Nigeria’s scandalous state of insecurity took a turn for the worse when eight corp members traveling from Uyo to Sokoto State for the mandatory one-year National Youth Service were abducted on August 19, 2023, on a highway in Zamfara State. About a month later, they are yet to be released as concerns grow about their safety and well-being. In many ways, to say that Nigerians do not feel safe in their country is to put it mildly. For many Nigerians, there is no promise of the next day, not even the next hour. Every day in Nigeria somehow manages to…
Author: Ike Willie-Nwobu
The tragic killing of Bako Angbashim, a Divisional Police Officer who was beheaded in Ahoada, Rivers State, has once again laid bare the grave danger law enforcement officers face in a country gradually going rogue. There is something about Rivers State that frightens even neutrals. Beyond the wild eccentricities of Nyesom Wike who was recently governor of the state for eight years, there is the fact that the state sits square in the heart of the Niger Delta. For anyone familiar with the Nigerian story, the Niger Delta has long held a haunting place in Nigerian lore. Rich and prodigiously…
Boisterous after the judicial victory that confirmed that his principal and boss, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, won the 2023 presidential election, Kashim Shettima Nigeria’s Vice president had some brutal jokes for former vice president Atiku Abubakar who was the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party in the last election. To say that the election was a heated battle would be to put it mildly. Months before the election, the ruling All Progressives Congress and the opposition People’s Democratic Party had been served a notice that they were not about to enjoy the understated frills of the traditional two-horse race. For long,…
The United Nations celebrated the International Day for people of African Descent on August 31. Africa’s status as the world’s backwater may have endured thanks to a skewed international legal order and self-sabotage. But it is incontestable that some of the world’s brightest lights trace their ancestry to the continent. From Nelson Mandela, to Desmond Tutu to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Africa is well and truly a continent of global icons. It Is not just on the continent that Africans and people of African Descent have stood tall. Around the world, in many spheres of life, people of African descent have…
What happens when people cannot get enough nutrients into their bodies? In a world increasingly fraught by frustration over the most basic things, what obtains when people can no longer enjoy the basics? Hunger usually breeds anger. In a world where there is often enough anger to go around, hunger is complicating what is an already difficult situation. According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Nigeria has the second highest rate of malnutrition in the world. This further indicts a country where hunger continues to pant for more victims. The Agency stated this while quoting the most…
On August 23 annually the United Nations marks the International Day for Remembrance of Slave Trade and its abolition. The Slave Trade always invokes the strongest feelings in those connected to its direct victims, in many ways. The reasons are not far-fetched. Humanity has a long and painful history of being scarred and scared. Scarred by self-inflicted wounds which would not just heal, and then scared to death by the thought of further inflicting wounds on itself. It is at once a treacherous and torturous trajectory. The Transatlantic Slave Trade raged like a storm for decades. In those years which …
The United Nations observes the International Day of World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9 and the World Youth Day on August 12 to reflect on two different demographics that are indispensable to a world where no one is left behind. The annual observances by the United States which is the largest organization in the world are meant to draw attention to some of the world’s most pressing issues. Africa has the youngest population in the world, with 70% of sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30. Such a high number of young people is an opportunity for the continent’s…
Life is a gift precious beyond any words can describe. In the process of giving life, no woman should have to die. In Nigeria, the sanctity of life is most times a matter of words, an abstract concept which hardly ever translates into reality. In 2009, a decade after Nigeria’s triumphant return to democracy, Boko Haram arose with a peculiar but virulent brand of terrorism. Having openly declared Western Education and, by extension, civilization a sin, the group proceeded to reduce lives, livelihoods, and buildings to dust. The killing spree has since spanned many years, tearing through Northern Nigeria with …
The United Nations celebrated the International Day of Friendship on July 30. It was another opportunity to reflect on the gift that friendship is. In the Igbo country, it is often said that a good friend is better than a bad brother. To befriend is to believe. It is to believe in another other than oneself, it is to believe in life, it is invest in life, it is to be alive. In their bid to define friendship, some people have called it the “ship that never sinks. A famous aphorism also says that a friend in need is a…
As Nigeria continues to battle a virulent combination of hate and terrorism, some of the country’s top security institutions have acquired a belligerent edge. The fact that some of them are creaking under the pressure indicates the level of stress they are under. When human rights lawyer Maxwell Opara led a group of lawyers in protest against the continued detention of former Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele at the Federal High Court in Abuja on July 17,he could not have envisaged that at the end of that day, he would be given a new name by the mouth of the…
The recent discovery of 103 bodies in Lagos State shreds the government’s claims about the number of casualties from the EndSARS protests of 2020. In October 2020,an unprecedented wave of protests swept across Nigeria. What began as a ripple from one man’s death at the hands of the police in Sapele, Delta State, soon swelled into a tidal wave of protests calling for reforms and even a revolution. At the vanguard of the protests which hit Lagos and then Abuja with the force of knots were young people, long converted to practice targets in the police game of brutality. Their…
It appears that Nigeria’s 10th National Assembly is content to continue with a tradition of ostentation while comfortable to cling on to its reputation for insensitivity. 110 billion Naira. That is the amount penciled down by the 10th National Assembly for the purchase of bulletproof vehicles for Nigeria’s legislators and as palliatives. The amount has hit Nigerians like a thunderclap at a time when they are reeling from the effects of the policies of a new government whose head many believe was the product of tainted elections. But while Nigerians smart from the removal of the fuel subsidy in addition…
On July 11,Nelson Mandela,the late South African anti-apartheid hero was remembered by the United Nations on the occasion of the Nelson Mandela Day. He remains a matchless reference point. There are men who walk the surface of the earth and never leave until they leave their footprints on its sands. These men lead simple, ordinary lives but somehow manage to touch many other lives in profound and extraordinary ways, so much so that their memories become monuments to the transcendental tenacity of the human spirit. Between 1884-85,some European powers sat in Berlin, Germany, and with extraordinary arrogance and presumptuousness partitioned…
The United Nations celebrated the international Widows’ Day on June 23 this year, as every other year. On that day, it was as important as ever to remember and resolve to protect a group that remains vulnerable to shocking human rights violations. For as long as man has lived, and even longer, death has lived side by side, offering a ceaseless, macabre companionship of cyclopean proportions. In many ways, to live is to die. This assertion is not only true for human animals but especially for non-human animals, many living things and even for abstract and intangible things like hope,…
For many Nigerians, the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board is inextricably linked to the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination which holds many memories and horrors for them. Long recognized as the door that opens into the world of premier learning in Nigeria – university education- UTME has hardly ever failed to provide endless drama for many, slamming the door to university education so forcefully in their faces that they wondered if there was anything personal. Stories abound indeed – of six years of painstaking secondary school education reduced to middling scores on jamb result printouts and the consequent long years of staying…
The bible says that there is safety in the midst of counselors. But what happens when the counselors are at once crass and crafty? As Nigeria has huffed and puffed on the path of nationhood with very little to show for its exertions, it has become clear that the cocktail of dysfunction has thrown up hurriedly assembled heroes. The clones and clowns of the Nigerian circus. So, it happened that former Niger-Delta warlord Asari Dokubo crawled out of his lair in Port-Harcourt and travelled all the way to Abuja to advise Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s newly minted president. In a…
The recent exchange between Bello Matawalle, the outgoing governor of Zamfara State, and Abdulrasheed Bawa the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) would have been comical if it it weren’t almost tragic. Nigeria is a country burdened about corruption. That this burden as costly as it is does not generate the amount of bother it is supposed to generate speaks more to the nonchalance of a country headed for the rocks than to the extortionate cost of corruption on the country’s resources. Before Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999,the extremely perfidious military regimes of first Ibrahim Babangida,…
On the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Independence of the State of Israel, it is important to pay tribute to a country that is one of history’s most spectacular miracles. In 1948,as the world picked up its pieces from the ashes of WW2, the Jews who were dealt a particularly heavy hand established the Independent state of Israel. As the war had raged on exposing man’s darkest side, Jews were disproportionately targeted. By the time the war ended with the decisive defeat of the Nazis, some six million Jews had been killed. As with any new beginning, Israel…
As with war everywhere and every time, the conflict in Sudan has yielded multiple victims, many of them cross-border victims which result in evacuation problem. It was in February 2022 that the world was shaken by a new conflict coming from the heart of Europe and going to the center of the European Union, which is one of the most important regional organizations in the world. Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine immediately sent shockwaves across the world, sending refugees pouring over the border into neighboring countries. The world’s response to what was essentially an act of defiance from Russian…
The recurrent killings of defenceless villagers in Southern Kaduna put a lie to the government’s supposed commitment to the welfare and security of Nigerians For the long-suffering people of Southern Kaduna, every day grows longer than the last, winding into a narrative of death and destruction that pile every perspective with peril and pain. In communities that have long known the peculiar vulnerability that adversity offers, the last eight years have seen a marked return to the bottomless belly of bombs, blood, and bullets. In December 2022, armed criminals fell upon Kagoro in the area. By the time they were…
The recurrent crises in Sudan reminds a resilient country and a long-suffering continent of the long road to peace and the unmistakable profile of the men who have kept Africa in the backwater for far too long. The Sudanese people starkly and stoically hoist a hologram of fortitude and even defiance. This defiance has been anything but reckless or suicidal. If anything, it has been measured and methodical, recently proving its worth as democracy’s last stand in one of Africa’s great hopes. This defiance emblazoned in Sudanese men and women, young and old, has proven to be the undoing of…
I want to participate in Nigeria’s oil patrimony. I want a slice of my share, a couple of oil blocks here and there won’t be bad. Nigeria coughs out millions of barrels of oil per day, yet poverty continues to roundly chew up Nigerians before spitting them out like expired chewing gum. I want to have my share of the $3.72 billion of stolen oil from Nigeria between January 2021 and 2022. Give me my share of the $700 million lost to oil thieves monthly which has left some Nigerians dirt-poor and others stupendously rich. Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer…
Undoubtedly, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous democracy and economy, faces great challenges, and indeed a race against time to be considered a developed nation. A confluence of shocks and factors has drained the country of the prodigious promise shown at independence in 1960. In many ways, Nigeria is a lesson in not how to manage a country, especially one as gifted with human and material resources. In fact, even the devastating civil war of 1967-1970 could have been averted if wisdom was engaged. That the scars of that horrible war continue to mark Nigeria more than forty years later in the…
For the Igbo, adversity is an elixir, a powerful antidote to the mediocrity and melodrama that envelope many parts of modern-day Nigeria. It was in 1967 that Nigeria’s southeast region, whose people had until then wanted nothing more than the stability needed to preserve their proud entrepreneurial heritage, became embroiled in a devastating civil war. For thirty months, missiles rained down on the region in a battle that pitched David against Goliath. At least a million people died to mark the bloodiest page in Nigeria’s history as a country. After the botched Republic of Biafra surrendered in 1970 after a…
Never has an open letter about Nigeria detonated with such force as the one multiple award-winning novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently wrote to Joe Biden, President of the United States. The open letter titled “Nigeria’s Hollow Democracy” and published in the Atlantic, was the writer’s searing reaction to the election of February 25, 2023, which produced Bola Ahmed Tinubu as winner. Given that Adichie’s galaxy of refulgent books – “Purple Hibiscus”, “Half of a Yellow Sun”, “Americanah”, “Notes on Grief”, among others – has long transfixed a global audience, her weighty words have wrung a wave of reactions from Nigerians…
On April 7, the United Nations observes the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The lessons from the genocide remain that ethnicity and hate should never be allowed to dictate national discourse. As tension boiled over after the declaration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Nigeria’s president-elect, and the subsequent battle for the Lagos State governorship, Bayo Onanuga, spokesperson to the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council(APC-PCC) said he was a Yoruba man before a Nigerian, in one of his tweets. If it was something said in the heat of passion, people say much…
The United Nations marks the International Day of Conscience on April 5. Nigeria has to improve its treatment of the elderly. Life comes in a natural cycle. There is conception, birth, childhood, adulthood and then old age. Each of these stages is marked by its peculiarities and uncertainties, when they meet, they make for all that is unpredictable about life. In a developing low-income country like Nigeria, where life is much tougher than in other places, negotiating each stage of life comfortably or otherwise depends on the level of support one has. The stronger one’s support network, the easier it…
