The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Demola Osinubi at 70

    Demola Osinubi at 70

    That Night at Radisson Blu in Ikeja GRA, Lagos, Sir Demola Osinubi looked resplendent in a flowing kaftan. With patches of grey in his hair, showing that he was no longer a spring chicken, at least not the same as the young man that I first came across in 1988, he did not look like someone three years shy of his 70th birthday which he marked three days ago.

    That night, he was honoured with the well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award by Diamond Publications, promoters of the Diamond Awards for Media Excellence (DAME). There could not have been a worthier recipient than Sir Demola, who we, his reporters at The Punch then, used to call ‘Demo behind his back. Sir Demo was already the Deputy Editor of The Punch, which was then struggling for survival when I stood before  him in his office at Onipetesi, Ikeja, off the old Lagos-Abeokuta Road, in 1988.

    His office door opened into the newsroom, separated by the corridor which people took to get to other parts of the building. Osinubi was a newsman to the core. He could smell a good story from afar. His nose for news was extraordinary and like every editor he was impatient with lazy reporters. He expected you to think and write on your feet. As his reporter, he did not expect you to just walk into the newsroom, and start rambling about the story you have. You are expected to have sketched out the frame and only get to the office to flesh it up.

    Osinubi was never far from the newsroom. He was always on hand to help the News Editor, Chris Mammah, with stories of the day and how they should be treated. He was also good at spotting talents and was ever ready to help to build their careers. Though, The Punch had challenges then, it was still one of the best newspapers around. It was a breeding ground of sorts as many left despite the conviviality for greener pastures when it could not fulfil its obligations to them as when due. The story is different today. It has become a business empire, thanks to the efforts of people like him and Emeritus Chairman of The Punch, Chief Ajibola Ogunsola, among others.

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    Osinubi was in The Punch for almost 46 years. He joined the organisation in 1976 as a reporter and left in 2022 as Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief. He was not a laid back editor, who led from the rear. He led from the front and was in the heat of things in the newsroom. When news broke, he was there to give directions and guide us on how to handle it. Alhaji Najim Jimoh, the Editor, had implicit confidence in him. They worked well together. Theirs was a mutual relationship which helped to build The Punch into a great paper despite its financial challenges.

    We learnt a lot from both men – the editor and his deputy – which has shaped the lives and the careers of many of us who passed through them. One thing you learnt immediately from Sir Demo is to get the spelling of names correctly. For instance, you do not spell his surname with an ‘h’ in the Osinubi. He would not take kindly to it. As such, he would not want the same done to others. He would ask you again and again: “are you sure of the spelling of so and so person’s name”.

    Those days, The Punch was a great family. It was a school. My oga, Dipo Onabanjo, calls it a “university”. It prepared a reporter for wherever he would find himself in future. Sir Demo held the place together as a unit and if he had his way, many would not have left. I doff my hat to a reporter, editor and manager par excellence as he joins the Septuagenarian Club. Seventy Hearty Cheers, Sir Demo.

  • Recurring malady of tribalism or ethnic nationalism

    Recurring malady of tribalism or ethnic nationalism

    The issue of tribalism or ethnic differences have largely ruined the success of the country. It has infected our politics to the extent that people either votes along ethnic lines and where they tried to look at issues rationally and nationally, they are immediately slapped back into supposedly tribal redoubts or ostracized as traitors or saboteurs. There is widespread rigging of votes to enhance ethnic figures in the census which are usually rigged because revenue sharing is tied to census. This is a problem that affects states creation, education, financial allocation and inability to have genuine democracy and stability which has been the bane of our society. The constitution which was a negotiated federal constitution before independence has been undermined by the military dictatorship edged on by civilian politicians who have less than noble or patriotic motives.

    Most of the political problems Nigeria has had since independence are traceable to tribalism or ethnicism.  Example of this can be seen in the Action Group crisis of 1961 to 1963 which split the party into two rival groups which indirectly led to the incarceration in 1963 of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the then leader of opposition in the federal parliament with the combined forces of the tribally rooted Northern politicians and their collaborators from the Eastern region. Awolowo may have been ambitious, but it is doubtful and unlikely to  have tried to violently overthrow the federal government of Nigeria with a few party toughies trained in Kwame Nkrumah’s Wineba Ideological School where the likes of Samuel Grace Ikoku, a former Secretary General of the Action Group was a lecturer. The evidences presented at the famous trial for reasonable felony were not overwhelming enough to condemn a major political leader without upsetting the equilibrium of the country and its stability. The reaction of the people of the West got to a crescendo in 1965 when the Chief S.L. Akintola’s government which was obviously unpopular decided to manipulate the voting process when the Deputy Premier, Chief Remi Fani-Kayode boasted that whether the people voted for their party or not “… angels would vote for them” took laws into their hands, burning and looting while the cabinet prepared for the worst. When some elements in the army struck at dawn of January 15, 1966, some of the ministers felt that their opponents were behind the “attempted coup d’état while the BBC radio network was telling the whole world that there had been an attempted coup and the prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa seemed  to have been kidnapped and two regional premiers namely, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and Chief S. L. Akintola, the Are Ona Kakanfo of Yoruba land had been killed and many senior army officers seemed to have been killed. When the news were confirmed and regional and ethnic dimensions of the killings were analysed the original cheering for the army putsch petered out in fear of what may happen because Nigeria had never seen anything like this before. Then came the counter coup of July 1966 which appeared as if the equation was balanced by the number of army officers who were killed. But unfortunately the situation got out of hands when the pogroms against the Igbo in the North began and the whole country became destabilized setting the stage for the civil war after the mediation by Ghanaian military leaders failed and General Yakubu Gowon on return from the Aburi reconciliation meeting in Ghana, appeared to have been outflanked by those who wanted to militarily sort out the issue.   Going to war was a terrible denouement for which Nigeria is yet to recover. Another example that shows up the fault line in the country is forming of the federal government in 1954, 1959, 1964 when the recurring decimal of those days of the opportunity to form a more radical governments than we have ever had but people, seemed to just have their jobs rather than what was good for the entire country. We can zero on the coalition government that took the country to independence. The election in 1959 was deadlocked with the NCNC coming first with the highest number of votes followed by the AG and the NPC coming third but having the highest number of seats and reversing the choice of the electorate. If the NCNC had shown some courage by accepting the offer of coalition with the AG, the course of Nigerian history would have changed for the better but the leader of the NCNC, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe in private could not trust Chief Obafemi Awolowo.  This mistrust was not on ideological grounds but on ethnic grounds. It was the latter because his party had nothing in common with the NPC, its senior partner in the coalition government. Azikiwe had erroneously argued that the AG had bought some of the elected supporters in the Western Regional House of Assembly election in 1951 where those he claimed were his party men claimed they were independent and because of this, his ethnic supporters said Yoruba people could never be trusted! This was unfortunate because politics in southern Nigeria since then have been conducted largely on assumed rigid political division between the East and the West despite the fact that the NCNC was almost as widely supported as the AG in Yorubaland.

    This pattern has been repeated by dominant parties in the Western Regional election and East in subsequent elections despite the time changes and names and ideology of the parties. This has affected the conduct even of census and location of strategic industries such as location of iron and steel complexes, petroleum refineries for example had been determined by political factors  rather than  by economic sense. Choosing who to run these factories had not always been based on the principle of careers open to talents but rather on nebulous grounds such as federal or ethic grounds resulting in failed projects and colossal waste of public funds. The result has been lack of economic development and availability of jobs the consequences of which are slow or no growth at all thus fuelling conflicts because of competition for jobs and sharing of jobs on emotional basis of federal character and not on merit.

    We can learn a thing or two from India where most jobs are determined by principle of merit in public and private sectors and this in place much bigger than us and a population eight times bigger than the Nigerian population.

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    Our leaders have not been genuinely patriotic enough to fight for the common man’s good. The lessons of the ruinous civil war between 1967 and 1970 have largely been forgotten because at the root of the war was tribalism and corruption and both maladies still dominate our politics and political alignment and rather than ideology. Nobody is seriously fighting for how to make the country great and we will be confronted by the same difficult situation when the oil wells run out and there is no ability to solve the problem, and it will be too late because we woefully depend on the wasting assets of hydrocarbons which is exhaustible and it will be too late.

    When the civil war ended in 1970, we had the golden opportunity to remake the country. Oil production increased phenomenally and by 1973 following the war in the Middle East and the Arab boycott, the price of Nigeria’s ‘light crude’ rose phenomenally and one of our leaders was said to have said the problem of Nigeria was not the cost of things but how to spend money. This may not be true but it shows the scandal of recklessness in those years.

    We spent money in support for blacks overseas such as funding police departments in Grenada for example, embarking on iron and steel complexes and celebrating black culture and inviting people from all over the world for cultural jamboree in Lagos and building a new capital in Abuja when we could have taken Kaduna which was established in 1914 for the same purpose if Lagos was correctly considered unsuitable. A fool would soon be separated from his riches captures our situation of the time. Then the military which has become the “fall guy” for our problem of movement without motion in 1979 handed over government to civilians-led NPN after imposing an American presidential constitution on Nigeria. Meanwhile the problem of corruption virtually overwhelmed the country under President Shehu Shagari. The Shagari government was gotten rid of by a military junta under General Muhammadu Buhari who imposed a stiff and stifling government on the country. The government was at first welcomed by the people who were appalled by the corruption of the Shagari regime bogged down by importation of rice and profiteering by the leadership of the government and the parties running it. 

    The new Buhari government could not find a solution to the serious economic problems confronting the country. Some of its leaders were involved in selling foreign exchange allocation papers for imports in extremely controlled foreign exchange management. The sudden change of the national currency and the accompanying corruption and smuggling of the Naira from abroad by a traditional ruler whose son was a military officer right in Buhari’s office gave his enemy food for thought and proof of alleged corruption. There was a coup within the army which ushered in General Babangida’s regime in 1985 till 1993 after prolong transition politics which saw Moshood Abiola, a well-known businessman and influential Muslim politician as winner. His election brought up the recurring problem of tribalism with his Yoruba supporters ready to fight any attempt to deny him access to power on the grounds that he was a Yoruba man. Those opposed to him came from the East and the North until his jailer, Sani Abacha and Moshood Abiola died rapidly after the other in 1988. This was in mysterious circumstances in which the hands of foreign governments were suspected with circumstantial but unproven evidence. This happened without resolving the perennial North-South political dichotomy.

  • God’s chosen (2)

    God’s chosen (2)

    Life as a “chosen pawn” is no walk in the park. Your heart is thick with repentance, but your penance has no audience. Perhaps because your chosen idols have counted you as part of the sacrifice.

    Your date with epiphany begins with promise. Pardon the recap in real time. On January 1st, the Year of Retribution, at precisely 8:40 am, you are ushered into a media parley at the “captured” State House in Abuja. You have rehearsed “appreciable” questions for the occupying force’s spokesman and the Commander of the counter-insurgency, aka Operation Chosen Lion.

    Your wit is honed to impress, and your conscience, neatly folded like a newspaper back copy. But few hours into the propaganda parley, you are briefed that resistance fighters had breached the perimeters of the north central’s open-air prison. You are told they are being crushed and pushed back.

    You applaud the newly constituted God’s Chosen Army for its daring and professionalism, stressing that Nigeria’s former military “would have caved and taken to their heels.”

    The Commander beams appreciatively at you – glorying in your impassioned sycophancy – while your colleagues rue their inability to beat you to the butt-lick and crawl. Eventually, you are discharged with a handsome reimbursement for your time.

    Sometime between your take-off and ascent to the FCT skyline, you learn that God’s Chosen forces are battling resistance fighters close to your residential district in Lagos. But you can neither call nor text, in compliance with aviation rules.

    Instantly, you become hysterical, wondering if your home has been caught in the carnage. As your plane descends astride the southwest perimeters of Nigeria’s open-air prison, you become anxious about the fate of your family amid the onslaught. But you’ve been assured, after all, that you would always be spared any of God’s Chosen military assault, given your relocation outside the internment camps.

    As you get closer to your neighbourhood, you are turned back by God’s Chosen special forces combing through for fleeing rebels. In your hysteria, you receive a call from your wife’s phone. ‘Thank God, they made it out before the siege,” you mutter. You are relieved to hear your seven-year-old daughter at the end of the line.

    But she is pleading over the phone for you to come rescue her. You hear shots being fired, drowning out your daughter’s screams. And then, silence.

    You hear nothing of your family until two weeks later, following the withdrawal of God’s Chosen forces from the area. Your daughter’s body was found alongside five others: your wife and four other daughters, inside your family car, a Kia Picanto.

    Satellite images reveal how they were targeted by heavy artillery and run over by God’s Chosen army tanks. Your family car got riddled by exactly 335 bullets, and you can barely recognise your seven-year-old daughter, her sisters and your wife, from their severely mangled corpses.

    In your grief, you recall your mockery of the sad fate of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab. On January 29, 2024, in Gaza City, Hind Rajab pleaded over the phone for emergency workers to rescue her from a car riddled with bullets. Her body was found two weeks later, on February 10, 2024, alongside the bodies of six of her family members in the car they drove to flee their neighbourhood as Israeli forces invaded.

    Picture your daughter in the mangled carcass of Hind Rijab. Picture her as the bloody carcass of each murdered Palestinian newborn and toddler. Suddenly, it’s not so witty or “touche” anymore to write, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” in response to social media outrage to the genocide in Gaza. “How about October 7?” now resonates like a dumb riposte.

    You realise how dubious it was of you to write the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from October 7. Yet, your grief manifests as ghosts of your past hypocrisies. Each bullet in each of your family members resonates as a headline that once mocked the suffering of others. The irony is pungent, the poetry unbearable.

    You had gone to report on “order” as directed by God’s Chosen leadership, and broadcast “balance” effected through carpet-bombs. You drafted your editorial masterpiece right before you left the God’s Chosen media parley, telling your fellow Nigerians that the occupying force was grossly misunderstood; that their tanks were moral instruments deployed in a siege against anarchists masquerading as resistance fighters.

    You quoted the scriptures to justify bombardments, as though God moonlighted as a munitions dealer. In your voice, objectivity becomes fiction, crafted according to the designs of those who rewrite history with the blood of others. It isn’t true if it’s not just. And justice requires choosing sides; always against annihilation.

    Now, faced with your family’s execution, your knees collapse. As you grieve, you see your colleagues still live-tweeting God’s Chosen propaganda and competing for soundbites. Their eyes avoid yours. They will file their reports and sleep. And you, broken father, will write one last column, perhaps a confession or a curse. But it will come too late for your daughter.

    Now, you attempt the literature of rebellion, but your voice has lost its vigour, like a redundant hyperbole in a rant against God’s Chosen. Eventually, you collapse in the wreckage of your own rhetoric, your press badge dangling like a noose of your own design.

    It takes a special kind of maleficence, and insolence perhaps, to rejoice at the murder of infants. Those who justify sniper bullets in the head of a three-year-old abroad may welcome sniper bullets in the head of their child or grandchild. Karma comes full circle, always.

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    You find that, not even a swift recourse to frantic remorse, could make heaven spare you your just deserts. You are accountable for your secret lusts and espoused chaos. The goodness you espouse will make you; the evil you applaud will unmake you.

    Forget Deir Yassin, Sabra, Shatila, Jenin, Khan Younis. Forget the siege, the deathly checkpoints, and the snipers who target children. Forget the journalists who got buried with their cameras alongside their families. Forget starvation, too, because remembrance is rebellion.

    And now, in the same logic of convenience, you will forget your heartfelt losses as you parrot God’s Chosen phrases: “security operation,” “neutralised threats,” and “collateral damage.” You will sanitise massacre into lexicon as your coloniser’s grammar becomes your creed, and your craft, once meant to awaken, now anesthetises.

    Gaza was an experiment. The world watched it burn and called it geopolitics. It watched children being vaporised and called it defence. It watched truth die and called it complexity.

    The same logic is rehearsing for its Nigerian debut. Every dollar grant that demands ideological loyalty and silence from your newsroom prepares you for future occupation. Every journalist who flatters tyranny abroad must prepare to relive it soon in his native dialect.

    And when the performance begins, and the skies darken with imported drones and a colonist pall, both your patriotism and humanity will be tested.

    Every God’s Chosen pawn has a price. What’s yours? A dollar grant? A travel visa? Or an opportunity to relocate your family abroad?

    These days, the Nigerian newsroom objectively debates everything but the daily savagery depicted in Gaza. Journalists fear the rancour that may arise. But, I want to say to dear colleagues, in the poetic tenor of Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer, can we not be sad together at the descent of humanity? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? Can we not at least mourn together?

  • Raise IT budgets for courts, Police efficiency

    Raise IT budgets for courts, Police efficiency

    The commendable success of the police in tracking and arresting the participants in the despicable armed robbery and home invasion which led to the occupant falling from the balcony rather than face a terrible ordeal and certain death caused by young aggressive very evil men. It is reported that some were arrested en route another robbery. Thank goodness or we could now be reporting on another murder. Congratulations to the police everywhere!

    Only the police will be able to tell us, after interrogation, how long they have been robbing and killing without being detected, investigated seriously or detected or even arrested during their years of criminal existence in and around Abuja and Zamfara. Hopefully, this interrogation will lead to further arrests and solving of other older unsolved cases. Could this be because past victims did not have the massive social media and mainstream media reach and political backlash leverage surrounding the wickedly motivated attack and murder of or sadly deceased ARISE TV journalist?

    We know that the nation is facing under-policing made worse because the police is severely overstretched with a sizable percentage of active service personnel allocated to ‘VIP GUARD DUTY’, some guarding handbags while elsewhere for example seven were killed in a Kaduna attack in the last few days. It would be a resounding achievement by the police and army if the attackers of these more recently murdered Fellow Nigerians, the  latest ‘Kaduna Seven’, as yet unnamed and without social media clout, are also arrested ‘with immediate effect’ by a similar police and military operation.

    Too many crimes are let go unless the victims’ relations escalate the matter and often have to fund parts of the investigation process themselves. Exactly how much is allocated to each police station for crime reporting and investigation. In most cases even paper and pen are required from the victim’s family for writing statements and ‘transport money’ moving around is standard. This brings down the value of our many well trained highly capable hard-working police in the eyes of the citizenry. We must make adequate provisions for all police to do their best work in all their cases and not just for certain cases.

    Nigeria is supposed to be recruiting 30,000 new policemen and women. There are many stories swirling around the coming of state police and ‘local knowledge’ benefits and the ‘political abuse/private state governor or LGA chairman’s army’ dangers. We await the political conclusion and subsequent positive results on both issues -recruitment and state police.  

    But then we are still in Nigeria, a country in which judges are still forced to personally record cross-examination and opinions in handwriting in court when most of the rest of the world has stenographers, computers, in court live video recordings and even INSTANT SPEECH-TO-TEXT FACILITIES – available on your phone now! These are to quickly accumulate and confirm accuracy of case-related legal information transmission. Is there a conspiracy against modernising the court system in Nigeria?

    Is there a group that wants to keep justice slow and unsteady with cases taking years, some up to 20-30 years?  We are in a country with 200,000-250,000 lawyers and many more at the cutting edge of international law practice while living abroad and with approximately 700 SANs. In spite of this massive legal brain power, the citizens suffer under the agonisingly slow court system clearly demonstrating ‘JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED’. There are annual hugely expensive NBA meetings all dedicated to assessing and improving the self-acclaimed ‘Learned Profession’, though many other professions dispute the justice and legality of this ‘self-crowning with cerebral excess’.

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    The citizens expect, no demand, a unity between the traditional red, silk and black robes and assorted wigs, seen in court, to spearhead modern police station legal procedures and a smoother, more efficient, less daily expensive court recording procedure backed by the NBA. Many lawyers are in the National Assembly, NASS, and the corridors of political power and can collectively improve the judiciary budget.

    The judiciary budget is for an independent branch of government and should advance the cause of justice delivery nationwide, not just in Abuja.

    The training of personnel or recruitment of IT staff and computerisation of evidence taking  for all police stations and courts across Nigeria should be top of the agenda of the Tinubu government, state governments and LGAs, Body of Benchers, judges committees, SAN and NBA.  The citizens are tired of waiting for ever for justice.

    In contrast politicians always get what they want. The politicians get the police as guards, needed by the rest of us. The politicians get quick decisions on election matters at special short-lived  ‘Election Tribunals’ while citizens’ cases take years ‘or till death’. Politicians have ridiculous multi-million naira monthly incomes while the citizens get a pittance as minimum wage.   IT IS TIME THE CITIZENS GOT BETTER RECEPTION IN POLICE STATIONS, SHORTER TIME IN COURT AND ANOTHER FREE AND FAIR ELECTION LIKE 1993.   

    For too long Nigeria has tolerated, fought, lost gallant personnel and JTF members and witnessed resurgence of Boko Haram, bandits, terrorists and some violent herders with poorly sustained repercussions and many rehabilitation strategies copycatting but outdoing the Nigeria Delta militants settlements programmes.

    We must curb these dangers before the election for 2027-2031 when the police will again be spread too thinly to counter the evil political elements strategizing now to fight Nigeria and INEC, with ballot rigging and violence.

    Nigerian citizens@65 deserve better!

  • Killing democracy one lie at a time

    Killing democracy one lie at a time

    I have listened to many an opposition politician cry to high heavens that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is destroying democracy by turning Nigeria into a one-party state, because some Governors defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the All Progressives Congress to which the President belongs. One of the proponents of one-party-state even took a leap into prophecy: President Tinubu wants to rule forever!

    Not one of them provided any evidence of pressure on the defecting Governors by the President, only speculations and innuendoes. Nor did any Governor complain of pressure as each of the defectors gave reasons for their action. Proponents of one-party-state are willing to deprive the defecting Governors of freewill, of the ability to make their own independent decision. Yet, the proponents themselves are in one or the other of the 19 registered political parties in Nigeria, many of them having defected from one party to the other, some several times! Their hypocrisy is further illustrated by their continuing effort to recruit more members from other parties into their own.

    The point here is that this phantom of a one-party-state is yet another political gimmick to undersell our democracy by portraying it in bad light, all in the attempt to incite voters against President Tinubu, preparatory to the 2027 general elections. It all started in 2022 as preparations were underway for the 2023 elections. Candidates used a variety of tactics, including false allegations of certificate forgery, corruption, drug trafficking, exploitations of ethnic and religious tensions, allegations of electoral malpractices, exploitation of electronic voting failures, and baseless legal challenges. Throughout the campaign, social media were mobilised to spread misinformation, disinformation, trolls, and manipulated images, all to discredit Tinubu and delegitimise his election. The concerted attack on INEC was a strategy to achieve this goal. To be sure, INEC did have its shortcomings during the election.

    Nevertheless, there was nothing about the election that could have changed the overall results. The outcome of the unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court, in which judges directly chastised the petitioners for the baselessness and frivolity of aspects of their cases, further highlighted the validity of the election. Of course, the petitioners turned around to insinuate that the judges were bought, all of them. By the time the election and litigation were over, all major institutions had been discredited.

    The misinformation about the person and candidacy of Tinubu and outright lies about various aspects of the 2023 elections prepared the grounds for two major developments that followed the presidential election. One, foreign media bought into the lies and further propagated them. Some supporters of a losing candidate even went to the White House in Washington, DC, to protest the Nigerian presidential election results. They thus pushed election denialism to then President Joe Biden, whose opponent had used similar tactics to deny his own election. It was easy for Biden and Western leaders to see through the shenanigans of Nigerian election deniers.

    Two, the exploitation of the Muslim-Muslim ticket by Christian candidates, their supporters, and Christian religious leaders laid the foundation for false claims of genocide against Christians. The escalation of conflict over land in the Christian South, accompanied by herdsmen clashes with farmers over grazing land, worsened the narrative. But domestic proponents of the narrative knew too well that Muslims were also killed in large numbers in the Muslim North, where conflict rages between land and cattle owners, involving banditry and kidnapping for ransom. But what the world knows is what we portray about ourselves in the media.

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    One consistent negative portrayal of ourselves is in the economic sector. So much negative propaganda about the economy is spewed that it is hard to believe that Nigeria could survive. It is as if President Tinubu came to destroy the economy, while he has been doing the best possible to revive it by following the road not taken (see Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, Follow Who Know Road, The Nation, October 15, 2025). True, the tripartite measures he had taken to revitalise the economy—removal of fuel subsidy, unification of the exchange market, and overhaul of the tax system—came at a cost to consumers. Nevertheless, the coast is gradually clearing. There is an interesting irony here. While political opponents see a dying economy, foreign observers—the World Bank, the IMF, and rating organizations—see a revamped economy on the way to full recovery. This is one area where statistics truly don’t lie: the Naira has stabilised, fuel cost is at least 50 percent cheaper than it was at the peak of the crisis of fuel subsidy removal; inflation is down by over 30 percent of its peak; and food prices are coming down gradually.

    However, nothing better illustrates the desire of political opponents to destroy our democracy than their insistent call for a military take-over. It’s a call they have been making since the election results were announced. The cancellation of 65th independence anniversary celebrations last October gave room for their conspiracy theory that the cancellation was to avert a military take-over. The same people who would have chastised the government for celebrating in austere times quickly turned to a phantom military coup.

    Incidentally, the ongoing disciplinary action against some army officers for various offenses provided the leeway for their conspiracy theory. It took the Defense Headquarters to deny coup rumours trolling online. It explained (1) that the investigation of some officers was to instill discipline and professionalism, rather than in reaction to a coup plot and (2) that the cancellation of the anniversary celebration was to allow President Tinubu to attend a “strategic bilateral meeting”, which he indeed attended, and has since returned.

    There is no doubt that a military coup would have been the death of democracy as it was for over 30 of the 65 years of independence, when the constitution was suspended and full dictatorship was established. Why detractors of President Tinubu would want that situation to reoccur is beyond sanity. Assuming that many of their social media supporters had no idea what military dictatorship looked like, it is a shame that the elders among them who know are willing to cut their nose off to spite their face.

    It will be more profitable as the next election season approaches for our politicians to focus on policies and solutions to national problems than to keep destroying our democracy by lying about it.

  • Opposition parties in disarray

    Opposition parties in disarray

    Despite the propaganda of the emergent African Democratic Party (ADC), and the Labour Party (LP), the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), remains the main opposition party in the country with a potential to put up a fight against the dominant All Progressive Congress (APC), in the 2027 general election if they can put their house in order. But with all the crisis bedevilling the PDP, it appears the party would remain in disarray, unless the warriors sheathe their swords.  

    Looking back, former president, Goodluck Jonathan and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, principally bear the blame for the precipitate decline of the PDP. What Atiku started in the run up to the 2011 general election by decamping from the party, Jonathan consolidated by running for the 2015 general election which he eventually lost. While PDP members, especially from the north accepted as fait accompli that Vice President Jonathan should run for election in 2011, after completing the term granted late President Umaru Yar’Adua, they rejected outright his attempt to run again in 2015.

    From hindsight, the division caused by the decision of Jonathan to run led to a fissure, and the emergence of what became known as new PDP, which some governors and legislators championed. The eventual loss of power by the party saw the exodus of many members of the party, especially the fair weather ones, to the APC which won the presidential poll with President Muhammadu Buhari, as flag bearer. And ever since, it has been a free fall for the PDP.

    Former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, after abandoning the party during their crisis period, returned for the second time, to hijack the presidential ticket of PDP for the 2023 general election. That action appears to have set the party down to its current free fall to destruction. The former governor of Rivers State and current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, having been deceived by the former Speaker, House of Representatives and former governor of Sokoto, Aminu Tambuwal (an Atiku accomplice), appears to have forsworn never to be taken for a ride again, by the party men.  

    Wike has ensured that he has the PDP is in his vice grip, and so unless on terms, that he considers as fair and just, he has vowed that the party will not hold the National Convention to elect new party leaders. Governors Bala Mohammed and Seyi Makinde, of Oyo and Bauchi states, respectively, and other party leaders who dared Wike to do his worst, are realizing that life is being squeezed out of their party, as the day unfolds.

    The chairmen of PDP, in Imo and Abia states, Austin Nwachukwu and Amah Abraham Nnana, with the party secretary in south-south zone, remains in court, claiming that the PDP has not conducted the required congresses in some states to elect delegates to the planned convention amongst other grievances. While that case is still pending, the PDP got enmeshed in another crisis, between the acting national party chairman, Umar Damagun and the national legal adviser, Kamaldeen Ajibade, SAN, over the right to appoint a counsel to defend the party in the suit filed by those opposed to the convention.

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    The legal adviser contends that by Article 40 of the party’s constitution, no other party officer or organ has the right to appoint a legal counsel to defend the party, without his concurrence. The National Working Committee, without waiting for the court presided over by Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court, Abuja, to determine the conflicting claims between the chairman and the legal adviser, relieved the legal adviser of any right to represent the PDP in the suit.

    There is the chance that the legal adviser may seek to open another battle front with the party, over what he may consider as attempt to whittle down his power. While all that is playing out, the secretary of the party has raised a bombshell capable of truncating the entire plans for the convention. He claimed that his signature was forged on the document, notifying INEC of the planned convention, and has petitioned the Department of State Security (DSS), the Nigeria Police and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), over the claim.

    While PDP has dismissed the impact, and vowed to forge ahead with the convention, we wait to see whether the claim if proved to be true, would affect the veracity of the notice required to be sent to INEC before a convention can be validly held by a political party. While Anyanwu is seeking the prosecution of the party leaders, over the alleged forgery, it is instructive that no party official has come forward to renounce the alleged forgery of the signature of the party secretary.

    Less than four weeks to the date slated for the convention, the court has asked the parties to maintain status quo, pending the determination of the suit. Of note, Justice Omotosho, has promised to determine the substantive suit by the end of October, so the parties would know their fate. If he gives the party the go ahead, to hold the convention, the challenges over party delegates, the alleged forged signature and other issues, would continue to becloud the convention.

    Interestingly, there are diehards in the party who have maintained that the party would survive all the challenges and come out stronger. Apart from the governors of Bauchi and Oyo states, there is the elder statesman Chief Olabode George of Lagos State. There is also the latest alliance between Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim and former Senate President Bukola Saraki, to work together. On the reverse side, recently the governors of Enugu and Bayelsa states have left the party, and their colleague in Taraba, Agbu Kefas, is touted to be on his way out of the party.                                   

    The ADC which the promoters had said would provide the opposition to the APC, when juxtaposed against the indices of potential greatness, so far, is akin to the despondency of Macbeth in the Shakespearean play, of the same title: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In that play, Macbeth had made the exclamation on the hopelessness of his life, when he heard that his wife, Lady Macbeth had committed suicide. This column believes that those who believed the hype by the promoters of ADC, may now exhibit such despondency.

    The other party which got some elixir, in the 2023 general election, the Labour Party, has been left high and dry, with an “enemy chairman” in charge of the party. At the last INEC meeting with party chairmen, Barrister Julius Abure, who has fallen out with the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the former presidential candidate of the party, Peter Obi, and the only party governor, Alex Otti, was ensconced in the chair reserved for Labour Party.

  • PDP: Old stab, new gash

    PDP: Old stab, new gash

    Idowu Akinlotan, the muse of “Palladium”, The Nation Sunday back-page column, near-prophetically declared the PDP won’t die: “Defections and wind of change”, October 19.  Maybe he is right?

    But except he used PDP as the opposition generic (as it was in the late 1960s/1970s, when the defunct Daily Times was so dominant it passed as a credible generic for other newspaper titles) — and not as PDP qua PDP — he just might be wrong.

    How?  Well, the Alliance for Democracy (AD), home to Yoruba pro-democracy heroes, and National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) veterans that wore a chip on their shoulders, as arch-conquerors of Sani Abacha and his political army goons, also died.  The AD died when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) delisted it on 6 February 2020

    Yet, in 1999, AD swept well-nigh everything there was to win in the South West, just as PDP, the special purpose vehicle (SPV) for the fleeing military, fearing a civil order puritanical backlash, made hay in other areas of Nigeria, save the defunct All People’s Party (APP, later, ANPP: All Nigeria People’s Party) redoubts mainly in the North.

    But Palladium was right on one score: even if PDP, as we know it now withers, the opposition won’t necessarily die with it. 

    There is a strain of AD in the present ruling APC (recall this chain: AD-Action Congress, AC,-Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN,-and finally, All Progressives Congress, APC). So, the PDP will also morph into some future opposition coalition.  The first stage of that is already manifested in the new SPV, African Democratic Congress (ADC).

    Therein then lies Paladium’s basic point: Nigeria would hardly succumb to a one-party rule, the hysteria the scattered opposition are now bleating, for cheap sympathy.  But with the havoc PDP had wreaked on Nigeria, may they long endure their blues!

    But even with its present bind, the opposition may yet, in future, clutch back at power.  That would power Nigeria’s democracy, as other global democracies that experience periodic power changes, by sheer voter power: for or against the ruling order.

    Yet, it’s joy, perverse and impish, seeing the PDP that, between 2001 and 2003, went berserk to kill the AD, now grouching, mourning and moaning, going through what seems the final dance of its own death!

    Indeed, it’s a classic comeuppance: the old cruel stabs PDP dealt the AD, and these no less ruthless gashes PDP is being dealt too! What goes around comes around!

    No less thrilling too: the two main orchestrators of the AD death and burial are very much alive, to see the PDP grand unravelling and chaotic meltdown.

    One is former President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007).  To, “by  force, by fire” seize a South West base, he must subvert and eventually kill the AD.

    The other is the martial Chief Olabode George, in their power heyday, Obasanjo’s dashing viceroy, in their joint scramble to “capture” Lagos!  Old man George did not retire as Navy Commodore for nothing!

    In that campaign was indeed mutual bliss: Bode George’s trophy as PDP National Vice-Chairman (South West) was nothing without the glorious vice of “capturing” — his very word! — his native Lagos!  Operation Capture Lagos was a task that must be done!

    For his imperial Abuja principal, seizing the crown jewel of Lagos was a worthwhile gambit: to consummate the grand surrender of his native South West which people, by the dire presidential results of 1999, didn’t exactly love him.  Indeed, they scorned him. 

    But the more the South West scorn, the harder Obasanjo’s will to crush!  PDP was the armoured vehicle.  George was the fearsome field commander.  AD was the nuisance to be squelched.  2003 was the year! 

    Mission accomplished?  Not quite! The South West did fall. But the crown jewel proved a bridge too far!  George would later tell Daily Champion (3 June 2025), though: “We also won Lagos but the result was manipulated.” Well, arch-delusion is democratic!

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    The same PDP opposition nemesis in 2003 is the same ruling party PDP nemesis now: Bola Tinubu, then the Governor of Lagos, now, the President of the Federal Republic!

    In closet, former President Obasanjo would wail for whatever befalls the PDP today, though the Owu chief makes a huge show of his divorce from partisan politics.

    Yes, the PDP might have been an Army Arrangement SPV, which was why Obasanjo, George, David Mark and other retired political soldiers, were very prominent in its ranks.  So, when folks wax poetic over some PDP founding ideals, Ripples just yawns! 

    The PDP “founding ideals” were nothing beyond power and how to grab it.  That was why it made a hash of governance for 16 ruinous years; and even a greater mess of the opposition, these last 10 years, since it lost power in 2015.

    Even then, ex-President Obasanjo knows the PDP, no matter how vacuous, would still have turned out far better, without the inglorious anti-democratic manouevres, under his watch, that further denuded the former ruling party. 

    But God has spared his life, to witness the mess he created, in its final putrescence!

    Chief George lacks such closet luxury: hence his dramatic collapse in public, at the defection of Peter Mbah, the Enugu governor and ex-PDP wonder boy of Wawa country. 

    To boot: Mbah reeled out his strides, in infrastructure and sundry achievements, in his PDP sack speech, to boisterous applause on October 14.  The next day, Bayelsa’s Duoye Diri drove another knife into the PDP spine. You can imagine the further meltdown in the George camp!

    The sheer anguish from the old man: “The governor” — meaning Mbah — “we all waded in … You’ll get whatever is due to the South East,” he told Channels TV, “But the rationale and emphasis he gave, it was like I was in a very long dream” — the same long dreams that the AD fellows felt in the PDP glory days!  All is turned gory now!

    But not even that would stop the old man from crunching sour grapes; and putting on a sheen the PDP never had — or would ever have — given its dire public record, both in power and in opposition. 

    “We’ll campaign, go to the field,” he blustered, “and tell Nigerians what the APC has done or failed to do to put smiles on their faces …”

    Pray, what glorious legacy might PDP campaign on?  Galloping corruption that nearly sunk Nigeria in 2015? 

    Or the eternal fumbling as opposition: that childish, silly penchant to lie, bare-faced, about its past, thinking folks are too fickle to remember its horrors-in-government?

    A very good luck on that!  With old habits, this PDP might just be beyond redemption!

    The opposition, victim of PDP’s use of brute power, is the same under which the PDP now grinds!  So, it too should know a future life in opposition is very possible!

    Which is why it must learn from the PDP bind.  That’s the only way it can, in future, avert the PDP current blight.

    Multiple governors swelling the APC ranks are good for optics.  But the real deal will be the ruling order domesticating the gains of its reforms in most, if not all, households. 

    On that, from the data coming up, it has the momentum. But it’s time to go for the kill, make the people happy, and kill off any opposition dream to milk subversive sympathy, in the run to 2027.  

  • Tinubu’s strength: Reward for party loyalty

    Tinubu’s strength: Reward for party loyalty

    Loyalty is political party’s highest badge of honour. Therefore parties hardly invest in those with shifting loyalty. Of course the party oligarchy made up investors, former office holders, current office holders, also have obligations to party members. What therefore sustains political party is members’ trust that their leader will always do the right thing.

    If APC has in recent months become an irresistible refuge for PDP and Labour Party elected members trying to escape from what President Bola Tinubu describes as a sinking ship without life jacket, it is precisely that they found trust in APC and its leadership which unfortunately was absent in PDP during their 16 years of war of attrition, called family wars over the sharing of our national resources. Although President Tinubu had said as a democrat, he was not expected to reject anyone trying to escape from a sinking ship, I am sure he must have today become overwhelmed by what seems to have become a tsunami.

    The irony is that APC is an amalgam of strange bedfellow made up ACN with progressive world outlook, Muhammadu Buhari’s ultraconservative CPC, a faction of ANPP and APGA joined by a faction of PDP led by Atiku Abubakar and a few PDP governors bent on bringing down their party over the sharing of proceeds of fuel subsidy scam. In fact, leading members of PDP including the late Doyin Okupe, President Obasanjo’s erstwhile attack dog, swore APC would implode after three months. Rather, the party has gone on to uproot PDP that had boasted to govern for 60 years, from power in 2015 and defeated it round and square in a keenly contested 2023 election because of the usual greed of leading light of the party which led to its splintering into three factions on the eve of what Obasanjo would have described in his days as ‘do or die election’.

    But if it is going to be of any relief to PDP, they must be told that what stood out for APC was a group of loyal party members led by Bola Tinubu who understands the role of political party as modernization agent in the 20th century. Indeed this group of loyal party men and women did not include the late President Buhari, Tinubu’s collaborator during the 2013 APC formation. Buhari neither loved politicians neither did he see political party beyond a tool for attaining political power.

    Tinubu as APC leader was never discouraged by internal betrayals and party in intrigues. He remained a committed party man even after Nasir El Rufai and some PDP stalwarts, who, Buhari’s wife claimed had no idea about APC manifesto, prevented an access to an ‘un-electable’ Buhari he carried on his back around the country, he remained a committed party man as against NCNC and NPP of first and second republics who for similar reason pupped down their coalition.

    As a loyal party man, he was on hand to dance around Nigeria with Adam Oshiomhole for Buhari’s re-election. He remained steadfast and worked for Burari’s re-election. But not long after this, betrayal came from his southwest serving and former governors he had invested heavily on. Driven by ambition, they bought the dummy sold by Buhari’s Abuja loyal gatekeepers of automatic presidential ticket once their principal was out of the way. They soon joined hands with their principal’s potential rivals, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, Rotimi Amaechi and his political foes including El Rufai and Governor Boni, to illegally remove Oshiomhole as APC chairman thereby preventing their principal’s access to a party in which he was by far the greatest investor.

    If President Tinubu took risk to remove the fuel subsidy scam which allowed criminals in shining suits to rape Nigeria using NUPENG and PENGASSON  to inflict suffering and untold hardship on Nigerians, facts available to his predecessors who did not have the courage to rescue Nigeria, it was because Tinubu has his party behind him.

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    If he frontally confronted the bank owners, principal owners of society and Godwin Emefiele their CBN governor-collaborator and others who became billionaires overnight as a result of foreign exchange round tripping, it was because he was sure his party would shield him from dangerous sharks.

    If he dared states and LGAs to whom much resources had been deployed to do more for their people at the grassroots level, it was because he knew his party has faith in him as an independent arbiter when it comes to the sharing of resources.

    Governor Peter Mba of Enugu’s principal reason for joining the Tinubu train besides the vexxed issue of Igbo voice not being heard when it mattered most, was “seeking affiliation where our interest as a region are represented in the form of fair partnership” and our vision is heard at the federal level. Mba in summary was talking about trust since “Igbo DNA does not change; their “destiny does not change; even while their “vision now finds stronger reinforcement at the federal level”.

    For Governors Oborevwori’s “the decision to align with APC is strategic and thoughtful move driven by a singular objective: to fast-track Delta State development through enhanced collaboration with the federal government”.

    But I think his predecessor Senator Okowa captured it better.

    “People wondered why, but in the history of a people, there is always a time to change their path for the common good of the people, and whatever decision we took was based on that common good and the need to change our path in the best interest of our state”.  It is just as well if APC is the instrument Delta whose successive leaders have been accused and in fact indicted for frittering away billions that would have changed the lives of impoverished people of Delta for better, in underwriting campaign expenses of President Umaru Yar’Adua in 2007 and allegedly, Atiku Abubakar in 2023. I think it will be a big relief for a people whose leaders including the late Augustus Aikhomu and ex-president Jonathan did not see stealing government money as corruption.

    Akwa Ibom governor, Pastor Umoh Eno went biblical by aligning himself with the children of Issachar in the Holy Bible who were able to interpret the times and flow with the tide by declaring “I have progressively moved to All Progressives Congress (APC) I have changed my political affiliation; we are support the president for second term in office to complete reforms he has started”.

    Everything boils down to trust.

    Nigeria has been haunted by lack of elite consensus since the run up to independence with the tenuous one secured through the British stick and carrot approach collapsing barely two years into independence. The result was a descent into turmoil of warring groups starting with Isaac Boro’s Niger Delta insurrection, the Middle Belt violent resistance, military coups, and pogrom; civil war, and 30 years of military dictatorship. And when they were finally humiliated out of power in 1999, they replaced themselves with military-baked “new breed politician’ who behave like military occupation. In what they often describe as ‘family quarrel’, they spent 16 years fighting over illegal sharing of the resources kept in their temporary care. The era witnessed the privatization scandal through which Nigeria’s total investment of over $100b was according to House probe, sold to PDP stalwarts for $1.5b; fuel subsidy scandal through which PDP leading light and their children embarked on monumental theft of the nation’s resources.

    President Jonathan unbundled PHCN after government’s injection of billions of taxpayers’ monies and sold them to PDP stalwarts. They even in the name of dubious monetization policy sold properties dating back to pre-independence period kept in their care for our children to themselves.

    President Tinubu, of all our past leaders, is today in a unique position to address the source of the nation’s nightmare. With those who have moved into his APC in droves with the party now in control of 72 senators in the red chamber, 265 in the green chamber and 24 of the 36 state governors, he should be able to leverage on those who have claimed to be driven by his courage to take hard decisions on behalf of the nation.

    He has shown by his institutionalisation of six development commissions that he doesn’t need to go back to 1957 or 1963 that we and our fathers have agitated for in the last 50 years. His former political foes now turned political collaborators are all he needs to prevail on National Assembly to legitimize the development commissions as federating states with central police patterned after Amotekun of southwest with local and community police holding sway in the states.

  • Between Gumi and Sowore

    Between Gumi and Sowore

    Two separate events penultimate week, drew attention to the responses of Nigerian authorities to the festering multi-dimensional insecurity in the country. The first was the peace agreement brokered by the United States of America (USA) which ushered in a ceasefire and release of hostages in the two-year old war between Israel and Hamas.

    Though Nigeria had no role in the agreement leading to the cessation of hostilities, albeit temporarily, Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi saw parallels between that event and possible solutions to the unabating banditry in the country. In a Facebook post, he had said, “Peace between Israel and Hamas they term as terrorist brokered by USA. Who said there is no peace with terrorists? Make peace with bandits and let us have peace”.

    The reading of that comparison is that, if Israel can enter into a peace accord with a known terrorist organisation like the Hamas, there is no reason the Nigerian authorities cannot work out a peace plan with the bandits and restore order in the country. There is some sense in it.

    It is also suggestive of Gumi’s frustrations with the current military campaign against banditry. He did not disclose the shape of the peace proposal. But the fiery Islamic scholar is known to have at different times called for amnesty for the bandits to lay down their arms.

    Engaging in peaceful negotiations with the bandits would seem plausible especially if issues to the conflict are clearly known. But do the bandits have issues to resolve with the Nigerian state? If yes, what are those issues? I shall return to it.

    The second is the proposed peaceful protest march to Aso Rock Villa on October 20, by activist and publisher of Sahara Reporters, Omoyele Sowore for the unconditional release of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).

    Though Sowore had some weeks back, made public his intention to galvanise support for the campaign, he has been visibly mobilising for the protest march. Available reports indicate that he has been securing the buy-in of some notable Nigerians including students’ bodies against the continued incarceration of Kanu in the past four years.

    In a viral video in which he appeared with the special counsel to Kanu, Aloy Ejimakor, among other activists, Sowore was seen querying the rationale for Kanu’s continued detention in the face of the clemency granted some categories of convicts among the 172 Nigerians pardoned for various offences. He is contending that if the heinous crimes committed by some of the convicts could be pardoned under the president’s prerogative of mercy, there does not seem further justification for Kanu not to benefit from such reprieve.

    There is a convergence of views between Gumi and Sowore on the path to resolving the insecurity in the country. Gumi believes bandits could still be engaged to lay down their arms and embrace peace despite being termed a terrorist organisation. This to him promises a better approach to ending the scourge of banditry that has left sorrow and awe in parts of the northwest.

    Gumi may have been led to this position by his knowledge of the bandits, given that a few years ago, he visited their camps in Zamfara forests where he interfaced with some of their leaders. Some of the bandits’ leaders who spoke during that visit cited cattle rustling, attacks by the military and being beaten up by the indigenous people of the state while on the road as their grievances.

    Then also, Gumi had called on the federal government to grant amnesty to enable them lay down their arms and embrace peace. But that did not happen apparently because of the difficulty in deciphering their proper grouse with the government, except the military attacks to contain their menace.

    But banditry has since metastasized with the government unable to contain the monster. This has compelled communities in some of the affected states to enter into some form of peace accords with the bandits for peace to reign. The most recent was the accord in the Subuwa Local Government Area of Katsina State in which traditional rulers and communities engaged directly with some of the bandits to foster dialogue and peace. Before now, a traditional ruler in one of the states was suspended but later reinstated for entering into similar peace accord with the bandits to allow local farmers access to their farms. Nobody can give a vivid account of the efficacy of such ad hoc peace agreements.

    But their lure inexorably highlights the helplessness of the local people in the hands of the bandits. And in existential challenges like this, it is difficult to fault those entering into such agreements in the face of the inability of the governments to maintain law and order in the affected communities. When Gumi canvassed amnesty or peace accord with the bandits, he may have been guided by this reality.

    The case of the IPOB and Kanu is more straightforward in the sense that the leadership is identifiable and their cause known as well. But the grouse Sowore and all those rooting for the IPOB leaders’ release have is with his continued incarceration for over four year without conviction by the courts. Sowore argues that with some of the names that benefitted from presidential clemency, it has become difficult to find justification for Kanu’s continued detention.

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    Expectedly, issues have been raised from government quarters regarding the propriety of such demands with the current court case in which Kanu is standing trial for alleged terrorism. Some other private individuals have even gone to the length of holding Kanu allegedly responsible for the killings in the southeast following the insecurity that trailed the self-determination agitations. They would want the courts to sort out his case before the issue of pardon could arise. They are all entitled to their views.

    But such antagonistic views fail to state how his conviction and possible jail will resolve the insecurity in the region, especially when weighed against the non-kinetic strategies of the same government to Boko Haram insurgency. Kanu has been in the custody of the DSS for over four years now and arraigned in various courts without being convicted.

    There is nothing preventing the committee on the prerogative of mercy from recommending his release among the 172 persons granted presidential clemency. There is also nothing preventing the president releasing him in the overall national interest if he decides to do so. If four years of detention and trials could to resolve the insecurity in the southeast, it remains to be conjectured what a jail term can do.

    Besides, the demand for a political solution to the Kanu saga is not new. Nearly everybody that matters in the southeast had at various times lent their unequivocal voices for the release of Kanu to deny oxygen to the band of criminals hiding under IPOB to commit crimes.

    The Ohanaeze Ndigbo sent delegations to the immediate past president to give guarantees for his freedom. But the most touching was the delegation led by first republic minister and elder statesman, Mbazulike Amechi, to late President Buhari on the eve of his 94th birthday in 2022 pleading for the release of Kanu to him as a birthday gift.

    There is nothing wrong in Kanu benefitting from the presidential clemency as part of the solutions to the insecurity in the southeast. The parallels drawn by Gumi and Sowore should not be wished away. Not with subsisting challenges in containing the nation’s insecurity.

  • King of tractor

    King of tractor

    He is named the king of tractors. Governor Mohammed Umar Bago, the helmsman of Niger State, has pushed himself to the forefront as the chief farmer of his state. He is called farmer governor. Niger State is such a vast land that it is big enough to feed the whole country. The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs invited him to give a keynote address on World Food Day. It was not a day to make a barn of rice but to say that he has knotted a deal with Dangote for over  a trillion Naira farm. It is not a day to feed Lagos, but he announced a deal with the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu for a N500 billion deal to make Niger State the farm and Lagos the barn. Lagos has the top appetite in the nation, so it made sense for food and mouth to coalesce.

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    He also spoke of his state as the capital of shea in the world, and President Bola Tinubu has proclaimed no to shea export. So, we can take it through its full value chain to the consumer. His address raises a point, though. He spoke of many crops going to waste for lack of use. How can excess cohabit with hunger? That is why he stresses, in tandem with many like Kaduna’s Governor Uba Sani, for infrastructure, storage and investment. The king of tractor is undertaking a royal trip to food sufficiency. Safe trip, farmer governor.