In “For Black Children at the end of the world – and the beginning,” award-winning American Poet, Roger Reeves, writes with piercing poignancy,“ Hey, Black Child, You are the fire at the end of your elders’ weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof, stick, stone, several plagues including time.” Days after the United Nations celebrated the 2024 International Day of Older Persons commemorated on October 1 annually but celebrated on October 5, this poem which poignantly mentions “elders’ weeping” and the “plague of time” acutely describes the spectre of ageing in Nigeria. Unlike Japan whose aging population has become…
Author: Ike Willie-Nwobu
Nigeria’s fitful attempts to clean up its politics is suffering a seismic setback in Rivers State where bitter politics of succession is combined with the desperation of politicians to pollute the environment. The flames which licked up some local government secretariats in Rivers State may have only flared up on 7th October 2024, but their provenance lay in the past, in the bitter rivalry between Nyesom Wike, former governor of the state and current minister of the Federal Capital Territory, and Siminalayi Fubara, his successor and the incumbent governor of the state. The recent judgment of the Supreme Court on…
Nigeria’s new Chief Justice, Kudirat Kekere-Ekun takes charge of a horse that is unbridled and unruly. A crash is only a matter of time. The Nigerian judiciary has a new sheriff in town, and she is Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, the second female Chief Justice of Nigeria, and the first from the Southwest, who was recently sworn in to replace Kayode Ariwoola who retired amidst muted scandals. As with all her recent predecessors, the new CJN has talked tough about fighting corruption in the judiciary, improving justice delivery and not tolerating disobedience to court orders. But as she must already be finding…
The 2024 Governorship election in Edo State has come and gone with the All Progressives Congress and its candidate, Monday Okpebholo, wildly celebrating a dubious victory. The state which distinguished itself as a slippery slope for the APC during the 2023 general elections was always going to be tightly contested. The buildup to the election showed that the prediction was well on course. As soon as results started trickling in, the ruling People’s Democratic Party in the state which had been circulated dubious results even before the counting was concluded was rattled. Seeing that it had been outmaneuvered in the…
From time immemorial, sex has always been a commodity – something that can be bought, sold or even stolen when it is taken by force, as in the instance of rape. Women selling their bodies did not start today. It is why prostitution is sometimes described as the oldest profession. I remember that as far back as the 80s and 90s, there were always red spots in different major cities where the business of selling flesh was carried out mostly when dusk fell. One did not need to be a patron of such spots to know of their shady existence…
Boko Haram’s audacious attacks in Yobe have served notice to the Tinubu presidency that tales of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Early this month, Boko Haram sunk its scythe into Mafa in Yobe State. By the time it wiped the blood-stained scythe on the body of its last victims, about eighty persons lay dead with many more injured or uprooted from their homes in attacks that recalled the worst days of the terrorist group. Nigerians would rather forget the year 2009 for it was when Boko Haram rejigged its operations and launched an onslaught against the Nigerian state. Things have…
Sokoto State in Northwest Nigeria has a unique way of surging into the news and nestling there. For one, it is the seat of the sultanate superintended by the sultan who leads Muslims in Nigeria. So, arguably, it is the most important state to Nigerian Muslims. Recently the state has become the scene of some of the worst atrocities committed in Nigeria’s recent memory. On 12th May 2022, Deborah Samuel, a 22-year-old student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education Sokoto was lynched by a murderous mob on spurious allegations of blasphemy. It indicts everything Nigeria stands for as a…
Nigeria’s tightly wound religious veneer stretches and slips but always manages to hold firm in a country where hypocrisy is a national heirloom. To serve is to steal in Nigeria and with each stench of rot that wafts into the public nose, there appears to be no end to the predation of those who pilfer the public purse. About two years ago, Nigeria lost its accountant general, Ahmed Idris, to a corruption investigation. According to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), about one hundred and nine billion Naira had disappeared from the national treasury through his office. Nigerians immediately…
Nigeria duly served up a disaster class at the just concluded Paris Olympics failing to pick up a medal of any sorts and ensuring that the country’s drought of medals in recent years flared into a full-blown famine this time around. While the so-called Giant of Africa froze before the Olympic podium in every sport it participated in, supposedly ‘lesser’ African countries feasted on medals — about nine gold medals in all. Of particular note was Botswana’s 21-year-old Leslie Tebogo who ran a blistering 19.46s To obliterate Noah Llyes of the United States and take home the gold medal in…
A chilling report paints the horrific picture: two students robbed at raped at gunpoint at Tai Solarin University of Education(TASUED) in Ogun State on July 22, 2004. It was not the first time a night became a nightmare for female students of the institution. In October 2023, four female students were robbed and raped by armed robbers in the same institution. After the first incident, the police promised to act, just as it has promised yet again. That there was a repeat means no strong action was taken. When will something be done? Is it until all female students in…
Rather than doing all it can to protect children, Nigeria remains content to line up excuses while children remain inexcusably vulnerable and child protection virtually non-existent. A society where children are prone to abuse would always condone excuses for exposing children to horrific abuse. Such a society often shields the worst offenders or punishes them minimally before cutting them loose to continue their sadistic abuse of children. The case of 13-year-old Bridget Samuel in Taraba State is particularly pathetic. Falsely accused of stealing 5000 Naira, her hands were tied by two of her uncles and dipped in hot water mixed…
The planned August 1 protest is ill-timed to say the least. About time, Nigerians know of both its healing properties and unmatched ability to wear and wound irreparably. National despondence over the state of the country has as one of its central lamentations the fact that Nigeria has had 63 years of independence and 25 years of democracy to at least find its bearing if not compass. The country has inexplicably managed to find none with the little cheer there is coming from the resilience of its democracy. President Tinubu is the latest to attempt to steady this desperately stranded…
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appears to have done it again. The sixteenth Nigerian president, who is quietly proving to be just what the doctor ordered for Nigeria has created a Ministry of Livestock Development to address age-long farmer-herder conflicts in the country. It is suspected that true to style, the president consulted widely before creating the ministry which is dedicated to addressing a central driver of insecurity in the country. However, beyond signing names on government stationary, the fate of the ministry is a debt that only time will be able to pay. Nigeria’s fifteenth president Muhammadu Buhari may have…
Amidst President Tinubu’s wholehearted attempts to steady the ship of a desperately troubled country, Nigerians are daily forced to chew the kola nuts of the macabre. An outbreak of cholera here, Boko Haram abducting a judge his wife and orderly there, deadly attacks by terrorists elsewhere, all tangle for space in a chilling chronicle of death. In the face of these daily encounters with the macabre, Nigerians are forced to cling on to dear life every day. Just getting out of bed in Nigeria has become an act of survival. By the time one navigates the hassles of the day…
The swearing-in of Cyril Ramophosa as president for a second term continues South Africa’s remarkable break from the past. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 distributed African countries as colonies to European powers, rolling away centuries of self-rule and altering national destinies forever. The fact some people still look back to colonialism with nostalgia means that colonialism meant different things to different people. However, for South Africans collectively, colonialism meant the cruelest kind of subjugation. Apartheid and all its abominable accretions was a nightmare of unimaginable ramifications. It is doubtful that history has ever recorded anywhere the kind of discrimination that…
How does one begin to describe Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the indefatigable Nigerian woman who heads the World Trade Organization? What superlatives befit a woman whose winnings in the lottery of life have been about more than just luck? Now 70, she is a cause for celebration in Nigeria and elsewhere. In a country whose recent memory is littered with leadership failures and mishaps, Okonjo-Iweala is a quiet inspiration. A woman, mother, banker, she twice left the dizzying heights of the World Bank for the charged waters of Nigerian politics, serving as Minister of Finance under two different presidents. She survived with…
Nigeria’s June 12 celebration of its democracy day is itself a historical thumbs up to the distance the country has covered in the past two decades. June 12, 1993, was the day Nigeria held an election deemed free and fair amidst a repressive military regime, which turned out to be a cruel charade that ushered in a more brutal military regime. The winner of that election, M.K.O Abiola, which was annulled, died in custody just a year before Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999. If history holds lessons for Nigeria’s democracy, it is one of resilience and rootedness found in…
For many of Nigeria’s 250 million people, life is a daily, desperate grind below the international poverty line. With many families and households mired in the muck of such relentlessly suffocating poverty, the standard of living haunted by the rising costs of living has only continued to plummet. Take bread for example which used to be a staple for many Nigerian families who favour a hastily prepared cup of tea before school or work or to bat away hunger or cold. It has gradually become unaffordable for many, its price rising with the moans of bakers about increasing costs of…
They can afford it: the president, the legislature, the judiciary can all afford to nibble at nostalgia and why not, even the worst times reserve respite for a select few. In Nigeria, this circle of select few which has continued to shrink has some powerful people. In many ways, this administration has been at once a harsh departure from the past and somehow a stark return to it. While the prices of goods and services have made a clean break from the past to leave Nigerians gasping for the good old days, the return of the old national anthem as…
Two soldiers beat up not exactly to a pulp but in the full glare of onlookers and bystanders, some terrified, others not quite, and then in the global glare of the social media. Too much humiliation in a day, and within months, and signs of considerable danger for a regimented institution known for its discipline and indelible institutional memory especially with the attack in Okuama, Delta State where about sixteen military personnel lost their lives in the most brutal manner. True to form, the Nigeria army had shut down Banex plaza, a behemoth commercial hub that sits like a boulder…
Nigeria may not be Gaza, that planet of persecution and its critically endangered people betrayed by a global conspiracy of silence and battered by the minute by Israeli airstrikes, yet, there is something distinctly carceral about Africa’s most populous country. It is distinctive by its population, its considerable prison population and the unmistakably squalid conditions of its prisons which seem designed to ruin rather than rehabilitate. To service one of its many myths that no one has any business being a criminal in Nigeria, Nigeria maintains carceral spaces within the country. Spaces it prefers to call correctional centers are crowded by…
Justice must precede peace if peace is to have immediate power or hold lasting promise. Peace is the usual goal of conflict resolution, whether it is arbitration, mediation or conciliation. Because of its acrimonious nature, litigation is not always considered the pathway to peace, even if its more forceful ways of seeking justice guarantees peace eventually. As a country, Nigeria has grappled with many solutions to terrorism since 2009 when Boko Haram’s campaign became bolder and bloodier. One of the solutions was to rehabilitate and reintegrate into the society terrorists willing to ‘repent’ and lay down their arms. This proved…
Preliminary investigations show that a police inspector in Plateau State cut off his wife’s hand over three thousand Naira. Reports say he gave her twenty thousand Naira to keep, but she could only account for three thousand Naira. While the woman has been hospitalized, the man has been detained as the investigation continues. These days, news from within and outside Nigeria is prodigal with reports of men who have become violent at home turning their wives into victims in the place where a woman can be anything else but a victim. In a world which insists on persisting with the…
Abdullahi Ganduje became the national chiarman of the All Progressives Congress after eight years of being the governor of Kano State. In many ways, he is the poster child of the patronage system inherent in Nigeria’s politics. He became Governor in 2015 having been deputy governor for two terms of four years each, though not consecutively. During his time as governor, he removed Sanusi Lamido as the Emir of Kano, split the hitherto single emirate into five emirates. He also quarreled with Rabiu Kwankwaso, his long-time boss and benefactor, and largely trod where angels feared. Maybe it was because he…
Nothing, except corruption, doubtfully, has exemplified Nigeria’s struggle to become the country erected on the magical dreamy landscapes of Nigeria’s founding fathers like its perennial and pathetic failure to power itself, a paralysis which has become a dagger to the hearts of many citizens and their businesses. The recent decision of the federal government to increase electricity tariffs is one that has rankled a great deal of people especially because the hike doesn’t match a higher standard of energy services. Up NEPA with which Nigerians cheer intermittent power supply has become at once a paradoxically cheerful crumb of triumph and comfort…
Following allegations that the current governor of Kogi State Usman Ododo foiled the arrest of his predecessor Yahaya Bello, by the EFCC, the former governor has been declared wanted by the anti-graft agency. It is truly chaos personified, another grand shock to democracy’s dreams of grandeur: a sometimes overzealous government agency (which may just be reaping its just desserts)on the one hand, on another one of its forages, the law as a caricature on the other hand, and a former governor caught in between. Already, as with other high-profile cases in Nigeria, there is a forge of competing narratives so…
Like one wants a woman and her wrapper at the same time, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) wants a complete control of the anti-corruption war and its narrative. It wants to shoot and control the trajectory of the bullet all at once. Following the arrest of controversial crossdresser Idris Okuneye aka Bobrisky, by the EFCC for Naira mutilation, the commission drew a sharp rebuke from Chidi Odinkalu, a professor of law and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission. Odinkalu who felt that the EFCC was abandoning weighty anti-corruption issues to chase shadows called out the commission for…
The clearest hurdle to Nigeria’s rather feeble efforts to check those who kill and destroy its people is that there is no genuine commitment. If there was, the bloody experience of the last decade would have been mined to provide a lasting solution to insecurity. Because with the killers, it is more a question of when and where rather than will or if. Every society exists on the basis of a social contract variously hailed as the masterpiece of social engineering, and the engine of every seamless social machine.When a society calcifies into a country, any existing social contract acquires…
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the face of a presidency that is keeping its promises to Nigerians. Food may have become unaffordable; insecurity may be suffocating many, but the president has remained hopeful that his government can deliver. Historically, democracy has not always yielded its famous but sometimes fictional dividends. In fact, in many places where there has been a democracy, it has sometimes gone on a barren run, the majority content that it fills a vacuum that dictatorship would otherwise fill, unconcerned that it remains childless. Nigeria’s experiment since 1999 has not been barren even if it has yielded…
Death has become unnervingly cheap in Nigeria. Incredibly, life manages to be even cheaper. In many parts of the country, lives are being snuffed out of people with alarming regularity. Every day, people are being snatched and led to their deaths like sheep to a slaughter. On 12th March, the red mist descended on popular Wuse Market in Abuja, when a hastily convened mobile court which tries environmental offenders found a teenage hawker liable for a couple of environmental offence. He was duly convicted and while he was being taken away by men of the Nigeria Correctional Service, the familiarly…
