The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Trump becomes bull in a China shop

Two contrasting theories have been advanced to explain United States president Donald Trump’s greed for foreign lands and resources. One, that his rapaciousness accords with his private and natural inclination for coveting other peoples properties. Alarmingly for the rest of the world, this greed sits very well with America’s historical fundamentals that saw their founding fathers seize and expropriate native Indian and Mexican lands. For both the US and Mr Trump, eyeing, co-opting and seizing other people’s resources have become an existential necessity. Mr Trump knows no other way of existence than to plunder and pillage, while explaining that malfeasance away as a display of strength in a world populated by weak, undeserving and expendable people. His private business is a litany of plunder, and his personal life an exemplification of cruelty and unscrupulousness. It, therefore, gives him immense pleasure to now sit atop the American throne and project that greed around the world, receiving plane gifts here, signing private and national contracts there, and attempting to buy or coerce lands in Greenland or elsewhere for the US.

A second explanation relates to what some experts have described as the strategic projection of America’s national security interest. America now has a president totally averse to democracy and one who has not once enunciated any lofty ideal of democracy. Seizing Venezuelan oil, dispensing with that country’s controversial and repressive leader Nicolas Maduro, and exerting total and long-term control over the world’s largest deposit of crude oil is said to be a ploy to weaken China, neutralise Russia and Iran, and determine the price of oil. But China is transiting to clean energy at a bewildering rate, buying over 11 million electric vehicles of the 18.5m sold globally, at a time when the US is fixated on oil production at home and engaged in costly military adventures for oil abroad. Years ago, former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had explained American hostility to his country as inspired by the desire to control Venezuelan oil. While that desire has finally been accomplished, and regardless of the pacification of Venezuela’s weak, colluding and greedy elite, no one can accurately what the long-term consequences would be.

Many European countries have equivocated on the US attack on Venezuela, blaming the victim for its domestic antidemocratic practices, repression of the opposition, and rigged elections. But nothing really justifies US outlawry, for as it has become immediately obvious, Mr Trump who ordered the attack on Caracas had no interest whatsoever in democracy, fair elections or the rule of law. He knew what he wanted, and he had the boldness and defiance to go for it. In 1938 and 1939, much of Europe also condoned the adventurism of Adolf Hitler whose policy of Germany’s living space or Lebensraum took the continent apart and sucked the world into a devastating maelstrom. The predictable end was a war that led to the death of an estimated 50-80 million people, nearly half of whom were civilians. The world sees a disturbing parallel between Mr Trump and Hitler, but it is unclear how a vacillating Europe, which has also been bullied and derided by the American president, sees him. The US president expresses the fear that he might be impeached should his unpopular policies lead to the Republicans losing the midterm elections. In other words, he is already signaling that the ossification of US political divisions could be exploited to thwart democratic change.

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The world order has been destroyed, as this column concluded last week, but eventually the US will face resistance, and from resistance will flow alliances that will inevitably trigger another major conflagration. Great war is the natural outcome of the destruction of world order, a cyclical inevitability to redefine, reorder and impose a new global order, whether it has the capacity to last or not. For now, the US has lost virtually all its friends as well as global respect, accompanied by the even heftier losses of democratic ideals and cultural imperialism it had projected for decades. Mr Trump’s first term was viewed as an aberration. His second term, not to say his domestic popularity that is underscored by racism, has cemented the view of America as an imperialist bully, a danger to world peace for its scores of sponsored terrorism against many countries, and completely destitute of the principles and ideals it had sold the world. Might had always been right, as history shows, but that might remained right only until a mightier force came along. From the Assyrians to the Babylonians, and on to the Chaldeans, and then the Greeks and Romans, it is a long, bloody history of one empire usurping another.

The world is not about to shed its toga and change its trajectory. As contemporary history shows, particularly as exampled by the despairing responses of France’s Emmanuel Macron to the US provocation, Britain’s keir Starmer’s, and Kemi Badenoch’s feeble twaddle over the morality of the attack, there are few brilliant and perceptive leaders left anywhere. Great leaders were not always in abundant supply even before now; but the scarcity is now so sever and punishing that the world must blanch with horror at the ubiquitousness of mediocre leadership. The US president has shown that the world is clearly more endangered by visionless and incompetent leadership than by the challenges nations relentlessly face, whether economic, social or political.

January 11, 2026
Obi’s defection sets teeth on edge

It took former Anambra governor Peter Obi over 2,600 words, about the size of a full newspaper page, to craft a simple defection (or what seems like defection) from his former party to the so-called mega opposition coalition, the African Democratic Congress (ADC). The statement was not just verbosity on display, it was the clearest indication of the dithering that buffets his politics and how deeply puzzled he gets when grappling with complex issues and entities. His experience in the Labour Party (LP), whose standard-bearer he was in the 2023 presidential election, concretises the general lacuna of his life and politics. As far back as the end of the third quarter of 2025, it was clear that Mr Obi’s stay in LP had become untenable. But he wanted ironclad assurances in the ADC regarding the presidential ticket for the 2027 poll. Yet, no one would give him that undertaking despite his Obidient Movement predicating their fanatical support for him on nothing less than the number one ticket.

The party primaries are now a few months away. To continue dithering would mean being stranded next year. So, Mr Obi has finally taken the plunge, but has needed circumlocutions and considerable blather to salve his troubled conscience and convince his ardent crowd that he remains the real deal. So he was impelled to say nothing, which his defection statement amounted to, in grand terms that fetch his amorphous band of supporters from their delusions. The supporters are, however, still agitated. They tentatively hinge their support for him on his taking the presidential ticket, not the running mate position. How they would react when it becomes obvious that the Camorra which runs the ADC had been pledged to former vice president Atiku Abubakar lock, stock, and barrel, remains to be seen. They can, if they wish, bolt from the party or reappraise their jaded philosophies about party politics. If the former, they would be committing suicide; and if the latter, they would be emptying themselves of the passion that frenzies their irrationalities.

Either way, Mr Obi is headed for very interesting times. He will make a grand show of contesting the presidential ticket not many months from now, but he knows deep down that that battle is lost and won already. He had been preceded in the ADC by the political aurochs from Adamawa State, a head start backed by financial wizardry and assured outcomes. Mr Obi can certainly not hope to upstage him, even if he managed, together with his baying crowd, to create an atmosphere in the party and in the country conducive to only a southern presidential candidate. The jobholders that flocked into the party along with Alhaji Atiku are not interested in Mr Obi’s vexing parsimony; they instead salivate for the former vice president’s munificence, and can breathe better under his inattentiveness to detail. Well, all said, Mr Obi is now irretrievably locked in the same boat with Alhaji Atiku and the ADC. It does not matter any longer whether the opposition craft is seaworthy or not.

Indications of the despondency and desperation that led the former Anambra governor to take the fateful step of hitching a ride with the ADC in 2027 abound in his rambling disquisition on democracy, defection, and patriotism. His statement was replete with value judgement, name-calling, unverified facts, simplistic reasoning, untested theories, and sweeping and sanctimonious generalisations. Winning elections at a state level or being elevated to the governorship office does not often tax a politician’s profundity; so, it was not surprising that Mr Obi took the Anambra stool. Manipulate the electorate’s emotions, conjure the right catchphrases, posture as the moral right in a sea of moral wrongs, and add some religious or cultural ketchup, and a governorship candidate is made. But transiting to a higher level has, however, proved daunting for him, despite exploiting the country’s dangerous religious cleavages. To aspire higher, he would need to manifest philosophical depth, network across the country’s geopolitical zones, and develop a solid and verifiable cross-cultural appeal. These have proved too much for his short-termist approach to politics.

In his presumed defection statement, Mr Obi gave an indication of how his mind worked. He was already thinking of the presidency and campaigning for the presidential ticket. He used more than two-thirds of the statement to angle for the top job, when it was not clear that he had registered with the ADC already. After profusely de-marketing Nigeria and concluding it had been consigned to the dregs, after describing its institutions, particularly the electoral commission INEC, as weak and perhaps unsalvageable, he spoke glowingly of how other nations rose to prominence and development through ‘unity and effective leadership’, ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’, and ‘responsiveness’. He regurgitated the street mendacity about the current Nigerian government attempting to turn the nation into a one-party state simply because of political defections, which culture he himself exploited to his advantage on at least three occasions, and he also parroted the ignorance about taxing the poor obviously because he had not read the new tax laws. And then he waxed theoretical about development indices of some south-east Asian countries without explaining why he was unable to apply, even partially, the rubric of those theories in Anambra which he governed for eight unremarkable years.

The statement was also full of non-sequiturs, drawing direct relationship between ‘grabbing power and mismanaging it’, and suggesting that his travels and interactions with intellectuals and leaders had opened his eyes to how nations develop, an epiphany he believed would serve him well as he had become equipped for leadership. Had it been so easy to transcend the chasm between theory and practice, every professor would be a great statesman. But just before he dropped his pen, he finally got to the subject of his defection, in the third or so paragraph to the last. For this peripatetic politician who just trotted the globe so effortlessly and spoke so glibly about everything, and inflated himself with the helium of leadership theories spanning three continents, he failed his own test of predicating great leadership on honesty. He had at various fora insisted he was still in the LP, and claimed he was only testing the waters in the ADC. But in his defection statement, he dishonestly claimed: “Having been part of the coalition from inception, I now respectfully call on my political leaders, associates, supporters, the Obidient Movement, political leaders and members of the opposition parties across the country to join this broad national coalition under the African Democratic Congress led by Sen. David Mark.”

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He forgot that newspapers of the day contained reports of ADC leaders and so many other politicians urging him to make public his defection, especially as he had waffled over his continuing membership of the LP. Well, better late than never. He will now presumably go ahead and register with the ADC and intensify his campaign for the presidential ticket. But if he is again worsted in the presidential primary, he will have nowhere else to go. He will lick his wounds, aware that those who seized the leadership of the ADC had done so at the behest of Alhaji Atiku, and are in no mood to subsume their future or hope under the politics and style of a former LP man from whom they could not hope to make hay while the sun shines at its brightest.

Yet, in all this, there is a catch somewhere, and Mr Obi may perhaps be more disingenuous than some Nigerians think. His former running mate in the 2023 presidential poll, Datti Baba-Ahmed, seems to know him more than anyone else. He knows him, it appears, as a man full of vacillation. Speaking to the media late last week, he insisted that it did not seem as if Mr Obi had actually defected. What he thinks the former LP standard-bearer had done was to merely tune his mind to be in a coalition arrangement with the ADC. If Mr Obi fails to get the ticket, swears Mr Baba-Ahmed, the doors of the LP will remain open, and any support he wants will be given to him. The other side of the coin, however, is that Mr Obi lionised his association with the ADC right from the beginning, thus giving the impression he was not a late joiner. Yet, curiously, he said little else, in a manner that also suggests he is minded to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. What then are Nigerians, and particularly ADC chieftains, to make of Mr Obi’s encouragement to his support base to ‘join this broad coalition under the ADC led by Sen. Mark’?

Since Mr Baba-Ahmed has now burst everyone’s bubble, ADC leaders will likely press Mr Obi to clarify his association with the so-called mega coalition. If the former Anambra governor goes ahead to register at his ward, they will call for no additional proof and will regard any suspicion as crying wolf where none exists. But if he pussyfoots as is his custom, then they will smell a rat and press him to commit himself. What seems to be the case is that Mr Obi is hedging his bets. He is merely procrastinating as usual, unable to make up his mind as firmly as many, and probably himself, hope. He is disillusioned with the crisis-ridden LP, and can see no alternative in sight. But he thinks he still has in his corner the captive audience that gave him 12 states and the FCT in the 2023 presidential poll, in the same way the hallucinating Buharistas think they still have a captive 12 million votes that can be whimsically deployed during any election.

But deep down, Mr Obi probably senses his goose is already cooked. He has, therefore, shamefacedly committed himself to the ADC without making it sound so, in delicate literary half measures. He half boyishly expects that by some celestial intervention, Alhaji Atiku would in the course of events be unhorsed and he would be presented the ticket on a platter. Politics may have magical charms, but it is not magic. Alhaji Atiku realises this, and has now fully committed himself to the ADC after first taken refuge and playing politics in press statements. It is Mr Obi’s turn to chafe at how nature and political circumstances have dealt him a cruel hand.

January 11, 2026
Venezuela attack: Trump destroys world order

Yesterday was seismically significant as President Donald Trump ordered United States Special Forces nighttime operation to seize Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife. They have been flown to the US to be tried, according to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, in US courts. Charges had previously been filed against Mr Maduro in the US in 2020. The bombing of Iran last year, the airstrike on Nigeria last Christmas, the abduction of Mr Maduro, and the torrent of threats Mr Trump issued against US traditional allies and foes alike are all indications of the upending of the rules-based global order in favour of a power-based world order. Long after the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century had established the concept of sovereignty, among other variables, as the foundation of global peace and stability, the world order was nevertheless repeatedly broken at least four times in the past two centuries. Each time the order was broken, war followed. Mr Trump is about rounding up his first year in office; by the time he is through, it is uncertain what would be left of the global order, or how long it would take for the consequences of his disruptions and dictatorship to manifest.

Mr Trump may be picking on small and less powerful nations incapable of retaliating against the US, but by balkanising the world into two camps, pro-US and anti-US, and by first alienating his allies before taking on his enemies, the American president may be setting the stage for his country’s isolation and vulnerability. The US may have the most powerful military in the world at the moment, but until it is truly tested by near equals, no one can say whether the US military is as invincible as Mr Trump has repeatedly boasted. Until Russia took on Ukraine in 2022, few expected that even with external help Kiev could last for as much as it has done, one month shy of four years. Russia has so far failed to expand its sphere of influence, and if peace is finally brokered, it will have gained only a little territory at the cost of over 300,000 men. China is not content to maintain its huge and expanding zone of economic influence. If it makes a bid for Taiwan, there are no indications it would not be a very costly misadventure.

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The Saturday morning attack on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, lasted barely 30 minutes before the country’s leadership was decapitated. No one is sure whether the US would make no other move, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised, or whether the ease with which the abduction took place would tempt Mr Trump into something more far-reaching and catastrophic. However, the attack followed months of sabre rattling as the American president baited President Maduro, and weeks of gunboat diplomacy that effectively shut-in an already distressed Venezuela in a crippling economic blockade. Back in 2020, in the Southern District of New York, Mr Maduro had been indicted in a US federal court on charges that included narco-terrorism and possession of weapons against the US. Additional charges might now be included in a fresh indictment. Like Panama’s Manuel Noriega who was also seized exactly 35 years ago during the presidency of George H. Bush, it is clear that no one can save Mr Maduro: he will face the charges, and he will get a guilty verdict, for the US had expended so much resources in abducting him.

But the unlawful arrest and trial of Mr Maduro is the smallest of the world’s headaches. Since the advent of President Trump, and for the past one year, the United Nations (UN) has been shunted aside, forced to reenact the dying throes of the League of Nations, its voice reduced to little more than whispers. And when it manages to speak loudly, it sermonises. It will get worse in the months and years ahead. The US under Mr Trump has forsaken soft power in favour of brute force. Unopposed, its enemies and friends alike cowering before it, the sole surviving superpower will flaunt its wealth and throw its power in everyone’s face. It may in the short term limit himself to taking on less powerful and non-nuclear countries, but ultimately it will look for formidable opponents. President Trump has no sense of history, nor even studied history, and has paid little attention to the principles that undergird the rules-based order he is dismantling. So his instincts, short attention span, and what a psychologist called his malignant narcissism, will conjure the deadly spasms the world must experience in the years ahead.

But overall, Mr Trump is a historical accident. Men like him have ruled empires, destroyed empires, and reshaped the world in ways neither they nor their successors, nor the rest of the region which they dominated, anticipated. For instance, the Assyrian Empire which peaked between 10th to 7th centuries BCE under rulers like Assurmasirpal II, Tiglath-Pilesar III, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal may have collapsed as a direct consequence of a 60-year megadrought experienced in the 6th century BCE, but it took only three months for Babylon to overrun it and sack Nineveh, the capital, because the empire had become weakened by a combination of many factors. Take a roll call of powerful empires and kingdoms, and observe the eerie parallel with Mr Trump’s shallow understanding of power, regional and global dynamics, and the internal factors that conduce to or corrode state power. It will be evident that the empires of the Romans, Mongols, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Persians, and the Greeks tell cautionary tales. But it takes a leader schooled in the art and dynamics of power to safeguard an empire. Mr Trump is not adept or schooled. It is a matter of time before the world and circumstances take on the might of the US.

Most condemnations of the abduction of Mr Maduro will be tame, for the prevailing unipolar world cannot withstand Mr Trump’s destructive projection of power. Nigeria was fortunate to get away with a face-saving joint attack on terrorists targets in the Tangaza forests of Sokoto State last Christmas. Had the US decided to go it alone, Nigeria would have been powerless to raise a finger. Even the Nigerian promoters of religious hegemony and ethnic exceptionalism as well as sponsors of terrorism had suddenly become deathly quiet. Had Nigeria united behind its leaders and managed its differences well, no outsider could attack. Had Venezuela united behind its controversial and flawed leader, the US would have thought twice before embarking on the crude and insane colonial exploitation it has embarked upon.

In the end, the ultimate consequence of the demolition of a rules-based global order is the rekindling of global arms race. Small and medium level countries will from now onwards strive to develop weapons capable of projecting power on such a scale that even the big powers would think twice about meddling in their affairs. North Korea did it, and has been left alone. Iran needed brilliant and circumspect leaders to do it, but it made a lot of noise, threatened genocide against Israel, and showed itself to be a regional nuisance. It will need time and perhaps change in leadership and ideology to be able to achieve military self-sufficiency and political latitude. Other ambitious countries will quietly take the lessons of history made possible in real time by the US to rearm. In the end, like every era when the world order was undermined, war will be inevitable.

January 4, 2026
Needless, partisan bickering over tax laws

Two main reasons explain the ongoing bickering over Nigeria’s new tax laws promulgated last year after intensive and bad-tempered legislative and political processes. One, few people like to pay tax. The new tax laws make evasion difficult. Two, and closely leashed to the first, financial dealings previously conducted largely outside prying tax eyes will also become difficult to hide. Indeed, before the four bills were transmitted to President Bola Tinubu mid-June, they had inspired animated discussions and disagreements among the political class, and sometimes across regional lines. Even the National Economic Council (NEC) was not left out of the turbulence, as their consideration of the bills reportedly led to sharp disagreement among officials at the highest echelons of government. But once transmitted, the president wasted no time in appending his signature on June 26.

However, some six months later, just as the January 1, 2026 implementation date loomed, a carefully orchestrated and fiercely politicised campaign to discredit the tax laws again took centre stage. The reason for the new campaign was the alleged alterations made to the laws by unnamed persons who inserted themselves between the legislature and the presidency. The National Assembly has promised to open to the public the bills they transmitted to the president as well as the gazetted copy to enable a transparent comparison. By forging ahead, the presidency seems convinced that either there were no alterations or that whatever changes were made were nothing but correction of clerical errors, or that whatever changes were noticed merely rendered the laws more readable.

Significantly, those championing the suspension of the laws, most of them politicians campaigning under the aegis of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), have seized upon the fallacy that the laws would raise taxes, stymie economic recovery, and worsen hardship particularly among the poor. Knowing full well that most Nigerians have not read the laws nor, if they did, understand them, the campaigners recognise that crying wolf where there is none is always an effective tool of political mobilisation or social revolt. On top of this, no one wants to pay tax, regardless of whether the economy is stable or in recession. The adversarial campaigns have, however, achieved limited effectiveness, fortunately because it is coming outside the election year. Had the administration deferred its implementation to the end of the first quarter as some, including the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), advocated, the seemingly innocent act of procrastination would have restricted the government’s elbow room and risked weakening or derailing its political campaigns.

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The four legs of the Tax Reform Act 2025 are (1) The Nigeria Tax Act (NTA) 2025; (2) The Nigeria Tax Administration Act (NTAA) 2025; (3) The Nigeria Revenue Service (Establishment) Act (NRSA) 2025; and (4) The Joint Revenue Board (Establishment) Act (JRBA) 2025. Opponents of the laws rarely bothered about the second, third and fourth laws. They have been particular about the first one, The Nigeria Tax Act 2025. It is understandable. This Act, as the Presidential Fiscal Policy and Tax Reform Committee put it, “is the core of the reform, consolidating over a dozen federal tax laws into a single, unified statute.” It argued further that “it replaces previous laws like the Companies Income Tax Act, Personal Income Tax Act, and Value Added Tax Act, among other outdated tax laws.” The NTA not only simplifies what was a complex and misaligned tax laws, it provides relief for low-income earners and small enterprises. Even as far as VAT is concerned, the new sharing formula benefits states (55%) and local governments (35%), much more than the federal government (10%). The resurgent campaigns have been based on nothing significant, as President Bola Tinubu put it, but on the unprovable supposition that the tax laws would raise taxes.

The president was more assertive in a statement he issued before the laws took effect. According to him: “These reforms are a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a fair, competitive, and robust fiscal foundation for our country. The tax laws are not designed to raise taxes, but rather to support a structural reset, drive harmonisation, and protect dignity while strengthening the social contract…Our administration is aware of the public discourse surrounding alleged changes to some provisions of the recently enacted tax laws. No substantial issue has been established that warrants a disruption of the reform process.” Though President Tinubu rightly approved the implementation of the tax laws to begin on schedule, unwary members of the public were probably spooked by opposition falsehoods to see the tax laws as their worst nightmare. The reality is, however, different. In fact, the poor as well as small enterprises, not to talk of those who have nothing to hide, will be the chief beneficiaries.

There will of course be implementation hiccups at the beginning, but despite the stifling opposition to the reform, it should improve Nigeria’s fiscal space, ultimately enthrone tax equity, energise small and medium enterprises, and simplify the social contract by making the public more responsible and the government more accountable. What the administration should worry about is that the initial hiccups do not grow into a monster, engender gridlock, or empower detractors of the laws to make more sanctimonious noise.

January 4, 2026
Malami cuts a sorry figure

Former attorney general Abubakar Malami spent weeks in detention with the EFCC and the New Year and many more days in jail pending the determination of his bail application by a court. He was not alone. His wife and one of his sons were later remanded with him. In the previous Muhammadu Buhari administration, Mr Malami was one of the most powerful ministers, indeed a cabal all by himself. He excused tyranny, waffled over court processes, rode roughshod over governmental negotiations, and refused to speak up when the rights of murdered Nigerians were abridged. He will predictably be bitter about his ordeal, and might even believe that his circumstances were inspired by the government of the day.

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Never in his wildest imagination would he have expected to be incarcerated for weeks on end. He probably thinks his ordeal is politically motivated, and as a governorship aspirant in the opposition his fellow travellers have encouraged his miscomprehension of his legal troubles. A third-rate lawyer himself, he seems to believe the lies. But what did he expect? The courts wait patiently for men like him, powerful people who think they are untouchable, who when they were in office connived at the raids on residences of judges and mistreatment of court officials. He will of course get his bail, but he will now be more enlightened about the transience of power and how the system ruthlessly exacts vengeance.

January 4, 2026
No battle for ADC presidential ticket

No one is certain who first mooted the fallacy that with the defection of former Anambra governor Peter Obi to the African Democratic Congress (ADC) there would ensue a healthy struggle for the party’s presidential ticket. Mr Obi defected only last week, while those who hungered for the ticket were either present at the party’s formation or funded the party almost entirely. To presume he stands any chance at all of picking the ticket simply because of some fanciful permutations is sheer nonsense. There will be no battle whatsoever. More accurately, Mr Obi himself knows there will not be any battle, nor if there was one, that he stood any chance.

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Former president Goodluck Jonathan was briefly afflicted by that political hyperbole, leading him to saunter into the party’s informal caucus meeting one sunny day only to receive a devastating rebuff. Deflated, he sauntered out like he came in and has since not been heard from again on the subject, not even to joke about it. Mr Obi may fancy himself a modern-day pied piper, and may sometimes not know when he is fairly and thoroughly beaten in an electoral contest, but he has no illusion who his political masters are. At any rate, he had once encountered the ADC panjadra before; now he knows that they will master him once again.

After dithering for more than two years, not knowing what to do or where to go, and unsure of everything but his pet foreign statistics, he has finally berthed at the ADC. His stay in the Labour Party (LP) had become untenable, for he lacked the acumen to manage or reform complex entities, and was therefore not adding value to the beleaguered party. In the end, his clearly outsized ambition to rule Nigeria impelled him to seek refuge anywhere. For a man so feckless, returning to his vomit appeared the logical choice, indeed, the logical end. He will, as he was wont, eat humble pie before former vice president Atiku Abubakar.

January 4, 2026
Fubara, APC, Wike and 2027

The frenzied jockeying for political supremacy in Rivers State between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and FCT minister Nyesom Wike is bound to constitute one additional piece in the 2027 presidential election jigsaw puzzle for President Tinubu. Rivers has indeed become a simplified complexity. The state legislature is APC majority, but the lawmakers don’t see eye-to-eye with the governor who is now also in APC, having recently defected to the ruling party from the moribund PDP. The supposed political leader of the state remains Mr Wike who is still standing pat in the PDP but who receives the loyalty of the legislature almost in its entirety. Finally, in the puzzle, both the PDP and APC in the legislature are largely and firmly pro-Wike.

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However, President Tinubu will need both Mr Fubara and Mr Wike joining hands together to ‘deliver’ Rivers to the APC; but these are two men engaged in shadow boxing, with one continuing to posture imperiously, and the other unable to decipher sublime politics, let alone practise it with the suavity and depth expected of a leader with the most basic qualification. What the president must find ways of dealing with is how to manage two Rivers politicians with very large egos. Mr Wike brooks no challenge, and Mr Fubara gives no quarter. One is ruthless and the other naïve; and both will, going forward, demand the president to clarify his allegiances. But it is a clarification the president will be loth to give. He will prefer to walk the tightrope than recklessly do pole vaulting and risk breaking a leg or an arm.

December 28, 2025
Makinde, Turaki on destruction of PDP

Oyo State’s governor Seyi Makinde said so many things during his media chat last Tuesday in Ibadan, the state capital. His statements have helped to open a window into the delicate workings of his mind, the quality of his reasoning, and the depth of his political perspectives. He has, unfortunately, not emerged with the lustre he hoped his frank and provocative discussions would acquire. Anyone who seeks a rational explanation for the collapse of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) should look no further than Mr Makinde, an engineer, who now doubles as the leader of the party; Tanimu Turaki, the actual chairman of the party; and before them, their 2023 presidential candidate, the remorseless former vice president Atiku Abubakar.

Mr Makinde’s expostulations are extraordinary and far-fetched, even bogus. Mr Turaki, a lawyer, is remembered for his mawkish interpretation of politics and his public invitation to the United States president Donald Trump to save Nigerian democracy because two factions of the PDP fought over the party’s headquarters in Abuja. And the flighty Alhaji Atiku encapsulates his politics in adventurism and opportunism, jumping from one party to another seeking relevance and office. Three straight electoral defeats starting from 2015 and ending in 2023 have conspired to strip the party of knowledgeable and experienced politicians and strategists, leaving third-rate party leaders incapable of plotting the most elementary electoral victory. One year of trying to coax the party into a fighting force has also depleted it of vigour.

Back to the magisterial Mr Makinde. Like everyone else left in the PDP, the Oyo governor blamed outsiders for the party’s woes. The insiders were, in his estimation, loyal and blameless, in fact flawless, having observed all rules and regulations as well as electoral laws and the constitution perfectly. He dismissively characterised any other faction purporting to be a faction as either pretentious or inexistent. Then he sneered at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for disingenuously seeming to recognise the existence of factions. Hear him: “And by the way, the way the PDP is today, there is no faction. We held a convention here in Ibadan. We gave adequate notice to INEC, which is all that we are required to do under the law. So, it will take INEC some time if they choose to behave like the ostrich, bury their head and all of their bodies outside…Now, to hide all of these things that they are not supposed to hide, they basically called the two factions together, played our people, by saying they wanted to engage with the leadership of PDP…And then, they (Makinde faction) got there and found out that they called Samuel Anyanwu and co (Nyesom Wike faction). I said, that’s even silly to start with…”

Mr Makinde is in denial over the status of the party. No Nigerian believes the PDP is not factionalised in fact and in law, except of course the governor and his coterie. And talking about the convention, which many party leaders counselled should be postponed until some healing could be attempted in the party, the governor insisted all the convention planners needed to do was invite INEC. He was silent on whether there was no right or wrong way to notify INEC of the meeting, or that INEC reserved the right to assess the legality of the invitation. The governor went on to argue that the Supreme Court had, by two judgements, seemed to virtually cede to parties the power to determine their own affairs one way or the other, irrespective of the provisions of the law. He likened the electoral commission to the ostrich and derided it for ‘tricking’ the Makinde faction into sitting at table with the Wike faction, an accusation echoed by party chairman Mr Turaki who has accused INEC of bias. The fault is always in others, never in the PDP or its shambolic self-appointed leaders.

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But that was not the end of his fiery denunciations of his party’s detractors. Despondent, he accused the electoral body of conspiring with unnamed others to kill the party. Said he: “There’s a danger that if you do that, you may, you know, unknowingly… kill democracy in this country, God forbid.” In other words, on the issue of the PDP, and despite the misgivings of so many PDP leaders, including the Ibadan convention planning committee leaders who took exception to the governor’s style, Mr Makinde was peerless and unassailable. Any other person who refuses to identify with his position was a detractor and an apostate. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, the decisions taken at the convention, including the elections/affirmations and expulsions, were unquestionable. It is not clear what he thinks of his logic or whether he has had time to reflect on how he sounded to himself. But his adamantine resolve to press ahead on his chosen path while lashing out at dissenters unsettled by the intractability of the party’s position and Mr Makinde’s oversimplification gives the impression of somebody unable to wean himself off the predictable and mechanical certainties of engineering in favour of the slow and sometimes painstaking effort needed to forge a consensus.

Mr Makinde’s destination in the media chat, however, was Mr Wike and President Bola Tinubu. He accused the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, leader of the other PDP faction, of duplicity in pledging to virtually destroy the party to smooth the way for the APC in 2027. He also described President Tinubu, whom he supported in 2023, as incapable of responding adequately to the country’s challenges because of his refusal to run “a government of national unity, government of national competence.” He said he regretted that support, and would not give it in 2027. Mr Wike will, of course, respond soon, for he is not known to suffer his enemies gladly, especially after being accused of perfidy. As for the president who declined to appoint Mr Makinde’s nominee for ministerial position, it was the end of the 2027 electoral road. Like everything else he said at the media chat, the Oyo governor displayed a penchant to oversimplify complex political matters. The months ahead and the suits filed at various courts by both factions of the party will determine whether the Oyo governor saw the future through his inelegant and imperious dismissals of his opponents and their arguments or he is trapped in the past by his mystifying projections of what he sees as the country’s retrograde electoral future.

December 28, 2025
US airstrike triggers uproar in Nigeria

The long-awaited United States-led airstrike on Nigeria finally took place on Thursday night or, as local reports indicate, in the wee hours of Friday. President Donald Trump was characteristically immoderate in his tweet on the strikes which he described as deadly. As he put it, “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries! I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was…Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

Mr Trump was not only highfalutin, he mischaracterised the orders he gave as designed to salve the wounds of Nigerian Christians. Then he ended his triumphalism with morbid humour of wishing the dead terrorists merry Christmas. Worst of all, he gave no indication of the involvement, cooperation or approval of Nigeria in the airstrike. His Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, was less given to histrionics. His statement on the airstrike which involved the firing of about 16 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the Lakurawa terror group fighting under the aegis of the Islamic State (ISIS) was more accurate, more balanced. He said: “The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end. The Department of War is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight on Christmas. More to come, Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation. Merry Christmas.” The Secretary of course still played to the Christian gallery, perhaps as sop to his boss, but he at least admitted and applauded the cooperation of Nigeria.

The Nigerian government has reassuringly been very circumspect about the whole affair, probably because it recognises its position as the underdog in the tragedy. Speaking on television, the Foreign Affairs minister, Yusuf Tuggar, said: “It was Nigeria that provided intelligence for the US strike in Nigeria. I spoke with the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, for 19 minutes before the strike, and we agreed to talk to President Tinubu for his go-ahead, and he gave it. After the approval, I spoke again with Marco Rubio five minutes before the strike was launched against the terrorists. Now that the US is cooperating, we would do it jointly, and we would ensure, just as the president emphasised yesterday before he gave the go-ahead, that it must be made clear that it is a joint operation, and it is not targeting any religion nor simply in the name of one religion or the other. We are a multi-religious country, and we are working with partners like the US to fight terrorism and safeguard the lives and properties of Nigerians.” The official statement from the ministry itself was also balanced and cleverly worded.

Though a post-strike assessment is yet to be finalised, initial indications are that the strike on the Lakurawa terrorist camp in Tangaza local government area of Sokoto State was highly impactful. The US has promised more strikes in the coming days or weeks. The bigger surprise, however, is that the first strike occurred in the Northwest rather than in the Northeast, against bandits instead of against Boko Haram/ISWAP. In time, it may become clear why the first targets were located in the Northwest. Significantly too, Nigeria and the US, minus Mr Trump who has doubled down on his pro-Christian and genocide narratives, have reached an understanding that Nigeria’s security situation is more nuanced than the Americans had at first been fed. The North of Nigeria is predominantly Muslim, and consequently most victims of the terrorist attacks in the region have been Muslims. The objective of the terrorists is the establishment of a caliphate, regardless of whether the goal was the largely Muslim Nigerian North or whether it was Mali, Burkina Faso or Niger Republic. Using the Fulani land grabbing and herdsmen-farmers clashes narratives of the Middle Belt of Nigeria to approximate the insecurity nightmare assailing Nigeria paints only a part of the picture. Mr Trump has, however, chosen a narrative that pleases him, energises his support base, and grabs the attention of a sizable number of Nigerians. He will continue to stick to that narrative, while his aides apprised of the bigger picture will do their best to moderate his overreach and find common ground with Nigerian authorities.

Last Thursday’s US airstrike has surprisingly not been opposed or denounced as some people expect. Islamic cleric Ahmad Gumi, popularly regarded as bandit sympathiser, was among the first to open his mouth and put his foot in it. He decried the Sokoto missile strikes and demanded the cessation of the bombings. Then he followed up by imperiously asking Nigerians to live at peace with herdsmen. No one still regards his choices or statements with any respect. They see him as a loose cannon unworthy of his position as a faith leader or a retired military officer. Those who have been victims of the terrorist violence in the Northwest have in fact welcomed the strike and hoped that civilian casualties would be avoided, and the terrorists bombed flat. But consistent with its hasty and sometimes illogical approach to issues and the practice of opposition politics, a faction of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) criticised the government for not alerting Nigerians to the strike. They did not say how that could be achieved without tipping off the terrorists.

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The Nigerian government had initially worried about being denounced for enabling the US airstrike, and for compromising and denuding the country’s sovereignty, especially in light of Mr Trump’s inconsiderate tweet about saving persecuted Nigerian Christians. Some Nigerians had also worried that US involvement, especially if mistakes occurred, might inflame passion, accentuate religious and possible ethnic divisions, and lead to dangerous escalations. This fear was not unrealistic on account of America’s poor record at foreign military interventions. But so far, the airstrike has achieved some measure of success, has given hope of significant degradation of terrorist forces, and may encourage Nigeria to put boots on the ground in those far-flung and ungovernable places to carry out mop-up operations and reassert state authority.

While it is not out of place to seek foreign help to help reassert control against rampaging insurgents and caliphate dreamers, there are also arguments as to whether Nigeria, over the past decades, did not by its actions and inactions, some of them leading to the erosion of their own secular constitution by bigoted state laws, attract and encourage terrorism. If the US assistance is sustained and leads to significant degradation of terrorism and insecurity, Nigeria must thereafter do a lot of soul-searching to see whether the right lessons have been learnt. The US is intervening today because (1) Nigerians are not of one mind in opposing and fighting foreign terrorists and insurgents, sometimes because of ethnic or religious affinity with the attackers; (2) poor, incompetent and undisciplined governance and widespread corruption; (3) the country had been rendered vulnerable for far too long as a result of poor investment in security and law enforcement apparatuses; (4) the country is militarily weak to take on the insurgents, let alone stand up to the great powers; and (5) Nigerians have failed to make up their minds whether they want to stay together under a new and restructured mandate or retain the current untenable structure.

Hopefully, the tempo of the current US intervention, as humiliating as it might seem to the image and sovereignty of Nigeria, will be sustained. It should give Nigeria breathing space and perhaps some elbow room to reexamine its approach to governance and security. Firm lessons must be learnt from an anomalous security situation in which two past administrations allowed a small ulcer to become gangrenous. Nigeria is of course not out of the woods yet, while the situation still calls for deft handling. But overall, the country must rebuild its national esteem, be proactive in handling security and systemic threats, and find ways of averting any future possibility of being picked on by great powers which ram strange elixirs down their reluctant throats.

December 28, 2025
Nigerians and the Burkinabe affair

If social media is a fair barometer of the proclivities of Nigerians, then their exultation over the detention of a Nigerian Air Force Hercules C-130 aircraft in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, on December 8 after a technical issue forced it to land is a sad reminder of the deterioration crisis faced by Nigeria. Some 11 crewmen were detained in addition to the aircraft. They were Nigerian sons, brothers and fathers on active national duty. But some Nigerians, perhaps taken in by the Burkinabe military leader, Ibrahim Traore’s months of propaganda, praised the junta, derided Nigeria, and concluded that the West African giant had been tamed by a mouse. They added that Nigeria was being ‘rightly punished’ for aiding and abetting France’s national interest and ‘ill-advisedly’ terminating the Benin Republic coup which tried to overthrow President Patrice Talon’s government. Left to the surly Nigerians, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) of three military juntas in West Africa did right by delinking from France and jumping into bed with Russia. They see nothing wrong in substituting one Caucasian and exploitative master with a Slav antidemocratic and brutal master.

The problem is not the substitution that has taken place in the sub-region; the real problem is Nigerians’ lack of national identity and pride. To disparage their country in its hour of trial, to ridicule their men in arms simply because they dislike the administration of the day indicates how ignorant and insensitive politics of division has made them. They have no idea how Col. Traore is charming the Brukinabe like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, how he is repressing his people, how economic development has not been as impressive as propaganda has made it, and how unwinnable the anti-jihadist war has become. All the scornful Nigerians know is that they resent the government of the day, and any reverses it suffers, even if it reflects very poorly on the country, is deserved. They rejoiced over the detention of the craft and military personnel, believing the propaganda of the Burkinabe that the soldiers were on a war mission to Benin Republic through the back door. But what war? And was the coup not crushed the first day?

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Nigeria’s political division is hardening irredeemably, and its people have no idea what nationalism means. The traditional media and social media commentators seem to think that until a man of their choosing is in office, no leader deserves their support. Have they by any chance heard of the expression credited to a US naval officer Stephen Decatur in 1816? He said: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!” At the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US, was believed to have said: “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Given the highly visible marks of division tearing Nigeria apart, including the bloodletting triggered by banditry and insurgency, Nigerians seem already hanging separately. Worse, it does not even appear to them that they are well on the highway to Sudan or Somalia, an apocalyptic scenario they may lack the ingenuity to understand or confront, let alone escape.

December 21, 2025