The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Trump and the politics of brinkmanship

    Trump and the politics of brinkmanship

    It seems the American president, Donald John Trump, is determined to change the world if the rest of us permit him to without United Nations notice of a reason for belligerency or the interest of global peace or threat to the security of the USA. Therefore, having to embark on retaliatory action in the interest of self-defence and without declaration of formal war on Venezuela approved by the US Congress, he nevertheless sent an armada of a carrier group of ships, frigates, air armaments and the Delta Strike group and assorted coastal ships and previous deployments of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) to the coast of Venezuela. It did not come as a surprise when on the morning of January 3, the USA government announced the capture of the president of the Republic of Venezuela, his wife and one of his children while asleep and brought them to New York where they were detained in a New York prison for drugs and gun running thereby putting, at risk the security of the United States. 

    Legally, the US was violating international law and the norms of international diplomacy. The situation was made more surprising when Donald Trump announced that he was going to run the country and invite big American oil companies to return to Venezuela and redevelop the oil wells which they owned before the oil business was nationalised by previous governments of Venezuela. Then while the public was wondering how he would single-handedly run a whole country three times the size of California, it was announced that the US government was leaving virtually intact, the government of President Nicholas Maduro in power without Maduro because his vice president, of Delcy Eloina Rodriguez Gomez was sworn in as president. This was rather bewildering because people expected Madame Carina Machado, the new Nobel laureate for peace would play some important role in post-Maduro government but Trump dismissed her as not popular despite the fact that the democratic coalition she organised won democratic elections last year in Venezuela which Maduro rigged against her.  

    It seems the American government had learnt a bitter lesson from its experience in Iraq where it dismissed the entire Saddam Hussein government only to face in later years, rebellion under ISIS and the Al Baghdadi Caliphate. This may be understandable but is it wise and justiciable? The case is still in court and postponed to start litigation in March.  The case remains unresolved while the whole world is watching and waiting. Trump directed his attention to other areas of the world as if he is driven to action by unseen forces. He picked on annexation of Danish Greenland and war on the Islamic Republic of Iran following street demonstration against the government of Ayatollah Khamenei. Any intelligent observer would ask on how many fronts of war can the US fight on? It was known at the time that a big fraction of the naval strength of the USA was committed and tied down in the Caribbean front in Venezuela. Trump unfortunately encouraged the Iranians to continue their demonstration against their government and promised that help was on the way from the USA. Some days later he backed down saying the Iranian government had not carried through execution of about 800 people arrested for demonstration against the Iranian regime. Then to palliate the anger and discontent of Iranian rebels, he began to say the time for looking for a new Iranian leader was ripe to which the Iranian government in a withering  attack told him if he killed their Ayatollah Khamenei, he would pay dearly for it.

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    Now apart from sending ICE paratroopers to Minneapolis and threatening war against  states run by the Democratic Party and threatening to issuing a declaration of insurrection and sending troops to put down demonstrators against forceful deportation of illegal immigrants, as I am writing this piece on the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King (January 19) who in the 1960s led protests by black people and their supporters against more than a century of denial of rights and economic opportunity and equality which culminated in the Civil Rights laws of 1965 which Donald Trump has been eroding gradually, his government has one by one undermined rights of black peoples to equal education by getting rid of rights reserved for minorities in education and employment describing them as racist attack on whites. He has been getting rid of black peoples through so-called reduction of the federal government and blocking opportunities for blacks even in sports.  While doing this, he is imposing psychological damage on blacks because he is banning African people from coming to the US because Trump is characterising them as people from “shit-hole countries” while appealing to countries in the Scandinavian region to come to the USA since they will be welcome. He is also asking whites from South Africa to leave the republic and emigrate to the US because he said they were being killed or victimised in the Union of South Africa without evidence. He invited the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphoza and humiliated him before the whole world.

    He is totally unaware that he is building a black bomb for future explosion of discontentment. He has started threatening Greenland which he said the USA needs to protect itself from threats from Russia and China in an increasingly strategically important sea route because of the melting ice in the Arctic. We are also aware of Trump’s secret plan to build on Greenland an anti-nuclear shield to protect the USA against possible nuclear attack either by Russia or China. We now have a situation in which European countries, formerly solid allies like Denmark, Norway and other Scandinavian countries and also France and Germany and other allies of the USA which are members of NATO are opposed to Trump’s policy on Greenland and are ready to resist Trump’s braggadocio.

    Although nobody expects American troops to start shooting Europeans but anything is possible in a situation when Trump’s cabinet ministers and even the American vice president, JD Vance openly say America represents strength and power while Europe is a symbol of weakness. If Trump goes ahead with his so-called military option against the Kingdom of Denmark in order to seize Greenland, that will signal the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

    Sometimes one wonders if one should take President Trump seriously. How does one interpret the seriousness of a man who accepts the Nobel Prize from Machado and hangs it prominently in the White House even though everyone knows it is not transferable? How serious can one take him when he publicly writes an open letter to the Norwegian prime minister for not ensuring that an independent body like the Nobel Committee did not give him the Nobel Prize for peace which he claimed he has earned for stopping eight wars which everyone disagrees and disputes? It seems as if he feels this justifies his bellicose relationship with Denmark a sister Scandinavian country!

    With US piling pressure on European countries in order to force them to support the possible seizure of Greenland, Europe is beginning to ask whether America is a worthy ally or a bully using them in its struggle and competition for world power. It is becoming clear that European support for America is no longer guaranteed. Yet America would need European support if America decides to stop justified Chinese future unification with the island of Taiwan. The same America is alienating India by putting up tariff against it and China for buying oil from Russia and thus helping Russia to have money in prosecuting the war against Ukraine.

    I personally think it will get to a point when the Chinese that holds substantial portion of American debt in form of Treasury Bills, the Norwegians and others begin to unleash on the market their holdings of American treasury bills and treasury bonds and this will simply expose the fact that for years, America has enjoyed living on the backs of the rest of the world by using the dollar as a reserve currency without controlling the printing and issuance of the currency. The whole world since 1945 has been working to support the American economy and to allow Americans to live well to the disadvantage of the rest of the world.

    President Trump’s rambling policy may usher in the end of the American global military but most importantly financial domination. What is Africa or Nigeria’s response to what the Canadian Prime Minister Mike Carney says?  He said there is a rupture in the world order and not a transition and countries have to determine to forge economic ties with groups with similarities of ideas goals and needs instead of fixed and rigid permanent organisations dominated by global or single hegemon doing whatever pleases it at any given time without considerations of the interests of other members of the global community. Nigeria must organise, albeit clandestinely, without too much noise. I hope we are not just going to continue with our old politics without ideas, plans or goals as long as we get elected into office.

  • He simplified being human

    He simplified being human

    Faith is sorely weaponised in Nigeria. One person’s “God” is another person’s “Satan.” One temple’s saint is another temple’s sinner.  Between rival altars rots the skeletons of neighbours who once shared water, markets, and laughter.

    Faith is a boundary stone in Nigeria; and sometimes, a password or a warning. It decides who gets mourned honorably and who deserves the dishonour of a mass grave. It decides which deaths are explained away as destiny and which are weaponised as proof of divine favour. In this bruised moral landscape, religion thrives on maleficence; what should soothe becomes a tool of persecution.

    Thus it was startling, almost disorienting, to read amid the haze of Islamophobia and religious extremism perpetuated by Nigerian Christians and Muslims, the reportage of a Nigerian who rebelled.

    On June 23, 2018, Abdullahi Abubakar, Chief Imam of Akwatti Mosque in Nghar community, Plateau State, opened his masjid and his home to about 270 Christians fleeing death as well as Muslims fleeing reprisal attacks. Long-running communal violence between Berom and Fulani groups in the State had flared again, and more than 80 people were killed as suspected Fulani militias carried out midday attacks on 10 Berom villages in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of the State.

    Abubakar, then 86, sheltered the refugees, knowing fully that to harbour them in that moment was to sign his own death warrant. Yet, he defied the militia prowling his premises, desperate to kill. He resisted the terrorists.

    Let us be precise with language. They were ethnic terrorists, not Muslim terrorists. No verse in the Qur’an or Islamic jurisprudence licenses the murder of Christians or sanctifies the killing of innocents. The same moral courtesy Christians routinely extend to themselves must be extended here. When a Christian mob lynched and burned Pastor Dio Idon of ECWA in Southern Kaduna recently over allegations of witchcraft, Christians across Nigeria insisted those murderers were “not real Christians.” Likewise, when Deborah Yakubu was lynched and burned for alleged blasphemy, Muslims reserved the same moral latitude to say “Deborah’s murderers are not real Muslims.”

    Consistency is the minimum requirement of morality, and on that count, Imam Abubakar exerted himself admirably. Senior journalist and writer Sam Omatseye, who later interviewed Abubakar, captures the simplicity of the man’s courage stressing that, “In a region where Christians and Muslims have been reported to be at daggers-drawn, where the so-called herdsmen and farmers only met in blood puddles, this Imam bucked the narrative. He dared to disdain his personal safety for others and valorised human life without prejudice to religion.”

    Because of him, hundreds of Nigerian men, women and children were saved, notes Omatseye. “We are all children of God. Both faiths want peace,” Abubakar explained his actions with a simplicity that mocked our sophisticated cruelties.

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    To understand the significance of Abubakar’s act, one must understand the ecology of hatred in which it occurred. Plateau is a landscape where grievances are inherited and weaponised across generations. The Berom, who are mainly Christian farmers, and the Fulani, who are largely Muslim pastoralists, have a history of violent conflict in the State, rooted primarily in land disputes and the contentious classification of residents as “indigenes” or “settlers.” Tensions worsened significantly after a federal political appointment in September 2001 triggered violence that killed about 1,000 people and displaced thousands. Since then, cycles of attack and reprisal have continued, often sparked by rumours.

    In such a place, neutrality is tantamount to betrayal and to save “the other” is to offend one’s own. Abubakar’s action, deservedly drew global attention. In 2019, the United States honoured him with the International Religious Freedom Award. He also received Nigeria’s national honour of Member of the Order of the Niger (MON) from former President Muhammadu Buhari.

    He died on Friday, January 16, two weeks after his 92nd birthday.

    Imam Abubakar, no doubt, belonged to a different moral generation, one raised on a culture that measured faith not by how loudly it announced itself, but by how gently it treated the vulnerable. His Deen wasn’t performative. It was Qur’anic in the deepest sense: “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of humanity” (Quran 5:32).

    The Qur’an insists that there is no compulsion in religion. It commands believers to speak kindly to people, to stand firmly for justice even against themselves, and to recognise human dignity as God-given, not sect-granted. That lineage of thought lived through Imam Abubakar.

    So too does Christianity, at its moral core, insist that love of neighbour is inseparable from love of God. The problem has never been scripture. It has always been selection. And Imam Abubakar selected humaneness. In doing so, he exposed the poverty of our religious theatrics.

    Omatseye intones with a rare moral precision that in Abubakar: “The Christian fanatic zealot will see remorse, the Muslim fanatic will find a new path, the atheist will coddle human pathos. He was a man with true evangelical zeal. A puritan of love and peace. A partisan of harmony, not sects.”

    In death, Abubakar outlives our pretensions and embarrasses our noise. While others milk tragedy for relevance, he refused even the spotlight that found him. Little wonder he had no social media accounts. He didn’t save Christians to project himself as a saint or perform theological gymnastics. Thus, when the world applauded, he went back to being human.

    Contrast this with our age of clout-chasing righteousness. Even now, established and closet bigots are laundering their reputations with Abubakar’s name, accessorising themselves with virtues alien to their conduct. It is a cheap and soulless spiral.

    In Imam Abubakar, Nigeria lost a rare gem, ultimately because he established a truth too inconvenient for ideologues: that we were human before we became religious. Humanity is the first covenant and any faith that violates it is counterfeit. Abubakar lived this reality. And that wasn’t a small feat.

    It is easy to preach tolerance behind microphones and security details. It is another thing entirely to shelter about 300 neighbours while a blood thirsty militia stalk your door. Too many contemporary faithful parade themselves as God’s gift to a broken world while ploughing its peace with gospels of carnage. They have perfected a theology that can explain any corpse away, provided it belongs to the wrong kind of believer. It is about time we defanged religion in Nigeria, not by banishing faith, but by stripping it of its license to kill.

    Yet, we must understand that the merchants of hate want us to live in fear of one another. We must appreciate why a villager who watched his family butchered by men chanting “Allahu Akbar” may never see goodness in Islam again. And why another who lost loved ones to Christian militias chanting “self-help” and “Glory!” may define every cross as threat. Trauma rewrites theology and hate-mongering preachers exploit pain, pawing it into permanent hostility.

    Abubakar was a rebuke to every such agent of hate. He proved that the most radical act in a season of slaughter may be to open a door.

    To remember him is to submit ourselves to his unimpeachable humanity. To decide, in the moments that will test us, when rumours thicken and fear knocks, between the easier creed of hate or the harder discipline of humanity.

    •Abubakar chose, and hundreds lived. The rest is commentary.

  • General Musa’s war against subversives

    General Musa’s war against subversives

    Nigeria’s Defence Minister, General Christopher Musa (rtd), last Thursday read the riot act to Sheik Gumi for describing those who have ravaged the Middle Belt, engaged in mindless killings of thousands of subsistence farmers and condemned thousands of their displaced families to IDP camps in their own country as “our brothers”. He frowned at his efforts and those of his group at providing “covert support to criminal elements seeking to destabilize our country”. And with foreboding finality, he threw a challenge at Gumi and his tribe of subversives: “The choice is clear. Stand with the law and the nation, or be counted among those enabling criminality” because for him, “a friend of a thief is a thief”.

    One can understand General Musa’s righteous indignation. He has seen how rhetoric and actions of those who behave as if they are above the law not only endangered the lives of his soldiers but also increased the nightmare of Nigerians. He has witnessed how Gumi’s call for rehabilitation and payment of compensation to those who under the pretext of government marginalization killed thousands of innocent Nigerians has only increased the frustration of Nigerians. He equally understands that Nigerians are scandalized  by betrayal of our country by respected Nigerian leaders like Sanusi Lamido Sanusi who directed Fulani settlers in in Benue to disobey anti-grazing laws of their host state; Abubakar Malami’s attempt to extend free movement constitutional right of Nigerians  to cows, and Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed’s attempt to confer Nigerian citizenship on immigrant Fulani herdsmen terrorizing Nigerians with AK 47 which he said they needed to protect their cows from rustlers.

    But I sympathize with General Musa because beyond Gumi and his tribe, most Nigerian elite have subversive tendencies and have engaged in serial betrayal of Nigeria since independence. Indeed, this is why many believe that the Nigerian educated elite are the scourge of Nigeria. Chief Obafemi Awolowo who in the run up to independence, believed Nigeria’s educated elite were driven by greed was also of the opinion that given a choice between them, our traditional rulers and the departing colonial masters, Nigeria would choose in reverse order.

    Let us start with Book Haram insurgency that has dragged on for over 13 years, spreading violence at its pick from Borno State to Abuja. For instance, General Andrew Owoye Azazi, one time National Security Adviser to President Jonathan is on record as saying Boko Haram was a creation of PDP subversives. Today, leading lights of PDP currently taking refuge in ADC blame others for their folly as if it is possible to have today without yesterday.

    Many believe terrorism in the northeast was a creation of dissident northern governors. For instance, Sharia law since it was institutionalized by the colonial masters was just a method of local adjudication in the north.  But that was to change when anti-Obasanjo northern governors led by Ahmed Sani Yerima on October 27 1999, launched Sharia as a state religion in defiance of section 10 of the 1999 constitution, which states very clearly that “the government of the federation or of state shall not adopt any religion or state religion”. Thirteen other northern states soon joined Yerima to inaugurate sharia law in their states. Many of the ‘Sharia’ governors later sponsored some of our youths for indoctrination under Osama Bin Laden who was then taking refuge in Sudan. It was widely believed that some of the youths that went through that indoctrination formed the nucleus of insurgents groups that have brought nothing but misery to poor northerners. While the 13 Sharia states today remain the most underdeveloped part of the country, their other baleful legacies are millions of out-of-school children and street urchins known as ‘almajiris’.

    Niger Delta’s violent militant groups were also the creation of Niger Delta dissident governors. At the onset of the 4th republic, agitation for resource control by self-serving Niger Delta elected governors forced the federal government to seek the Supreme Court’s interpretation of section 162(2) of the 1999 constitution. The court ruled that the plaintiff was obliged to comply with the provisions of the constitution on the 13% derivation from May 29 1999.

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    That was all Niger Delta traitorous governors needed to invite disloyal VP Atiku Abubakar who was planning to oust his principal from power as their arrow head. Falsely swearing in the name of the people, they went on to arm frustrated jobless Niger Delta youths, victims of land degradation and water pollution.

    Mujahid Asari Dokubo’s Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF) later accused of “siphoning oil and gas from pipelines, destroying energy infrastructure and declaring war on Nigerian state, was one of such creations. Others include Odili ‘s  rival group, the  Atake Tom’s “Niger Delta Vigilantes”(charged for treason and jailed in 2005) and  the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) led by  Ben Victor Ebikabowei, alias General Government ‘Boy Loaf’, responsible for the death of over 1000 people  with over 300 others taken as hostages. This forced late president, Umaru Yar’Adua to negotiate and agree to pay each militant N65,000 monthly or N65b per annum.  Non-faithful implementation of the programme after Buhari’s emergence in 2015 led to the emergence of the Niger Delta Avengers, whose attack on oil installations led to reduction in Nigeria’s oil production by half.  This was what forced Nigerian government into the negotiation table.

    General Government  Boyloaf,  who  the late Pa Edwin Clark said could not secure government job  because of lack of education, chased around by security officers on account of his criminal activities,  has since obtained a  first class degree in international relations from Abuja Base University and transited into  a multi-billionaire business man with a big mansion in Abuja while Dokubo, his former principal has settled down as first class traditional Ijaw ruler routinely consulted by Niger Delta politicians.  While the militant leaders have been integrated into the system, the lot of the poor in Niger Delta remains the same.

    And if you believe they were driven by altruism to unleash terror on Nigeria, take another look at the profile of these self-serving leaders. First, they have all been accused of financial malfeasance against their states: – Peter Odili was saved by the court, Alamieseigha was chased by EFCC and foreign security agencies from Germany, through France, Britain where he had deployed his state resources to buy mansions to Nigeria; James Ibori was jailed in London. Ifeanyi Okowa is accused of deploying his state resources on Atiku’s 2023 presidential campaign. And as for Wike and Fubara, facts have emerged to show they generously deployed resources of Rivers to buy influence among PDP oligarchy and respectable Nigerian institutions like the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).

    But perhaps the greatest threat to our survival as nation is the economic and political subversives.

    In the seventies and eighties when the naira was stronger than the dollar, we produced our own food, manufactured our own refrigerators, television, car accessories such as batteries, tyres, windscreen and our own drugs. Ibrahim Babangida’s liberalization and commercialization policies were to turn us to importers of labour of other societies. The economic subversives who argued most vociferously in favour of globalization to justify change of policy from manufacturing to importation are today behind massive importation of foreign goods including substandard and fake ones. They have over the years also sabotaged government’s efforts at backward integration just as they are the most critical of current government’s policy aimed at changing the narrative.

    And of course, the political subversives have continued to betray aspirations of Nigerians by preventing a return to where the rain started to beat us.

    Unfortunately, most Nigerian youths and others below 70 may never appreciate how beautiful our country used to be at a period we operated a federal arrangement that guaranteed “unity in diversity”. Our three regions each with her own High Commissioner in the United Kingdom operated without interference even from the centre. That was the period Nigerians had no apprehension putting their 12-years old inside the train unaccompanied from Ibadan or Lagos to Kano, when Sam Ikoku, an illustrious son of an illustrious father, Alvan Ikoku contested under AG, a Yoruba party and defeated his father contesting under United National Independent Party (UNIP) in Aba.

    This is why I sympathize with Defence Minister Musa. Subversive war whether in the north or in the south are only symptoms of our unresolved national question.  We today spend millions on subliminal advertising campaign to decree unity as if possible to climb the palm tree from the top even after 55 years of repeated failure of military social engineering strategies to promote unity.

    I wonder if it has ever occurred to our leaders why it was only the period Nigerians were not ashamed of belonging to their Igbo, Hausa /Fulani, Yoruba, Edo, Ibibio, Mumuye, Kataf, Gwong,  Biron etc. ethnic nationalities that our identity as Nigerians was never in question.

  • On the chopping block

    On the chopping block

    Seven Days Have passed between last Thursday and today that the Rivers State House of Assembly adopted a motion to initiate impeachment proceedings against Governor Siminalayi Fubara. According to the 1999 Constitution (as amended), the impeachment notice must be served within seven days.

    Speaker Martin Amaewhule promised to ensure that it  was served within the stipulated time. The assembly later claimed that it had served the governor the notice. When was it served? Who acknowledged receipt of the notice? What time was it served? The answers to these posers are not in public domain.

    This first hurdle is critical to any planned impeachment. It must be followed strictly in order to give the governor fair hearing as enshrined in Section 36  of the Constitution. If at any point in time, it emerges that he was not granted fair hearing, the exercise will be rendered a nullity. So, for both parties the time element is essential. When do we start counting the time in this instant case? If we start from the day of the assembly’s special plenary where the decision was taking, seven days have passed.

    Meaning that the governor is left with seven days to respond to the allegations of gross misconduct against him and his deputy, Prof Ngozi Odu. It must also be stated that it is also within his right not to reply, but that would not be a wise thing to do. Why? This is because whether or not he responds, the assembly is constitutionally empowered to go on with the exercise. He can also not say that he was not served.

    The office of governor is one and  it is staffed by people expected to receive such communication on his behalf. Things should not be complicated for the governor by those who are now saying that he was not served the impeachment notice. Are those in the governor’s office saying the document was not delivered there and received by them? The governor is not expected to, and should not, receive correspondence personally by virtue of his office.

    Impeachment is serious business, and nobody knows this more than the governor himself. You cannot evade the service of an impeachment notice. Those thinking the governor can do that by saying that he was not served, and as such ignore the notice, should perish the thought. That is a dangerous path to tread. The governor, and not those people, is at the receiving end and they should not worsen things for him. For the sake of emphasis, this is what Section 188 (3) of the Constitution say:

    Within fourteen days of the presentation of the notice to the Speaker of the House of Assembly (whether or not any statement was made by the holder of the office in reply to the allegation contained in the notice), the House of Assembly shall resolve by motion, without any debate whether or not the allegation shall be investigated. That Fubara was not around when the notice was served is not sufficient ground to vitiate the process. Wherever a governor is in the world when such katakata bursts, they are expected to rush back home to douse the fire.

    Fubara can still save the situation, even though the assembly has vowed not to spare him this time around. Upon his return to office following the lapse of the six-month state of emergency in Rivers, he should have courted the lawmakers rather than continue to antagonise them. Politics is about give and take. The more reason he should have done this is hecause he knows their loyalty lies elsewhere. Who says he cannot woo them to his side, if he plays his politics right?

    We have seen such happen elsewhere before. But to get them, he has to play their politics and talk to them in the language they understand. He must have heard about the anecdote of ‘people talk to people, people understand’ in political circles. If he has chosen to remain a minority and be in the shadow of those he should lead as their governor then he is not a politician. No political godson can unseat his godfather that way. Wooing the lawmakers would cost him nothing, but treating them as a pariah may be the beginning of the end.

    He may have the President’s ears, but he must understand the political terrain well to continue to enjoy this privilege. Saying that the President asked him to join APC,  or brandishing a membership card bearing ‘001’ does not confer automatic leadership right or an assurance of a second term ticket on an incumbent who acts out of turn. Are there anything to the allegations of gross misconduct against him? Did he act in breach of the Constitution as alleged? It is a grave offence to breach the Constitution.

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    Why should a governor spend public funds without appropriation by the assembly or decline to send a list of commissioner-nominees for screening and confirmation? Can special advisers constitute the executive council of a state (EXCO) and approve the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) on which fiscal budgets are predicated? Fubara’s mistake is not knowing how to manage the lawmakers in the face of his feud with their common benefactor, Nyesom Wike. If he had handled things well, he might have won the lawmakers over to the consternation of their godfather.

    This may be too late now. The battleline is drawn again. His only hope is in the President. But for how long will he continue to run to the President? The President has many other matters to contend with, without being bogged down by Fubara’s self-inflicted woes. He knows what to do, but has deliberately refused to do it for reasons best known to him. Those calling for peace today should have intervened long before things got to a head. They should not have waited for the impeachment proceedings to be initiated before wading in the crisis.

    What this says about them is that they do not want the governor impeached, but they are comfortable with him governing without following due process. When the Supreme Court described Fubara as a “despot”, they did not call him to order. When the President declared a state of emergency in Rivers last March to save him from impeachment then, some of them described it as illegal. Strangely, now that the assembly has again resorted to impeachment, they want peace because his neck is on the chopping block!

    Only Fubara can save Fubara from himself. He knows what to do if he wants this cup to pass over him.

  • Rage therapy

    Rage therapy

    Apeople can grow weary of hope without knowing it. They begin to speak carelessly of fire and joke with the lexicon of extinction. They summon ruin as if it were a cleansing rain and call it banter.

    Somewhere between disappointment and rage, the tongue learns to flirt with death. And a nation, like the human body, begins to rehearse its own burial long before the blunt spade touches earth.

    Nigeria is doing this as you read. We have got the funeral habit. Some have called it disillusionment. But all I see is a civilisational failure; animal instinct overtaking everything human.

    Long before borders are breached and institutions collapse, ethics get rotten. Nigeria will not fall because our enemies are strong, it will fall because we desire our own unmaking. Too many citizens ignorantly suppose that implosion will give them relief. Like it did in Nepal? Or Bangladesh perhaps.

    History is pitiless on this point. When a people start invoking violence against themselves deploying death as a casual metaphor;  when civil war is romanticised with the bravado of anarchists who have never smelled a mass grave, external predators take note. Empires have always listened for this sound—the clang of an unlatched door.

    International law has become worthless as nuclear-armed states now act less like guardians of order and more like impatient gods, striking first and justifying later. “Might is right” gets validated with news features and hashtags.

    The United States, in particular, has demonstrated, through rhetoric and precedent, that it reserves the right to interpret reality however it pleases, and to act unilaterally when it suits its interests.

    Last year, the American President Donald Trump threatened to invade Nigeria ‘guns-a-blazing’ to protect Christians from genocide. Of course, he made good his threat though in coordination with local authorities. That incident revealed how easily Nigeria could be fabricated as a moral emergency requiring foreign “intervention.”

    Whether managed diplomatically or not, the undertone is unmistakable: Nigeria’s ability to prevent external force depends less on sovereignty than on the goodwill of those with superior firepower. Had cooperation been refused, who doubts that the bombs would still have fallen?

    This is the New World Order; one in which any nuclear-armed nation can storm an African country on the flimsiest pretext. Leaderships can be deposed and presidents abducted and prosecuted abroad like common criminals. Borders can be redrawn under threat of violence, all in the name of “security,” “humanitarian intervention,” or some other sanctified lie.

    Nigeria is not immune. No African country is. Imagine, for a moment, what Nigerians casually threaten themselves with when they speak longingly of collapse: terrorism escalating beyond containment and major cities falling under siege as the courts and constitution become irrelevant.

    Imagine if the anarchists have their day: neighbours will hack each other to death as rage forges prejudices into weapons. At breaking point, the corrupt leaders over whom many bicker and fight, online and offline, will not remain to share the consequences. They will flee to safe houses abroad. They will not queue for refugee status in Chad, Ghana or Niger. That will be the fate of over 200 million Nigerians.

    We shall remain the negligible indices in a state of war. Guns will seek out our lost boys and carnage will school them faster than any classroom ever could. People who once shared fences, marriages, and jokes will hunt each other to death. Old friendships will split like overripe fruit as many learn to think with the machete and speak with bullets.

    Nigerians will hound and hack to death, people with whom they used to be next door neighbours, in-laws and “best friends  simply because they are Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani. Women will pay first. They always do. Rape will become a tool of terror and domination. Many will watch their mothers and wives, daughters and sisters become “comfort women” and voiceless courtesans to, at least, four or five soldiers or revolutionaries at a go.

     And when they are delivered of pregnancies that no man will take charge of, we shall name the poor, ‘regrettable’ fruits of their shame: Okwuoeimose (War is ugly), Okwoeinata (Not to be told), Okwoba (Red is the colour of war), Enitaiyeko (The one whom the world rejects), Enitan (Child of intrigue); Aiyeteminimowa (I have come to live my own life); Ogunbayoje (War has destroyed our joy) and so on. An entire generation will learn grief before it learns to walk.

    Millions of citizens will be reduced to mere statistics, blurred news footage and “developing situations.” Nigerians will embody the kind of suffering that must be hidden until it becomes too grotesque to ignore. Reason will evaporate and morality will be repurposed as a weapon. Every atrocity will be justified in the name of God, patriotism, tribe, or profit.

    Streets will rot with bodies and human innards will litter our sidewalks like discarded orange peels. Our journalists and poets will be hunted for showing the world the septic underbelly of our rage. Plantations will become mass graves and aid will arrive too late – only after the right images have been captured and the foreign weapons contractors have made profit.

    Through the sadism of it all, we shall accomplish the separation we love to talk about. The Igbo may have Biafra; the Hausa may have their Emirate; the Yoruba, Oodua Republic; and the South-south, Niger-Delta Republic. Every tribe shall have its nirvana; yet, in those hazarded homelands, the same old brutes will rule and the same greed will scorch the fertile soil. Violence does not cure itself by changing flags.

    This is how nations die. Rwanda taught the world this in 1994, when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in a hundred days. Later, the horror was repackaged into award-winning films like Hotel Rwanda (2004), viewed safely in distant cinemas. The carnage became narrative and the trauma nourished art.

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    If Nigeria implodes, there will be big budget movies. The same powers that nudged, armed, or watched will fly in actors and film crews. Oscars will be won and performative tears will be shed on the stage. Our dead will be immortalised by people who goaded them into mass graves – all for a profit.

    This is the obscenity Nigerians flirt with when they summon destruction in anger. The ingredients for implosion are already abundant: ethnic bigotry, religious absolutism, greed dressed as grievance, and a reflexive “us versus them” mentality.

    Nigerians are skilled at inventing enemies, especially when disappointment needs a face. Elections, football matches, private quarrels—everything becomes a battlefield of blame and identity. The literate and semi-literate alike now traffic in incitement, mistaking virality for truth and cruelty for courage.

    They imagine they will be spared when Nigeria burns to a rubble. They forget that the matchstick is indifferent to which house it burns. Those who inflame will be consumed and those who cheer will choke on fumes. There is no safe corner in a country on fire.

    Our differences must be resolved through dialogue. Not the selective kind that flatters tribe, but the hard memory of what war actually does to ordinary bodies. Then we must learn restraint; the discipline to refuse dehumanising language even when angry.

    Grievances must be pacified, not armed. Nigeria won’t thrive by toxic taunts or a resort to aggression. Violence begets death and destruction. To summon death upon our country is to invite strangers to nourish on its corpse.

  • Between Wike and Fubara

    Between Wike and Fubara

    Whatever name: errant godfather bootlicker, or  a loquacious mischief maker, etc.; that his media bashers may call him, Wike, a versatile, shrewd  master of his game, has since the run up to 2023 elections, defined the character and the colour of Nigerian politics just as he remains the main issue of 2027 election. While President Tinubu, overwhelmed by a deluge of defecting politicians, trying to escape from a sinking ship, is laughing at his political foes and unthinking ‘Obidients’ who only yesterday swore to pull his government down, Wike remains unapologetic as he embarks with an unusual fervour in his self-assigned crusade of ensuring President Tinubu’s victory in Rivers in 2027. Towards this, he has passed ‘fatwa’ declaring Rivers State close to other contestants in 2007.

    Wike, a very versatile and resourceful politician is a man whose adversaries often underestimate until almost too late. The testimony is in the number of wars he waged and won since joining politics at the grass root level as a local council chairman in his state. It is on record that Wike has never lost any political battle.

    His first victim was Rotimi Amaechi, his dependable and faithful ally during his war against dictatorship of Obasanjo who substituted Amaechi’s name after winning a PDP primary with that of the president’s favourite. Wike fought the judicial battle while Amaechi took refuge in Ghana, returning only after judicial victory was secured.  When they however fell apart over sharing of spoils of war, Amaechi came out with bruised nose.

    That encounter which occurred on in Port Harcourt on November 11, 2015 where, gun-toting security men attached to Wike’s convoy confronted Amaechi’s over 50 SARS personnel, soldiers and mobile policemen ended in a draw. The second encounter was when Amaechi suspended the chairman of Obio/Akpor Local Government Area which had become Wike’s recruiting base for thugs in readiness for the 2015 election. But President Jonathan came to Wike’s aid by directing Joseph Mbu of Rivers State Police command to illegally take over the LGA.

    Wike won the third round when he defeated Amaechi as a sitting governor along with his candidate in the governorship election. When Itse Sagay, alleged “Wike climbed to the governorship seat over dead bodies”, Wike celebrated his victory by declaring through his information commissioner that all he did was to “urge his people to defend their right to freely choose their leaders with their blood”. With Wike’s formation of a rainbow coalition of PDP and APC in Rivers State, Amaechi without a political base has been forced to escape to ADC, a ready-made vehicle for disgruntled and frustrated politicians.

    It was the turn of IGP Ibrahim Idris and Major General Kasimu Abdulkarim of Port Harcourt sixth division to be tamed following the beheading of some security officers during Rivers State legislative rerun election, in Ujju community near Omoku on December 10 2016. When the service personnel attached to Wike were fingered following the recovery of the uniform of the beheaded officers in the bush, Wike’s question which remained unanswered was “were there polling units in the forest?

    Moving to the national level after consolidating his state, Wike literarily retired Iyorchia Ayu, PDP former chairman he had challenged to account for the sum of N1b allegedly raked in from sales of forms to aspiring political office holders.

    Wike, more than any other PDP politician, probably caused Atiku Abubakar the loss of the 2023 presidential election. After he and Tambuwal breached PDP zoning policy, Wike who has driven all those involved in that fraud from Atiku to Tambuwal and David Mark to ADC, was further incensed by Atiku who settled for Ifeanyi Okowa to spite Wike despite securing 14 of the 19 votes of PDP leading lights that carried out the screening exercise.

    In the battle for the soul of PDP against Bode George, his estranged godfather, and Makinde who disagreed with him over the controversial Ibadan convention which ended in fisticuff with use of thugs at their Abuja Wadata plaza headquarters, it was his opponents that came out calling on Trump to come and solve their intraparty crisis.

    Unfortunately, after series of external victories, Whirlwind Wike who always ensures those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind, has been drawn back home to face the battle he thought he had won.

    Fubara, against the run of Rivers politics, often dominated by Ikwere Igbos was installed as the first governor of Ijaw extraction for reasons not totally altruistic.  But you never know a man until he is in power or has acquired wealth.  Just a few months into his four years tenure, Fubara tried to assert his own independence.  Fubara, ‘a mistake’, to borrow Rivers Speaker’s phrase was doing this in breach of the constitution. He employed the services of media meddlers and the like of Ugochinchere, an interloper from Imo state.

    Fubara, who was saved from impeachment at the last minute by the president’s declaration of state of emergency, was again served notice of impeachment for an alleged bombing of the assembly complex, conducting LGA election in defiance of court order and presentation of budget to a three-man assembly while he side-lined 27 elected members of the state assembly. After being saved by the president’s declaration of emergency rule, Fubara learnt no lesson from his six months ordeal. He is yet to understand the intrigue that goes into balancing the interest of pressure groups and public interest in a democracy, the deviousness and ruthlessness of office.

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    Back from emergency rule, one would have thought Fubara would have realised that “politics is the art of the possible’’ where compromise is a badge of honour. Now served with another impeachment notice last week, Fubara who has learnt nothing from his six months ordeal during which other people helped him to fight his battle is probably hoping to be saved by appeal to his Ijaw nation, just as he did few months back.

    A Yoruba axiom crudely translated says someone who is aware of enemies plan to have him roasted should not rub his body with inflammable oil.  The question Fubara sympathisers, including the APC to which he recently decamped is not asking him, is why he is deliberately breaching the constitution. But for the appointment of a sole administrator during the emergency who raised a moral question about NBA holding on to unappropriated N300m Fubara donated on the understanding that Rivers would host NBA annual conference, no one would have discovered that NBA refused to refund the money even after the venue had been unilaterally changed by some ignoble men in NBA protesting president’s declaration of state of emergency in Rivers. Supporting NBA’s right to hold on to the money, the chairman of the NBA 2025 Conference Planning Committee, Emeka Obegolu (SAN) said that the money was “an unconditional gift to support the event”.

    That incident is enough reason for the Rivers State House of Assembly to insist Fubara does the right thing. And who do you blame if such impunity and deliberate breach of the constitution provided additional incentive for Wike, who holds no hostages, set in his ways and would do whatever he says he would do no matter how mean?

    Wike had during his recent visit to some traditional rulers in Rivers criticized Fubara saying he would not secure re-election after accusing him of failing to honour their political agreement. But the Ijaw Youth Council Worldwide, under the leadership of Dr Alaye Tari Theophilus, has reaffirmed its total, unwavering, and unequivocal support for Governor Siminalayi Fubara. And while “The Ijaw Youth Council Worldwide categorically states that it does not recognise, accept, or align with any political arrangements or agreements being promoted by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike”, Fubara was not cautioned about his breach of the constitution.

  • Maduro’s capture and the breakdown of international order

    Maduro’s capture and the breakdown of international order

    On January 3, at about 1300hours, the president of Venezuela, his wife Cilla Flores, and his only biological son, Nicolas Ernesto Madura Guerra, were captured in one of the presidential safe houses in Caracas and spirited to New York on an American gunboat and are now facing trial in New York for drug running involving millions of tons of cocaine into the USA and narco-conspiracy.  He was additionally charged with gun running.

    He was born on November 23, 1962 in the capital city of Caracas to a trade unionist father. He was a previous bus driver and transport unionist before becoming a member of parliament in 2000 and five years later, he became president of the National Assembly and foreign minister from 2006 to 2012 and vice president from 2012 to 2013. He became interim president after his mentor, Hugo Chavez, died in 2013. He became president after a snap election in 2013. In 2018 and 2024, he was re-elected in what his opponents called sham elections and repression of democratic forces, following which most Western countries refused to recognize his government.

    His regime moved closer to Cuba, China which buys 70% of its production of crude oil, and Russia and Cuba buys the remainder at premium prices. The country is sitting on about 40% of global known oil reserves. The exploitation of crude petroleum was largely developed by giant American oil firms before all of them, with the exception of Chevron were nationalised and expropriated by the Hugo Chavez socialist government in the 1970s. Those American oil companies nationalized included Standard Oil Company, now Exxon Mobil, Gulf Oil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips. From the 1970s nationalisation and expropriation of major American companies, the production of crude oil, either by design or incompetence, declined to just about one million barrels daily. The capture of Maduro came after months of an American armada of ships, air force, aircraft carriers air force aircraft of different types from stealth bombers, to helicopters naval assets of all kinds from submarines to attack naval crafts and deployments of FBI and CIA operatives. The apparent easy way the operation was conducted belied the fact of the cost and efficiency and effectiveness of American coordinated armed and security forces.

    The Americans say none of their troops was wounded or killed but Cuba claimed that 32 of the intelligence officers in Venezuela were killed during the operation. After the success of Maduro and his wife’s capture, then what follows is the big question. From what President Donald Trump, the president of the USA and his foreign minister, Marco Rubio have been saying since the invasion of Venezuela, it does not seem there is a well thought-out plan for post invasion than his saying simply that he was planning to bring back the American oil companies that were driven out in 1970s out of Venezuela to come back after the success of the invasion. President Trump indicated the oil companies will come back to rehabilitate the degraded facilities to make America and Venezuela people rich. This will be under American administration. He also went further that Marco Rubio was already talking to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez who had been appointed by Maduro as his vice president since June 14, 2018 and apparently retaining the other key elements of the Maduro government in office which will negate the whole purpose of the invasion of Venezuela in the first place by retaining the Maduro’s criminal infrastructure. It seems the Americans would be happy with remnants of the Maduro administration if it can run the country to the benefit of American oil interest.

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    Perhaps America has learnt from its previous mistakes of totally disbanding of the Iraqi troops after capturing Saddam Hussein, thus creating a security vacuum which criminals filled.

    I personally felt very sorry for President Trump to have been left to commit so much blunder while addressing the world press after the glorious military exercise. He ought to have been given a cryptic statement to read instead of his rambling about producing crude oil to pay off American oil companies following nationalising of the oil companies. There was no need to spell out what his victory would entail and anger not only the Venezuelan citizens, but also large measure of radical American and global population and people in neighbouring countries like Canada and Mexico.

    As somebody with some experience in government, we would not have allowed our president to commit this kind of blunders while addressing the global community. One of these blunders committed by Trump was his dismissal of the democratic opposition in Venezuela and particularly his comment on the Nobel Laureate, Maria Corina Machado as not being popular and effective. By this statement, the potential American supporters are being alienated.

    He is opening his country to much opposition from the global community to his rather abrasive policies and pronouncements. The Mexican and Colombian presidents are already shouting at the roof tops that Trump should perish the thoughts of similar actions against their countries. The president of Iran whose people are demonstrating against his regime and Trump’s statement that its guns are ready and loaded against the Islamic Republic should it attack the demonstrators against its regime. The Danish government owners of Greenland being publicly demanded by Trump for American security say over and over again that the large Arctic island is not for sale. Some enemies of our country and its current government are urging Trump to direct its action to Nigeria.

    Whoever thinks this kind of pleas will be considered because one is against the current administration in Nigeria should ask himself under what justification that would be legitimately considered. In the meantime, opposition against American intervention is gathering support from US Democrats in Congress, the UN Secretary General and generally the governments of global South which Trump’s policies and action had angered, irritated and generally put at arm’s length. The Security Council of the UN has been meeting to discuss the American government’s action but it is known by most people that the structure of the UN would militate against the UN because the USA, like the remaining four permanent members of the UN has the veto power against all possible action of the Security Council which requires UNANIMOUS action of the five permanent members. This is because structurally, the UN is handicapped and will be unable to do anything to the US, and not even a condemnation because decisions in UNSC are taken by unanimous decision and even if Great Britain and France are unhappy about the US action, they will not join China and Russia to unanimously condemn the USA and if they do the USA will veto it.

    The consequences of the actions of the USA would empower Russia to intensify its actions against Ukraine and China would use the same USA forceful action to take over Taiwan and India may be emboldened in her policies towards Sri Lanka and Jammu and Kashmir thus opening a Pandora Box of desire by bigger and more powerful countries to forcefully run over and annex neighbouring states they had hitherto claimed leading to a breakdown of international order and war will become acceptable for settling international relations.

    The world is entering a phase where national power would be the most important lever of the engine of international relations.

  • Matters arising

    Matters arising

    IT IS EARLY DAYS yet in the new year, but things have been happening at dizzying speed. The American President Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela; the coming of the tax law; the political gerrymandering of Governor Seyi Makinde and former Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun; and the unfolding developments on the political scene have started to shape 2026.

    From nowhere, the United States (U.S.) invaded oil-rich Venezuela last Saturday, snatched President Nicolas Maduro, his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to New York, where they are now facing trial for narcotic and other related offences. The invasion has defined the beginning of the year like no other issue has.

    Trump is still hungry for more territories. He is eyeing Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland, which is under the sovereignty of Denmark in Europe. The world is on edge as Trump continues in his desperate bid to use the American might to oppress, suppress, and depress other countries. What does he want? His fellow American compatriots too cannot say. Many of them are not happpy with the image he is giving their country, but they cannot do anything to stop him.

    His allies are comfortable with him. Allies like Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller can die for him. They have lauded his invasion of Venezuela, describing him as “a talk and do president”. “When this president says he is going to do something, you had better listen because he will surely do it”, Rubio enthused on television shortly after the invasion, which Trump described as “watching television”.

    How can any person reduce the invasion of another country’s territorial integrity to ‘watching television’. That is Trump for you. He poses as the fighter for the rights of the oppressed in some countries, but does the opposite elsewhere where assets that he wants to acquire are at stake. After the invasion, he says U.S. would ‘run’ Venezuela and has warned its new president, Delcy Rodriguez, to play along with him or suffer a fate worse than Maduro’s. Will the world just watch and allow him to annex Greenland too?

    All of a sudden because of the tax law which implementation began seven days ago, almost every Nigerian has become a bean counter. We now look at everything in terms of the cost of tax. If I do this or that, how much tax will I pay? This is the question they now ask. It is not everything that is taxable. You will not pay tax on food or recharge cards or data. You will only pay tax on your income.

    Anything that does not come to you as income is not taxable. Money transferred to you to help a friend buy a car, build a house or for your personal use is not taxable. The stamp duty for transfer hitherto known as electronic money transfer levy will be paid by the sender. The charge is N50 for every transfer above N10000. The pay as you earn (PAYE) deducted from monthly salary has been reworked to exempt certain class of workers from income tax payment.

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    Those earning N800000 and below per annum are exempted from payment. Workers will now pay tax on salary above the N800000 threshold. If you are earning N900000, N1 million and so on, you pay tax calculated on the N100000, N200000 et al, that is above the N800000 mark. This means that high income earners will pay more tax in order to bring relief to the poor, who earn little or nothing.

    The beauty of the law is its provision for the Tax Ombudsman whose job, among others, is to ensure that none is unduly taxed or ripped off. Government should ensure that the ombudsman does his job effectively and efficiently without delay. Complaints should not be allowed to drag too long, otherwise the purpose of having the office, which I believe will be in all the 36 states and Abuja, will be defeated.

    Makinde is fighting to extricate himself from a self-inflicted problem over the Bodija explosion fund. Former Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose said Makinde got N50 billion from the Federal Government. Makinde said it was N30 billion. Whether N50 billion or N30 billion why did Makinde have to wait for Fayose’s exposè  before he told the world about the N30billion? So, if Fayose did not say anything, Makinde and his administration would have kept quiet about the fund and pretended that all is well after spending N4.5 billion out of it, without mentioning the source of the money?

    The affairs of a democratic government are not run like that. Did the governor even tell the House of Assembly about the money? Was the N4.5 billion disbursed with the lawmakers’ appropriation? The governor’s claim that a certain percentage of the N20 billion balance is being demanded before release is an afterthought. Why did he not cry out before the Fayose revelation? Did he undertake the recent changes in his executive council because of a leak about  this development?

    Kemi Adeosun has found her voice years after she resigned as finance minister over a fake National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate. She said her resignation was not admission of guilt. Is that so? Did she use a fake NYSC discharge certificate or not? Use of fake documents is an offence. If she is sure of what she is saying, she can ask that the case be reopened for investigation. Otherwise, she should let sleeping dogs lie.

    The political scene is bubbling ahead of 2027. Peter Obi has defected from Labour Party (LP) to African Democratic Congress (ADC).Will he get the party’s 2027 presidential ticket? Can he still count on the support of the Obi-dients, the vociferous movement on social media with little electoral value? How many votes can those openly identifying with his defection to ADC give him? How strong politically is the man who says he would withdraw his support for him if he does not get ADC’s ticket? Some people just like to sound off!

    Let’s sign off on Rivers and its potentialities for the 2027 elections. Will Governor Siminilayi Fubara get a second term ticket on his new platform, APC? If he does, can he win? Can his estranged godfather, who is Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike stop him from getting APC ticket or determine who becomes the next governor? All eyes are on the state as to how these issues and the bigger presidential contest will play out in 2027. These are early days yet, but they are pointers to what to expect next year.

  • To summon a siege

    To summon a siege

    Every civilisation has its myths of rescue. In ours, the rescuer arrives in the attire of the West, hawking human rights in one hand and carnage in the other. Empires never travel light. They arrive with doctrines and appetites, and an accounting logic that mortgages human lives against barrels of oil, shipping lanes, voting blocs, and dubious evangelism.

    Nigeria as other nations of Africa, is once again ripe for the picking in the so-called New World Order, not because we are weak in prospects or numbers, but because we are fragmented in will and allegiance. This renders us dangerously exposed in an era where might is always deemed right, international law is reduced to a ceremonial proviso, and the United Nations, a forum of toothless bulldogs.

    In such a clime, even the presumed Giant of Africa must tread with the exaggerated politeness of the vulnerable. Thus, Nigeria’s resort to frantic diplomacy while its citizenry – out of spite or despair – openly fantasise about foreign invasion as if it were a Netflix series with a happy ending.

    No doubt, terror stalks our forests as bandits and insurgents turn entire regions into cauldrons of grief. The carnage is real and fear isn’t imagined. What must be resisted is the childish leap from justified anger to suicidal longing. The idea that a global hegemon like the United States, would arrive in Nigeria as a neutral surgeon to excise evil and depart politely, intones naïveté.

    There has been much heated talk, some of it reckless, about foreign military capabilities, “coordinated efforts,” and what powerful allies could do if unleashed. Statements by American officials are quoted and misquoted, even as rumours inflate to certainties. Yet the language of “partnership and counterterrorism” must be heeded with caution, not with hysteria or worship. Coordination shouldn’t translate to colonisation by default as it is rarely charity. It is interest meeting interest, and the dominant party always writes the footnotes.

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    Alongside US “cooperation” to crush terrorists operating within Nigeria, the Nigerian military’s recent operations deserve support and scrutiny in equal measure. And sponsors of terror, whether they wear agbada, humanitarian badge or military camouflage, must be hunted with the same intensity as the foot soldiers they bankroll. Apologists must be exposed and prosecuted. This is the bare minimum of sovereignty.

    Yet, sovereignty is diminished, not strengthened, when citizens behave as though only outsiders can save them. The most dangerous sound Nigeria can experience is not the crack of a gunshot or the roar of a fighter jet, it is the applause and shrieks of approval by a people, who, weary of their own contradictions and tedious labour of self-repair, summon a siege upon themselves.

    When a nation embraces an external force as the decisive answer to its internal failures, it announces something fatal about itself: that it no longer trusts its own capacity for reform. For a former colony, this is the worst form of self-betrayal.

    The global context makes this even more perilous. We are living through a period of resurgent imperial siege. Great powers no longer bother to hide their appetites behind diplomatic or moral sermons. They pursue brazenly their “enlightened self-interest,” spheres of influence, and strategic resources. After the Americas, Africa remains one of the last great theatres where rival empires test their might.

    The United States’ historical posturing toward Latin America, shaped by doctrines that claimed to protect the hemisphere while subordinating it, is instructive. In early January 2026, U.S. forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the United States to face criminal charges, after which President Donald Trump said the U.S. would “run” the country and take control of up to 50 million barrels of its oil for sale, for the benefit of Venezuelans and American interests.

    Trump has also revived his bid to seize Greenland, a strategic Danish territory in the Arctic, calling it vital to U.S. security and suggesting all options are on the table despite Danish and NATO objections to any annexation. From Chile to Guatemala, Brazil to the Caribbean, the logic was consistent: the sovereignty of smaller nations is negotiable when it conflicts with American priorities. To pretend that Nigeria is immune to similar calculations is to be delusional.

    The rise of alternative powers, particularly China, has complicated this old order. Both trade patterns and alliances have shifted. The BRICS bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, represents one such counterweight. Nigeria must take this multi-polar reality seriously, not as a romantic rebellion against the West, but as a sober exercise in self-preservation. Alignment, whether with Western powers or emerging blocs, should never be devotional. It must be transactional, disciplined, and rooted in Nigeria’s long-term interests.

    What is unforgivable is the growing habit among some politically embittered Nigerians of openly calling for US invasion as a form of domestic revenge. This is especially reckless in an era when American politics, under a resurgent Donald Trump, has shown little patience for diplomatic niceties while glorifying dominance and reduction of nations to strategic assets.

    Nigeria’s resource wealth makes it an even more tempting target in a world hungry for energy and strategic advantage. Oil, gas, critical minerals, a massive consumer market, and a pivotal geographic position all make the country too important to ignore. That importance should serve as leverage, but only if Nigerians quit trading their sovereignty for spite and emboldening imperial actors who see Africa as unfinished business.

    Every offer of intelligence sharing or security cooperation, whether from Western or Middle Eastern allies, must be handled with extreme care. If poorly managed, it becomes a Trojan horse, entangling domestic security with foreign agendas that may cause instability.

    No country survives by hating itself loudly enough to attract a conqueror. Those who cheer hypothetical invasions should remember the ghosts of Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Libya, once a rich and functioning state, became an impoverished slave market and weapons depot. Iraq’s invasion unleashed sectarian demons that still stalk the region while Afghanistan cycled through decades of occupation and collapse.

    Empires do not rebuild what they break. They move on. Nigeria must learn from the Afghan experience. In the wake of United States-led NATO’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gaisu Yari, an Afghan refugee, now a grantee of the Open Society Foundation (OSF), recalled his flight from his homeland as his darkest hour. As the occupying forces commenced their hasty withdrawal, he had just four hours to pack up the life he had created in Afghanistan into one suitcase. In a pain-filled memoir, Yari revealed how he cried all through his perilous trip to the Kabul airport, reliving the agony of saying goodbye to his tearful mother on the roof of an old house.

    He eventually evacuated to Poland, landing with his family in a refugee camp with scarce food and resources. Every new dawn he spends abroad lacerates and leaves a thick welt on his psyche.

    Would Nigerians learn from the sad fate of the Yaris of the world? Despite initial patronage by dubious and bleeding-heart foreign press, Afghanistan has faded from global news headlines.

    Let us be guided by the Afghans’ experience. Nigerians must shun the lure of anarchy. We must avoid poisonous interventions from foreigners, whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.

  • PDP’s immoral war against tax reforms

    PDP’s immoral war against tax reforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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