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  • Nigeria’s civil–military friction and the fragile art of legitimacy

    Nigeria’s civil–military friction and the fragile art of legitimacy

    By Lekan Olayiwola

    The recent encounter between FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Lieutenant Yerima revealed more than tempers; it exposed a system still learning how authority and legitimacy coexist. It was an uneasy dance between civilian command and military professionalism, between the habit of control and the discipline of restraint.

    Nigeria’s institutions often fracture at the fault lines of personality. When the minister invoked executive power and the officer held to procedure, both acted within traditions that shape our history: one of political urgency, the other of military order. Yet when these traditions collide without respect or clear boundaries, gridlock ensues and public trust is the casualty.

    In a state built on civil authority and military legacy this was no clash of individuals, but a signal that blurred mandates, political impatience, and historical suspicion continue to undermine the quiet strength of legitimacy.

    Civil–military relations as a mirror of political culture

    Civil–military relations are not simply about subordination or command; they are a barometer of political culture. The health of this relationship shows how a state negotiates authority without resorting to domination. Where civilian officials depend on personal force to assert their mandates, and where military officers step into civic space to protect institutional pride, democracy becomes performative rather than procedural.

    Nigeria’s enduring dilemma between the military and political class is a shared inheritance of command logic. Both systems (the barracks and the bureaucracy) were shaped by control, not collaboration. The military learned to equate loyalty with silence; the political class learned to equate leadership with fear. In this sense, what played out between Wike and Yerima was not an anomaly but a grammar of control speaking its native tongue.

    Psychology of legitimacy and the economy of respect

    Every society runs on an implicit economy of respect: who must defer, who may question, and who may act autonomously. In fragile democracies, respect is often purchased through intimidation, not earned through institutional design. Lt. Yerima’s restraint disrupted that expectation. His calm refusal was not rebellion; it was discipline performed as moral clarity. It represented a psychological inversion, the idea that legitimacy derives from coherence with rule and process.

    From a conflict perspective, where control logic produces escalation, clarity logic produces de-escalation. Had Yerima shouted back or Wike invoked coercive instruments, the event might have devolved into open confrontation. His silence was not weakness; it was the discipline that prevented institutional humiliation.

    This is precisely what peace studies call negative capability — the ability to hold power without performing it. The soldier’s discipline became a peace act, an embodied restraint that stabilised an otherwise combustible situation.

    The hidden conflict: institutional ambiguity

    Beyond being a struggle over incompatible goals, the more dangerous conflicts are those rooted in ambiguous systems where boundaries of role and mandate are unclear. Nigeria’s civil–military tension persists precisely because of this ambiguity: when the state deploys soldiers for civic tasks, it blurs the psychological contract that defines their loyalty.

    This lack of clarity breeds calls structural insecurity, a state where every institution must defend its dignity through self-assertion, rather than through the legitimacy of law. It is why officers guard private property; why ministers personally supervise demolitions; why command must constantly be performed to be believed.

    The Wike–Yerima clash thus becomes a metaphor for the absence of trust architecture in Nigerian governance. When roles are not clearly codified or strictly adhered to, every encounter becomes a test of dominance. Peace becomes episodic, dependent on the character of actors rather than the strength of systems.

    Conflict transformation and the ethics of role

    In peacebuilding, resolution is temporary; transformation is permanent. Transformation occurs when systems evolve beyond their old habits of conflict. For Nigeria, the task is not to punish a minister or praise a soldier, but to transform the operational ethics of both the civil and military spheres.

    This means building procedural empathy, an institutional practice where each side recognises the other’s legitimacy without surrendering its autonomy. Civilian authorities must understand that to command effectively, they must institutionalise respect, not perform it. The military must ensure its professionalism never mutates into moral aloofness; clarity must never become quiet contempt.

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    The equilibrium is delicate but achievable. Many democracies have faced it. the United States after Vietnam, Turkey after the 1980 coup, Ghana after Rawlings. What separates progress from paralysis is the ability to learn institutionally from moments of tension.

    The opportunity for reform

    Conflicts are a form of data, raw intelligence about how systems behave under stress. The data here revealed a minister’s authority contested not through rebellion but through procedure. The military defended one of its own not through denial but through affirmation of discipline. The public sided overwhelmingly with restraint over rage.

    Taken together, these signals show an appetite for a new civic contract where the dignity of process outweighs the drama of personality. Peacebuilding institutions, from the Ministry of Defence to the Federal Civil Service Commission, can use this moment to create a Dignity Index for Governance: a measure of how public institutions manage conflict, authority, and respect without coercion. That is how adversarial data becomes design intelligence.

    Reclaiming legitimacy as the foundation of peace

    The heart of peacebuilding is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, the moral and procedural balance that allows power to operate without humiliation. The Wike–Yerima episode, if read structurally, is not a story of confrontation but of civic calibration: a society testing whether it can evolve from obedience to legitimacy. The question is not who commanded or obeyed, but whether the architecture of dignity held. It did barely, and that is progress.

    Nigeria’s peace challenge is not insurgency alone; it is the everyday insecurity of authority, a condition where people do not trust institutions to act without bias or coercion. The peace that lasts is not secured by weapons or decrees, but by clarity; every actor knowing their role, every citizen knowing their rights, every leader knowing their limits.

    The limits of restraint

    Yerima’s restraint, whether deliberate or instinctive, embodied institutional clarity; Minister Wike’s reaction, whether emotional or political, revealed how fragile that clarity remains. The lesson is simple: a society at peace is one where dignity needs no defence.

    The officer’s brief remark to the police, viewed by some as dismissive, momentarily dimmed the composure that earned him respect. Professionalism demands not only vertical discipline but horizontal regard; every uniform, civil or military, upholds the same web of authority. When respect falters, legitimacy weakens. The task is to stand not with personalities, but with legitimacy itself.

    •Olayiwola is a peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst. He can be reached via lekanolayiwola@gmail.com

  • Nigeria and the opportunity of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan

    Nigeria and the opportunity of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan

    By Charles Onunaiju

    The just concluded 4th plenary session of the CentralCommittee of the governing Communist Party of China, whose deliberations centred on the 15th edition of the country’s Five-year Development plan, due to go into full effect and implementation for the next five years, beginning from 2026, has considerable implications for Nigeria’s international market access and investment drive.

    China’s Five-year Development Plan, a long standing governance practice of the country has been functioning since 1953 as a reliable compass that have guided and continues to guide the broad roadmap of her social and economic directions. The political integrity, efficiency and competence of the leadership of the governing party has ensured that the plan is not a hollow ritual, but a process aligned to the realities of the times with a clear objective to accomplish specific goals that makes practical contributions to the improvement in the quality of life of the people.

    As China economy of scale has exponentially grown with a contribution of about 30% to the global economy; her Five-year Development plan has both implications and ramifications not only to her economy but more crucially to strategic partners. As Nigeria and China partnership was declared comprehensively strategic, following the successful state visit of President Bola Tinubu in September last year, China new economic roadmap, spelt out in the 15th edition of the five yearly Development plan and which  was extensively deliberated  and approved for implementation at the 4th Plenum of the 20th Central Committee of the governing CPC, last month, has enormous potential to give effects to some key aspects of Nigeria’s economic reform objectives which consist of increase in export of non-oil and value added products on a steady and expansionary trajectory.

    A key aspect of the China’s 15th Five-year Development Plan, the “Initiative to open China wider, promote innovative development of trade, create greater space for a two-way investment cooperation and pursue high-quality Belt and Road cooperation” connects to the imperative of a reliable market destination for many African countries including Nigeria. Within the framework of this, China “would boost consumption, expand effective investment and eliminate bottle-necks and obstacles hindering the development of a unified national market”.

    A unified national market that is opened “wider” is a boon to Nigeria and her hunger for stable and reliable market access without the volatility of politically motivated disruptions, consisting of tariff walls. With a guarantee of a huge and stable market, Nigeria can drive a targeted policy to incentivize critical sectors oriented to leverage the concessional access to China’s huge market and returns from such venture would ameliorate the situation of foreign exchange and further the value of the local currency against major international currencies.

    At the conclusion of the 4th Edition of the China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo in June, the Chinese government took the measure to eliminate tariffs on quality products from the 53 African countries including Nigeria that maintains diplomatic relations with Beijing. China stated her readiness “through negotiating and signing the agreement of China-Africa Economic Partnership for Shared Development to expand the zero tariff treatment for 100% tariff lines to all African countries …, welcome quality products from Africa to the Chinese market. For the least developed countries in Africa, on top of the zero tariff treatment for 100% tariff lines announced at the 2024 Beijing Summit of FOCAC, China will roll out measures on market access, inspection and quarantine and custom clearance to boost trade in goods; enhance skills and technical training and the promotion of quality goods”.

    The robust mechanism already in existence to support and incentivize Nigeria’s access to China’s market has been further reinforced by the outlines of China’s 15th Five-year Development plan which guarantees not only a wider access but also the advantage of a consolidated national unified market scaled up not only by the healthy and efficient interaction of demand and supply but an increasing consumer spending and coordinates in physical assets and human capital”.

    While a “unified national market” would hedge China against politically motivated de-couplings and other trade restrictive manoeuvres, it would be the single largest national market in the world that is open, stable and predictable.

    China’s high quality development would also feature the transformation of work and its outputs, through the development of the new quality productive forces. Nigeria and other African countries through the framework of “an all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era” are well positioned to leverage the advantage of China’s massive domestic economy of scale, that would be given greater scope through the implementation of the 15th Five-year Development plan.

    In the explanatory note to the 4th plenary session, General Secretary Xi Jinping noted that 15th Five-year plan will serve as a crucial stage in building on past successes to break new ground for basically achieving socialist modernization. Last year, at the Summit of China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing, President Xi Jinping urged the two sides to jointly advance modernization that puts the people first”, pledging that “China will work vigorously with Africa to promote personnel training, poverty reductions and employment, enhance the sense of gain, happiness and security of the people in the course of modernization and ensure that all will benefit from the process”.

    The core of China’s socialist modernization is to ensure that people’s ever-increasing needs for a better life are continuously attended to and the content of this dynamic and ever-evolving process is also to provide more opportunities to the world and especially Africa, with whom China shares commitment to a modernization that works for all.

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    Interestingly, Chinese public diplomacy in Nigeria led by Ambassador Yu Dunhai is devoted to clarifying and elaborating the opportunities in the bilateral relations between the two sides and the wider China-Africa cooperation. The 15th Five-year plan raised all the big issues at the heart of the country’s social and economic goals and transformation but also tasked itself to “work harder to ensure and improve pubic well-being and promote common prosperity for all…in line with the principle of doing everything within our means, we must ensure that public services are inclusive, meet essential needs and provide a cushion for those most in need, while working to resolve the pressing difficulties and problems that concern the people most”.

    The lessons offered by this solemn avowal should never be lost to managers of economic reforms anywhere in the world, including Nigeria that any meaningful economic policy must provide an ambit for social inclusion, which consists in solving people’s most existential needs which in themselves are  major contributors to national security and stability.

    Despite the wind of the neo-liberal economic reforms that swept away periodic development plans in most of African countries, including Nigeria in the 1990s and after, the framework is not discredited and China has demonstrated that when social and economic development plans proceed from the reality of any country’s unique national condition, aligned to resolve specific problems, designed to serve practical purpose and addressed to real needs, it can and should be a powerful directory illuminating the pathways to understanding the opportunities of the times and how to turn it to real advantages for the country and its people.

    •Onunaiju is a Public Commentator on International Affairs based in Abuja.

  • Honouring Herbert Macaulay

    Honouring Herbert Macaulay

    By Kehinde Nubi

    The federal government’s recent pardon of Herbert Macaulay, Nigeria’s pioneering nationalist and father of Nigerian nationalism is a sentimental gesture that misunderstands history. It seeks to absolve a man who needed no forgiveness and revives a colonial injustice best forgotten. A pardon implies guilt; Macaulay’s life was, in truth, the moral indictment of the very empire that condemned him.

    Every generation rediscovers its heroes, but not every rediscovery honours them. To pardon Macaulay in 2025 is to exhume a colonial farce that history itself has long dismissed. At best, such an act should have been a commemorative honour — in my view, a posthumous Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) — conferred as a gesture of national gratitude. Instead, the pardon reopens a case that never deserved to exist.

    By granting it, the government has unwittingly breathed life into the colonial narrative that sought to reduce Macaulay’s nationalist fervour and defiance to criminality. It has thus turned a nationalist’s badge of courage into a bureaucratic blot erased by official mercy. Can this be branded rehabilitation? No! Methinks it is misremembrance.

    To understand this fully in context, one must recall who Macaulay was, and what he stood for and against. Born in 1864, trained in England as a surveyor, he returned home armed not just with technical skill but with the conviction that Africans could govern themselves. He soon became a thorn in the side of the colonial establishment, challenging its land seizures, exposing its corruption, and rallying Lagosians to the cause of self-rule and seeming opposition to authority. In other words, his articulate and outspoken nature turned him into a constant irritant who left those in power uneasy and resentful.

    The colonial government found all of this inconvenient. As far as they were concerned, he was a dangerous radical who had to be sorted out. To make matters worse, the Lagos Daily News and the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), which he founded in 1923, became platforms for relentless criticism of British excesses. What this meant was that he was already a “convicted” felon in the political sense; it was only a matter of time before the trial regularised the conviction.

    Herbert Macaulay was convicted in 1913 for misappropriating trust funds belonging to Mrs. F. B. Pearse, a Lagos widow whose estate he managed. Just the job — the colonial court saw embezzlement; the political climate saw a targeted silencing of ‘wahala,’ as Herbert Macaulay had already earned ‘notoriety’ as a critic of imperial power.

    He insisted he had acted lawfully and that the charge was politically motivated, aimed at silencing his criticism of colonial rule. The colonial court sentenced him to two years in prison, though he served about one year before release in 1914.

    Historians such as J.F. Ade Ajayi and Tekena Tamuno described the case as a political prosecution disguised as a criminal trial. If there were doubts, his second imprisonment stripped away even that disguise. In 1918, Herbert Macaulay was convicted of sedition under the colonial Seditious Offences Ordinance for statements he made in London defending the Eleko of Lagos and criticising British injustice in Nigeria. The colonial government claimed his words could “bring the government into hatred or contempt.” The colonial government had weaponised the machinery of criminal law to silence nationalist dissent — in the classic pattern of colonial ‘lawfare’: the deliberate use of legal processes to suppress emerging African political consciousness and resistance.

    So, while it could be argued that he was not blameless in the narrow, administrative sense, nonetheless, he was not a criminal in that sense either. To pardon such a man a century later is to confuse moral categories. In granting Macaulay a pardon, the state effectively validates the colonial judgment against him, implying that the empire was right to convict him, and that Nigeria is now magnanimous enough to forgive. On the contrary, it is Britain, not Nigeria, that owed Macaulay a debt of contrition and apology. His imprisonment was not the shame of a man but the disgrace of a system that feared his ideas.

    If the nation truly wished to honour its founding agitator, it should have done so through recognition, not absolution. A posthumous GCON (the country’s second-highest honour) would have been apt. It would have celebrated Macaulay’s pioneering role as the architect of modern political organisation in Nigeria, the defender of traditional chiefs, the relentless voice for accountability, and the bridge between the old Lagos elite and the new nationalist awakening.

    Such an award would have turned his story into inspiration, not pity. It would have reminded Nigerians that independence was not a colonial concession but the result of defiance — often punished, sometimes mocked, but never extinguished. A pardon, by contrast, shrinks that defiance into a footnote of repentance.

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    The symbolic pardon, though well-meaning, was not thought through, as it could corrode historical understanding. It makes mockery of resistance and puts a veneer of humanity on an otherwise brutal colonial rule. Worse still, it makes nonsense of the courage it took to oppose it. Let’s not forget that colonialism did not merely occupy territory; it degraded our humanity and criminalised our dignity.

    To be talking of pardoning Herbert Macaulay is, in effect, to forget that truth — and that, unfortunately, converts his imprisonment from political martyrdom into an administrative error. Across postcolonial societies, similar gestures recur: the state forgiving those who once fought to create it. Yet every such act subtly reverses the moral order of history. It casts the rebel as the penitent, and the oppressor as the arbiter of grace.

    By the time Macaulay died in 1946, unpardoned and unrepentant, he had already outlived the judgments of his age. His influence shaped the generation that would lead Nigeria to independence 14 years later. To them, his prison years were not shameful. They were veritable proof that liberty demands sacrifice.

    In fairness to the government, they meant well. For them, the idea of pardoning Herbert Macaulay was to heal, to reconcile, to close unfinished chapters. But then, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that Herbert Macaulay was either a hero to us or not. If the colonialists saw a villain, we must understand that it could not have been otherwise. It is for us to be steadfast in not validating that. Nations do not grow by forgiving their heroes; they grow by living up to them.

     True honour is not amnesty; it is remembrance. Macaulay’s life should not be edited into the moral vocabulary of forgiveness but preserved as the language of resistance. He was flawed, yes, but his flaws were human; his courage, historical. To pardon him now is to grant the empire a posthumous victory it does not deserve.

    Nigeria’s task is not to cleanse his record but to continue his rebellion — against corruption, against subservience, and against neo-colonialism by agents of internal colonisation. For a people still grappling with unfulfilled freedom, Macaulay’s lesson remains the same: that justice, once surrendered to convenience, must forever be reclaimed by conviction.

    •Nubi is a Lagos-based lawyer, and commentator on public affairs.

  • Do Nigerians need Trump’s help?

    Do Nigerians need Trump’s help?

    • By Ogungbile Emmanuel Oludotun                  

    We are all aware that the US President, Donald Trump, recently posted on Truth Social that he had designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” for religious-freedom violations, accused the country of allowing the “mass slaughter” of Christians, threatened to stop all US aid, and said he had instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action if Nigeria did not act.

    The statement was unusually blunt: Any US operation would be “fast, vicious, and sweet,” and he invoked a duty to protect “our CHERISHED Christians.”

    The announcement immediately provoked a diplomatic storm and a simple but urgent question for Nigerians and Nigeria’s leaders: Do Nigerians actually want this kind of US intervention, and is it likely to help?

    To answer that, we must separate what can be verified from what is rhetoric, review the scale and nature of violence in Nigeria, understand how Americans and Washington actors came to focus on it, and weigh the practical, legal, and political implications of US action including what ordinary Nigerians, on social media and in affected communities, appear to be saying and what both governments might do next.

    Trump’s public claim is twofold: that “thousands of Christians are being killed” and that the Nigerian state is failing to protect them enough to justify re-listing Nigeria as a US “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) and threatening aid cuts or military steps. The CPC designation is a formal U.S. foreign-policy tool used to signal particularly severe violations of religious freedom and can lead to sanctions and other diplomatic pressure; re-listing reverses a 2023 delisting and carries real policy consequences.

    At the same time, the rhetoric, the talk of “guns-a-blazing,” the tone of vengeance is exceptional. Most Western responses to mass atrocities begin with diplomatic pressure, targeted sanctions, or international criminal investigations. The leap to unilateral military strikes against a country with a functioning (if overstretched) army is rare and would be unprecedented in modern US –Nigeria relations. Reporting shows that the language of imminent military action came largely from the president’s own post and his aides’ briefings; but public evidence, such as definitive proof of a government-enabled, faith-targeted genocide, was not published alongside the threat.

    However, beneath the noise of morality and “Christian protection,” is a growing school of thought that sees Trump’s outburst as part of a deeper power struggle, one that goes beyond religion and straight into economics, oil, and control. Across Africa and the global South, many now interpret Washington’s renewed fixation on Nigeria not as an act of compassion but as an act of preservation, a move to reclaim leverage in a region that is learning to stand on its own.

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    The argument goes that the United States has a long habit of turning every place it “helps” into ruins. Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan were countries left fractured after being “rescued.” The pattern, as people often describe it, is disturbingly familiar. The West arrives under the banner of liberation, but leaves behind dependency, disunity, and dust.

    And just as the smoke clears, another truth comes to light, Africa drills the oil, the West refines it, and Africa buys it back at triple the price, often with gratitude. Imagine that.

    Then came Dangote, with his 650,000-barrel-per-day plot twist, a refinery large enough to threaten the global energy hierarchy. The first migraine, as some economists jokingly put it, hit when US fuel export numbers began twitching. West Africa, that once-loyal customer, suddenly said, “No thanks, we’ll refine it at home.”

    The second headache was monetary. If Nigeria begins trading refined products in naira, yuan, or any regional currency, it pokes directly at the US dollar’s dominance, the global ATM that underwrites American influence.

    The third pain was geopolitical. Africa’s largest refinery means fewer oil tankers from Texas, and more from Lagos to Lomé under African control. That isn’t just energy trade; that’s energy independence, and independence is rarely good for business in Washington’s playbook.

    The fourth sting is symbolic. Dangote didn’t just build a refinery; he built a mirror, showing Africa what it could have been decades ago if it had stopped outsourcing its future. The West is uneasy watching Nigeria shake hands with China and India over refinery technology, two relationships that dilute American monopoly.

    For many in this theory, this backdrop makes Trump’s renewed “concern” for Nigeria look less like divine duty and more like a defensive manoeuvre. A continent daring to refine its own oil, trade in its own currency, and build its own alliances threatens the global balance of power. In that sense, Trump’s Nigeria outburst fits an old pattern: when Africa begins to rise, the world remembers it needs saving.

    The security picture in Nigeria, however, is more complex than either Washington’s rhetoric or social media’s outrage allows. Over the last decade, the country has battled multiple overlapping forms of violence, jihadist insurgency in the northeast, banditry in the northwest, and farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt driven by land, resources, and ethnicity. Human-rights monitors document widespread killings, but victims include both Christians and Muslims, and motives often intertwine economics, ethnicity, and crime. Simplifying these conflicts into a single “Christian genocide” narrative obscures their reality and risks inflaming communal tensions.

    Reliable data confirms that Nigeria remains one of the most violent countries in Africa. The 2025 Global Terrorism Index ranked Nigeria among the world’s hardest-hit by terrorism, reporting 565 terrorism-related deaths in 2024, while ACLED data showed thousands of conflict incidents and several thousand fatalities annually from political, communal, and criminal violence. These figures reveal a grave security crisis but not one that neatly fits the binary genocide Trump describes. The human cost is real, yet the causes are plural.

    Now can the US legally or practically intervene? International law recognises state sovereignty and allows the use of force abroad only in self-defence, by UN Security Council approval, or with the host state’s consent. A US strike inside Nigeria without Abuja’s invitation would violate the UN Charter and likely spark diplomatic outrage. Even practically, Nigeria’s vast population, complex terrain, and active military would make intervention both costly and chaotic.

    Again, the question: Do Nigerians want US help? It’s so sad that reactions within Nigeria are divided. President Bola Tinubu and the Foreign Ministry rejected the “genocide” framing and affirmed that Nigeria protects citizens of all faiths while defending its sovereignty; it later added that the federal government is working on meeting with the US president. Meanwhile, on social media, Christian advocacy groups and diaspora voices hailed Trump’s stance as overdue, while others condemned it as reckless, arrogant, and politically motivated. Civil-society organisations and editors warned that the rhetoric risks inflaming sectarian divisions and could drag Nigeria into unnecessary turmoil.

    Some community leaders in affected regions, when interviewed by rights groups, tend to ask for one thing above all: security and justice at home, not foreign bombs. They demand better policing, early-warning systems, and accountability for perpetrators. In short, they want protection, not intervention.

    What can help?

    If the goal is to protect civilians and end violence, the solution lies in cooperation, not confrontation. Nigeria must strengthen prosecutions for attacks, reform its policing architecture, and address land and resource conflicts. The US can apply targeted sanctions on individual perpetrators, share intelligence, and fund humanitarian recovery not unilateral strikes.

    Trump’s administration should publish evidence behind its claims, channel energy into multilateral pressure through ECOWAS, AU, and the UN, and avoid rhetoric that legitimises chaos. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s government must go beyond denial and deliver results, transparent investigations, community-based peacebuilding, and visible progress in protecting all citizens.

    So, do Nigerians want Trump’s help? Not in the way he imagines. What they want is justice, protection, and peace, not a “fast, vicious, and sweet” war on their soil. The country’s sovereignty, however imperfectly guarded, still matters. If Trump’s aim is truly to protect lives, he must trade bluster for balance, convert threats into transparency, and turn sermons into strategy. Nigeria remains the largest nation in Africa, and if Nigeria fails, the entire continent fails and may never rise again.

    •Oludotun is a public affairs analyst.       

  • Real-time digital payments: Powering financial inclusion across Africa

    Real-time digital payments: Powering financial inclusion across Africa

    • By Tosin Eniolorunda

    Without exception, real-time digital payments are taking over from cash as the more convenient, efficient, and reliable payment method. Global transaction volumes are projected to reach 512 billion by 2027 – a level of adoption which promises to promote financial inclusion and economic empowerment at all levels of society.

    However, the transition from cash-based to digital transactions has been quicker in some regions than others. In Africa, for instance, cash has remained a popular payment method due to customers’ preference for instant value exchange. This is especially important for low- or irregular-income households as they look to pay bills and meet other financial obligations. Similarly, businesses with low working capital, including those operating in the informal economy, can often display a preference for cash.

    However, cash is cumbersome and economically limiting. Notably, cash needs to be physically carried everywhere – rendering it prone to theft and inadequate for any transactions which transcend in-shop purchases. It is also unfit for functions such as domestic remittances and local trade between cities. Over-reliance on cash therefore constrains market liquidity and stunts economic potential.

    Cash also creates a hefty burden for central banks due to the cost of printing, transporting, and protecting physical volumes of cash. In 2020, the Central Bank of Nigeria spent N58.6 billion on printing cash – and yet more on transportation, security, and other infrastructure requirements to manage it.

    There is, however, an alternative which enables instant value exchange without the logistical challenges perennially attached to cash-based transactions. Real-time digital payments offer the best of both worlds: immediate settlement, efficiency, and improved security. Gone are the days of customers needing to physically visit a bank branch and fill out a form to move their money. Now, all transactions – big or small – can be completed and managed digitally.

    The development of robust fintech infrastructure in Africa means real-time digital payments are reshaping the continent’s entire payments ecosystem, from consumer bill settlements to cross-border business-to-business (B2B) commerce – offering lower transaction fees; enabling new business models; and promoting financial inclusion.

    The benefits are substantial. For consumers, real-time digital payments mean instant access to funds, greater convenience, more financial flexibility, and easier access to credit and other financial services. For businesses, it means enhanced cash flow management and transaction processing, improved operational efficiency, and a smoother customer experience. Digital payments can also mitigate money laundering and fraud risks and decrease the amount of working capital needed for daily operations – empowering informal enterprises which are often the lifeblood of local economies.

    In essence, real-time digital payments enable more transparent financial ecosystems which create a virtuous cycle of financial empowerment for previously underbanked individuals and businesses – promoting economic growth at the national and sub-national level.

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     Real-time digital payments are already an established financial reality in some African markets. Nigeria is a leader in this area, not just on the continent, but globally too – its NIBSS Instant Payments (NIP) system is the sixth-largest real-time payments system in the world, processing billions of naira daily and more transactions yearly than equivalent payment systems in the U.S.

    NIP is the invisible financial infrastructure powering every financial interaction in Nigeria. The use of NIP transfers for every day, lower-value transactions is becoming more common as real-time digital transactions gradually usurp cash as the country’s favoured payment method. In 2024, more than 12 billion instant money transfers were completed in Nigeria – up from 9.7 billion in 2023 – and the rising adoption of this payment method in the Nigerian marketplace has been transformative for SMEs, saving them an estimated $296 million in 2021.

    As the adoption of digital payments continues to grow, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), in June 2025, moved to future-proof the current system by launching the National Payment Stack (NPS), a next-generation digital payment infrastructure compliant with ISO 20022 – the global messaging standard for secure and data-rich financial transactions. Only a few days ago, NIBSS announced the first successful transaction on the NPS signalling the dawn of a new era of speed, innovation, and interoperability in payments.

    This move represents a significant, demonstrable shift towards building a more inclusive financial landscape; one where the barriers to entry are lowered for underserved communities. It promises to engender a dynamic ecosystem where innovative services are accessible to all citizens irrespective of their location, language, or faith.

    With continued government backing, real-time digital payments will continue to shape the commerce ecosystems of Africa’s present and future – especially as trust and adoption continue to grow. Sustaining this positive trajectory depends on harnessing pioneering fintech platforms to connect higher volumes of consumers and enterprises to this exciting financial world which has the power to transform businesses and lives.

    The future for real-time digital payments in Africa is bright, and the benefits will be felt by all: boosting economic potential and output; supporting trade and value exchange within and between countries; and promoting financial inclusion continent-wide.

    •Eniolorunda is the founder and group CEO, Moniepoint Inc.

  • The hard realities of football governance in Nigeria

    The hard realities of football governance in Nigeria

    • By Adefila Kamal

    In any serious football nation, governance is not about noise—it’s about structure, patience, and continuity. The current barrage of criticism against the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) reflects an old national habit: our tendency to destroy what we should improve. Football is not just a sport in Nigeria. It is one of the few institutions that still bind us together across tribe, faith, and generation. From dusty fields in Jos to crowded viewing centres in Lagos, it remains a shared dream — yet beneath the cheers lies a fragile institution once again under pressure.

    To understand today’s challenges, we must remember how far we’ve come. When Amaju Pinnick became NFF president, he brought a new era of professionalism — connecting Nigeria to the global football community, attracting record sponsorships that made the Federation nearly 90% self-funded, and representing our nation on the prestigious FIFA Council. Under his leadership, Nigerian football regained credibility among international bodies and corporate sponsors. For the first time in years, the NFF was being discussed not for scandal, but for structure.

    Pinnick’s tenure also saw visible progress in youth and women’s football. The Golden Eaglets remained world-class, the Super Falcons cemented their African dominance, and the domestic leagues began to attract corporate partners again. It was not a flawless era, but it built a foundation of professionalism — a legacy that today’s NFF leadership under Ibrahim Musa Gusau has worked hard to consolidate with calmness and steady reform.

    Unfortunately, as progress takes root, familiar forces have resurfaced. Some of the loudest critics today are the same discredited actors who once fed on chaos within the football ecosystem. They have found in social media and sensational headlines new tools to spread misinformation — not to reform the system, but to regain lost relevance. Their noise is not new. Before the 2022 World Cup qualifiers, similar distractions weakened morale and diverted attention from preparation. The result was national heartbreak. We cannot afford that mistake again.

    The truth often ignored in these debates is that football governance anywhere in the world is a long, painstaking process of reform. Institutions like FIFA and CAF have some of the most rigorous audit systems in global sports — and both have consistently affirmed that Nigeria’s football administration meets their standards. The idea that a few loud voices can suddenly delegitimize a system recognized by world football’s governing bodies says more about our national impatience than the NFF’s competence.

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    In this context, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s bold decision to restore the National Sports Commission (NSC) and take sports administration out of partisan politics marks a turning point. For the first time in decades, sports management is being repositioned under professionals rather than political appointees. This structural reform is not just bureaucratic — it is visionary. It recognizes sports as a strategic tool for national development, diplomacy, and employment, not just weekend entertainment.

    Already, the impact is visible. The president’s unprecedented investment in sports — from football to basketball, athletics, and beyond — has raised morale across the board. Enhanced funding, better welfare packages for athletes, and support for international participation are redefining how the Nigerian state treats its sports ambassadors. This is leadership that understands that a thriving sports sector contributes to economic growth, social cohesion, and the nation’s global reputation.

    Against this backdrop, the NFF must be understood as part of a larger national reform story. Football remains Nigeria’s greatest unifier and one of its most valuable exports. It generates jobs, fosters national pride, and projects soft power globally. The Federation’s mandate is not only to manage teams but to nurture the system that keeps this cultural engine running — from grassroots development to elite competition.

    Every time we undermine our institutions, we weaken our collective progress. No country that constantly attacks its own builders ever grows. The NFF, under the current administration, continues to prioritize youth football, women’s development, and institutional rebuilding — initiatives that may not make flashy headlines but are the backbone of sustainable growth. Reform takes time. It takes quiet work, not noise.

    Civil society and the media have a critical role here — not as cheerleaders or critics for hire, but as constructive partners in accountability. Transparency reforms, independent audits, and digital governance tools can strengthen public confidence, but they must be pursued through collaboration, not combat. Our football future depends on it.

    President Tinubu’s sports reforms and the NSC’s renewed authority provide the framework for such collaboration. Nigeria’s football does not need another war of words. It needs patience, cooperation, and courage — the courage to build on the gains of the past rather than destroy them in a fit of emotion.

    Our football story, much like our national story, is one of resilience amid chaos and brilliance amid uncertainty. We cannot afford to keep starting over every few years. The future will not be built by those who shout the loudest, but by those willing to work quietly, strategically, and faithfully to sustain what has already been achieved.

    If we truly love Nigerian football, then this is our duty — to defend its institutions, refine its processes, and build on its progress. Anything less is self-sabotage.

    •Barr. Kamal is a legal practitioner and development practitioner.

  • Nigeria’s problem is not religious

    Nigeria’s problem is not religious

    By Vitus Ozoke

    There is a lie that has stalked Nigeria since independence – that our greatest enemy is religious division. It is a myth carefully designed, polished, and perpetuated by those who benefit from chaos: the political elite. Religion has been made the convenient scapegoat for every outbreak of violence, every act of terror, every national fracture.

    But look closely, and the real puppeteers emerge – the politicians who weaponise and exploit faith to mask their failures and feed their ambitions. For decades, the Nigerian political class has fed the nation a dangerous illusion: that Muslims and Christians are each other’s enemies. It is a purposeful falsehood – one that keeps the people divided while the ruling political elite loot in peace.

    The truth is that Nigeria’s Muslim and Christian populations have coexisted for centuries, with deep cultural and economic interdependence. Nigerians across faiths share common values – resilience, hospitality, and a strong drive for survival. The average Nigerian, Muslim or Christian, does not wake up in the morning thinking about jihad or crusades. They wake up thinking about survival – how to buy garri, how to keep their generator running, how to escape the nightmare of joblessness and insecurity, how to pay rising rent, and how to stay alive in a country where life is cheap and leadership is a burden.

    This pragmatic coexistence contradicts the narrative of endemic religious hatred. When a trader in Kano greets a customer in Enugu, or a driver in Ibadan picks up a passenger from Sokoto, there’s no religious animosity in that transaction. There’s only hunger and hustle – the shared misery of a people betrayed by their leaders.

    Yet, in this misery, religion has become the last refuge. With no functioning government to offer hope, faith becomes the anaesthetic that dulls the pain. Churches and mosques have taken the place of what the government should have been. They have become the de facto social welfare agencies, providing a safety net in a failed state – feeding the poor, promising miracles, offering hope where government has fallen short. The pulpit now feeds the poor that the government forgot, and the imam comforts the broken that the system destroyed. It is this structural vacuum and desperation that politicians exploit under the guise of charity, effectively buying loyalty through pious performance in a spiritual dependency that has made the people pliable and easily manipulated by politicians who know how to speak the language of faith when elections draw near.

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    The result is a nation where faith has been turned into a political currency – traded by elites and consumed by the desperate.

    Nigeria’s post-independence history demonstrates a consistent pattern: politicians instrumentalise religion to achieve political legitimacy. Every election season, the shameless masquerades emerge from their gated woods, and we see the same grotesque theatre: politicians in agbada and babanriga, suddenly rediscover faith, crossing from mosque on Friday to church on Sunday with staged humility, quoting scripture they neither believe nor understand, and pretending piety they do not possess. They distribute prayer mats and hymn books, not to honour God but to mobilize votes and marginalize their opponents. They turn faith into a campaign strategy, preaching peace in public while funding chaos and violence in secret. When the ballots close, they return to their barricaded villas, leaving the people to quarrel and kill themselves over adulterated doctrines while they divide the treasury and preside over policies that perpetuate inequality and economic stagnation, the true engines of unrest.

    The financiers behind religious violence in Nigeria are not imams or pastors. They are rarely true religious extremists in the theological sense. They are not men of God – they are men of power. They are politicians, opportunists, and power brokers who fund sectarian violence as a diversionary tactic. They understand the formula: divide the poor by faith, control them through fear. Stoke the flames of difference and watch the masses burn themselves while you harvest votes and contracts.

    The preachers who incite division do so not out of theology but out of economics. Every mob, every riot, every sectarian flame, has a politician behind it who profits from chaos. It is not faith that fuels Nigeria’s bloodshed; it is politics dressed in the robe of faith. The blood of Nigerians shed in the name of religion is not holy blood – it is political blood. It is the blood of manipulation, not belief. It is this manipulation of faith that transforms legitimate social grievances into religious conflicts.

    And now, even the world has joined the deception. When President Donald Trump thundered about sending American troops to Nigeria to stop the “killing of Christians,” he did more than ignite diplomatic outrage – he exposed how deeply the world misunderstands Nigeria’s tragedy. His threat, cloaked in moral outrage, plays perfectly into the same false script Nigerian politicians have used for decades: that the country’s crisis is a holy war. It is not. The bloodshed in Nigeria is not about Christians versus Muslims; it is about citizens versus a failed state – hardworking citizens versus a heartlessly corrupt political class.

    So, by misinterpreting our suffering as a religious conflict, Trump and Washington have now joined the chorus of those who weaponize faith while ignoring the real culprit – a political elite that has turned Nigeria into a slaughterhouse of poverty, corruption, and neglect.

    Let me state this clearly: Nigeria does not need American boots on its soil. It needs leaders in its government with a modicum of conscience. Donald Trump’s sudden moral outrage over “Christian persecution” in Nigeria is not driven by any genuine empathy – it is strategic ignorance disguised in bogus diplomacy. Truth be told, Donald Trump does not give a flying fig about “shithole” Nigeria or its Christian population.

    Sending troops to Nigeria would not end the killings; it would only embolden those who profit from division.

    Until Nigeria addresses its leadership problem, religion will continue to serve as a mask for evil. We must unmask it. The day we stop letting politicians manipulate our faith for personal gain is the day Nigeria begins to heal. When a hungry Muslim and a hungry Christian finally realize that their shared hunger comes from the same source – the ruling elite – the spell will be broken. When impoverished Christians and destitute Muslims see that their true enemy is the same – a system designed to keep them poor, divided, and desperate – then and only then will our mosques and churches join in the same cry for deliverance and freedom, stop being battlegrounds, and become what they were meant to be: sanctuaries of conscience.

    For the umpteenth time, Nigeria’s problem has never been religion. It has always been egregiously bad leadership. Religion, in the hands of the political elite, has been transformed into both a shield and a sword – a cover for corruption and a weapon for division. Nigeria’s salvation will not come from a pulpit or a minaret, not from a pastor’s sermon or an imam’s prayer; instead, it will come from its people’s awakening. Nigeria must first confront its governance crisis. Reforms must address corruption, institutional weakness, and elite impunity. The focus must shift from religious tolerance – which assumes inevitable hostility – to social justice, which removes the material conditions that enable elite manipulation. The answer, therefore, is not in silencing faith but in reforming politics.

    •Dr. Ozoke is a lawyer, human rights activist, and public affairs analyst based in the United States.

  • Human capital development and Nigeria’s sovereignty

    Human capital development and Nigeria’s sovereignty

    By Oluwole Ogundele

    It is very worrying that the political leaders (with a few exceptions) are yet to fully understand, let alone appropriate the centrality of education to the liberation of the country from the shackles of neo-colonialism/imperialism and aggravated material poverty. In Nigerian politics, education is seen as a triviality as opposed to the cornerstone of sustainable peace and progress in all their ramifications.

    Succinctly put, education is an age-old process of liberating the human mind from the bondage of huge ignorance and underdevelopment, through the lens of structured and unstructured methods of approach. The former refers to that type of education received in schools, while the latter arises from socialisation at the family and community levels. Both forms of education are needed for the evolution of a healthy, truly sovereign society.

    Education particularly at the university level is both for knowledge acquisition and wisdom (applied knowledge). This paves the way for socio-economic stability, peace and progress of a country. Contrary to what obtains in Nigeria, education is not to be politicised in a dangerous manner. Greater emphasis should be placed on high quality education instead of establishing more and more caricatured universities, mono-technics and polytechnics, just for self-glorification often inseparable in a neat way, from arithmetic of smelly power.

    Establishing universities is a serious exercise outside the domain of unbridled cosmetic engagements. It is a pity, that Nigeria is dangerously ignoring the inner qualities of higher education. Research findings from good quality institutions of higher learning are the foundations of technological innovations. But the government has not shown the expected commitments to research funding and welfare of the stakeholders who are often treated like trash. This was a pre-Tinubu absurdity that must be thoroughly redressed now. The only option is the reckless importation of technologies and even cosmetic items to Nigeria, at the expense of local industrialisation and sustainable development. Overdependence on Europe, America and Asia rubbishes Nigeria’s collective dignity and progress. Thus, for example, unemployment rate is going up daily despite the available huge natural and cultural resources of world-class status. Material poverty defines and rules the Nigerian world even as our politicians continue to play the age-old, smelly politics of the belly.

    Nigeria has academics and non-academics that are capable of moving and shaking the society. This current government should kindly begin to craft a new pathway of higher education as if quality and practical results are of the essence. This underscores the reason why ASUU has always been advising the Nigerian government to stop establishing new universities in the face of dwindling funds.

    Nigerian universities are busy producing annually engineers who cannot manufacture spoons, let alone fridges, air-conditioners and other modern technologies.  The political leaders have painfully de-coupled from the led, as a result of a gross lack of patriotism, on the fringe of an inflated sense of self-importance and insensitivity on an unthinkable scale.

    Without mincing words, no country can be respected in the comity of nations, in the face of low productivity in a wide range of ways. Neo-colonial machinations would certainly go on unabated if Nigeria failed to embrace the culture of productivity instead of overdependence on the developed nations.  It is a deceit to claim that the country is developing, when in actuality, the geo-polity is under-developing in a myriad of ways.  The government should take good care of our higher institutions. I’m sure that the world would be amazed to see what Nigerian academics and other categories of staff of our higher institutions could achieve in the next 10 years. But corruption across the societal spectrum has to be reduced to the barest minimum. Research funds have to be thoroughly monitored. The nature of man is generally corrupt. That’s why monitoring is important.

    Maximum corruption promotes aggravated material poverty. Conversely, aggravated poverty engenders different forms of corruption. In the long run, sustainable human capital development suffers in the absence of great commitments to good quality higher education in the country. How can a professor be taking N500,000 or thereabouts monthly especially in the face hyper-inflation?  Does the government want a university professor to be shining the shoes of a politician or senator as a coping strategy?

    What a country! In early 2022, the Nimi Briggs Committee recommended that a professor should be earning N1.2 million monthly. Shortly after this, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors (CVC) reduced it to N800,000 per month, so as to practically demonstrate a sense of appreciation of the state of the national economy. ASUU never rejected this position in the interest of Nigeria’s development. What patriotism is greater than this?

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    But shockingly, this gesture was/is never appreciated by the government. Like some stone age leaders, the political class fails to understand the existential fact, that no national progress on a sustainable scale can be made without motivation of the academics. Hungry lecturers can hardly be innovative. The government should stop treating lecturers like trash. Normalisation of disdain for the Nigerian intelligentsia is at variance with national development. High quality university education is central to the production of robust human capital.

    By now, Nigeria ought to have stopped practising raw material economy as if we are still a colony of the West. It is a pity, that we are still fetching water and hewing wood for the developed parts of the global village after more than six decades of independence. This is shameful! Thus, for example, Nigeria’s world-class lithium coupled with other mineral resources is irresistible to the West and China.  Consequently, they are ready to set the country ablaze in order to have unfettered access to these resources. Indeed, every serious leader is an enemy of the powerful nations. But despite this dilemma, Nigerians must begin to look inward for development on a sustainable scale. We will not allow the bullies to frighten us to submission under the guise of modern internationalisation. International politics is often laced with dishonesty.

    Nigerian ethnic groups have to unite and rise above all forms of bigotry otherwise the country will be swallowed up by the ravaging ocean of globalisation. Sponsors of terrorism have to be dealt with according to the Nigerian constitution. Stop the so-called “de-radicalisation” of terrorists. These violent criminals are merely trying to pull a fast one. PBAT must do much more than hitherto to clear the abominable stench generated by his predecessors. Pay greater attention to high quality university education.

    Another avoidable ASUU strike action is looming in the face of empty rhetoric by the government. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should kindly change the narrative by honouring agreements freely entered into with the Nigerian university academics. Disruption of academic calendars almost on a yearly basis is at variance with socio-economic development. Monies invested in education are a great service to society. Thorough education wrestles ignorance to the ground. Once again, nobody will respect a country that is merely consuming what others are producing, painfully at the expense of local industrialisation and by extension, sustainable economic development. Similarly, nobody is going to honour any political leadership that lacks the capacity to deal decisively with terrorists and their sponsors.

    •Prof Ogundele is of Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan.

  • Still on wards as building blocks for economic development

    Still on wards as building blocks for economic development

    By Vincent O. Akinyosoye

    Planning for development of the political wards depends on the availability of good statistics, particularly those assembled for tracking activities of citizens resident in rural and urban wards of the nation, as well as in all commercial and non-commercial entities and public institutions therein. The lack of such statistics has largely impeded service delivery at the ward level of governance. A major problem is that the data collection activities at that level are not coordinated for planning. But, if we are to achieve any meaningful development that is fully inclusive at this primary level, the time has come to put in place a viable system of data and information gathering from the primary level and its dissemination through the establishment of a National Integrated Information Management System (NIIMS) to aid the development process. The system will draw data and information about activities in the wards from various government agencies, notably the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), National Population Commission (NPC), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Federal Ministry of Education (FME), Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), National Immigration Service (NIS), Nigeria Police and other data and revenue-generating bodies amongst others. These agencies will have desks in the Political Ward Management Offices (PWMOs) gathering data on a routine basis and storing such data electronically. The individual electronic storage systems in the office will be networked with others into a central server at the state and federal levels.

    When fully established, the system will be managed through a network of databases of socio-economic information on all citizens and residents and their activities in Nigeria, as well as information on all commercial, institutional, and social activities within all defined geographical entities in the country, that is, the 8,809 political wards, 774 Local Government Areas, 36 states, and the FCT. The national database can also be configured to report information on each of the 109 senatorial districts and the 360 House of Representatives districts. This way, all major stakeholders in the legislative and executive arms of government will have the wherewithal to track development in their respective political domains. A NIIMS Centre should be established in each local government headquarters to receive data and information from the wards. Similarly, NIIMS Centre will be at the state headquarters and be linked to all the Local Government data centres in the states. All state NIIMS centres will then be connected with a centralised node at the national level in Abuja under the watch of the National Planning Commission, which is now in the adjunct of the Federal Ministry of Budget and National Planning.

    Numerous benefits will accrue from this novel statistical apparatus for development. It will serve as a repository for data and information for national planning and management of the economy in general, as it will support the National Population Commission in the routine assemblage of vital demographic statistics and headcounts to regularly update population figures at the ward, local government, state, and federal levels.

    In addition, it will support the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the electoral process, especially making it a routine to obtain an accurate number of people eligible to vote within each ward, LGA, state, and the entire nation. Importantly, NIIMS will constitute a routine and regular assemblage of statistics on outcomes of economic activities, which can assist in the production and tracking of macro-economic aggregates like the ward GDP estimates, as well as expose the challenges of the economy right from the wards level, such as unemployment and other disequilibrous contexts.

    This grassroots activity will create a system for assembling statistical and non-statistical information on Micro, SMEs, and LSEs to enable the government to plan and have a broader stronghold on the economy, and facilitate tax collection and revenue generation through obtaining information on individual and corporate commercial activities, professional bodies, and the wealth status of economic entities regularly. Through this system, tax evasion will be difficult, and anyone outside the government who demands information on the system will have to pay to generate income for the Political Ward Management Office. Furthermore, the ward statistics will provide a platform for the enumeration and valuation of housing stock, enabling the estimation of the investment component of the GDP and providing basic information to inform decisions on investments in housing estate establishments and create job opportunities in wards.

    In terms of public order, the ward statistical system will provide an avenue to check corruption as information on individuals, corporate and social organisations, land and other assets in each ward will be recorded with official identities which will also keep criminal activities in check since the basic information of every citizen in the wards will be available in a database including biometric data to track criminal and other unwholesome activities in the society.

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    All these will enable the establishment of the Social Security System (SSS) in the country to complement the National Identification Management System (NIMS). Finally, the entire system will provide information on the societal needs of people at the wards that can be aggregated for planning constituency projects for elected politicians at the state and national assemblies.

    The concept of NIIMS is formulated on the need to create a comprehensive database system that is comprehensive to support the government’s desire to modernise its approach to development planning and management in the country. This approach will be based on the use of statistics and information technology to drive the process of development by integrating and managing the various existing data and information systems, which presently operate in an uncoordinated fashion into a modern embedded system that contains information of all citizens and residents in the country as well as all commercial and non-commercial enterprises and their locations at the ward level. Such information will be easy to retrieve and disseminate whenever the need arises. Everyone will be assigned a unique National Security/National Identity Number (NIN) that will be needed for any official or business transaction.

    As established above, technology will play a big role in the operation of NIIMS. Since the country will be delineated along existing wards, LGAs, states, and the various constituencies, digital mapping will be an integral part of the design and functionality of NIIMS. And, since a large body of data will be involved in this exercise, as well as the attendant requirement for fast data communication from the 8,809 data points and the heterogeneous nature of the demand for data and information from numerous points, advanced technology will be required to operationalise this concept.

    In this regard, the Cloud Technology and the Geographical Information System (GIS) based mapping and database protocols are suggested as tools to make this system work. The present Global System of Mobile Communication (GSM) in the country can be deployed to connect the 8,809 wards, 774 LGAs, 36 states, and the FCT into a central virtual mass of data that is easily accessible for every user. This way, the cost of implementation will be manageable, as the bulk of the information will be in high demand for personal, official, and commercial purposes, there will be a price attached for access, which will make the cost-benefit outcome of the system attractive.

    • Akinyosoye is a retired professor of Applied Economics and Data Management and pioneer Statistician-General of the Federation and CEO of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

  • How Nigeria’s security failures invite global condescension

    How Nigeria’s security failures invite global condescension

    By Tosin Adeoti

    Donald Trump’s latest outburst about Nigeria was classic Trump — loud, reckless, and dripping with self-righteousness. Speaking aboard Air Force One, he accused the Nigerian government of “failing to protect Christians” and warned that the United States might “take military action” if the killings continued. It was the kind of bombast designed for applause, not diplomacy.

    But while the remark briefly rattled markets, Nigeria’s 2051 Eurobond dipped before quickly rebounding to 92 cents on the dollar, the deeper question it raises is uncomfortable: why does Nigeria remain so easy a target for this kind of moral posturing?

    The answer, painfully, is that the country’s internal failures create the space for others to speak so carelessly.

    Trump’s comments were unhelpfully framed, yet they touched a grain of truth: there is indeed deep insecurity in the land, and the Nigerian government has not done nearly enough to curb it. In the past decade, more than 60,000 people have died in conflicts ranging from Boko Haram’s insurgency in the northeast to banditry in the northwest and communal violence across the Middle Belt. Kidnapping for ransom has become a thriving industry, while large portions of rural Nigeria have slipped into the hands of militias and criminal gangs.

    The result is a country where fear is a daily fact of life. Travelling by road between major cities requires prayer. Farmers abandon fields for fear of raids. Parents in Kaduna or Zamfara dread sending their children to school. Yet, even amid these grim realities, the federal government often communicates as though insecurity is a PR problem rather than a crisis of governance.

    When Trump accused Nigeria of “failing to protect Christians,” Abuja’s first instinct was not to clarify or inform, but to deny and deflect. Presidential adviser Daniel Bwala dismissed the comments as “an insult to national sovereignty,” insisting that both Christians and Muslims were victims of extremist violence. That statement was true but shallow. It dodged the underlying issue: why are Nigerians, regardless of faith, so vulnerable in the first place?

    Nigeria’s security failures are not born of religious persecution; they are the product of a broken state. The federal structure concentrates power but diffuses responsibility. Governors blame Abuja, Abuja blames local authorities, and the security agencies blame lack of intelligence or logistics. Meanwhile, citizens bury their dead.

    For years, governments have responded to insecurity with the same predictable pattern: reshuffle the service chiefs, convene committees, promise reforms, and issue warnings. Little changes. Coordination between security agencies remains weak. Police funding is pitiful. Rural intelligence networks are non-existent. Even when progress is made, as in the reduction of Boko Haram’s territorial control, new crises erupt elsewhere.

    Against that backdrop, Trump’s rhetoric, as offensive as it was, found oxygen in the vacuum of credibility that Nigeria’s government has created. The real scandal is not that the U.S. president made an outrageous threat; it’s that the Nigerian state has become too incoherent, too unconvincing, to effectively defend itself.

    For over a year, Nigeria has had no confirmed ambassador in Washington. Its foreign missions operate on thin budgets, often unable to mount even basic public diplomacy campaigns. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is treated as an afterthought, its strategic functions drowned by political appointments.

    Abuja seems perpetually surprised when criticism arrives, even though it is often predictable and, in some ways, deserved.

    The tragedy is that Nigeria is not a helpless country. It remains one of Africa’s largest economies. President Tinubu’s economic decisions — the removal of fuel subsidies, exchange-rate unification — have begun to restore investor confidence. Inflation is easing. The naira has started to stabilise. Yet, this fragile progress risks being overshadowed by the chaos within.

    Without security, reform cannot take root. And without credible communication, reform cannot inspire confidence.

    The problem is not just insecurity itself, but the government’s tone-deaf handling of it. Each time violence erupts, whether in Plateau, Benue, or Zamfara, the response is formulaic: condemnation, condolence, and silence. There is little transparency about what the government is actually doing. Casualty figures are disputed. Military operations are shrouded in secrecy.

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    This opacity breeds cynicism at home and misunderstanding abroad. In the absence of reliable information, foreign governments, NGOs, and commentators fill the vacuum with their own narratives — often crude, sometimes prejudiced, but never fully wrong.

    Nigeria once had a foreign policy posture that inspired respect. From the 1970s through the 1980s, and especially in the 2000s, it championed anti-apartheid struggles and mediated regional conflicts. Today, that confidence has withered.

    So when crises erupt, the government reacts rather than leads. It protests indignantly, but belatedly. It trades in outrage rather than persuasion. And it leaves the impression, at home and abroad, that Nigeria no longer knows how to speak for itself.

    Trump’s words should not enrage Nigeria; they should embarrass it. They should force a reckoning with the disrepair of its institutions and the weakness of its global voice.

    It is easy to condemn the arrogance of foreign critics. It is harder to confront the domestic dysfunction that makes their criticism believable.

    Nigeria needs more than economic reform. It needs administrative competence and a clear foreign policy vision that reclaims its story from the hands of others. Appoint ambassadors. Empower the foreign service. Communicate transparently. Invest in intelligence, policing, and the rule of law.

    For too long, Nigeria has mistaken indignation for strength. But in the world of diplomacy, credibility — not bluster — earns respect. Until Abuja learns that lesson, even careless rhetoric from abroad will continue to find a home here, not because it is true, but because it sounds plausible.

    •Adeoti writes on society, governance, and business. He writes via contact@tosinadeoti.com.