Author: Frederick Nwabufo

By my educated guess, it will take four decades to put Nigeria together after the exit of President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria is like humpty-dumpty – broken, amputated and cannibalised. The Buhari administration has wrought irreparable damage on the country across sectors. The mess is deep and stinks. The next president of Nigeria in 2023 will have to be a night soil man; in our parlance – a shit parker; agbepo; onye obulunsi. All government institutions have caved in under the fatal incompetence of the Buhari administration. In fact, every sector with a semblance of life before the erosive coming of…

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Chioma is having troubles with her mother-in-law. I know because she made it headline news on her social media page. She does not share her concerns with the other party in the nuptial contract or with a trained counsellor, but with aliens on social media who are sweating on the treadmill of their own problems and who have no understanding of the situational context. Hear Chioma: ‘’It has been uncomfortable living with my mother-in-law. She insists I do my husband’s laundry which I never did even while we were dating and in our first few years of marriage. My husband’s…

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In the evening of February 19, 2018, 110 schoolgirls of Government Girls’ Science Secondary School, Dapchi in Yunusari local government of area of Yobe state were abducted by Boko Haram and taken into grisly captivity. Five of the girls died in the hands of their captors. But after weeks of negotiations between the government and the abductors, 104 of the schoolgirls were released except one – Leah Sharibu. Leah refused to succumb to the vile power of her holders. She refused to deny her faith in return for her freedom. She feared God, not man or weapons of death. She…

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Security is everybody’s business. It is a flawed assumption that issues of security must remain strictly within the orbit of agencies with the lawed responsibility. Even security agencies cannot function without citizens’ alliance and community help. Simply, they cannot operate in vacancy of citizens’ collaboration and the support of stakeholders and other institutions – both formal and informal. The most fundamental ingredient to addressing crime is intelligence. And intelligence does not jump out from the coloured screen of a computer; it comes from people – of all shades and appliances. It is the reason I believe our traditional institutions and…

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Nigeria is an exceptionally intolerant country – religion-wise. In fact, the country is next to Iran on the religious intolerance threshold. You could get killed, threatened, hounded, harassed and victimised for going against the religious orthodoxies. The two major religions in Nigeria – Christianity and Islam — bubble with the most fanatical of followers who elect themselves ‘’defenders of God’’. In their inquisition, death is the penalty for every perceived breach of the holy canons. There is no other way. Over the years Nigeria has been on the US watch-list for religious intolerance. I must say, this problem has always…

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On January 22, 2015, at Chatham House, London, Sambo Dasuki, former national security adviser (NSA), baited the whirlwind. He said he had suggested to Attahiru Jega, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to postpone the general election scheduled for February 14 by six weeks – which is within the constitutional 90-day election window – to give more time for voter-card distribution. “It costs you nothing, it’s still within the law,” Dasuki was reported to have told the INEC chairman. Being a spy chief, Dasuki secreted the underlying reason for his startling suggestion away in election contingencies. But the…

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#ZabarmariMassacre! The farm is a place of sowing and reaping, and the most unlikeliest haunt of the grim reaper. But at least 43 citizens who went harvesting on their farm in Borno on Saturday had their souls harvested by the emissaries of hell — Boko Haram. How many more will have to die before the conscience of President Muhammadu Buhari is stirred to do the most expedient thing regarding the failed service chiefs? In December 2018, Boko Haram insurgents pulled a blitzkrieg on military formations in Baga, Borno state, sacking the headquarters of the multinational joint task force and taking…

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The hypocrite minimises his own flaws and makes allowances for imperfections while homing in on and exaggerating the problems of another. We have an even distribution of hypocrites among all sections of the country. But I think there is a more bubbling joint of whited sepulchres in the south-east. Yes, a host of people lost in gyrations of affected piety and plaster saints who capitalise and summarise their troubles with third-party headlines. They are never responsible for own their problems; there is always someone or some people in the north, south-west or south-south to blame. Even the gully erosion ravaging…

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‘Why always Buhari?’ As it was in 1984 under General Buhari, so it is in 2016 and 2020 under President Buhari? Is it by the unfortunate hands of kismet, that recession hits Nigeria every time Buhari takes charge of the country’s affairs? If the recession of the 80s under Buhari was a conspiracy by economic and political factors, to what do we attribute that of his first coming as a civilian president — and now in his second coming? Why does pestilence scourge the land, hunger ravage the population and lives lost malevolently when Buhari presides over the country? Why…

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Probe. This is another word for political manoeuvring, horse-trading, chicanery and blackmail – in the Nigerian milieu. Probes are launched here not for righteous ends but for some predetermined recidivist motives. In particular, the so-called ‘’corruption probes’’ are themselves felonious panels set up to exact vengeance, broker deals or cause distraction from national discontent. Beelzebub cannot cast out demons. I recall the Ndudi Elumelu corruption probe of the power sector in 2009 where as chairman of the house committee on power, ‘’the prober’’ was accused of receiving bribes and allegedly annexing N5.2 billion from the rural electrification budget alongside other…

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Bigotry. We are big on it. To inflame passions and to smoke out the most reticent of Nigerians, flagellate the tempers of religion and ethnicity. Yes, then you will see the beast behind the mask. The mute compels speech and even the Nigerian PhD holder brawls when matters circle around his religion and ethnicity. Critical thinking is embargoed and the animal in man takes over. Why do we lose our heads over religion? Some Nigerians become executioners when they assume their religion has been slighted, but when it comes to the bounden duty of holding government to account they surrender…

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No government is short of opposition. In a democracy, the residence of an animated opposition signals the buoyancy of the system. Where there is democracy, there is opposition. In fact, opposition is the mitochondria of a republican system – it keeps the government on the mill working according to purpose. Why is the Buhari administration after the only opposition platform of all citizens? Really, the principal task of the administration from its conception was dismantling instruments and institutions of check. The Buhari executive thwacked the judiciary and effectively broke its back when agents of the state attacked judges in their…

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Humanity is all-inclusive. There are no higher or lesser humans. We all breathe the same air. Whether doctor, lawyer, journalist, police or soldier; we are all humans first, and as such we are entitled to the natural right to exist, to live. When this right is breached – even if it concerns our ‘’enemy’’ – we must all stand up against the violator and condemn the abomination. We cease being human when we selectively outrage against transgressions. Every breach of the human code must be condemned. The right to live is eternal; hence any innocent soul lost to violence of…

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There is no government presence in the federal capital territory (FCT). Yes. In fact, there is no such thing as leadership in the FCT. If there was, I would certainly know being a habitué of the city. There are only vulgar structures which are purely administrative habitations of the federal government. Beyond the vast jungle of bricks and glass, the FCT is rudderless. There are many sore points in the ungovernance of the FCT. But I will situate my concerns in only two. Security is in a parlous state and infrastructure is generally decrepit. Derring-do attacks by bandits have become…

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There is an agenda to violence — the state’s agenda. The biggest beneficiary of violence in most cases is the government which controls every apparatus of terror. Nothing happens in isolation of executive conspiracy. The infamous connoisseur of terror, Sani Abacha was once quoted as saying: “If insurgency lasts for more than 24 hours, the government has a hand in it.” Who could have put it better than the grim reaper himself? During the military era, ‘’unknown soldiers and unknown policemen’’ were the agents who executed violence on behalf of the state. Assassinations, bloody clampdowns and even riots – all…

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The streets of Nigeria are coursing with the blood of innocents felled by guilty bullets of state agents. The Nigerian flag has turned scarlet from being a sponge soaking up the living fluid of harmless citizens who thought that the murderers would respect the symbol of the nation and spare their lives. The bodies of citizens are broken, littering the alleys. Young Nigerians who only ventured out with nothing but the flag, their fist and voice to protest against police brutality became victims of the violence they are campaigning against. Who gave the order for the killing of at least…

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Power has returned to its rightful repository – the people. Our liberators did not come from the north, the south or the east and west of Nigeria. They emerged from the ruins of the country; they broke free from the noxious culture of silence and shattered the substructure of generational complicity and conspiracy. They are the youth of Nigeria; the deliverer of the colony of slaves – from the fowler’s snare and deadly pestilence. The #EndSARS protests did not only end a ferocious unit of the police and constrained the capricious hands of the government into making pledges of initiating…

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The vulture is a minaciously patient bird. It does not exert itself hunting. It waits to devour the kill of another. It circles the sky while the hunt is on waiting for the opportune time to take advantage and gobble up the carcass. The spirit of 10 Nigerians dispatched to the netherworld since the spasm of #EndSARS protests groans in mortification. The EndSARS movement began as a righteous agitation against years of police brutality and regime oppression. It was citizens’ convulsive reaction to state terrorism. But it appears the vultures have come to feast on the carnage left in the…

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Women like Aisha Yesufu are like comets; they come once in a generation bearing the torch of truth, courage and resilience. They are lodestars, shining light on the path to a new world where humankind can thrive without chains and shackles. They are definers of the age; excellent species of their kind. Aisha bestrides the civic landscape like a rodeo, bringing to submission revilement from traducers and hangers-on of the corrupt and oppressive political class – only with her clenched fist and dauntless voice. The Chibok girls’ abduction of April 14, 2014, coerced Aisha out of comfort. She was among…

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I believe you have all noticed. Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo is regaining his stature and waxing reformist on some of the problems dogging Nigeria. He is breaking out of the supposed cabal-stitched straitjacket into a tinderbox of chutzpah. It seems he has elected to remove the duct tape from his mouth at this time.  But it is puzzling why the vice-president is picking this time in the life of the administration he represents to pipe up. Is there a 2023 graph under plot? Really, Nigerians pined to hear Osinbajo, a professor of law and senior advocate of Nigeria, talk up when…

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The affliction called “the special anti-robbery squad (SARS)’’ has become resistant to every divined antidote. It was set up to treat the pestilence of armed robbery and other violent crimes. But the police unit became the behemoth of organised criminality. It became the canker it was commissioned to extirpate. There have been many accounts of criminality and extra-judicial exertion by this police unit. But there is only a trickle of detail on the prosecution of these dispatchers of death by the police authorities. I must say, the police leadership is complicit in the SARS menace. The force is aiding its…

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One detraction to the national rapport is the hackneyed lies. Lies told and retold many times as truth. Lies told deliberately to tinge a past of acrimony in brushstrokes of harmony. Nigeria never had a glorious past and the ‘’founding fathers’’ never envisioned a congenial future for the country. There has never been such a thing as ‘’Nigerian unity’’; it only exists in the tomes of make-believe. We would rather parrot this fiction than work at achieving a national accord. The first step to unity should be discarding the lies and embracing the truth about our past while seeking collective…

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The British colonialists chucked the power console to the aborigines of Nigeria in 1960. Let me rephrase that. The British prowlers tossed power into the palm of native champions and ‘’non-functionally’’ exited the dais before the close of 1960. But these infiltrators did not go with the evils and vices of their craft.  The perils of colonialism remained. So, long after they are gone, the colonial construction still stands sturdy. The political layout the British handed to Nigeria was fatally flawed. It was designed to perpetuate strife and disharmony. The Nigerian anatomy was deliberately contaminated. The interlopers’ emulsion of disparate…

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The Igbo and the Yoruba share the affinity of interest. Their political goals are analogous. They both seek jurisdiction over their space and resources, and desire to be master-planners of their own political future. The two groups long not for territories outside their borders or nurse expansionist ambitions. They just want to live on the turf of their own terms and contrivance. But why are the Igbo and the Yoruba at strife — politically? Why do they not agree essentially on the same things that form the core of their interest? Well, I think the long history of distrust among…

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Alliances can make and mar us. Jehoshaphat king of Judah (south of Israel) was a man who sought the face of God. He was a decent ruler. But his yoking with kings of base virtue ruined his legacy. In particular, his dalliance with the house of Ahab and Jezebel impaired his bloodline and nearly cost him the glory of Yahweh. Power is a principal thing but the path on which we tread to its courts matters. I think it is hypocritical fighting a system but at the same time enjoying the dysfunctionality of that system. The Edo governorship election has…

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The campaigns of the first-tier contenders in the Edo governorship election have been largely ensconced in the agitprop of godfatherism. While Godwin Obaseki, incumbent governor of the state, claims he is wrestling against the forces of recidivism who have held Edo down and who want to keep lording it over the state as godfathers, Osagie Ize-Iyamu, his challenger, struggles to shake off the tag of being a flunkey of these ‘’patrons’’. According to Obaseki, his re-election will end godfatherism in Edo. In fact, the governor said his cardinal mission in the state is to end godfatherism. But what is the…

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Nothing puts greater timbre on the parlous state of security in the country than the denudation of the virtual hedges and moats around the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and the disarray of the phalanx of boots in the city. Abuja was once assumed to be impregnable and residents lived with a false sense of security. But the terrorist blitzes in the national’s capital in 2013 and 2014 jolted many out of the reverie. With the dawning of the Buhari administration, the bombing in the city petered out. The security forces also appeared to have nicked the insecurity in the north-east…

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We have to face up to the truth; the truth about Christian fundamentalism. The church today has been sculpted in the image of extremists and demagogues – men who arrogate to themselves the power of life and death. They pronounce perdition on those who step on their testy ego and deploy the bloodhounds of hell against those who differ with them. These men are the people Jesus the Christ dismissed as “brood of vipers”. They have taken the word of God and revised it to fit into their foibles and weaknesses. They make themselves god and instruct their followers by…

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Just yesterday — March 10, 2010 – Nigerians bent the capricious hand of kismet; they rose against the pirating of the presidency. Nigerian libertarians, in their hundreds, converged on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and marched to the residence of authority, demanding the actuation of the ‘’doctrine of necessity’’. The ailing Umaru Musa Yar’Adua had just been snaked into the country from Saudi Arabia while a coterie of scavengers held power by the jugular and were unwilling to relax their grip. Nigerians of all religion, tongues and tribes rose and defied impunity. It did not matter that the beneficiary (Goodluck…

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The Buhari administration has ruptured the ceiling of liberties it enjoys. Like King Solomon in his last uneventful years, the government has compounded the yoke of the people with the rocketing of the prices of essential commodities. It appears the administration has lost its sensory organ and has become insentient to the ‘’wailing’’ of citizens. And like the Israelites in the twilight of a failing Solomon rule, Nigerians are seeking another ‘’messiah’’.  Just five years ago, President Muhammadu Buhari made overtures of blunting the economic perils Nigerians endure. He seduced citizens with the promise of humbling the dollar and arresting…

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