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…
Author: Jideofor Adibe
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”,…
The mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private military contractor Wagner Group, against the Russian military, highlights one of the challenges of engaging mercenaries or private military contractors of any hue, including thugs, to help a state prosecute its wars and police actions. Prigozhin, a long term ally of the Russian strong man Vladmir Putin, rose to prominence after his mercenaries helped Russia to raise its flag in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in April this year following a long and bloody battle. Emboldened by its successes, Prigozhin began to accuse Russia’s top military chiefs…
Tinubu’s first three weeks in office have been packed with actions – fuel subsidy was removed on his inauguration, some aides have been appointed, the Naira has been floated and a Bill establishing an education loan scheme has been signed – among others. Though the actions so far have been mostly policy pronouncements that are yet to be implemented and tested, some people, carried away by the giddiness of the actions, have wrongly declared that Tinubu’s first 15 days in office have been better than a whole four-year term spent by past administrations. This piece interrogates the Access to Higher…
The 29 May 2023 inauguration of a new set of power wielders highlighted once again the transient and ephemeral nature of political power. Political power is said to be transient because, like a candle in the wind, it is fleeting and impermanent. It is there one moment with all its glow and beauty, and gone the next twinkle of an eye. It is ephemeral because its duration is quite short. Even if you were to hold an office for 20 years, it will one day come to an end, and the period in which the office is held will seem…
President Bola Tinubu Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s President since May 29 2023, once said that his lifelong ambition was to become the President of Nigeria. He was lucky that his dream came true. Though the outcome of the election remains contested, he has been Nigeria’s President the past one week. So what are the takeaways from his one week in office? One, there was a bounce from his inauguration. Though Tinubu came to office with a huge legitimacy crisis and is one of the most scandal-ridden African Presidents, no fewer than 20 Presidents from around the world attended the inauguration according to some…
The Friday May 26 2023 Supreme Court’s dismissal of the appeal by the People’s Democratic Party seeking the disqualification of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu in the 25 February 2023 presidential election over alleged double nomination of his Vice-President Senator kashim Shettima, essentially removed the last hurdle to his inauguration on 29 May 2023. This means in essence that those who cannot bear the thought of Tinubu and Shettima as President and Vice President respectively will have to find a way of adjusting to the reality that they will be stuck with the duo till August this year (at the earliest) when…
Leadership, especially in a fractious country like ours, is not easy. Jeff Boss, an executive coach and author of the book, ‘Navigating Chaos: How to Find Certainty in Uncertain Situations’, tells us that in “addition to the responsibility of making tough decisions every day, there is another critical component that pervades a leader’s thinking, something that he or she can’t help but wonder from time to time, and that is: what will be my leadership legacy?”. Essentially, legacy is something of value, a goal or mission, that a leader wants to be fondly remembered for long after that leader has…
IRRESPECTIVE of who eventually becomes the President, the person will face a huge legitimacy crisis from a big swathe of the country. For instance if the courts affirm Tinubu as the President, he will have to deal with the fact that there is a substantial population of people from the North who believe that since the South is assumed to control the country’s economy, political power should be ceded to the North permanently to serve as a lever. Though they may not admit it, neither Tinubu nor the North trusts each other despite media shows of a strong alliance. In…
It was a great privilege to be invited as one of the three keynote speakers on a security management symposium and book launch under the theme ‘Sustaining the Gains of War Against Banditry and Insurrection’ held at Ibeto Hotels, Abuja on 4 May 2023. The other two keynote speakers were General Lucky Irabor, Chief of Defence Staff and Solomon Arase, retired Inspector General of Police and Chairman of Police Services Commission who was ably represented by Ferdinand U Ekpe, Director of Police Recruitment. The two books presented were ‘The Nigeria Police Force and the Dynamics of Election Security Management System:…
What is the value of an apology offered by a country’s ruler to its citizens? More importantly, what does the leader expect to achieve by such an apology? When President Muhammadu Buhari hosted a controlled number of guests at his ninth and final Sallah homage at the Presidential Villa, Abuja he used the opportunity to seek the forgiveness of Nigerians he felt he might have hurt t during his eight year presidency. “I honestly consider myself very lucky; I was made a governor, minister of petroleum, head of state in uniform, then after three attempts, God, through technology and PVC,…
If INEC learnt anything from the highly contentious Presidential and National Assembly elections of 25 February 2023 and the 18 March 2023 Governorship and State Assembly elections, it did not reflect much in the quality of the supplementary elections it conducted on April 15 2023. In Adamawa State, where the Governorship election was declared inconclusive on the ground that the number of cancelled votes exceeded the margin of lead between the People’s Democratic Party candidate, incumbent Governor Ahmadu Fintiri and his closest challenger, Aishatu Dahiru (also known as Binani) of the All Progressives’ Congress, the outcome of the supplementary election…
In recent weeks Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, multiple award winning writer, Chimamanda Adichie, and supporters of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 25 February 2023 presidential election (otherwise known as Obidients), have been trending. The backgrounds were an interview granted by Datti Baba Ahmed in which he was quoted as saying that whoever “swears in Mr Tinubu has ended democracy in Nigeria.” Elsewhere Dr Datti Baba Ahmed was also quoted as saying that Nigeria does not have a President-elect. The conversation took a different turn when Soyinka criticised the comments by Dr Datti Baba Ahmed,…
Elections everywhere tend to be divisive. This is because mobilization of support hinges on a successful creation of a simplistic binary of ‘we-versus-them’ dichotomy, which is then nourished by all manner of scaremongering. This is why political campaigns are often likened to wars without weapons. In Africa, it is even more so where politicians seem to have taken literally the exultations by Kwame Nkrumah, a pioneering pan-Africanist and Ghana’s independence leader (1957-1966), to seek first the political kingdom and everything else would be added unto them. In Africa, the allure of political office is exceeding high. Apart from being perhaps…
Recently the political space has been further heated by the narrative from the Tinubu camp that some people are ‘plotting’ to foist an interim government on the country. The subtext is that the ‘plotters’ are using the call for interim government as a veneer to stop Bola Tinubu, who was declared President elect by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), from being inaugurated as the President on 29 May 2023. The Department of State Service (DSS) lent legitimacy to the alleged plot by announcing (without naming names) that it had indeed uncovered a secret plan by some people to foist…
The violence, aggressive voter suppression and Igbophobia that characterized the 25 February 2023 Presidential and National Assembly elections and the 18 March 2023 Governorship and State Assembly contests respectively in Lagos State have raised several concerns. These attributes of Lagos politics, hitherto nuanced, became first weaponized in the run-up to the 2015 Presidential and Governorship elections in the State when the Oba of Lagos was quoted as threatening to drown the Igbos in the Lagoon if they failed to vote for his political preference. At the root of this conflict is the tension between nativism and cosmopolitanism – a trend…
Did Obi’s candidacy take votes that would have gone to the PDP? The answer to this is not as straight forward as some have made it out to be. In fact arguments that Obi took votes that should have gone to the PDP smacks of an entitlement mentality. When the PDP failed to micro-zone its presidential ticket to the South-east, there was a strong feeling among the generality of the Igbos that the party took their support for granted. Based on this feeling of being disrespected, I had argued elsewhere (shortly after the PDP’s presidential primary in May 2022) that…
One of the most defining features of the current election cycle is the rise of former Anambra State Governor, Peter Gregory Obi. How do we explain what is now commonly referred to as the ‘Obi phenomenon’? And how is this likely to impact on our democracy and political process? The aphorism that charity begins at home seems to work the other way round in Igboland. The Igbo cultural ethos reveres the person who goes outside the community and achieves success there – and then comes home to be validated. Several Igbo proverbs illustrate this. A typical example is, ukpana uno…
As we get closer to 25 February 2023, the date for the presidential elections, the leading candidates seem to have taken off their gloves for bare-knuckle punches. While desperately trying to de-market their opponents, they concomitantly hype their candidates as the messiahs that would, with a magic wand, solve all the country’s problems, once elected. In the course of the competitive de-marketing of their opponents, there have been troubling allegations against some candidates which deserve being independently fact checked to guide the voters into making informed choices during the election. From the PDP, we have heard the allegations by one…
