. One of them has a Damocles of corruption hanging over his wife for billions of naira without a month of work. None of them would even fast except the mullah among them with a beard and a forked and profane tongue. He is fattening on the image of a pariah.

The hypocrisy of brothers, but much more. It started with the squat figure among them who was shooed out of Kaduna like a bleating goat in a garden. He moved from the APC to the SDP, and asked over all his fellowship of wounded to a house of refuge. Some of them have a sore head or broken knee. He assumed a proprietary air. Then the owners of the land said he, an interloper, was a squatter. The landlords had no place for him. He had no grassroots cred, no papers, no love. The habitual noisemaker turned voiceless and even meek.

They all, the wounded, remained in limbo for days. They developed an independent spirit, and wanted a party of their own. They were not good at it as they formed a new party known as ADA. It sounds like someone’s sister or mother or wife. Poor planners that they were, they discovered they had conjured up a copycat. They went back to their vomit. An existing party already had that signature. They were trying to imitate the coalition they were planning to defeat. Their first step was a crash, to copycat a name. A bad case of caricature.

Then suddenly, they all came together under the aegis of the ADC. All we saw was a bad alloy of retirees. The new entrants of the ADC were bloated. Bloated as in bored. Too much money and nothing else to do with it. Preening, privileged, patrician.

They had hardly enjoyed their new home when the true owners, just like the SDP, told them they are squatters. They came with area boys’ swagger. They are banding together to take over another person’s property. They are the impostors of the Omo Oniles of Lagos. If they are not bandits, what other word can describe them? They are the Bello Turji of today’s politics.

They are all experienced politicians. But so far, they have shown that they do not know how to do a naming ceremony of a party, and cannot form a party. They do not know how to defect. Some of them have not left the Labour Party. Those who left, like our man from Anambra State, did not know how to register. In the name of ethnic parapoism, he ignored the law and process. Enugu stakeholders say he is not of them or with them. So, they lashed at him. They do not know how to take over a party.

Obi cannot leave his Obidient rabble in the lurch. He is hoping for a takeover of his own. If they do not give him the ticket, just as PDP did not in 2022, where would he go? Would he return to his tent to embrace his crowd of hecklers?. They say they will abide with him. Are his followers going to be obedient to Atiku? Is their leader now going back to his vomit as second fiddle? Is he going to content himself by returning to the boys’ quarters as Atiku boy? He cannot abandon his followers. They are his breath of life. He is just a squatter among squatters waiting to be a landlord. As for the other fellow, his hunger is a grudge match. He has nowhere to go but to bow to an inevitable crash.

Atiku, the grand patron of defectors, has a bigger grudge. This is his last chance, and he is going to fight like a bear with a sore head. What we have in this new coalition are coalitions within a coalition. We have the Atiku crowd, the Obi crowd, the El-Rufai cretins and the Amaechi amen sayers. When these bacilli of ambitions coalesce, we can only wait for the end of the story. We are in the first act of an interesting drama, and the most important conflict is not their ambitions and party nominations. It is the prospect of a legal and ego turmoil that threatens to end up like the Labour Party and PDP crises. Maybe not as bad. But not good enough for a fighter. Claims of conflicting legitimacy may splinter the organ. Everyone may realise that they are tenants of a tenant. Ralph Nwosu, a self-imposed place holder as ADC leader, will tell them, “I thought I was a landlord, but I cannot return your rent. Sorry.”

The other issue though is that none of them has a big hold on their states or regions. Not David Mark, not El Rufai, who was shooed out, not Amaechi, who cannot hold 13 percent of Rivers State, not Rauf Aregbesola, who can only fete Atiku to a protem breakfast, not Atiku, who has been dishonoured from a title.

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The bigger point of this so-called delusion is their claim that they are the rescuers of Nigeria. They are trying to play on our collective amnesia. They forget that we know all of them. This new group can be divided into major two past governments. The first are the Jonathan men. The second are the Buharists. These are the men who battled against each other just a few years ago. It shows us ideas have no traction in their action. The only outlier in the group is Atiku Abubakar, who has always been for everyone and for nobody. For instance, was Amaechi not a Buharist? Of course, just like Malami, who rose from fringe lawyer to attorney general. That man who spent the holidays with wife and son in prison for coddling loots cannot be thinking about ADC now. The Jonathan crowd is led by David Mark who this time is going to show us how the poor can afford telephones. For the Genzs and Millennials, this man was a minister under IBB’s military government and mocked the poor who could not afford telephones.

These two governments, Buhari and Jonathan, precipitated the crisis that the present government is trying to solve. The Jonathan era wasted the boon of oil and had no rubric for solving the security burden. They spent the nation into huge deficits and rolled the country into foreign exchange rut. The Buhari administration was a footloose amalgam of failed men like Malami, who ran the country into a spend-and-waste economy in which N30 trillion and billions of naira in debt made the present government the real rescuer. Now, they want to turn the logic on its head. They committed the sin and they are calling themselves the saviour. The sinner and saviour in one breath. They are a parody of the messiah. Jesus bore the sin without committing any. This is what made Jesus angry with the Pharisees. He said they were whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones.

The coalition should respond to the elimination of ways and means of N30 trillion and the billions of dollars of debts. These were the burdens that these same men created in the years of the locusts.

They are playing geriatric politics, the game of old men who know that the time of the end has come for their dreams. It reminds me of the chilling biography about Nazi holocaust titled: Cold Crematorium by Josef Debreczeni. It is perhaps the chilliest eyewitness account of that misbegotten time. He wrote of a part of the concentration camp where the inmates were at once out of breath and still alive. Scrawny, wounded, slobbering, febrile, sterile, weak. Waiting for the grim reaper. Crematorium is hot by definition. But he called it cold because they did not need to go through the gas chamber to go.

In the case of the coalition, time is their cold crematorium. In his prison memoirs, Soyinka called such fate slow lynching, the title he wanted to call The Man Died. These men of different stripes in ADC are typing out their last days as an assembly. Cobbled together by expired fantasies of power, they are awaiting ADC’s epitaph.

January 5, 2026
Designating bandits, kidnappers as terrorists

Federal government’s last week’s designation of bandits, kidnappers or any group that engages in similar criminalities as terrorists is very welcome. But it has long been overdue. But Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris betrayed official prevarication on the issue while announcing the decision when he said the era of ambiguous nomenclature is over.

“Henceforth, any armed group or individual that kidnaps our children, attacks farmers, and terrorises our communities is officially classified and will be dealt with as a terrorist”, he said.

The minister captured the seeming duplicity in the previous handling of killings when he stated emphatically that – “Now the era of ambiguous nomenclature is over, if you terrorise our people, whether you are a group or you are an individual, you are a terrorist and will be classified as such. There is no name hiding this again”.

Though the government did not explicitly name the groups under reference, armed killer groups such as bandits, killer herdsmen and sundry kidnappers fit into this categorisation. They have been involved in attacks and killings in our communities, kidnapping for ransom and abduction of school children.

The new stance by the government marks a significant departure from the previous order of treating mass kidnapping, abductions and rural attacks as ordinary crimes. By this, the full weight of counterterrorism will be deployed to confront the criminals behind these attacks.

It is heart-refreshing that the government is coming to terms with the mortal challenges posed by the activities of the so-called bandits, militant herdsmen, sundry kidnappers and an assortment of non-state actors challenging its authority and legitimacy. Before now, government’s handling of the criminal challenges by these groups had left discerning Nigerians doubting its seriousness in decisively taming the monster.

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The body language of the last administration on the twin issues of banditry and insurgency of the herdsmen did not help matters either. What we saw were rather strident efforts to rationalise the killings especially by herdsmen as communal or herder-farmer clashes spurred by climate change, pressure on land and migration challenges. These were the common terms deployed to obfuscate and conceal well planned and well targeted attacks to kill, displace and occupy targeted communities.

What of the alibi that the killer herdsmen were foreigners who got their arms and ammunitions when Libya under Ghaddafi was collapsing? That was how late President Muhammadu Buhari explained away the attacks and killings in the Middle Belt when he interfaced with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

He told the Archbishop that the problem has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of West Africa: “They were trained and armed by Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their guns. We encountered some of them fighting Boko Haram”, Buhari had said.

That has been the level of official narrative that obfuscated clear understanding of the characters behind the apparent invincibility of the killer herdsmen, the source of their sophisticated arms and ammunitions, their purpose and overall objective. But the communities at the receiving end have not been under any illusion as to their attackers and their motivation. Not with the displacement of the natives and renaming of apparently conquered and displaced communities.

Curiously, as this official prevarication and denial of the potent danger the insurgency of the herdsmen portends, Global Terrorism Watch had as far back as 2015 listed Fulani militants as the fourth most deadly terrorist group in the world coming after ISIS, Al-Qaida and Al Shabab.

Perhaps, the other group that has not been clearly decoded and understood is the so-called bandits. They made their debut into Nigeria’s insecurity matrix not long ago. At some point, they were taken for renegade Boko Haram insurgents or killer herdsmen.

But the characters behind the mask were seemingly unveiled when fiery Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi interfaced with them in Zamfara forests. In the discussions he had with them, they listed their grievances as cattle rustling, attacks by natives of Zamfara on the roads and attacks by the security agencies.

Gumi has been canvassing a lot of options from the federal government to rein them in. These range from the mundane to the very absurd. Of late, he went beyond amnesty advocacy to ask that they should be included in the budget by the federal government. He went very strange when a fortnight ago, he sought to rationalise mass abductions by bandits on the premise of being better than the killing of soldiers.

Ironically, this official duplicity has allowed the terrorism of the herdsmen and bandits to take root such that today Gumi is not only asking that bandits who share no visible dividing line with killer herdsmen, should not be attacked but included in the budget to share resources with other levels of the government. Yet nobody sees anything wrong with it even with the recent conviction of IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu for terrorism.

Nigerians must have heaved a sigh of relief when the federal government announced the designation as a terrorist organisation, any armed group that kidnaps children, attacks farmers, or host communities. It has also come to terms with the deployment of ambiguous nomenclatures to camouflage acts of terrorism by sundry criminals operating in the country.

For long, questions have been raised about the real identity of the bandits. Curiously, these questions are usually brushed aside because those who control the affairs of the country either share sympathy with, collaborate, or, are the real enablers of the cascading insecurity for one objective or the other.

It is good a thing President Tinubu has taken up the challenge to call the spade by its real name. Realistic stance on the chequered issues of our national being holds the future for the peace and progress of the country.

But the government must go beyond words and initiate immediate and measurable interventions to confront the scourge. The bandits’ enclaves and some of their leaders in the forests are known to the security agencies. They have of recent, engaged them in negotiations. And unless they have extracted commitments from them to dismantle their cells within an agreed timeframe, the government should take the war to their hide-outs and smoke them out. That is the message served by the Christmas day strike on terrorists in Sokoto by the United States of America (US)

Matching words with concrete action will convince the international community of our commitment to stem the spate of insecurity that has diminished the worth of life in our country.

December 29, 2025
Who is on talakawa’s side?

The state of the talakawa. That is the story we hardly tell in the whole theatre of banditry. Yet we know that it is the poor in the north who do everything. They are poor so the elite can preen. They wash their clothes, clean their cars, secure their homes, flatter their vanity in songs and dances, cook for them, fight for them. When it is over, they die for them. They are the lambs on the slab.

For those who know them, they are called the almajiris. They are innocent on the streets, pan in hand with beggary looks. When I was a youth Corps member in Wudil in Kano State, I had one as friend. He ran errands for me. Mosquitoes upended my joy and he was by me day and night like a son as I tried to shake off the pangs and shivers of malaria. I don’t remember his name now. But I know he needed some mentor or official policy to redeem him from the life of a happy mendicant.

I remember boys like him today, and I wonder what and who he is today. Is he in the throes of banditry? Oliver Twist or a redemptive tale like Pip in A Great expectation? Is he still in the precinct trying to live out his days under the mercies of a kitchen, or a dinner leftover, or working like another friend I had in Kano city known as Sunusi, who was a security person but who could read every word of the newspaper?

That was what we should contemplate as we await details of the sweet morsels of 16 tomahawks that rattled southern Sokoto. Some are trying to spin it in different ways. To some, it is America invading northern Nigeria. Some said it is the government of Tinubu, who allowed an imperialist to undercut our sovereign pride. Gumi, the irritant foul mouth, would rather have Turkey do it.

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What is left out is the little boy and little girl, their fathers and mothers in the underbelly of the north. The man who had been paying fines or taxes just to retrieve masara or shinkafa from his farm. The mother who cannot travel without fear to her daughter’s wedding or son in the hospital. The fellow who has lost all hope because the bandits have destroyed all lifelines and he has caved in to their logic of brigandage. He now survives supplying them food and medicine. Of the mother who now carts her daughters to their beastly arms as aquiline comforts.

They are the ones who live in the underbelly of Sokoto and Kebbi and Zamfara. They are the little fellows whose children lay in bunks and are ferried away by the goons of plunder. They are the ones who get slaughtered on the highways, on the farms, on the way to mosques. They are the defenceless citizens who seek mercy but get death.

They have no one to cry to and nowhere to scream, except to their boy wonders of Ak47 and in their lairs in the forest glades of hate. They are the folks we must think about this season. We must not look at the bullets that torch the goons, because they have no mercy in the fibres of their beings. We must not look at it with the eyes of partisan fights because the first people we must fight for are those who have no Ak47 or armoured cars or who do not have bank accounts in Abuja.

Hence, it was a pity when a section of the northern elite has kept quiet and tried to weaponize the misery of the folks for partisan benefits. But it is this section of the northern elite who have shown no pity for the commonfolk. They are not only politicians but a few clerics and even intellectuals and media. They think the fight to stop the hoodlums is about fighting against a region. We have heard about the tormented soul of Gumi and his cohorts and a few politicians including men like Nasir el Rufai and Prof Usman Yusuf, although the small fellow had said nothing at the time of writing. He had tried to turn ploughshares into swords, seeing a north and south duel when it should all be about lifting the real small fellows in the north. His successor is showing him how to do it.

Thank God not all of the northern big men think like Gumi and some top media fellows who see fire when there is light. The fellows who do live in the secluded luxury of feudal rampart. They are not affected by all the hoopla of bandit carnivores. Their children are not in those schools. none of the reports has indicated that even the Kebbi incident involved a big man’s daughter. No. Their children are either in a top school in an impenetrable enclosure in Abuja or in the London at Eaton, or in Switzerland or in Canada or in Dubai or the United States.

They do not need the hospitals. They go for checkups in the U.K. or Germany, when they are not splashing huge sums in choice clinics in Abuja or Lagos. They do not have to go to a bank in town. They have dollars at the ready, and they will spend at will. They have their homes in secure precincts, and their security guards are armed to the teeth. If you get past the security, the homes are fortes.

They do not need to go to the markets where bandits storm and loot and kill. Their kitchens sizzle with aromas inside a fortress of their homes, and all the choice dinners and lunches and breakfasts are chummy between their tongues and lips.

The poor pray in public mosques. The rich talk to God from beneath their roofs. They pray in peace, except when they fortify their ride to and from the place of worship.

They are immune from all the news of the slaughters and tears in the villages and towns in the north. Hence some, like Bashir Dalhatu, who was an Abacha crony and now the leader of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), can compare them to the Niger Delta militants. And they are saying we should coddle the goons.

It is sentiment like this that gave birth to Aminu Kano with his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) and he held sway in Kano and Kaduna, and some of the northern progressives today still see him as their ancestor. Alhaji Kano still personifies the tendency of talakawa empathy today as we can see in Kano and Kaduna where strong strands of people empathy still assert themselves.

It is a time like this that we know who is on the people’s side and those who are in the cocky circle, looking down on the majority with disdain and make merchandise of the talakawa and politics of their aches and pains. This is not the time to turn the people against their helpers as Shakespeare narrated in his play Coriolanus.

December 29, 2025
Last man sinking

Seyi Makinde is one of the politicians that has the look of the meek but acts with the stealth of a reptile, especially the green variety. The reptile can do nothing until its back is against the wall in the home, and then it tries to deliver its strike. The thing is, the reptile is not supposed to be in the house and so its anger should belong to the landlord.

That is the problem with the Oyo State governor. He is now in a corner and all he can do now is try to strike. But Makinde first showed a lack of creative flair. He wanted to fight Nyesom Wike and yet he borrowed his style. He gathered journalists in Ibadan, and the sitting arrangement is also like Wike. His is like what in literary tradition is described as the anxiety of influence in which you imitate the person as though they are imitating you. You have to perfect it or else they will call you a copycat and it will mean you are trying to flatter your model. In this case, Wike may not be impressed.

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Then he turned it into an ego booster for himself. He told us how good a business man he is and how he can be president. He lies to himself in public about the tranquility in PDP. Everyone has fled, even his fellow governors. There was a pity of a picture online where he was sitting at a one-man southern PDP summit. He probably did not get the memo. Or he got it, but lost his memory. He is suffering because of his insistent illusion. As Roman sage Seneca wrote, People “suffer more in the imagination than in reality.”

He wants to imitate President Bola Tinubu, who is known as the last man standing. Makinde is like a passenger in a ship that caught fire in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Youth. A fire was already gutting the ship. The first to know were the rats that were leaping out of the vessel. By the time many on board like Makinde knew, the ship in its magnificence had been lapped up by flames. That is Makinde. He is the last man sinking. He just does not know. First, he needs to answer Fayose’s poser about another fire under his watch and a certain saga of N50 billion.

December 29, 2025
Sani and United States’ visa restrictions

Fiery lawmaker, Shehu Sani wants Nigerians to stay at home and develop their country as a way out of the sweeping visa restrictions imposed by the United States of America (USA). But is that really possible given extant realities?

The White House had in a proclamation published in its website barred 24 countries including Nigeria from entering the US as immigrant or on several non-immigrant visa categories, including-B-1(business), B-2 tourism, B-1/B2 (business and tourism), F (academic studies), M (vocational studies) and J (exchange programmes).

Before the latest far-reaching restrictions, there was an earlier partial one by the same government which was interpreted to apply to those engaged in religious persecution. But the latest one affects all categories of Nigerian visa seekers as can be seen from the listing.

The US government cited security concerns, difficulties in vetting applicants and high rate of visa overstay by Nigerians as reasons. That was not all. They also referenced the activities of radical Islamist groups such as Boko Haram and ISWAP.

Details listed in the overstay report showed that Nigeria recorded 5.56 per cent in B1/B2 visa and 11.9 per cent on F, M and J visa.

A further breakdown of the countries involved in the suspension indicated that of the 24, Africa accounted for 17, Asia had three countries, the Caribbean/Oceania had three while the Middle East had one.

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The disproportionate number of African countries affected by the restrictions must have led Sani to the conclusion that the way out is for citizens of these countries to stay at home, solve their problems and develop their countries. Its corollary is that the humiliating treatment they get is on account of the inability of their leaders to develop their economies. That goes without saying.

It is doubtful whether Sani’s prescriptions can happen in the short run given that the world has become a global village with a greater level of interdependence among nations. Ironically, that global village is marked by glaring inequalities that are often to the disadvantage of the developing countries. That is why the US can wake up one day and bar countries from entry into its shores. But third world countries can ill-afford to initiate the same measures due to the fragility of their economies.

When Sani said the message of the restrictions is that third world countries are not welcomed with an advice for them to develop their countries, he had proper reading of the restrictions.

His position strikes at the heart of the glaring disparities between the developed countries and the less developed ones that compel citizens of the latter to seek better life in the former. But it is more of an indictment on third world leaders whose citizens flock advanced nations for the good things of life despite their huge natural potentials to transform their economies for the better.

The rate at which citizens of third world countries flee to the advanced ones in search of better living standards has become a huge embarrassment. The media space is replete with Nigerians of all hue, seeking both legal and illegal means to leave the country because of the suffocating economic conditions.

In Nigeria today, a family with people overseas irrespective of whether they left with any skill at all is considered a success. Not surprisingly, they return after some years to begin projects they could not have imagined before they left. This tends to spur others to seek avenues both lawful and the illegal to emigrate the country.

But these unguarded migrations raise questions as to what has become of our natural endowments and why they cannot be properly harnessed for the greatest good of the greatest number of our citizens?

When the US or any other country records a high rate of overstayed visas from national of third world countries, they cannot be blamed for taking steps to reverse the trend and protect their economies.

Unfortunately, this thinking has led to the weaponisation of visas to deal with the less developed countries. Why not when their leaders are more engrossed with primitive accumulation of capital? The message from the US restrictions is clear: if you don’t like what we have done, stay in your country and develop it.

But the restrictions have wider repercussions for the Nigerian economy and its people. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous Black Country with visible presence in all spheres of the US economy. Given the level of cooperation that has been existing between both countries, our citizens in all fields of the US economy; those seeking new visas and renewals will face stricter vetting, delays and even more denials. Their ripple effects are better imagined

They will not only constrict opportunities for studies and exchange programmes, but go with the additional burden of criminal suspicion. It is not just good for the image of the country. The US or any other country is within its right to determine the kind of people it admits into its shores. But it must not be done as humiliation.

Africa is hugely endowed by Mother Nature. But it has been constrained from utilising these natural and human capitals for the transformation of its people from hewers of wood and fetchers of water to modern living conditions. Virtually all social infrastructures have remained decrepit as leaders revel in sending their children overseas for studies even as medical tourism has become the fad for those controlling the affairs of the government.

The US cited the activities of Boko Haram and ISWAP and visa overstays for their restrictions on Nigeria. That should not be surprising. Of recent, the country has been on the US radar for religious extremism. It’s designation as Country of Particular concern (CPC) with threat of military action, and, the recent visit of a fact-finding team are evidence of increasing US focus on the country.

It should not be surprising that the restrictions mark the first steps in the chain of actions lined up for this country. But the US said the restrictions can be reversed if the reasons given for them are visibly addressed by the affected countries. That is a window for the Nigerian leadership. Even if it is possible to tame Islamist extremism, the factors that incubate visa overstays will continue to persist for quite some time.

They are largely developmental; the inability of the government to create living jobs for the unemployed, non-functional infrastructure and politics of self, one’s family and the ethnic group. Nigeria must rise beyond these predilections to save its citizens the disgrace and humiliation they suffer in foreign lands.

For now, our citizens will have to contend with the fallouts of the sweeping restrictions. Maybe, the situation will sufficiently challenge our leaders to address the debilitating cycle of underdevelopment that compels our citizens to flee to advanced nations and overstay their welcome. Then, the US or any other country will have little cause to tell Nigerians they are no longer wanted in their country. How soon that will happen?

December 22, 2025
Who poisoned Buhari?

The enigma that was Muhammadu Buhari sprung up again for reckoning. In his new book: From Soldier to Statesman, Dr. Charles Omole intrudes on our understanding of the man. He thereby has nudged the tall, angular figure with an ascetic carriage and rare, beguiling smiles from the solemnity of his grave.

From the grave? Great men do not rest in peace when they leave. They are summoned now and again for eulogies and more elegies. They return for a moment, a seminar, or a political event, a comparison, an inspiration, to rebury them, or to historicize them into heroes or villains. We distort their words, reappraise their deeds, send them to Golgotha and back. We cast them in our image by reimagining the past itself as though it is now.

Men like Caesar, Solon, Napoleon, Mandela, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Awo, Sankara, Lumumba rise out of their epitaphs to be redressed or perfumed. Also, Hitler, Pol Pot, Franco, Mobutu, Idi Amin, and the sawdust Caesar also known as Mussolini help illuminate us even when they pollute. So, Shakespeare may have overplayed the ritual of death when he wrote in Hamlet, “Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

No rest for Buhari this season. We have Buhari today back to the forge or forgery of a censorious nation. Omole’s book reminds us as Ralph Waldo Emerson does in his line that “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.”

Maybe Buhari was great. Maybe not. But two principal things strike one in that book, even as excerpts steal out to the public eye. First is the lament of his wife and former First Lady Aisha Buhari. And it relates to the man’s illness on the throne.

Aisha said it all began when the former president abandoned his medical regimen because some of his folks insinuated that she wanted to poison him. A great charge that none of them have denied or even have tried to undermine. She said the regimen kept him in good health. But once he leaned to the so-called cabal, he abandoned the regimen, and his health began to fail him.

Because of that he was out of the country for over 150 days. We recall that time as precarious for governance. Osinbajo took over and made a ‘royal’ misstep and fell into the doghouse of the power game. There were those who stoked underground intrigues and eyed a new berth as president for themselves. A certain small man from a power state up north and a certain mouthy man from the south-south were dreaming a tie-up as possible president and vice president. They are together again in a coalition in the same furtive game of futility.

Meanwhile, stories of death or near so were exaggerating Buhari’s health. Not many of the intriguers were happy he returned to the éclat and applause of his adoring followers. But what bothers one is how a few advisers could destroy a throne because of their greed for influence and filthy lucre.

They turned husband against wife because they wanted to turn a profit. They did. They twisted democracy in their own favour. They were political families and blood families against the greatest bond between two people: man and wife. They stabbed the first unit of the first unit of society in the country. Sociologists say the family is the first unit, and the president’s family is the first of the first units. One of cohorts, a fuddy-duddy, took over and felt entitled to hold court in Aso Rock as though elected. Another one, Abba Kyari even made himself NNPC board member and said with familiar impunity that it was Buhari who put him there to represent him. The chief of staff told the lie to Buhari, even when the president did not say so. He was the man trying to play double. He was a metaphorical Jibrin. The fuddy-duddy a family man; Kyari a political associate. Both led him to near death because they broke a family.

Aisha was no goddess in Aso Rock. Neither did anyone expect her to be. But she was his wife. Before her, Yar-Adua had Turai as first lady who served as the garrison of the president’s heart. No cabal could push her down. She was the cabal, if there was one. In fact, a prominent woman today once asked in those days what Yar-Adua did to his wife that Turai would not forgive him but allow him to undergo public ridicule and trial? In other words, the man was dying, so why not let him go in peace rather than egg on the tempest of stories about his good health and return to power?

Aisha irked the Cabal for trying to be the husband’s garrison. They took her down. She complained about Buhari’s lack of gratitude to those who helped him to the office after three tries. She was referring to now President Bola Tinubu and many a foot soldier. But the man who mocked the other room would not listen. She also said her husband was listening to the wrong voices. She was challenging wickedness in high places and principalities in the vault of power.

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She lacked Turai’s or Maryam Babangida’s influence with the man. She also did not have the wiles of the wives of ancient Greece and Rome, who turned themselves into matadors. It was because the man did not love his wife enough. He almost died because he abandoned his great asset. He had to return to her in a way because she resumed, in her confession, by slipping new medicines into his porridges. The man revived but time had been killed. “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity,” noted Thoreau.

Losing over six months, of course, injured his legacy. How did that time affect his ability to operate with physical and mental confidence? How did that affect how he handled power, or ethics, or education or the other high imperatives of office? We shall never know.

So, if someone tried to poison Buhari, it was not the woman who revived her. In fact, we might say, the cabal poisoned him. They took him off work, derailed his focus and undermined his legacy. In the end, you will not blame the cabal but the man who made them his trust.

The other point in the book was Dr. Yemi Osinbajo’s ambition. It is clear that he might have betrayed his naiveté. His team said he met Buhari about his ambition. To say he supported him showed the novice the former vice president was. If the man encouraged him to run, it did not mean he supported him. If he approved, it was not the same thing as endorse. Godfathers don’t ask anyone not to run. In fact, the father often is the initiator of the project. He clasps to his chest his favorite, and it was not President Tinubu. Tinubu was not naïve to rely on Buhari. Hence his Abeokuta rhetorical uppercut. If Osinbajo was wise, he was not street smart, nor politically savvy. He went to battle with a hole in his armour. The don was undone.

He should have known that Buhari was propping up Lawal. If he did not know, he was not a politician. His associates, especially a professor, was gung-ho about Buhari’s support. The Katsina patriarch was cracking the nuts for the former senate president and Osinbajo thought himself the darling of the gods.

He was entitled to his own failure as other hopefuls in the APC top perch who were hoodwinked and suborned into delusions of grandeur. The cabal filled its pouch. In that regard, though, Omole reveals nothing new.

Omole’s book also shows that Buhari, for all the hero worship, was made of flesh and blood. And as Sophocles notes in his play Ajax, “He was just a man before this, wasn’t he?”

December 22, 2025
Fashola goes to court

It was a brief moment on social media. Former Lagos State governor and minister as Trojan under Buhari, Babatunde Raji Fashola, appears in court. We do not know the case or the status of the client. It was just a sentence as the tall attorney rises to introduce himself. Here we have it. Fashola goes to court.

It is interesting because the man has shown that real men can have a life outside politics. Political career is a good thing, and everyone with a social conscience should aspire to it. But it ought not be the be-all and end-all of a career. He has been in politics since he became chief of staff to the now president but the then governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. He became governor for eight years and minister for another eight approximately. He spent a huge chunk of his life in the arena.

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He is a lawyer and good one at that, hence he is a SAN. Others should learn from him. One, having served in office, they can bring their acumen back to enrich the civil society. Two, many of them have acquired resources and ideas about a better society, and they mobilise them for good in charities for education, healthcare, environment, etc. such engagements can occupy them for a lifetime. Jimmy Carter is known for his work after he was president than his White House exploits. It is a pity that many of them think a reward for political office is another political office. Three, they should allow others a chance to try their talent as well. There is a certain selfishness that makes some of them angry when they are not called back for the meaty prize. They ignore their past privileges, the constipation of opportunities they have had, and they should bow for others.

Aristotle noted that to enter politics one must have first done well in a profession. These days, persons leave school to become politicians.

December 22, 2025