The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

On the evolving nature of elite consensus
- Clarifications, elaborations and amplifications
The Return of the Man from Birmingham

THIS is supposed to be a commemorative piece. Next week, it will be exactly fifty five years that is February, 1971, since yours sincerely published his first op-ed piece in a major Nigerian newspaper while still a teenager and a staffer with the Nigerian Tribune, then based at Pa Aminu’s house at Adeoyo, Ibadan. University education at the then University of Ife commenced later in the year in October. Titled Enoch Powell and the Coloured Immigrants, the piece was submitted to the Features Editor of The Nigerian Tribune, Mr Fola Oredoyin, who later in 1979 ended up in the Lagos State House of Assembly while his boss, the Editor in Chief, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, ended up in the gubernatorial mansion. A man of pure and noble heart, Oredoyin immediately published the piece in the features page while hinting the editor, Mr Olukayode Bakre, that his wonder-boy had done it again. In effect, this would mean a lifetime spent at the barricades of the mind in addition to other dangerous political sorties.

But this is not so much a commemoration of a personal benchmark, as significant as that is, but a moment of bemused introspection about the changing or evolving nature of the phenomenon of elite consensus. The concept of elite consensus is not original to the author. It was first noticed in the works of some leading scholars of Scandinavian and northern European politics while the author was a researcher in the Netherlands at the tail end of the nineties.

Readers of this column and some other writings by the writer would have noticed a scholarly obsession with the concept, particularly as it pertains to the postcolonial nations of Africa with Nigeria as primal focus of attention. Having closely studied what they observed as the virtually intractable and “pillarised” differences among the political elite of these Nordic countries, the scholars came to the conclusion that only skillful negotiations and “pacted” deals could have allowed the nations to transit to meaningful and impactful democratic order.

Without this elite consensus, elections are national fiascos foretold. We can then imagine the prospects for real and meaningful democratic order in a postcolonial Africa with its multiethnic armada, its cultural and religious polarizations and fractious political elite. An observer of the just concluded elections in Uganda noted with wry submission to fate that the country has had nine head of state since independence but none has ever handed over power to his successor. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has been at it for a whopping forty years.

      Theories of dynamic human interaction and political culture evolve not from scholars’ studies and closet libraries but by closely observing the dialectical collision and collusion of contending and countervailing actions in the theatre of politics as factions slug it out on a daily basis bending or altering concepts and received notions to human will in the process. This is where our Powell article assumes a significant analytical dimension for our troubled world and the whole notion of elite consensus. The only thing its youthful author recalls at this moment is the ringing phrase “resultantly negrophobist”as a sophomoric dismissal of Enoch Powell’s outlandish rant.

   But who on earth is Enoch Powell? And why is his unquiet ghost disturbing the peace of the world from the Warwickshire cemetery where his illustrious bones are interred? As a person, Powell was as distinguished as they come. He was MP for Smethwick in Birmingham in the sixties. By consensus, the Midland politician with the manic glint of a possessed shaman, is regarded as the most cerebrally outstanding and intellectually gifted person to have sat in the House of Commons in the last century. He was as brilliant as they come. Having taken a Double Starred First at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was named a full professor of Greek at the University of Sidney in Australia by the age of twenty five and had ended the Second World War as a Brigadier in the British Army. A sympathetic and perceptive observer rued that Enoch Powell wasted his exceptional talents on politics.

    Where fame crosses into infamy and renown dips into notoriety is easy to plot in this instance. On April 20, 1968 Powell delivered a speech which has turned out to be as historic as it is a landmark intervention in modern British politics. Dispensing with customary niceties, polite formalities, coded etiquette and the British admonition that a gentleman must wear his hat and opinion lightly, Powell tore into the heart of British post-war elite consensus by dismissing the whole notion of unchecked immigration by coloured people and the idea of integrated racial harmony in a society whose culture immigrants can never imbibe as a derisive hoax and a clear and present danger to the health of the nation. Deploying his immense erudition and unrivalled mastery of Classics, Powell dropped an apocalyptic bombshell: if the rot was not immediately arrested, Britain would soon resemble a River Tiber foaming with blood.

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Retribution was swift and exemplary. Edward Heath dismissed him from his post as Shadow Cabinet. Speaking invitations were summarily cancelled. Polite circles began avoiding him. He had infracted against the cardinal canons of British post-war settlement: no part of the society must be made to feel unwanted or unappreciated however small and whatever may be the race, colour or creed. That is an invitation to anarchy and social conflagration. The British learnt their lesson the hard way in bloody confrontations in their colonies. Fighting alongside their old colonial tormentors had also shown the natives that there are no superior races where suffering and pains are concerned, and a baronetcy is no armour against bullets.

   The snag in this ruling class social engineering is that a survey of the time put the percentage of those who privately agreed with Powell’s gloomy prognostications at sixty which amounted to a dire forewarning of what the future held in store. Just around the corner lay Margaret Thatcher’s brutal rightwing intervention which felt like social Darwinism on steroids. While Enoch Powell did not believe so much in ideology as the driving principle of politics and human interaction, the puritanical daughter of a Methodist alderman was an astringent cold warrior who believed everyone could be pigeon-holed with ideological labels. This obsession with endless labeling powered by a deeply suspicious and polarizing mindset eventually led Thatcher to a political overreach. She bluntly declared that there was no such thing as society. This finally set the alarm bell ringing in Tory circuits particularly among the storied grandees who clung to the old liberal consensus like a waning talisman.

At that point in time, we were still far from the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s open heart surgeries on the British patient, but not very far in real time. Enoch Powell’s Tiber was welling up with its gory contents but not about to overwhelm its banks. It will take the failure of Tony Blair’s anodyne, a mere leftwing sheen and gloss on Thatcherite Darwinism, and a series of incompetent and dismally limited Tory leaders hovering over the patient as if it is a fascinating cadaver, to tip the scale. This is not discounting unfavourable global developments particularly the resurgence of an economically buoyant China, Russia’s geopolitical malevolence, the rise of xenophobic nationalism and authoritarian populism all over Europe and America and what appears to be the fundamental inability of the British political class to reset the nation’s economic categories in the face of growing international encirclement. Britain has been living on borrowed times and borrowed largesse. The creditors have arrived. Harold Macmillan’s patrician ululations to his country people that they had never had it so good was predicated on an economic delusion without any foundation in reality and real time production.

    Now, the man from Birmingham is back with an ear-splitting bang. Almost sixty years after his hair-raising prediction, Enoch Powell is moving to the centre stage of British politics once again after being banished to the margins. His prediction is about to come to pass but not in the way he himself could have foretold. People make predictions based on their own prejudices and the colouring of their imagination. And they come to pass not in the way they could have imagined. This is due to the cunning of history. Unless there is an apocalyptic meltdown, the streets of Britain are unlikely to foam with blood. But never in the postwar history of Britain has there been such open xenophobia, such foul and sullen distemper in the streets with the fabric of elite consensus completely rent asunder.

The circumstances of an enfeebled and exhausted lapsed empire unable to come to terms with its own historic superannuation which made Enoch Powell to issue his tempestuous edict have now manifested in the fullness of time. From the margins of elite disavowal, Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party have happened upon the funeral rites with the proboscis relentlessly probing and devouring the grisly entrails of the Conservative Party. Appropriately too, and with superb dark humour, the Conservative Party has gone ahead to enlist the services of a Black woman originating from Lagos to preside over the rituals of passage. Let no one deny that Kemi Badenock is doing very well. It was not for nothing that her father, a noted physician, was known as Iwosan, or healer. Enoch Powell who saw no difference between the two parties and who quit his party for the Ulster Unionist Party will purr with satisfaction wherever he is.

   It is a collapse of the elite consensus which has held Britain together since the end of the Second World War. No one can be sure of what will replace it. This is what happens when political elites, within the limits and limitations of their talents and endowments, are overwhelmed by historical circumstances beyond their remit. It will be foolish and feckless to count out this great and gifted country, despite all its foibles and historical peccadilloes. No nation is perfect. Those of us who consider ourselves as avid Anglophiles will be rooting for its revival and rejuvenation. For now, the old order is gone. It will take a new generation of gifted and visionary political actors to put a new deal together based on extant realities.

   There is a signal lesson here for the elites of postcolonial Africa. As we have seen from the above, forging national consensus is not a tea party. Political elites who have not reached a national consensus on the shared destiny of their nation cannot be expected to achieve the level of critical unanimity to effect a positive change when it comes to the political and economic direction of their nation. This is the consuming tragedy of many contemporary African nations.
January 18, 2026
Under the boots of Jack

To the iconic Muson Hall, Onikan last Thursday for the much heralded unveiling of Ayo Opadokun’s book, The Gun Hegemony. A big scary word, hegemony gives the uninitiated some jitters, just like the Yoruba word, egeremiti, which could well be a scare word which announces its intimidating intent by sheer onomatopoeic intensity. Hegemony is one of those useful Greek words which have found their way into the modern English language to elaborate on the concept of human domination by dominant or hegemonic groups that exert their dominion over others by sheer force and/or pleasant persuasion. Just because you are scared of the word doesn’t spare you the spell of its pervasive invasions.

This morning, the atmosphere was redolent of human distinction and respectability. They had all come to honour and pay their respect to a man who was a known face of popular resistance to military dictatorship and the struggle to rid Nigeria of despotic rule which high noon was the annulment of the freest and fairest presidential election in the history of the country and its disastrous aftermath. Captains of industry, moguls of the press, barons of solid capital, scions of old money, illustrious royalty, masters of political brinkmanship, emergent plutocrats, former governors, old ministers, top international diplomats, brave journalists of the old barricades, warriors of the protracted siege against the military/feudal complex, former freedom fighters now lapsed into sedate respectability and unreconstructed anti-military stalwarts who had come to hang their old tormentors.

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No one in the hall appeared more pleased by the distinguished crowd which included Femi Gbajabiamila, the Chief of Staff to the president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, than the man of the moment and author, Ayo Opadokun. He was effusive in his praise of his friends, comrades, associates, benefactors, rescuers, patrons and supporters including his beloved spouse. Opadokun himself is quite a bundle. But he is a bundle to cherish in your corner of the ring. Brave, fearless and indomitable when going forward, his political and institutional memory is a tad short of staggering. He knows where all the dead bodies are buried and it will be a truly feckless fellow who chooses to mess around with him. As a Chinese proverb has it, if you tarry long enough by the bank of the river, the bodies of your enemies will wash by. In the jungle of Nigeria’s postcolonial politics, the Offa-born warrior-prince is an arch-survivalist.

As speaker after speaker rose in fury to denounce military rule in all its infamy, its villainies and brutal decimation of the Nigerian dream this fine Thursday morning, you got a sense that they have come to bury Ceasar and not to praise him. Particularly outstanding was Chief Emeka Anyaoku who gave a clinical analysis of why a new federalist constitution was an urgent imperative for the nation. Standing proudly erect and impressively alert a few days short of his ninety third year on earth, the former international diplomat has spent the better part of twenty six years since his retirement canvassing for a wholesale reconfiguration of the unitary arrangement that is at the heart of Nigeria’s endemic instability and political predicament. From the fiery denunciations and the enraptured approval of the audience, it was clear that the noise was not about to disappear.

Here comes the sublime irony. Not all military interventions can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. In any case, hegemonies even of the gun cannot be sustained by force alone. They require intellectual rationalizations and philosophical fabrications to insinuate them into the popular consciousness. Soldiers alone do not construct the gun hegemony. They require intellectual ammunition and critical firepower from the political and intellectual class. We must be painfully honest with ourselves. There is no point hiding behind one finger. You cannot build something on nothing. Military intervention in Nigeria was probably inevitable; a disaster waiting to happen. So was the gun hegemony. Had there been some national consensus following the military mutiny of 1966, the rump of Balewa’s cabinet would have withstood the attempt of General Aguiyi-Ironsi and his cohorts to subvert the constitution. But the famous owl of Minerva always begins its flight after the event.

January 18, 2026
A day to remember
- May the January 18, 2026 agreement between the FG and ASUU permanently end their hostilities. Amen!
January 18, 2026, would for a long time be remembered in the annals of university education in Nigeria. It was a day that two hitherto sworn ‘enemies’ agreed to sheathe their swords.

This is significant given the belligerent nature of their relationship, especially since the signing of a controversial 2009 agreement that had been the source of acrimony between the two parties. This had led to strike several times, which paralysed academic activities on our university campuses, and made nonsense of their academic calendars.

Some accounts say the country’s university system lost about 1,200 days to the 17-year-old crises.

I am here talking about the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government.

The 2009 agreement dealt essentially with university funding and budgeting; academic welfare; university autonomy and governance; research and development (R&D); legal frameworks and implementation, as well as implementation and review.

It was supposed to be a foundational document aimed at revitalising public universities in the country, which, really, were in dire need of revitalisation. However, the agreement suffered poor implementation, leading to incessant strike by the university lecturers.

On the basis of the agreement, ASUU called its members out on a strike that lasted four months in 2009; followed by another that lasted five months in 2010. There was a 51-day strike in 2011 and another five months strike in 2013. In 2017, ASUU members went on a month-long strike while students were sent packing for three months in 2018.

As if these were not damaging enough, ASUU went on what could pass for the ‘Mother of all strikes’ in 2020. The strike lasted nine months, followed by another eight months strike in 2022.

The effects of all these strikes cannot be quantified in financial terms alone. Students who should spend four years on their chosen courses ended up spending six years or more. Of course, students staying at home for longer than necessary were exposed to all manner of dangers, including but not limited to drug taking and sundry crimes. As they say, ‘an idle mind is the devil’s workshop’.

Abroad, certificates issued by our public universities lost recognition. It was private universities to the rescue.

It was not that ASUU did not have good reasons to protest. Things were bad enough in our tertiary institutions to make anyone who had an idea of what many of these institutions were in the past, angry.

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Just that many Nigerians saw ASUU as too rigid in its demands from successive governments, especially its penchant to resort to strike. The truth of the matter is that our higher institutions, including the hitherto iconic ones, have become shadows of their former pristine state.

Those of us who went to some of these institutions even as late as the 1980s know the kind of things we met on ground, which were even at that time mere remnants of what those who were ahead of us enjoyed in the higher institutions, particularly the universities.

I remember vividly then that we had foreign lecturers that were among some of the best anywhere in their respective disciplines. Till today, myself and some of my colleagues still speak nostalgically about one of such lecturers, one Father Schuyler.

Just as we had foreign lecturers then at the University of Lagos, we also had foreign students on the campus from around the globe. These were positive indices about those institutions then. One, foreign lecturers on our university campuses pointed in the direction of the comparative pay the institutions offered, among other things. Foreign students on our campuses, on the other hand, was indication of the high quality of our academic standards.

All of these are gone with the winds.

A few months back, I was discussing with one of my seniors at the Federal School of Arts and Science in Ondo, Ondo State, who is now a lecturer at the University of Lagos. When he told me what a professor earns, I felt so sorry, first for myself, and then the country. How come? How did we sink that low?

How do you attract good hands to the universities if lecturers are not well paid? It is only a matter of time for the institutions to decay because they would not be able to attract brilliant minds and can only recourse to people who just want a job, any job at all, not necessarily people who want to impart knowledge to others. Even if they want to impart knowledge, where do they get it? If they too had it, they wouldn’t be in the universities where they are paid peanuts when they can get better pay outside of the academic environment.

In the same vein, foreign students would not come to study in universities where students perch on windows to listen to lectures. The state of most of our public higher institutions is just nothing to write home about.

This reminds me of what a student in one of the public higher institutions told me about two weeks ago. I am talking specifically about The Polytechnic, Ibadan. We were discussing on why the student chose to stay off campus when there are hostel facilities on the campus. I expected her to say it was because they didn’t have enough space to go round. But what she said surprised me: she said many of them chose to stay off-campus because the toilets and some other facilities were bad. And, as if to punish the students for the bad state of the facilities, the institution forces those of them who chose to stay outside to pay about 50 per cent of the accommodation fee for what it calls “hostel refusal”!

In our time, we did everything possible to stay on the campus. The situation must be so bad for many students to want to stay off-campus, given the many advantages. Of course, a few may want to stay outside because they have free accommodation somewhere around or because they want to do some other things beyond what their parents sent them to do in school. But there is cause to worry when majority fall for the off-campus accommodation and, on top of that, they are forced to pay for refusing to stay in the hostels.

Let no one get me wrong. The Polytechnic, Ibadan, might not be alone in this. It is only a metaphor for the state of affairs in many of our public higher institutions. Perhaps the institution itself was forced to be collecting money for a service not rendered as a result of the larger malaise of underfunding that the institutions are grappling with.

Given the afore-stated, among others, one would think successive governments would have dealt with the tertiary institutions’ matter with utmost urgency. That they didn’t, and only kept flexing muscles with the union lent the governments open to accusations of being insensitive to the plight of the students and their parents.

Although the neglect that these institutions suffered from successive governments was not good enough, ASUU still got the chunk of the blame for its inability to think out of the box for solutions to the universities’ seemingly intractable problems. As people in the ivory towers, Nigerians expected them to be more creative in dealing with the government.

Indeed, this penchant for strike led to the formation of CONUA, the Congress of University Academics, which has always opposed ASUU’s flagrant recourse to strike to settle disputes with the government.

Be that as it may, it is good that, as they say, “all is well that ends well”.

The ASUU/government feud has only confirmed what Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” Many other people have affirmed this saying in different words. For instance, Sun Tzu also said that “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

It is incredible that the braggadocio and an ego war that has lasted so long could end, albeit at a roundtable without, literally put, any single ‘shot’ being fired. But that is the way of all wars.

I am not sure that many Nigerians were aware of the processes that led to the signing of the agreement. Even if they were, they would have simply dismissed it as improbable fiction.

But here we are today, celebrating what should herald hope of uninterrupted academic activities in our universities, a thing that has eluded us for years.

Although one would have to see the details of the current agreement before drawing conclusions, one needs to remind the government that the curtains cannot be drawn on the challenges in the universities without attention paid to the aforementioned areas and others outside of the universities.

The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has come a long way in barely 30 months in office, particularly in the area of tertiary education.

The government’s student loan scheme, the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND), alone speaks to this commitment. It is one major way of demonstrating its resolve to expand access to tertiary education.

At least about N89.94 billion has been paid directly to 263 tertiary institutions for tuition and institutional fees, and N72.03 billion paid directly to students as upkeep allowances at N20,000 per student, for the over 864,798 students that had benefitted from the fund as at January 13.

As the Managing Director of NELFUND, Akintunde Sawyerr, noted, “These figures are not just statistics. They represent real lives impacted, real barriers removed, and real opportunities created.”

I commend the Tinubu administration for coming this far on the ASUU crisis. Specifically, the Minister of Education too, Dr Maruf Tunji Alausa, should be commended.

But, as we have seen with past pacts, the problem is not in signing agreements, the issue is honouring them. This government must do its utmost to honour the agreement. At least we did not see anyone pointing a gun at the other person before it was signed.

Not only that, it is not only our university teachers that have been clamouring for better conditions of service. Their counterparts in the nonacademic unions, teachers in the polytechnics, etc. also deserve consideration. Mercifully the minister acknowledged that much: “I can assure you that the ASUP and the NASU agreements will be finalised as well.”

Again, as Dr Alausa observed, “However, we cannot resolve a 20-year-old problem in just two and a half years,” nonetheless, we urge it to sustain the tempo such that our public higher institutions would gradually begin to regain their lost glory.

This is the expectation if we must avert the kind of violence that we are battling with in the northern parts of the country. Half-baked graduates are only a shade better than stark illiterates.

What would it benefit us if we invest so much in education only to reap whirlwinds in return? God forbids,

We must never return to the ugly era of incessant strike. This is a cautionary note to both the government and ASUU.
January 18, 2026
SNAPSONG    275

From Grass to Grace

Rice and Shine

Now let me arise

     With my precious bag of rice

So long in coming

     Our heads were already turning

We thought it was gone

     With our budget czar on the run

Our empty stomachs growled

     In a tone that was tense and loud

But this anxious time around

     Fate ran the tale aground

The soothsayers were wrong

     Our luck was bold and strong

So here they are

     Delectably rare

Heaving golden grains

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     And their forgotten pains

Hauled in from near and far

     On each bag a smiling star

With gentle hints of the waiting kitchen

     And the feathery flavor of the wary chicken

Cooked, fried, and gently jollofed

     Ready every way to be liked and loved

With dazzling dishes in their appointed place

     We find our way to the Orchard of Grace

January 18, 2026
*Adamant Kwankwaso versus Kano Emirate (First published October 20, 2024)

In an interview two Thursdays ago, former governor of Kano State and leader of the Kwankwasiyya movement, Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, disclosed that the splitting of the Kano Emirate into five emirates in 2019 as well as the dethronement of Muhammadu Sanusi II in 2020 would be revisited. In May 2019, former governor Abdullahi Ganduje had assented to the Kano State House of Assembly bill splitting the emirate. With the assent, the emirate was split into five: Kano, the surviving rump, and Rano, Bichi, Karaye, and Gaya. Barely a year later, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II was deposed, for, among other things, disrespecting the office of the governor, and land racketeering. Dr Kwankwaso insisted that the former emir was deposed because of Dr Ganduje’s inferiority complex. The former governor, however, countered by flaunting his own PhD and his wife’s professorship, mocking his traducers for not having professorial wives.

The Kano quagmire has become a huge entanglement, punctuated by bitter quarrels, trenchant language, and now almost irreconcilable differences triggered by a spectacular falling out due to unmet expectations of loyalty. Dr Ganduje was twice deputy governor to Dr Kwankwaso (1999-2003; 2011-2015), though punctuated by a two-term interregnum filled by ex-governor Ibrahim Shekarau. (They have rich CVs in Kano: highly educated, urbane, articulate, but cantankerous and unforgiving). Days after the Supreme Court gave judgement in the last governorship election dispute, Dr Ganduje invited Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, a civil engineer who also brandishes a master’s degree in Business Administration, and Dr Kwankwaso to abandon their party, the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), and defect to the All Progressives Congress (APC). He, however, sarcastically added that he would automatically become their Jagora (leader). The invitation has incensed the duo, Dr Ganduje’s sense of humour being lost on them. Though Kano’s leading politicians have so much in common, particularly the more than a decade of camaraderie between Dr Kwankwaso and Dr Ganduje, the Kanawa are likely to remain irreconcilable and will continue to bait one another.

It is mainly in this context that the promised review of the Kano Emirate split should be understood. Dr Kwankwaso will remain adamant until it proves politically costly. It is obvious why he is at the forefront of campaigning for the review of the emirate balkanisation, but it is not altogether clear that it makes political sense to champion the cause instead of the governor. Gov Yusuf hails from Gaya, one of the beneficiary emirates consequent upon the Kano Emirate split. Whole new infrastructure and economies have followed the split; reversing history now will be more contentious than before the split. But this has not deterred Dr Kwankwaso. According to him: “Honestly it (the Kano emirates issue) is one of the things that nobody has sat with me to discuss so far, but I am sure we are going to sit and see how to go about it. Is it going to be allowed, demolished, corrected, or whatever? It will be revisited, and what’s supposed to be done will be done. There were a lot of things and this was a trap. All these things were not done in good faith or intention. It was brought with some bad intentions which every one of you here and our listeners are aware of. Sometimes you come with things that are good and they turn out to be bad while sometimes you bring bad things and they turn out to be good…”

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For now, two things seem uppermost in the mind of the NNPP leader. One, he wants the Kano Emirate reunified. The previously monolithic emirate has a nostalgic hold on him and perhaps on many other Kanawa. It was a symbol of bigness, power and influence. But has the rump Kano Emirate become less influential in the cultural and political scheme of things in the state, and indeed in Nigeria where everyone is still besotted to Kano as a thriving and powerful emirate and entity? It is doubtful; for water is finding its level and course, especially after five years. To begin rebuilding the emirate through reunification will probably throw up fresh uncertainties. Will it not be better to let sleeping dogs lie, regardless of the politics that underscored the balkanisation? As the Hausa idiomatically put it, “A bar kaza a cikin gashin ta’. It is, sadly, very tempting not to let bad enough alone. The itch to tamper with things based on sometimes indefensible or untenable sentiments is always high. That the split was also ‘bad intentioned’, as Dr Kwankwaso said, and coming from, of all people, the hated Dr Ganduje, seems especially galling to the leader of the Kwankwasiyya movement and protector of the emirate council.

Two, somehow, either because of the goodness of his heart or for reasons not even he can properly decode, Dr Kwankwaso wants the ‘historic wrong’ done to Emir Sanusi II redressed. The deposed emir was not even Dr Kwankwaso’s first choice when he was appointed in 2014, a year before the former governor’s second term ended. Obviously he has grown to like him immensely. But since the NNPP controls the legislature, the lawmakers can of course be made to do the NNPP bidding. However, the emir wasn’t just deposed for thumbing his nose at Gov Ganduje, he was also probed for unregulated and liberal spending habits, and then queried for land racketeering. The NNPP will have to get all those inconvenient details expunged to legitimately return him to office. Reinstating Emir Sanusi II may not be the chief goal of Dr Kwankwaso, but he will do anything to rub Dr Ganduje’s nose in it.

Targeting and trashing his former deputy, who is now chairman of the APC, may, however, be far easier than managing his new mentee and governor, Mr Yusuf. On both the emirate matter and possible reinstatement of Sanusi II, the more candid and less bashful Dr Kwankwaso has thrust himself forward and spoken more authoritatively than the governor. He forgets that a new sheriff is in town, and his obtrusions will in due course be resisted more and more as state affairs get more volatile. It is inevitable. All it takes is a little more consolidation by the governor, and the new helmsman will begin to assert himself, differ from his mentor in policy perspectives, and eventually strike out from under the shadows of his leader in whose government he was once a Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport between 2011 and 2015. Sooner or later, Mr Yusuf’s mollifying and conciliating rule will contend with Dr Kwankwaso’s fierce and adamant disposition until something gives. No state has yet balked this trend. It won’t begin with Kano.

January 18, 2026
Discourses on Kwankwaso’s Kano

Last year, this column predicted the parting of ways between Kano’s Governor Abba Yusuf and his mentor and godfather Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, a former governor himself. Both politicians have now acrimoniously reached a point of no return in their relationship. The governor has virtually defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC), tired of his mentor’s dithering, while Dr Kwankwaso has been left stranded in the litigious New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), angry with his mentee for his impatience and flirtation with the enemy. For more than one year, Dr Kwankwaso negotiated with APC leaders to facilitate his defection, but every time the ruling party met his terms, he shifted the goalpost. Vexed and irritated, the APC separately courted an already disaffected Mr Yusuf who was anxious to avoid the legal pitfalls in the NNPP that threatened his reelection. It turned out that the governor couldn’t wait any longer, while his mentor could afford all the time in the world. The explosion that followed in the last two weeks between the somnolent mentor and his agitated mentee was predictable and inevitable, as this column anticipated in October 2024.

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One more prediction can be ventured on the Kano affair: Dr Kwankwaso has been left holding the short end of the stick, and Mr Yusuf is left with all the advantage. Having tarried so long in trying to negotiate a deal worthy of his stature, the Kwankwasiyya leader will now have to fight for his political life with little chance of stalemating the war or emerging victorious. He faces the unpalatable choice of either migrating to the African Democratic Congress (ADC), where there are covert and cowardly talks of unhorsing the immovable former vice president Atiku Abubakar, or of staying put at the forlorned NNPP. Whatever he does, he faces a veritable Hobson’s choice. To return to the APC suitor is to follow his mentee to the new watering hole while simultaneously losing face. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is out of the picture, while the ADC, now seething with plots and dreams of utopia, will test his forbearance to its limit. Enjoy the following 2024 discourses that presaged the Kwankwaso debacle.

January 18, 2026
*NNPP will not be outdone (First published October 20, 2024)

No one thinks that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) state chapters are free of bickering and rancour. If the rancour appears subdued, or if party elders still command respect and exert tremendous influence on quarrelsome rank and file, it is because the party controls the national levers of power and distributes patronage. The opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP), and the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) are not so lucky. Since they lost the presidential election last year, both the PDP and LP have been at once strident in opposition and wracked by guilt and rage. Last week, this column explored the tangential issue of electoral cooperation between the NNPP and LP, wondering why instead of tackling their identity crises and internal conflicts, they chose to focus on the more ambitious project of taking the presidency in 2027. The PDP, as nearly everyone knows, had sunk into crisis since 2015. It is now the turn of the two other opposition parties to confront their fates.

While the cancer gnawing at the liver of the PDP has festered for nearly a decade, some three weeks ago, the tremor coursing through the body politic of the LP assumed monumental dimension. Now, the NNPP, an otherwise fringe party controlling only Kano State, will not be outdone. Party leaders, led by the pugnacious and vengeful Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, have managed against the run of play to furnish themselves not only an internal crisis but also a war. No party has a monopoly of internal crisis, not even the APC, let alone the naturally fractious PDP; but the NNPP is determined not to be a laggard. The Young Turks in the party, though still scheming in the shadows, and working in concert with a smattering of old and calloused hands, have signaled the start of a rebellion. Their goal is to either dissipate the influence of Dr Kwankwaso or overthrow his suzerainty altogether. They feel his overbearing presence too constraining, and his diktats, not to say his malice, bilious and anachronistic. They also empathise with the ‘helpless’ Kano governor Abba Kabir Yusuf whom they are secretly nudging to extricate himself from the stranglehold of the party leader. But they do not yet have the courage to challenge their mentor in open fight. They know a thing or two about the unappeasable Dr Kwankwaso, with a few of them having at one time or the other been scorched by his fury; and they know quite well that he does not take prisoners. For now, however, they will fight him secretly, and even hide behind the thin flak jacket of the governor.

This is of course not the first time the NNPP, which was founded in 2002 by the Anambrarian Boniface Aniebonam, will be engaged in fratricidal conflict. Since its takeover by the Kwankwasiyya crowd in 2022, the party has been ill at ease. Last April, Mr Aniebonam accused Dr kwankwaso, who is now informally described as NNPP party leader, of hijacking the party, changing its logo and flag, and mutilating its constitution. But that initial fight was half-hearted and stalemated. A new chapter in the fight has now been opened. Unsettled by how the party leader has been riding roughshod over everyone in the party, particularly Gov Yusuf, a few party top shots reportedly schemed to throw off Dr Kwankwaso’s yoke. The alleged rebels refused to confirm the existence of any plot, but the state chairman of the party, Hashim Sulaiman Dungurawa, zeroed in on a few of the alleged masterminds and suspended them from the party ostensibly for disrespecting the party, disloyalty, and abuse of power. They are the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Abdullahi Baffa Bichi, and the Commissioner of Transportation, Muhammad Diggol.

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The story of the brewing revolt in Kano is, however, not the usual kind. Sources suggest that the so-called rebellion tagged ‘Abba Tsaya da Kafarka’, meaning, Abba stand on your feet, was plotted to put an end to the dominance and dictations of Dr Kwankwaso. The suspension of the two officials has since been rescinded, and both of them have disowned the plot, but the feeling persists around the seat of power in Kano that the party leader is unsparing and megalomaniacal. The party leader himself refused to comment on the matter, especially on the suspension of the two government officials, preferring instead that all inquiries be directed to the party chairman; but no one is deceived that his reticence means absolution. The plotters may have shriveled like worms on a hot plate, but everyone knows that it is a question of time before the silent war breaks into the open. The excesses of Dr Kwankwaso will make an open confrontation certain.

Gov Yusuf is unlikely to join any rebellion now, regardless of how much Dr Kwankwaso needles him. Though it is clear to many Kanawa that the governor does not enjoy as much freedom as he would like, he would, however, continue to walk the tightrope for as long as is humanly tolerable. He has been made to inherit the party leader’s enemies, chief among whom is former governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje. But he has probably seen why his predecessor fell out with the party leader. Whether his education is complete on this issue or not, he will nevertheless be wary of fighting his benefactor openly. Two reasons will account for his restraint. Firstly, he won the Kano governorship poll by a wafer-thin margin, scoring only 52 percent that was controversially upheld by the Supreme Court. If he is keen on reelection, he will try his utmost to accommodate the eccentricities of his mentor and party leader.

Secondly, Kano has an unenviable history of godsons fighting with and alienating their godfathers, as exampled by the late Governor Abubakar Rimi versus the statesman and NEPU legend, Aminu Kano. The end result of that open warfare did not bode well for the former governor’s political career. However, Dr Kwankwaso probably exaggerates his influence and power in Kano, and by overreaching himself too many times, he may already have compromised the reverence in which he is held. But Gov Yusuf will not want to find out whether he would be undone by an open warfare with his party leader. More, seeing how the SSG and Transportation commissioner ate crow last week, no one in public office in Kano will be eager to flex his muscles anytime soon. Discretion, they say, is the better part of valour. Borno, Katsina and Niger States are some of the very few states where godfathers enthroned godsons without acrimony or subsequent interferences. Kano and Rivers States could borrow a leaf from any of those three states had godfathers Kwankwaso and Nyesom Wike been made of subtler and more nuanced stuff.

January 18, 2026
Nigerians love zero-sum game

Moderation, middle of the road, restraint are virtues now almost completely alien to Nigerians. Islamic cleric Ahmed Gumi threatens the republic on behalf of Fulani herdsmen, arguing apocalyptically that going to war with them over banditry and killings would be counterproductive and unwinnable. Pascal Chibuike Okechukwu, alias Cubana Chief Priest, night club owner and former shoemaker, threatens the ruling APC with defeat in the next presidential poll for jailing IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu. Oyo governor Seyi Makinde also threatens ‘to use madness to cure madness’ should the 2027 poll be rigged. His assumption, of course, is that should the PDP lose, then the elections were rigged. And then, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, always hyperbolic and vengeful, Peter Obi, ever so highfalutin, and other African Democratic Congress (ADC) leaders, have also jointly threatened that chaos would ensue if the next elections were rigged. In all, every one of these threateners indicate that their loss would equate with the ruling party rigging the polls.

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The social media is not left out. There have been torrents of threats against the republic should the republic persist in fighting bandits laying the society waste. And there is also the owner of Air Peace threatening that if the new tax laws were not repealed or suspended, airline business would collapse inside a month. And finally, Nigeria’s neocolonial elite still bewitched by America and the irreverent President Donald Trump have threatened that should the APC rig the elections, US would give Nigerian leaders the Nicolas Maduro treatment. Truly sad. Flowing from the threats, it is clear that most Nigerian political and business elite are overrated.

January 11, 2026
Sense and nonsense in Rivers

Barely weeks after they seemed to have put their animosities behind them, Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State and his predecessor Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), have unsheathed their swords again. It didn’t take months in the first instance for the war between the two leaders to break out after the 2023 elections. Since then, they had been at daggers drawn until President Bola Tinubu brokered a peace deal between the warring factions. That deal quickly unravelled even before the ink was dry. Then threats of impeachment followed in quick succession, later a proclamation of emergency that stalled the impeachment, and soon thereafter another tentative peace deal presupposing that the combatants had learnt their lessons. Alas, all along, trench warfare had been unfolding, leading once again to another round of impeachment notice served one way or the other, on the governor last week.

While the war seems to be about political disagreements caused by misdirected loyalties, it is really all about a battle for supremacy between the governor and the FCT minister. Mr Fubara does not appear to know how to sustain a peace deal, in addition to being tactless and insufferable; and Mr Wike seems apathetical to being gracious and patient, in addition to being overbearing. That the war keeps flaring, it is now very obvious, is less a reflection of the contents of the various peace deals and truces reached in the past as it is about the idiosyncrasies of the two politicians unmitigated by time, politics, logic and affiliations. There will perhaps be another round, or even a few more rounds, of making peace, but it is uncertain that any peace penned would last between two men so unalike in their worldviews and so fundamentally opposed politically and behaviourally.

The war had been simmering for months despite strenuous efforts to keep up appearances and paper over the cracks. But the latest battle began when an unreflective All Progressives Congress (APC) national secretary, Ajibola Basiru, speaking at the commissioning of projects in Rivers State three days before Christmas, indirectly endorsed Governor Fubara for a second term in office. Having defected to the APC on December 9, not too long after a majority of Rivers lawmakers headed in the same direction, the governor, it was clear, had indeed begun to nurse a second term. It was probably not the most prudent ambition to exhibit in the circumstances, but it had been rumoured that one of the provisions in the peace deal Mr Fubara entered into related to his abjuration of a second term ambition. This may explain why Mr Wike kept harping on the ‘agreement is agreement’ mantra. But whether true or not, for the deal had never been made public, Mr Basiru, who was in a position to know the dynamic of the Rivers crisis, should have been more circumspect in his utterances.

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Last week’s flare up is also speculated to have been partly triggered by Mr Wike’s meddling in the succession battles in a few APC states. Incensed, some APC governors, already aware that the former Rivers governor was resented in President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet due to his rising profile and charismatic politics, threw in their lot with Mr Fubara and let it be known publicly that the governor was being treated contemptuously by a non-APC cabinet member who was becoming too big for his britches. They, therefore, began lending the Rivers governor support for his second term, agreement or no agreement. Mr Wike’s burden is compounded by two militating factors. One is the central role he seems to be playing in the disaffection and distemper coursing through the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), vitiating their politics and rendering them so weakened by dissension that any hope of revival appears foreclosed before the next round of elections in 2027. He is unloved and roundly hated in the opposition, making them wish his downfall. They revel in the animosities he has awakened in the APC and suggest that the ruling party had it coming, and so should not complain after deploying him as a battering ram against the opposition.

The second factor is more troubling and a little nuanced. His enemies in both the PDP and APC do not pull their punches in suggesting cynically that Mr Wike had rested almost his entire relevance in the Tinubu cabinet on how he swung Rivers State for the APC in the 2023 presidential poll. That race and that victory were of course pivotal to President Tinubu’s election, but some APC leaders now say it is discourteous and impolitic to keep hammering on it as if the entire election was won by that singular state electoral success. The Rivers poll victory was part of a collective, they said, albeit a significant part. Mr Wike’s constant iteration of his role in the Rivers poll success has finally driven many APC leaders up the wall, and they are sick and tired of his preening.

President Tinubu, a far better tactician than Mr Wike or any other political leader in the ruling party or in the opposition party today, has been more forbearing of Mr Wike’s excesses. He recognises that his stake in winning the 2027 presidential poll is far more epochal in significance than Mr Wike retaining his political relevance in Rivers. The other APC leaders, some of them popular governors in their own right, are more than ready to give battle to the former Rivers governor. And they have signaled their preparedness to fight, regardless of the cost in 2027. For the president to throw caution to the wind, however, and join them in the fray, they will have to convince him that sacrificing Mr Wike or even weakening his hold over Rivers would cost the APC little or nothing.

January 11, 2026
Extraordinary rendering in Caracas

Global attention in the past week has riveted on developments in the beautiful Venezuelan capital of Caracas. It has been a surreal supercharged drama, the type normally reserved for enthralling science fiction. The entire world has been on edge, like the audience at a movie that has become too real for comfort. You have a feel that this is history as it has been, as it really is and as it is going to be. So get on with it. But you also begin to doubt the collective health of humanity.

History is made by history-makers and not by those at the receiving end of historical developments; the passive receptacles who are nothing but canon fodders of human development. The Americans, astute choreographers of historical developments that they have proved to be, have even added a touch of eerie certitude to the extraordinary and outlandish development. It was exactly thirty five years since a former American minion, Manuel Noriega, was flushed out of the presidential precincts in Panama City before being taken into American custody after days of wondering in the same country he had ruled with iron severity.

This time around, the Americans have even scaled up the chilling expertise in high-tech human vaporization. Whether we like the American rampart militarism or not, whether we admire Donald Trump’s manic war-mongering and malevolent exhibitionism , his obtuse insensitivity to the plight of fellow humans, you have to go give something to him and his compatriots. The military operation to capture Nicolas Maduro was a classic of its genre showcasing human military ingenuity and capacity for brutal violence at its summit. It was from start to finish, brilliantly coordinated, clinically executed and tellingly enacted, leaving no room for any margin of error.

The Americans have been showing the world why they are emphatic and unquestionable masters of the universe and worthy successors to the mantle of the Roman Empire. It would have felt very good and immensely reassuring if our world were to be under the threat of an attack by some invaders from some outer planets. But we are not. We are our own worst enemies. Some twenty five years ago when the Americans blitzed their way through Saddam Hussein and his empire of venality, it was advanced by military experts that after America, the combined military might of the next twenty five countries could not approach the military dominion of the most successful country that the world has seen. The suspicion is that this disproportion would have increased ever since as an exhausted and historically superannuated Europe began to cynically offload its responsibility to defend itself on the American big brother which takes its divine mission, his manifest destiny and notion of American Exceptionalism to a new level.

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So, before we begin to castigate the Americans for disturbing the peace of the world and for disrupting the extant global order, we must factor in the dereliction of duty and the sense of historic ennui and sheer fatigue, the disorienting weariness, that seem to have overtaken the lapsed empires of Europe. We can then ask the legitimate question as to whether the world has become a better place to live, whether there has been increased prosperity and whether the plight of humankind generally has become more humane under the aegis of America’s unexampled might and total dominion.

But under a rightwing resurgence and the relentless hammer of a man with a ledger and balance sheet vision of history, the Americans are having none of that. We must first pay for past services and make arrangements to repair current debts. The world has taken America for a ride for a long time and this business of being your brother’s keeper only impoverishes Americans and set the citizens permanently on the boil while the Europeans go on their luxury holidays and the Africans wallow in their historic turpitude underwritten by American generosity and compassion. Charity must return to the home of charity and in order to make America great again, the Father Christmas nonsense must stop. As Oscar Wilde famously admonishes, we must avoid the careless habits of accuracy. The need for America to continue to parade as the global policeman while also insisting that it is all done in the interest of America’s supremacy is the central contradiction of the Trump enterprise and will see to its eventual unraveling.

   Nevertheless, self-summoned duty has its summoned obligations. The concept of extraordinary rendition by which Nicolas Maduro, the ousted president of Venezuela and his wife, have found themselves in American custody this past week, is one of those unique American extralegal inventions which does not brook scrutiny because it has its foundation in the use of overwhelming force to arrive at predetermined and often illegal objectives. Redolent of brisk and extreme brutality in apprehending and transporting those on its wanted list of designated terrorists, It is America’s preferred mode of international abduction. But as it becomes an omnibus dragnet snapping up high-profile global personalities including serving heads of sovereign nations, the threat to extant global order cannot be overemphasized.

   As America sets about establishing and projecting its bona fide as the undisputed master of the universe and its principal cop, the Treaty of Westphalia, the grundnorm of the modern nation-state paradigm, stands diminished and attenuated. After unending wars among the global principalities of the period, the treaty established the notion of sovereignty and territorial integrity based on dominated space rather than sphere of religion. Even then, succeeding global powers have often scoffed at the idea of sovereignty based on legal fiction rather than real power and authority. Superior French artillery put paid to the idea of Italian city-states, just as the French themselves could arguably be called the first masters of extraordinary rendition as seen in the tragic abduction of the Haitian leader, Toussaint L’ Overture, and his subsequent death in French incarceration.

    In our era and in this particular conjuncture, however, no country has been more gung-ho in imposing its interests on the global order and more adept at projecting a rampart militarism and capacity for brutal preemption as the cornerstone of its foreign policy than the United States. Apart from capturing Nicolas Madura, Donald Trump has directly threatened Iran, Cuba, Colombia and has steamrolled even mighty Russia on the high seas aided by the British RAF. The American strongman has also resumed his psych-op and relentless baiting of Greenland asking the autonomous Arctic enclave to voluntarily relinquish sovereignty and surrender its age long autonomy. The danger in all this if care and caution are not taken and given Donald Trump’s combustible nature, is the possibility of a military overreach at some point which can have some apocalyptic consequences.

   Let us now bring in literature in service of troubled reality and life as science fiction. As I was about returning to Nigeria last week, my first daughter pressed into my hand as part of Christmas gift, a recently reissued edition of the magical masterpiece by the Columbia master, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Autumn of the Patriarch is an unforgettable portrait of decaying splendour and splendid state paralysis enacted against the dismal background of an expiring Latin American despot holed up inside the presidential palace. It was a sumptuous feast of decadence and desuetude; a classic study in the epidemic of human dereliction. Huge vultures take position ready to feast on the remains of the dying emperor. The courtesans and couriers of power had all left, abandoning the old man to his fate.

The irony of Marquez’s novel could not have been more pronounced when three days later the Americans staged the extraordinary rendition of Nicolas Maduro and his spouse from the Caracas presidential palace. As a result of what is known as biological coup d’etat, the aging autocrats who swarmed the president palaces of Latin America, the Trujillos, , the Somozas, the Stroessners, the Duvaliers, the Ugarte Pinochets etc when the novel was published fifty years earlier have all disappeared. Time is the ultimate master of tyrants. Rather than being an aging dictator, Maduro was a caudillo in his prime. It was obvious from the swamp of bandage that the spouse had to be physically restrained. And rather than having vultures swarming over, it is drones that seem to relish devouring fresh human flesh in real time.

   This is where this engrossing Venezuelan story finally turns on its head. What ought to be celebrated as a victory over communism gone rogue and liberation from the clutches of an antidemocratic fascist is fast transforming into a nationalist liberation struggle against foreign tyranny and a stirring rally for sovereignty. Extraordinary rendition has produced its own extraordinary rendition. With America hinting at full militarization and unwisely suggesting that its stay in the embattled country is unlikely to be a short an uneventful one, this is likely to provoke some ancient nationalist cadres in Venezuela to resuming what they know best: guerrilla sabotage. With Columbia actively hostile across a three-thousand miles border, we may be seeing another major American quagmire developing.

   A strong person without discretion is often likened to a weak, ineffectual protagonist. One of the most remarkable consequences of the abduction of Nicolas Maduro is the global pushback it has spawned against authoritarian rightwing politics even in the Trumpian homeland. The obvious retreat of President Trump from a precipitate military overwhelming of Venezuela and the attempt to woo the hard men of Colombia is coming when the horse of resurgent nationalism had already bolted from the stable. Either as collective entities or as individuals, both countries are likely to dissolve into chaos and civil war.

Something is beginning to stir anew in humanity all over again. This has laid the condition for the possibility of a new benign type of leftwing politics to act as countervailing rallying point against the global dominance of xenophobic populism and rightwing authoritarianism. It will not in the short run halt the rampaging momentum of Donald Trump’s Wehrmacht. But it is likely to contain its excesses in the long run for the benefit of humanity.

Some new music is beginning to sound in the remote horizon. It is the time of extraordinary rendition. We may have to thank President Donald Trump for the lack of moral and political encumbrances which has allowed us to see the old global order for the unworthy charade it has become. But we can also see the limits of sledgehammer geopolitics in a world far more conflicted and convoluted than the time of Westphalia. It is time for a new global order.

January 11, 2026