The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

Why 2026 is more consequential politically than 2027

Nigeria’s most popular seers and clerics have, somehow, missed out on some of the most dramatic developments we’ve seen in the polity for ages.

Who would have predicted that Kano State Governor, Abba Yusuf, who seemed quite content with being resident in the pocket of his godfather, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, would do the unthinkable – ditch his New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)?

What’s unfolding in this Northern state is a big deal. To prevail in Nigeria’s presidential politics, winners must take at least two of, if not all three of the nation’s largest vote baskets – Lagos, Kano and Rivers States.

It is not for nothing that President Bola Tinubu has cultivated a pre and post-election strategic alliance with current Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, who has demonstrated repeatedly that he holds Rivers firmly in his grasp.

It is for those same reasons that the president assiduously courted his long-time political associate Kwankwaso for backing ahead of the 2027 battle. As it turned out the deal fell through because the one-time Kano governor asked for too much.

In the heat of the Yusuf defection saga, Kwankwaso stated he was open to abandoning his NNPP for any other party that was willing to offer him the presidential or vice presidential tickets. Those conditions would have required Tinubu to drop his deputy, Kashim Shettima.

This would have been a tricky political manoeuvre fraught with many risks. At best, Kwankwaso could deliver Kano, but it remains doubtful if it would be by the margins witnessed in 2015 when APC received 1,903,999 votes to PDP’s middling 215,779 votes.

Whatever benefits the former Kano governor would have brought on board, it’s a move that would have damaged Tinubu in the Northeast as he would be perceived as having used and dumped a man who has been loyal to him beyond the call of the duty. There certainly was no need to start that fire.

In any event, the APC in Kano has been chipping away progressively at the NNPP’s support base in the last three years. Over the last six months it was becoming evident that the party at the centre in Abuja stood a very good chance of winning the state.

There’s no question that those dynamics, particularly as they concerned Governor Yusuf’s second term prospects, played a big role in pushing him to cross the carpet. Still, not too many would have dared predict he would leave his erstwhile benefactor who also happens to be his father-in-law in the lurch.

In Rivers, the truce brokered between Wike and his successor, Siminalayi Fubara, quickly unravelled with the governor apparently unwilling to follow through on some of the components of the deal that resulted in the lifting of the state of emergency. Again, not too many expected this given his dovish utterances on returning to office in September.

But words are one thing, actions a different story all together. It is significant that months after his return Fubara has not constituted a full cabinet. Strategic offices remain unoccupied while a supplementary budget that was supposed to be presented for House of Assembly scrutiny never saw the light day.

All these were clear signs of disagreement behind the scenes that would be confirmed by the warlike utterances by House of Assembly Speaker, Martins Amaewhule, when asked to comment on claims by the governor about what he had done to reach out to the legislators. His assertion that Fubara ‘lied’ was evidence that the old conflict had been reignited.

It’s not even one week into 2026 and the war of words between the Rivers camps has grabbed national attention once again. It promises to stay that way for much of the year whether Fubara gets the APC ticket or not.

In Nigerian politics, elections are dramatic, but the year before them is decisive. That is when power is negotiated, alliances are reconfigured, and outcomes are quietly shaped long before voters are invited to confirm what has been settled behind the scenes.

By that standard, 2026 is set to be one of the most turbulent and consequential years in Nigeria’s recent political history.

Pre-election years follow a familiar script, but they are never routine. What makes this year especially intriguing is the state of the main opposition PDP. It is paralysed by legal challenges which look like they won’t be resolved in time for the party to play any significant role in next year’s polls.

That’s partly the reason its most savvy governors quickly emptied into the ruling APC. Before matters came to a head, elements of the opposition had giddily suggested a coming together of all their forces in a coalition to unseat the incumbent. This would be a reminiscence of what then opposition accomplished when they fused together and ousted the Goodluck Jonathan administration.

Unfortunately, the would-be coalitionists quickly discovered that they didn’t have a lock on the franchise. Rather than attract the hordes they expected from a government that was supposedly on the ropes, the opposite has happened. Today, the ruling party is on the cusp of numbering 30 governors within its ranks – just two shy of the 32 recorded by PDP at the height of its powers.

This one-way traffic has raised the spectre of a one-party system. Opposition parties allege the incumbent is coercing their governors to join APC. Whether these new relationships are gunshot marriages or simply born out of convenience and interests remains to be seen.

Available evidence doesn’t, however, support the coercion theory. More than anything, ambitious people who perceive that the legal troubles of their party could deny them a credible platform for re-election have simply opted for the next best thing.

For the opposition, its moment of truth has come early. It is received wisdom that the best chance they have at any point in time is when they pool their resources. APC confirmed that in 2015. Atiku and company have been singing that same chorus to screeching point. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be an unstoppable coalition is fast turning into an uninspiring damp squib.

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) rather being a coming together of different political structures like APC circa 2013/2014, is just one platform to which everyone with an axe to grind with Tinubu is gravitating. Unfortunately, many of the entrants aren’t bringing much to the table.

Perhaps, more than his colleagues, Obi who joined last week arrived with a couple of senators and House of Representatives members. Significantly, the only Labour Party (LP) governor, Alex Ott of Abia State pointedly refused to move.

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Now, there’s talk of Kwankwaso holding talks with ADC or even partnering with Obi to battle Atiku for the party’s ticket. But the former Kano governor isn’t the political prize he once was. His godson, Abba Yusuf, has virtually stripped him of the NNPP structure. All the 44 local government chairmen are loyal to the governor as are the majority of state assembly and House of Representatives members.

Politicians are not dumb. They flock towards the party they sense has momentum. There’s certainly a reason why they are not beating the bush path to ADC’s door.

Nigerian opposition politics has often thrived on grievance without offering coherence. So far, what they have offered is invective, not alternatives. In 2026, that weakness will be exposed. Public discontent alone will not suffice. Without a credible national message, the parties risk drifting into 2027 reactive and without energy.

Economic conditions will add volatility to the political atmosphere. While elections are rarely decided by macroeconomic indicators, hardship sharpens political instincts. Luckily for the incumbent government, inflation is trending downwards. If this pattern continues the gap between official optimism and popular experience would shrink further. That’s not good news for the opposition.

Security will be another defining fault line. Persistent insecurity will not only shape public mood but also electoral logistics. In some parts of the country, the question will not be which party is favoured, but whether elections can be credibly conducted at all. This scenario played out in parts of the Northeast in 2015.

Equally important will be the strain placed on institutions. Pre-election Nigeria has a habit of weaponising misinformation, inflaming identity and testing the limits of institutional independence. Electoral bodies, the judiciary and security agencies will come under sustained pressure well before ballots are printed. The tone set in 2026 will either strengthen confidence in these institutions or further erode it.

The significance of 2026 lies in the simple truth that elections are won long before election day. The bargains struck, institutions stressed or stabilised, and norms upheld or violated this year will shape the outcome and credibility of the 2027 polls.

January 7, 2026
The truth about Tinubu’s economic reforms

In an article on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s boldness in embarking on major economic reforms early in his administration, Bamidele Ademola-Olateju invoked Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Road Not Taken to show that neither previous Nigerian Presidents nor his major competitors for the presidency in 2023 had the audacity to choose the path Tinubu chose to follow (see Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, Follow Who Know Road, The Nation, October 15, 2025).

Tinubu’s chosen path (encoded in his manifesto, Renewed Hope 2023) entails four bold reforms, among others: (1) removal of fuel subsidy; (2) harmonisation of the foreign exchange market; (3) tax reform; and (4) infrastructural development. Although these reforms have interconnected effects on the economy, I will discuss them separately.

But, first, let’s briefly look at the macro-economic effects of President Tinubu’s reforms, that is, the large-scale or general economic factors, such as subsidy, interest rates, taxation, and infrastructure as they affect fiscal policy, inflation, price stability, employment levels, and so on. When the effects of President Tinubu’s reforms are assessed from the perspective of macroeconomic factors, the result is a positive outlook.

A quick demonstration is the Nigerian Stock Exchange Market, which, for the first time, exceeded the N100 trillion mark this week. Similarly, Nigeria’s Eurobond issuance was massively oversubscribed. The $2.3 billion target was met four time over! These examples demonstrate international confidence in President Tinubu’s reform agenda. Furthermore, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, headline inflation, which climbed to 34.19 percent in 2024, has been cut into less than half at 14.5 percent in 2025. It is no wonder then that domestic and international economists as well as global financial institutions have endorsed and praised President Tinubu’s economic reforms.

However, as far as ordinary folks are concerned, the reforms are only successful if they translate to pocket issues for them. The effects on day-to-day market decisions of individuals are the microeconomic effects of the reforms. The following review is just for demonstration purposes only. It is by no means exhaustive (for more detailed reviews, see Sunday Dare’s Tinubu’s policies yielding positive impact, The Nation, September 21, 2025; and Nigeria: Close of year accounting-sequencing from reform to relief, The Nation, December 30, 2025).

Removal of fuel subsidy

Undoubtedly, initial hardships followed the removal of fuel subsidy, leading the price of petrol to climb as high as N1,250 per litre. The result was an immediate hike in transport costs, which affected the cost of goods and services. Today, the litre price has fallen below N800, thanks in part to Dangote Refinery, which exposed the shenanigans of NNPCL and its subsidiaries. True, transport unions have hardly reduced transport costs for passengers in line with the reduction in fuel prices, but drastic reductions should set in soon, especially as the holiday season is rapping up. Otherwise, passengers should begin to call commercial drivers to order.

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However, even more importantly, the removal of fuel subsidy has released more money to be shared by federal, state, and local governments. Today, states are getting more than double their allocations when fuel subsidy was being paid. Heavens might not have fallen over subsidy removal, but it is well known that beneficiaries of the scam (some of whom were not even in the oil business at all) have been fighting back one way or another.

Equally significant is the fact that this last December and the entire holiday season is the first in decades, when there were no queues at fuel stations or buying fuel at exorbitant prices from off-pump profiteers selling from jerrycans.

Harmonisation of the exchange rate

The immediate effects of the harmonisation of the exchange rate were similar to the removal of fuel subsidy. The former affected imported goods, while the latter affected the local markets directly. However, both converged to hike prices of consumer goods and services. The former in particular led to the devaluation of the Naira.

Fortunately, however, both also started stabilising about the same time. Today, both have witnessed a major downward trend: litre price of fuel from N1,250 to about N750 per litre, while the exchange rate has stabilised at about N1,450/1 dollar from a high of about 1,800/1 dollar. The stabilisation has been aided by rising external reserve, which has been beefed up from a mere $3 billion, when Tinubu assumed office, to about $45 billion today.

The cumulative effects of both reforms have eased headline inflation as indicated above as well as food inflation. The result is a downward trend in the prices of transport, food, and household goods. This is evident in super- and local markets and retail outlets nationwide. For example, in local markets in Akure, Ondo state, gari has come down from a high of N25,000 to N12,000 per igbeleri; rice from N90-95,000 to N60-6500 per bag; and vegetable oil from about N95,000 to N65,000 per garawa.

Tax reform

The restructuring of the tax system started gradually in 2023 and the implementation of the new tax policy began piecemeal in June 2025. Nevertheless, tax collection improved significantly even before the new tax policy went into effect. In 2025, the economy expanded by nearly 4 percent due to robust growth in non-oil sectors, including tax collection, agriculture, manufacturing, and trade.

For the first time in Nigerian history, a new tax law was enacted, which consolidated over 70 fragmented taxes into a unified, digitised system. Moreover, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) is no more. It was rebranded into Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), capable of collecting tax on both domestic and foreign earnings. It is expected that this reform will lead to the collection of more taxes from various sources and boost national development.

Infrastructural development

President Tinubu has focused on two major types of infrastructure, namely, roads and power generation. He has completed many road projects inherited from the President Muhammadu Buhari administration (2015-2023), such as the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the East-West Road, and as many as 135 road projects across Northern Nigeria, according to the Minister of Transport, Sai’du Alkali. In addition, work has been going on steadily on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway and the Sokoto-Badagry Super Highway.

True, only a few citizens may ply these roads, but many citizens are enjoying record power generation, the Presidential Metering Initiative, and the payment of legacy power-sector debt. For the first time in two years, a popular Akure welder, who closed shop two years ago for lack of power supply, is back at work. Recently, too, my household experienced 24-hour power supply a few times and an average of about 20-hour daily supply overall. As a result, our power generator has been dormant for months.

Political opponents and saboteurs

They are at work already, causing confusion and misleading the public about the dividends of these reforms. If they are not focusing on the initial hardships at the beginning of the reforms, they are busy distorting the new tax policy. I won’t be surprised if they ask voters during the campaigns to compare fuel price and exchange rate today with the rates in 2022 or even 2012. They won’t tell voters that if we had continued on the economic trajectory inherited by President Tinubu, the Nigerian economy would have been in a deep ditch by now.

January 7, 2026
Trump’s gunboat diplomacy – 2

In early February 2025, this writer wrote a piece titled: Trump’s gunboat diplomacy which raised concerns about Trump’s determination to use brute force to promote his America first policies. I wrote: “Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States of America has mastered the act of intimidating his opponents, and so far, it appears to be working for him. Americans, non-Americans, foreign leaders, local and foreign corporations, indeed the entire world is apprehensive of what Trump might do with the enormous powers he possesses. Trump, who has vowed to make America great again, totally abjures soft power, and unabashedly is determined to use intimidation and brute force to assert his country’s supremacy and exceptionalism”.

I also wrote: “History will record his era, as the return of gunboat diplomacy, in foreign relations.” Last weekend, Trump raised the bar of his gunboat diplomacy. He ordered the USA military forces in collaboration with the intelligence agencies to invade Venezuela, abduct President Nicolas Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores, and forcefully transported them to New York, were they are now facing trial for alleged narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. In that same article, this writer expressed concern when Trump showed willingness to deal with Maduro, despite the flawed election which got him re-elected to power last year.

To the shock of the international community, Trump’s army went into Venezuela and according to some international media reports, within 30 minutes abducted President Maduro and his wife, and flew them out of the country. Clearly, while Maduro, according to international observers, did not win the 2024 election, there is no legal basis in international law, for the unilateral action President Trump took last weekend. It was simply a case of ‘might is right’. To show that he has no pretences, Trump threatened vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, who has been sworn in as acting president of Venezuela, that unless she moves in a certain acceptable direction, she would suffer worse fate than Maduro.

The acting president in her first speech had decried the abduction of president Maduro and demanded a proof of life of Maduro from America. Sitting in front of the country’s heads of security agencies, she talked tough against Trump and his invasion. She said: “What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law. History and justice will make the extremists who promoted this armed aggression pay.” She asserted: “There is only one president in Venezuela and his name is Nicolas Maduro.”

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But after Trump threatened her with a fate worse than Maduro, she appeared conciliatory in her social media commentary. She wrote about a “cooperative agenda” even as she had asserted that the oil resource of Venezuela was the reason for the invasion of her country by America. President Trump and his supporters, including Vice President JD Vance, didn’t make any pretence about the intention to grab the Venezuelan oil resources, albeit they try to justify it. They claim that they intend to get back what was taken from American companies some 20 years ago.

But in an article in the Caracas Chronicle, Marcus Golding, argued that the 1976 takeover or nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry was never a theft, as the foreign oil companies, were duly compensated. The article, titled: The theft that never was: inside Venezuela’s 1976 Oil takeover, chronicles how the nationalization process ran. Of course, for Trump and his associates, those arguments do not hold water, as they have shown determination to run Venezuela as a surrogate country. This position is reflected in the argument by Stephen Miller, a White House Adviser.

For Miller, the expropriated American oil industry assets are now used to fund terrorism and drug trafficking. The deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security wrote that the Venezuelan expropriation represents the “largest recorded theft of American wealth and property”. He further said: “These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.” No doubt, that mind-set reflects what the majority of Trump’s team believe, and they use such argument to justify the invasion of Venezuela and the forceful seizure and transport of the former president to face trial in New York.

While President Maduro was a dictator, who made mockery of democracy in his country, the question will linger whether that record can justify the action President Trump of America took last weekend? Even more worrisome, is what impact the unilateral military action would have on the rest of the world order? Trump’s re-envisioning of the world order, will reverberate well in Russia and China, which have similar tendencies within its area of geopolitical influence. Indeed, it would encourage Russia, seeking to regain as much of its Soviet era influences in the region, as is possible.

Ordinarily, last weekend’s action by Trump should deprive America of any moral authority to mediate fairly, the Russia-Ukraine war, which is centred around similar geopolitical assertion of ‘might is right’. Indeed, Ukraine should henceforth understand why Trump is urging them to give up territory, in order to find peace with Russia. When Trump keeps saying that if he was president five years ago, the war would never had started, he may actually mean that he would never have given Ukraine the impetus to wish to join NATO, or assert itself in a way, to anger dictator, Vladimir Putin, to attack the country.

As many have argued, China too would see the action in Venezuela as more justification to wish to annex Taiwan which it claims is part of its territory, since 1945. The huge military arsenal China is building may eventually be put to test to assert its control of Taiwan. Again, USA which by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) has the “mandate to make available to Taiwan such defence articles and defence services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defence capability” may no longer have the moral right to obey the provision of the act, should China seek to test its military might against Taiwan.

Even far flung countries like Nigeria, must worry at the rise and display of hegemonic power by Trump. The bombing of the bandits and terrorists in Sokoto, shows the long arm of Trump’s gunboat diplomacy. Pete Hegseth, America’s defence secretary, or secretary of war, asserted this rising gunboat diplomacy, when he said on Venezuela: “It means we set the terms. President Trump sets the terms”. He furthered: “It means the drugs stop flowing, it means the oil that was taken from us is returned, ultimately, and that criminals are not sent to the United States.”

As I wish my readers, a prosperous 2026, I urge our political leaders not to give Trump any reason, to play his war games, in out dear country.

January 6, 2026
PDP’s immoral war against tax reforms

The new tax law from onset was controversial. Early opposition came from northern political leaders and governors who had thought the north would be short-changed by the new tax laws. Of course, that was not unexpected in a multi-ethnic nation where ethnic nationalities are always in competition. At a point, the National Economic Council advised the president who is never afraid of taking risks, to withdraw the Bills from the lawmakers to allow for wider consultation. He refused, urging those who had misgivings to wait for lawmakers’ public hearing. He was not prepared to give his political enemies an opportunity to sabotage his tax reforms initiative.

While an observation by Abdulsamad Dasuki of the House of Representatives that the versions of the tax laws gazetted and made public contained provisions never debated or approved by lawmakers has only energized the president many enemies, he was not going to allow them to throw away the baby with the birth water.

He clearly understands if his political foes including Atiku Abubkar and Peter Obi, who out of greed splintered their party into three during the 2023 election, Kabiru Turaki PDP factional leader who unable to resolve his party’s intra party crisis, sought help from Donald Trump, the nemesis of democracy in America, the Nigerian Bar Association where some of its ignoble members have continued to play opposition politics in the name of the association, and the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) that would rather blame Tinubu’s two years administration for insecurity arising from the eight million out of school children and the ‘almajiris’, they bred over the years, don’t agree on anything, they are united by their opposition to his presidency.

The opposition to the tax law was therefore just another attempt at sabotaging his policies. That was why the strategy for opportunistic Peter Obi, who now says “Nigeria must rethink taxation if it is serious about economic growth, national unity and are prosperity”. And he was probably not expecting anything different from Peter Obi who is now counselling Nigerians saying “You cannot tax your way out of poverty, you must produce your way out of it” after being an importer of the labour of other societies since he left school, the reason Tinubu describes him as ‘container economist.

President Tinubu, had while signing his four tax reforms bills which include the Nigeria Tax Act, the Nigeria Tax Administration Act, the Nigeria Revenue Service Act, and the Joint Revenue Board Act, into law on June 26, 2025 told Nigerians that they were meant to “overhaul the Nigerian tax landscape to drive economic growth, increase revenue generation, improve the business environment, and enhance effective tax administration across the different levels of government”. Some of the laws took effect from the day it was signed while the remaining was programmed to become operational on January 1. This date, the president insisted, remained sacrosanct because according to him: “Absolute trust is built over time through making the right decisions, not through premature, reactive measures”.

But despite support by professionals and institutions including the Nigeria Employers’ Consultative Association (NECA) and declaration by the chairman of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, Taiwo Oyedele, that it was too late in the day to stop the law because two of the four tax laws were already operational, opposition leader continued to mobilise against the take-off date.

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But for President Tinubu who describes the new tax laws as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a fair, competitive and robust fiscal foundation for Nigeria”, relief came for the president with the dismissal of a suit filed by ‘the Incorporated Trustee of African Initiative for abuse of Public Trust’ calling for interim injunction to stop the laws’ take-off, by Justice Bello Kawu for lack of merit. The court had ruled that “once a law has been duly enacted and gazetted, disagreement or objections cannot, on their own, justify stopping its implementation; any alleged errors must be addressed through legislative amendment or a substantive court”.

It is not as if the forces against the take-off date were unaware of the above provision; it is about the culture of ‘if we cannot have it, no one else must have it. The tragedy of our nation is that those who pillaged and plundered our land ‘materially and morally’, shared our common patrimony through fraudulent privatization and monetization policies, and those who introduced ‘political sharia ’after sending our kids to Osama Bin Laden in Sudan for indoctrination, unleashed Niger Delta militants and Boko Haram on Nigerians are today posing as our new messiahs. Unfortunately, our youths below 30, their targets are not aware of their baleful legacies.

For instance, there can be no democracy without credible election. It is through it people participate in decision making in society. However, PDP that presided over the conduct of the most scandalous election in 2003 and 2007 became the greatest threat to democracy. Today, PDP and Labour Party sore losers, who have refused to congratulate a winner of an election after two years even as they run from one platform to the other at every election season in search of platform, cannot be said to be assets to democracy. With the exit of Obasanjo, the apostle or promoter of do or die election, Tony Anenih, PDP “Mr. Fixer” and Maurice Iwu, most Nigerians will admit an improvement in the quality of our elections since 2015. Unfortunately, those who only yesterday mounted an assault on the democratization process now want Nigerians to believe that President Tinubu, who remained faithful to his ideological orientation since 1999, built up a coalition that ended PDP 60 year’s dream of uninterrupted reign, has suddenly become a threat to democracy.

Our youths who are below 30 years of age must be reminded that it was not only democracy that came under serious threat under PDP 16 years reign; the economy came under serious assault. A House of Representatives’ probe report of PDP subsidy regime in 2011 showed that N1.7t trillion was stolen through mindless importation by PDP leading lights while their siblings without importing a pint of fuel also stole several billions. VP Atiku Abubakar presided over the privatization fraud that led to Nigeria selling assets worth $100b for a paltry $1.5b. Obasanjo and his PDP children spent between $8-13billion on the energy sector which only produced darkness while Jonathan spent some more billions before selling the unbundled PHCN to prominent PDP leaders.

About 40,000 barrels of crude oil was, according to Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, stolen daily. It is on record that she along with Chukwuma Soludo, Obasanjo’s CBN governor, predicted that anyone that inherited power from Jonathan will inherit an economy in ruins. Buhari might have contributed to Nigeria’s economic nightmare, the architect of poverty are today trying to exploit current hardship of Nigerians arising from government hard economic choices designed to change the narrative.

The judiciary has also come under serious assault of PDP and its media since the 2023 election which they lost ‘round and square’. But if one may ask, how did the judiciary fare under PDP 16 years reign? Joseph Jibueze in his “Legacies of the Judiciary between 1999 and 2014- How sabotage, blackmail, undue delays are killing the judiciary” provided some details on the legacies of the judiciary during the reign of PDP.

The resourceful judicial reporter cited the case of Ayo Fayose’s allegation of financial misappropriation that dragged on for eight years before winning a controversial election in 2014 even while facing eligibility case in court. Fayose was to later invade the court trying his case with thugs. According to Justice Daramola, Chief Judge of Ekiti State: “The thugs invaded my court, tore the record books, beat the court officials, descended on Hon. Justice J. Adeyeye, the presiding judge in court 3, beat and dragged him the ground”. After inauguration, Fayose chased out 19 elected members of opposition and ruled with seven PDP members. There was the Halliburton case where “American company officials involved in bribing Nigerian officials were jailed after conviction while their collaborators who received bribe in Nigeria walked away free.

He also cited the case of James Ibori, accused of stealing US$250m from public purse. He was on April 17, 2012 jailed by Southwick Crown Court in London and sentenced to 13 years imprisonment. That was after 171-count charge of money laundering fraud and corruption filed against him in Federal High Court, Kaduna was discontinued in his favour and the appeal court was eventually discharged and acquitted when arraigned before Justice Marcel Awokulehin in Asaba.

For PDP warring family members, whether in ADC or staying back to fight it out, ‘all is fair in love as in war’. For them, rules and laws are for others. The president understands he cannot put his faith in the hands of those who, in the process of sharing spoils of war, are prepared to pull down the edifice over their own heads.

January 6, 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
A shopping trolley for a new year

Let us cut this country some slack at the beginning of what is likely to be another momentous year. Some congratulations are in order for this enchanting country and its tough, hardened habitants for bracing through the past year with all its internal challenges and emergent international contradictions. As the Yoruba wise-saying would have it, the head does not always wish to stand in structural alignment with the nape and the rest of the torso. Only the master surgeon of human physiognomy knows how this is stitched together. A more profane version of this proverb has it that the testicular pouch of a ram may swing wildly from side to side, but it never falls. The lizard that jumps from the top of the Iroko tree to the bare ground says that if no one will congratulate it, it must congratulate itself.

Nigerians are a prayerful lot. Only a people specially favoured by the Gods would choose to live so dangerously and permanently at the edge of the precipice and still survive to tell the story. But as Bernard Shaw, the Anglo-Irish wit, cynic and merciless purveyor of western rationalism would have it, we must beware of people whose Gods are in the sky. If we ask the old codger that he should leave us alone to our joyous proclivities, and that he has no right to legislate for other people, he would probably shoot back: I hate people being happy when they should be unhappy.

But even for a people who love pomp and celebration, the instant jubilation and mutual hand-pumping which ought to have accompanied Peter Obi’s decamping from the Labour Party was rather muted and underwhelming. No one should be surprised, coming at a point when Peter Obi’s movement has lost much of its capacity to surprise and the momentum it has garnered. While it slithered down the ladder of national esteem, the other side gathered speed and substantial grit. While it encouraged its trolls and sidekicks to excoriate and slander those who expressed views contrary to their siege mentality and claustrophobic sense of entitlement, the other side began chipping away at its ramparts until the empire of froth and hate caved in from its own internal contradictions.

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Quality people deserted the Gadarene mob. A prime example is Peter Mbah, the energetic and hardworking governor of Enugu State, who has disavowed the possibility of joining Obi in his quixotic quest. Since politics is still a game of number and ethnic identity remains a stellar plank of national politics, it is hard to see how Peter Obi in the few months remaining can reassemble the old faithful even if he goes ahead to win the ADC presidential ticket. Some notable Nigerians who have worked for him at the highest level have sad tales to tell. It will not be fair to spill the beans at this point. Obi does not seem to have the allure and steely composure of a pan-Nigerian leader. A gifted but divisive and polarizing figure, politically, culturally and spiritually, it is so sad and alarming that the Nigerian ruling hegemons now view an Obi presidential ticket as the death knell of post-military politics in the country.

Rather than lose it all, they seem to have bought into a significant stake in the ruling party. One year may be a long spell in politics and in his desperation Obi may try to raise the ethnic and hate decibel; and the abiding economic misgivings hoping to catch out the ungainly and chaotic amalgam that is the APC as it tries to smother its internal contradictions and head off the possibility of a catastrophic implosion. In their brilliant conclusion to the book, The Gods that Failed, the authors noted that the final battle will not be between progressives and conservatives but between progressives and former progressives. That may well be the battle that is shaping up. The situation is so “overdetermined”, to use an advanced philosophical parlance, with so many contradictions jostling and contending for supremacy, that it is impossible for a political titan however talented to have a complete mastery of the situation.

January 4, 2026
Mental revolution as panacea

It is a long way to Hosanna after twenty six years of civilian rule with the nation still hobbled by the foundational crisis of ethnic discord, spiritual polarization, genocidal claims, institutional anomie so pronounced that every facet of human relationship based on trust and mutual understanding appears to have broken down. It did not begin yesterday. As colonized and enslaved people, the institutions handed down by our colonial masters to superintend our transition to political and economic modernity have not proved efficacious. Africa has been stranded in a political and economic limbo. Perceptive African leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Obafemi Awolowo, Amilcar Cabral and Samora Michel who saw through the ruse were rendered hors de combat.

Yet as we may be discovering very late in the day, there can be no viable democracy or irreversible economic growth without durable institutions. It is impossible to sustain economic growth within the context of institutional chaos and disorder. Economies do not grow if they are subject to conflicting sets of laws and precepts, one set meant for the public and the other for the Caudillo and his minions. The protracted face-off between Jerome Powell, the plucky chairman of the American Federal Reserve and President Donald Trump shows just how durable institutions work. Following rigid institutional guidelines, Mr Powell has resisted Trump’s repeated attempts to fire him or make him bend the rule according to his whims and caprices. It is a triumph of the institutional order against the caprices of human agency.

So, just what are institutions? Institutions are products of repeated actions, routines, habits, rules of engagements burnt into the human consciousness or what the French call repete geste from where they solidify into a set of subliminal precepts which serve as infallible guides to future actions. They then proceed to regulate the affairs of humanity with impersonal rigour and stern orderliness which brooks no human deviance or authoritarian deviousness.

African political elites have shown that they lack the mental magnitude, the steely discipline and the nationalistic self-sacrifice to produce the institutional framework for the postcolonial order in Africa. When President George Washington, hero of the American war of liberation and founding president, declined the call on him to continue as American president on the ground that an America that had seen off the feudal order in Europe cannot afford to have a presidential monarch, he was laying the ground for institutional validity and order which has remained in force till date.

You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. In almost all western countries that have transited successfully from the ashes of feudal Europe to political and economic modernity, the political revolution is always preceded by a mental revolution. The English long revolution was aided by the copious outpouring of John Locke and his theory of the social contract, Hobbes by his notion of an ever looming Leviathan; the French by Rousseau, Voltaire and Descartes; the Germans by Emmanuel Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and the Americans by the huge tomes of what has come to be known as the Federalist papers which laid the foundation of the modern American presidency. With the possible honorable exception of Ibn Khaldun, the great fifteenth century Egyptian philosopher, historian and social theorist, Africa contributed nothing to this global flux and ferment. It may well be that the intellectual labours of past African heroes have been permanently sealed in the catacombs of cremated memorabilia.

What you don’t know does not hurt you. But it can haunt you. The inability of Africans to come up with an intellectual organogram has left the continent floundering in a septic lagoon of waste and political refuse. This is why a mental revolution is a precondition for Africa’s cultural, political, spiritual and economic emancipation. Jurassic Age African potentates who routinely flout the prescribed term limits for their inglorious tenure are unaware of the monumental impact of their folly on the institutional order of their stricken nations. Even where they succeed, they have already triggered off a constitutional impasse which will make for a vicious, violent finale.

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To appreciate the institutional vacuum in which Africa’s postcolonial epoch operates, we must take one final historical excursion. After the cessation of serial colonial conquest and harassments during which its people suffered untold indignities and humiliation, the Chinese reverted to their native Confucianism which is an all-embracing philosophy of life and just governance. It has proved superior to western liberal theology in its impersonal rigour and merciless rationalism. There is zero tolerance for corruption and official malfeasance. Thieves are routinely executed. There is no room for political shenanigans. Even Mao’s widow, a decorated heroine of the Chinese Revolution in her own right, found out too late in the day. She was packed to prison never to be heard of again. Men are hanged not because horses are stolen but so that horses cannot be stolen. Today, imperial and imperious China scoffs at the western system with the contempt and condescension it thinks its former tormentors deserve.

Let us end with the mightiest elephant in the commodious room of Africa’s postcolonial void. How is Africa in general and Nigeria in particular going to handle the nation-state paradigm imposed on the world by the Peace of Westphalia as it goes into terminal decline and reverse gear? For about a decade now, we have been warning about the fraying at the edges of the nation-state paradigm. We had no foreknowledge of how it will happen or who the instigator will be. America and Donald Trump have supplied the missing grist to the rumination. Nigeria has already fallen to the global sledgehammer which makes nonsense of the founding tenet of the peace of Westphalia: the inviolability of every nation and the non-negotiability of its sovereignty.

Mr Trump has made a short shrift of this charter. Nations that have refused to correct internal disorder will be subject to international order in accordance with the Gospel According to Donald Trump. It is no longer a question of like or dislike or a moral or ethical issue. Mr Trump will have his way unless a superior charter suddenly supervenes. As Iran dissolves into apocalyptic chaos, the American strongman has vowed that he is loaded and locked, primed to unleash. This was exactly as it happened centuries ago when superior French artillery put paid to the notion of Italian city-states. Before our very eyes, America is redrawing the world map. Venezuela has been ringed in, and it is only a question of time before the collapse of the government of Nicolas Maduro. As we send this off, rumours swirl about that Caracas has fallen.

Other global powers are following. Russia is going to end up gobbling a huge chunk of Ukrainian territory in a redress of the geopolitical catastrophe Putin said had befallen his nation. China has announced a commencement of exercises close to Taiwanese waters. African thinkers and philosophers must now add the nation-state declension to their shopping trolley. Otherwise, it may be the Berlin Conference of 1884/ 1885 once again. Happy new year to all our readers.

January 4, 2026
Feedback

We have received an unusual volume of traffic in connection with last week’s piece. In Defence of Guerrilla Journalism. Samples:

Good morning sir. I just read your piece entitled , In Defence of Guerrilla Journalism, a sizzling offering and never-put-it-down-until-the-last-full –stop article in The Nation on Sunday. A great outing as usual: deep, scholarly, reflective and sharp excursion into the Nigeria’s past when paradox practically governed the polity. Well done sir. E e pe fun wa sir. —-Wole Olugboji.

Just finished reading your usually seminal article, In Defence of Guerrilla Journalism. I goggled “Guerrilla Journalism” and below is what I found. Most heartwarming to confirm what you wrote that it emerged in Nigeria. Thanks very, very much. Context-Specific.

Famously emerged in Nigeria as an underground response to severe government repression, becoming a vital tool for resistance. It’s a form of journalism that fights for a story, using unconventional, often defiant methods to report the truth when traditional channels fail or are compromised, though it carries the burden of balancing impact with integrity. INTERNET WED, 31 December, 2025. Venerable Feyisola Famutimi.

When I saw the picture of Stanley Macebuh headlining your article, I smiled happily to myself thinking that you have not come to bury Caesar but to praise and panegyrise him. Beyond his stellar role in the founding of The Guardian newspaper, which loves to posture as Nigeria’s flagship newspaper……Whatever you might say of the writer, you must concede that he’s one of the finest users of the English language and his understanding of African Literature is non pareil. It is fitting, then, that in the epic crossfire between you and the retrograde regime, the deep called to the deep, otherwise the warfare would have been asymmetrical. As Soyinka wonders in “Idanre”: do we summon the aid of a boulder to kill an ant? Granted a comprehensive background was necessary for countering a Ray Ekpu revisionism, but the extreme back-pedalling into the prehistory of journalism in colonial Victorian Lagos, nay, Nigeria seems a tad an overkill, if not an overwrought study in selective reportage. The present absence of Zik’s West African Pilot as a hub of anti-colonial rallying cry and an agora of autochthonous Afrocentrism gives cause for concern, particularly coming from the bristling stylus of one normally reputed to be a voice of moral suasion and historical gravitas. Only enforced amnesia could mollify the miffed, in this instance. Again, considering the whirligig of fate, we are reminded of Sophocles’ quip about the open-endedness of personal identity until death puts paid to one’s life’s peregrination. On this Bayo Onanuga is exemplary: a guerrilla journalist of yesteryear and ponce of power today…….Not many of your readers would share your optimism about the present climate of democratic expansiveness of leadership. If anything people in Nigeria are still being policed and monitored by overzealous agents and sundry agent-provocateurs. The times call for the focused and ceaseless grunt work of underground penmanship. Finally, Ray Ekpu: I guess it’s only the autumnal patriarch that might disclose what riles him; reason(s) for his unreasonable put-down of guerrilla journalists of the past and present……Perhaps he needs another occasion to right this wrong just so as to re-center himself in popular imaginary. Welcome back again—Former student now a professor.

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Your homily today is not only fire for fife, it lays bare the raison d’etre for the concept and practice of guerrilla journalism in Nigeria. Let me correct one impression. My Oga, Stanly Macebuh was a later day convert to orthodox liberal political thought. He could have been influenced by the daily imbibing of fine cognac and cigar in the office of the then managing director…… Stanley changed when he went to the Guardian and became a bourgeoisie when he went to the private papers of Baba Odogwu and later Sentinel of Yar’adua. As you rightly wrote what became of the great writers of The News?—- IBJ, Olonade Street, Lagos.

January 4, 2026
Thank God for Donald Trump

After about eight weeks of threatening to bombard ISIS camps in Nigeria, in what the United States President Donald Trump said would be “powerful and deadly” strikes against groups Washington claims are affiliated with ISIL (ISIS) in Northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, the bombs finally dropped on Christmas Day, last year. It was a big relief to Nigerians who had anticipated that the terrorists would want to disrupt the end-of-year festivities by carrying out significant, perhaps never-to-be-forgotten deadly strikes on several communities, particularly in the volatile areas of the north. The airstrikes probably averted such disasters.

America had insisted it would rain the bombs on the heads of the terrorists since October 31, 2025, when it re-designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC). That it eventually carried out its threat in collaboration with the Federal Government is indeed heartwarming.

As far as the Americans are concerned, they had to drop the bombs in order to protect Christians who had been victims of several attacks by some Islamic fundamentalists. As Al Jazeera noted in a December 31, 2025, piece titled ‘How many countries has Trump bombed in 2025?’, the strikes were ‘’timed, analysts say, to appease Trump’s Christian supporters as Washington doubles down on a narrative of “saving” Nigerian Christians, although Nigerian authorities insist the strikes are not about any one religion.’’ The Federal Government admitted that there was a problem of insecurity, with victims cutting across faith.

I pitch my tent with the Nigerian government. This is not necessarily because I want to be patriotically correct but simply because that would seem to me to be the truth. Although Christians who had lost loved ones to these senseless attacks would not agree with this position (and I won’t blame them; as they say, “he who wears the shoe knows where it pinches’’). What I know as a fact is that it was only at the beginning of the insurgency that the attacks were targeted mainly at Christians. At that time, many Muslims felt unconcerned. But it was only a matter of time for the insurgents to turn even against fellow Muslims that they also see as infidels because they do not accept to practice Islam as they (fundamentalists) practice it.

So, what we have in Nigeria today is not necessarily targeted against Christians; it is not Christian genocide but general insecurity imposed on the country by ragamuffins who had imbibed the wrong side of Islam’s pristine doctrine. They had been fed with the wrong assumption that the more blood they spilled in the name of the religion, the more the number of virgins they would have the opportunity to disvirgin in heaven!

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Expectedly, some Nigerians have criticised the Federal Government over the American bombings. Interestingly, for such different folks, it was different strokes. There are those who felt the American bombings demeaned Nigeria’s sovereignty. I do not know what that is supposed to mean. The last time I checked, it is only the living that can talk of sovereignty; not the dead. So, we need to be alive first to be sovereign. Notwithstanding my reservation on their reason for the American intervention, those of them who may feel genuinely so concerned about our sovereignty should accept my sympathy.

Naturally, there are also perpetual critics who have sworn not to see anything good in the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration. These include, but not limited to people who had lived all their lives on fuel and forex subsidies that the Tinubu administration stopped, and would stop at nothing to blame the government even for things that are visibly positive or result-oriented. They are entitled to their opinion, although I owe them neither an apology nor sympathy.

What we have to realise is that countries, from time immemorial, have always had cause to come to one another’s assistance in times of distress. Even in modern times, no country can be an island unto itself; hence, the different bilateral or multilateral agreements between and among the different countries. There is nothing unusual in America lending a hand in our fight against terrorism. Good enough, the US and Nigeria have a long history of security collaboration through training and intelligence sharing. The only difference is that the Christmas strikes marked the first known kinetic US military action in Nigeria.

Apart from Nigeria, the Trump administration has struck in six other countries, this year. These include Venezuela, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. In all, monitors say the US had carried out at least 111 strikes this year alone, and that this surpassed the number carried out under the George Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations combined.

Well, the lexical semantic differences notwithstanding, what matters most to me was that the December 25 air raids were eventually carried out successfully. And Trump has promised to drop more bombs should the need arise. The fact of the matter is that Nigeria has wasted too much time and resources fighting insurgents. If we have not been able to have a handle on the problem, what is wrong in the US or any other friendly country for that matter that has the superior fire power and other requirements coming to help us out?

One of the things that pain me on this matter is this idea of some people saying we should negotiate with the terrorists, kidnappers who demand ransom, bandits, etc; or assimilate them into the society after deradicalising them. We have tried all of that in the last 16 years since the insurgency started, to no avail. I am pained the more because Nigeria has thrown more than enough good money into the bad rubbish that these nonentities represent. So, I do not see any patriotic Nigerian calling for a slap on the wrist for them given the havoc they have wreaked on the country. These are resources we should have spent to brush up people who value western education.

Those who think it is ‘haram’ or forbidden to have western education should be free to live their lives like the caveman; but to want to hide under the guise of religion to coerce the rest of us to join them in the blissful ignorance is highly reprehensible. Even Saudi Arabia that is the birthplace of Islam and home to Mecca and Medina, its two holiest cities, making it the spiritual epicenter for Muslims worldwide, has since embraced western education and is indeed comfy in its relationship with the current world power, the United States of America, based on strategic mutual interests. So, where did these undesirable elements get their own brand of Islam?

As I said earlier, I am not interested in semantics. I am more interested in the overarching needless loss of lives perpetuated by these murderers in human skin. What I am saying is that it is immaterial whether it is Christians or Muslims that are being wantonly killed. Human lives are too precious to be wasted on the altar of some jaded religious beliefs or, in terms of the Boko Haram, to curtail the spread of western knowledge.

As a matter of fact, I do not think we have been told the full story of what these so-called insurgents want. For one, it is unthinkable that some people could be so daft to think they can turn Nigeria, a country whose population is a nearly even mix of Christians and Muslims, to an Islamic country. But that is what you have when people are just given birth to without adequate planning for how they would get education so they can be useful to themselves and the society at large.

And for the so-called Boko Haram, too, how can people who are making use of the very products of western education say that western education is useless? What of the bombs that they sometimes use? Even if we talk about the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that the insurgents sometimes deploy, despite their being “homemade”, are they entirely devoid of western education or civilisation? What of the motorcycles and vehicles that they transport themselves and their weapons in?

For me, Nigerians have the almighty God to thank for the December 25 airstrikes. I am delighted. Anyone who is not should put in his or her all to rein in the terrorists. All the kid’s glove treatment should be over by now for good. They have to impress it on the terrorists that they are on a wild goose chase if they ever thought they could convert Nigeria to a Muslim country. This is necessarily because no single religion has a monopoly of violence.

Similarly, those of them who have problem with western education are living in fools’ paradise if they ever thought they can bring down the rest of us to their caveman level. But we should no longer continue to tolerate the situation where some misguided elements would make us continue pouring water into a basket, which is what the trillions we have spent fighting terrorism is, instead of using it to uplift our people’s lives. Those who want to continue pouring libation on terrorism are free to do so. But Nigeria as a country should not continue to pick the bill. Those who lost out to fuel and forex subsidies should not be allowed to continue to feast on our common wealth again via ransoms and terrorism; the new faces of subsidy.

Once again, thank you, President Donald Trump. But don’t go too far away yet because we might still need you. The people we are fighting have been so brainwashed that they have become recalcitrant criminals who, like King Pharaoh, would rather prefer to perish rather than repent.

As they say, ‘a child who says his mother would not sleep should also not have the opportunity to doze’. The criminals and their sponsors should not be allowed to continue to unleash mayhem on innocent Nigerians, Christian or Muslim. People cannot be giving us sleepless nights and all we do is trying to differentiate between bandits and terrorists. To the extent that they all maim, steal, rape and kill, leaving tears and blood in their trail, they are all birds of the same feather.

Come to think of it; how can human beings with flesh and blood slaughter fellow human beings like cow and say they are fighting a just cause? I don’t think we should split hairs over whoever is coming to save us from such brutes.

January 4, 2026