Introduction A good beginning may be to pose the question of who is a political scientist? There are debates on whether someone who has just a Bachelor’s degree in political science or a combined honours degree in which political science (or politics or Government as it is variously called in some countries) is one of the subjects combined, can be called a political scientist. While some scholars have argued that you need a postgraduate degree in the discipline to be called a political scientist, for the purposes of this conversation, I will regard a political scientist as anyone who has…
Author: Jideofor Adibe
It was Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary socialist leader of the national liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau who formulated the theory of class suicide. He explained it as the act of dying to the privileged class of one’s birth or circumstance by sacrificing one’s own advantages in favour of full identification with the oppressed. For Marxists who bought into Cabral’s class suicide theory, their argument is that revolution in periphery nations can only come from a ‘petty-bourgeois’ (roughly, middle class) leadership which then dissolves itself (or commits class suicide) by consciously identifying fully with the working class and peasants who are unable…
Peace in South East Project (PISE-P), an initiative of the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Benjamin Okezie Kalu, was unveiled in the ancient town of Bende, Abia State, on 29 December 2023. The unveiling, which was also used as a grand reception/homecoming of the Deputy Speaker, attracted many eminent Nigerians from the South-East and beyond, including President Bola Tinubu, who was represented by the Vice President, Kashim Shettima. In his speech, the Deputy Speaker said the objectives of the PISE-P include promoting the use of non-kinetic (non-military) approach to the insecurity challenges in the South-East as…
It has become a predictable pattern in our politics that whenever a new government comes into office, we will, sooner than later, be regaled with the financial misdeeds of the preceding government or governments. With each new government, the storyline seems the same, only actors and the script writers are different. The trigger for the script for the new government could be any (or a combination) of these: morality hunt, vendetta, media and public pressure, pressure from hardliners in the government and triumphalist supporters. The formula seems same: make one or two people from the past government the bugaboo, the…
As the year draws gradually to an end, it may be germane to review some of the key political events that defined the year with a view to distilling the lessons to be learnt from them. Here are some of the highlights: INEC and the 2023 elections Arguably the biggest political event of the year was the preparations for, and the actual conduct of the presidential and National Assembly elections as well as the Governorship and State House of Assembly elections held on 25 February and 18 March respectively. In the presidential election, the four leading candidates were Bola Tinubu…
The feud between the former governor of Rivers State and current Minister of Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, and Governor Siminalayi Fubara has dominated the headlines the past couple of weeks, with no solution in sight. The political dogfight has led to moves to impeach Governor Fubara, the decamping of 27 PDP members of the State legislature to APC and the consequent declaration of their seats vacant by a factional Speaker of the State House of Assembly loyal to Governor Fubara, the demolition of the State House of Assembly complex and fears that the conflict is increasingly assuming an…
The recent call by former Vice President and People’s Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar, for a merger of opposition parties against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), has been generating interesting conversations. It should be recalled that in a statement issued by Paul Ibe, the media adviser to the former Vice President when the latter hosted the national executive committee of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) in Abuja, Atiku warned that “Nigeria is fast becoming a one-party system” and called for a formidable opposition to address what he regarded as the “decline in democratic values”…
President Tinubu’s 1,411 delegations to the Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai has raised considerable concerns in the country, overshadowing whatever benefit that could be potentially garnered from attending such a conference. Only United Arab Emirates which had 4,409 delegates and Brazil which had 3,081 delegates had larger representatives than Nigeria, which tied in the third place with China which also has 1,411 delegates. Temitope Ajayi, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, in an article entitled, ‘Nigeria at COP28: Separating the facts from fiction,’ sought to provide the government’s perspective on the controversy surrounding the…
I first encountered political prophecy in the run-up to the 1979 presidential election. I was then in secondary school, preparing to enter the University the following year. There were five main political parties at that time – the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) which had Alhaji Shehu Shagari as its presidential candidate; the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) which had Chief Obafemi Awolowo as its flag bearer; the Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) which had Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe as its presidential candidate, the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) which had Alhaji Aminu Kano as its flagbearer and the Great Nigerian Peoples Party…
On 9 September 2023, the Group of 20 (better known as G-20) in its summit in New Delhi, India, announced a decision to welcome the African Union (AU) as a new permanent member, effectively transforming the inter-governmental forum into G-21. September 9, the day the invitation was announced, coincides with the 24th anniversary of the Sirte Declaration in Sirte, Libya, where the African Union was announced as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity. Prior to the admission of the AU as a permanent member, it had been an invited member of the forum. The AU’s new status with…
There is an increasing consensus that the American form of liberal democracy that we currently practice in the country does not quite work for us. As far back as 2011, then President Goodluck Jonathan proposed a single tenure of six years for president and governors in the country, beginning from 2015. Suspicions over his motive meant that the proposal was shot down without any rigorous interrogation of its merits and demerits. In September 2023, amid fears of the resurgence of military coups in Africa, former President Olusegun Obasanjo opined that the current brand of liberal democracy will not work in…
The recent Supreme Court judgment which affirmed the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, was not unexpected. As Abimbola Adelaku, one of my favourite columnists, summed it in The Punch of 2 November 2023, “everyone – and by that I mean people who did not become Nigerians just last night”, did not expect a different outcome. “Apart from a few who love histrionics and pretended to be pleasantly surprised, I do not know of anyone who imagined that a court that could remove an incumbent president in Nigeria had been composed,” she further wrote. As the Court of the…
A recent report that the Federal government has approached the World Bank for a fresh loan of $400m for a conditional cash transfer for supposedly 15 million households is raising serious concerns among many Nigerians. The new $400m loan will bring to $1.2bn the amount that the Federal Government is borrowing from the World Bank for its cash transfer programme aimed at cushioning the harsh impact of removing fuel subsidies and floating the Naira, having earlier secured a loan of $800m for the same purpose. The government claims that the Conditional Cash Transfer scheme, part of its National Social Investment…
A recent report that no fewer than 50 “repentant thugs” in Kano were converted to Police Special Constabulary (PSC) by the Kano State Police Command has generated understandable concerns among the populace. The Kano State Commissioner of Police, Usaini Gumel, while addressing the “repentant thugs” at a ceremony held at Sani Abacha Stadium was quoted as saying: “Today is a happy day for the good people of Kano state and the Police Command because we passed out 50 youths from the 222 repentant thugs, who have since surrendered themselves and promised never to engage in thuggery and other social vices…
What you do not hear in Nigeria probably does not exist, to reformulate the lyrics of a popular gospel song. The latest paranoia across the country appears to be fear of missing one’s manhood. The Punch of 14 October reported that the Federal Capital Police revealed it had received reports of about 62 cases of alleged disappearance of manhood out of which it arrested 51 suspects and charged them to court for misinformation and causing breach of peace in the FCT. Such fears were however not limited to the FCT. The Punch of 13 October 2023 had earlier reported of…
The South-East Economic and Security Summit has come and gone. Organised under the auspices of the South East Governors’ Forum, and held in Owerri, Imo state from September 28- 29 2023, its theme was, ‘South East Beyond 2023, Time for a Reset’. The Summit attracted several political leaders and elites from the geopolitical zone including Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, the President-General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, all the Governors from the region – Charles Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra, Hope Uzodimma of Imo, Alex Otti of Abia, Peter Mba of Enugu and Francis Nwifuru of Ebonyi who was represented by his Deputy, Patricia Obila.…
As Nigeria celebrated its 63rd independence anniversary on Sunday, 1 October 2023, there seemed to be a consensus that we are not where we ought to be either in the nation-building process or with respect to economic development. While many wondered whether there was anything to celebrate at all (other than that we have somehow managed to be together all these years despite the challenges), others felt we would have fared better if the different nationalities that were brought together to form the Nigerian State in 1914 were allowed to continue on their autochthonous path of development. The idea that…
On 18 September 2023, President Bola Tinubu gave a speech from what could be called the grandest stage of them all – the United Nations General Assembly in New York. It was his maiden speech on such a stage. For a first speech at the UN, I feel Tinubu performed above expectation. Overall, I would score him a B. There is however still a big room for improvement. The speech highlighted five themes- (a) the need for global institutions and other nations to see Africa as a priority (b) an affirmation of democratic governance as the “best guarantor of sovereign…
In my last week’s column (Beyond the PEPT’s Judgement), I argued, among other things, that the Western brand of liberal democracy we currently practice does not, and cannot work in our type of society where the basis of even statehood remains contested. This is because the adversarial nature of our electoral competition aggravates the structures of conflicts in the society, deepening the fault lines necessarily mobilized as part of our identity politics and consequently undermining the nation-building process. I equally argued that largely because of these factors, many Nigerians feel alienated from the political process and consequently from the nation-state…
The 6 September 2023 judgement by the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) was honestly not unexpected. While the judgment did not come to me as a surprise, what rather jolted me was the manner in which it was framed: it was almost as if the judges were the attorneys for the defendants and were therefore visibly angry with the petitioners and their lawyers for daring to bring such petitions before them. The judgments, whatever their merits on points of law, were delivered in very pedantic, if not condescending manner to the petitioners. Let me mention that I am not a…
Military coups became the norm in several African countries shortly after independence until the 1990s when the current ‘wave’ of democracy began. The contagion effect from the 13 January 1963 coup in Togo, the first in Africa, in which President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated, soon spread like wild fire across the continent. There were over 200 attempted coups in Africa since the 1950s, with about half of these succeeding. Out of the 54 countries in Africa, 45 have had at least one coup attempt since 1950. Sudan has has the most number of military coups – 17, out of which…
The 2023 BRICS Summit held at the Sandton Convention Centre, South Africa, from 22-24 August 2023, has come and gone. It was the 15th edition of the annual international conference normally attended by the heads of state or heads of government of the six member countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The Chairman of the 15th edition of the Conference and South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa also invited the leaders of 67 countries to the summit of which several honoured the invitation. Nigeria sent its Vice President, Kashim Shettima. BRIC is an acronym coined in 2001 by…
When doctors and nurses become serial killers chilly stories of Lucy Letby One of the chilling stories from the United Kingdom last week was of the guilt, by a jury, of a 33-year old nurse, Lucy Letby, of wilfully murdering seven babies entrusted under her care and attempting to kill seven others while working at the Countess of Chester hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. Two of Lucy Letby’s victims were twin brothers, who were born prematurely. They were just days old when Letby tried to kill them in April 2016. Reports indicated that Lucy Letby attempted to portray…
There have been several conversations about President Tinubu’s ministerial nominees – the people nominated or not nominated, the size of the yet to be formed cabinet and so on and so forth. It has also been widely acknowledged that a President’s list of ministerial nominees embodies several coded messages designed to achieve particular objectives. So how do we deconstruct the possible innuendoes from the list of ministerial nominees submitted to the National Assembly by the President? The time it took the President to submit the list raises a number of uncomfortable questions. The first list of 28 nominees was submitted…
The Second Russo-Africa Summit, which was originally scheduled to hold at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on October 2022, was eventually held at the Expo Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city after Moscow, on 27 and 28 of July 2023. The original idea of holding it in Addis Ababa was partly in response to criticisms of African leaders being herded into one European or American capital in the name of Africa Summit – like small boys. However, given what has happened in the last couple of years, what are the main takeaways from the Summit?…
The recent coup in Niger against the democratically elected government of Mohammed Bazoum has again thrown into the front burner the fate of liberal democracy in Africa, in particular the West African sub region. Since the ‘Third Wave’ of democracy started in the continent in the 1990s, there has been a certain belief that liberal democracy, despite its twists and tumbles, is gradually entrenching itself in the continent. A democratic space is quite elastic and can contract or expand without this elasticity necessarily being a threat to the survival of democracy. In recent years however the number of constitutional coups…
July 18 of every year, which is Nelson Mandela’s birthday, is celebrated across the world as Mandela Day. It should be recalled that the United Nations General Assembly declared in November 2009 that July 18 of every year should be commemorated as Mandela International Day in recognition of the contributions of the late South African President to the culture of global peace. The Mandela Day was essentially aimed at honouring the late anti-Apartheid activist’s lifelong commitment to social justice, reconciliation, and human rights. The day also encourages individuals and communities worldwide to engage in acts of service that will make…
Monthly N8000 Cash Transfer: A Movement Without Motion? The recent approval by the Senate of the request by President Tinubu for the borrowing of $800m from the World Bank has been raising concerns among Nigerians. The angst is not just about the danger of further increasing the stockpile of our already unsustainable debt level but also of whether borrowing for consumption – in this case borrowing to enable the government transfer the sum of N8,000 per month over six months to 12 million poor households – is the best way of cushioning the inflationary impacts of the removal of fuel…
In the past couple of days, Mmesoma Ejikeme, a student of Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS), Nnewi, Anambra State, who took the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in May 2023, and was briefly celebrated as the highest scorer in the country, has been trending. The first child in a family of four, whose father works as an Okada rider, claimed she scored 362 and was subsequently awarded a N3m scholarship by Innoson Motors before she was accused of manipulating her result, using an APP. Several people took sides with the innocent-looking school girl who said she was incapable of such…
It was John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who, in his 1923 publication, ‘A Tract on Monetary Reform’, famously said: “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in the tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.” While the length of what constitutes the ‘long run’ will remain contentious, to say that the impact of an economic policy will be beneficial “in the long run”,…
