Nigerians are forced to relive mind-numbing trauma whenever and each time men in uniform step out of line. Instantly, there are flashbacks, and suddenly, a deluge of memories comes crashing down. A couple of days ago, personnel attached to the Sam Ethnan Airforce base, Ikeja stormed the Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company, where they assaulted workers and journalists. Are the personnel not Nigerians? As an arm of the Nigerian Armed Forces, what efforts have they made to ensure that Nigeria’s appalling power situation is resolved soon? What part of their staggeringly shameful resort to self-help tells them that they can take…
Author: Kenechukwu Obiezu
Politics mightily bemuses with just how easy it is for relationships to go down the drain.For many politicians, the sage political advice that there are no permanent enemies or friends in politics is a coda. In 2023, Rivers State experienced a change of political guard. It was as smooth as butter though, because without hassles,Nyesom Wike who had been governor for two terms of eight years handed the baton to Similayi Fubara whom he had worked closely with. Whether the ruling Peoples Democratic Party in the state had done enough work to convince the good people of Rivers State to…
Nigeria’s rising divorce cases shine the harshest light on the dysfunction plaguing many homes and marriages, baring many an inconvenient truth about one of the world’s oldest institutions and the way and manner modernity is threatening to erode its ancient utility. What will become of a society without marriage, without family, without children? The answer is depressingly simple: such a society which is shorn of marriage, divorced of family and destitute of children, will be one without a future. At a recent media dialogue organized by Plan International, a non-governmental organization, to discuss and strengthen the implementation of the Violence…
Many Nigerians fantasize about the Western World. While the more affluent Nigerians have been able to turn their fantasies into reality by visiting the Western countries and spending considerable time there, many other Nigerians have had to do with the often lavish and laundered offerings of globalization to count the stars over European and American skies. There are also many Nigerians who today live permanently in different Western countries. Not for them is any suggestion of returning home. Historical record and archives suggest that this obsession with the West has a long and sometimes dark history. Indeed, far from the…
Nigeria stands on extremely fragile foundations and many factors are responsible for the situation. They are to be found among the country’s living a host of those responsible for her many problems. If Nigeria searches among the dead, even some of those who rendered her empty would be found. The depredations really gained steam with the beginning of colonial rule in the 1880s, by the time Nigeria gained independence in 1960, many held their collective breath hoping that it was time for the country to turn a new leaf. There was to be no new leaf thanks to many military…
The various alternative security operations in states of the Southeast emanated as a result of the shortcomings of the Nigeria Police Force and other regular security outfits, the Southeast Stakeholders’ Summit on Peace and Security, and Public Hearing on Human Rights Violations held in Enugu revealed on Saturday. The summit was put together by the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA in partnership with the Southeast Civil Society Organizations. The programme brought together diverse stakeholders, including community leaders, security agencies, government officials, civil society organizations, and the media, to foster collaboration and coordination. It also presented a platform for the stakeholders to engage in informed conversations about…
Nigeria’s independence in 1960 provided a momentous occasion for the country to pause, re-evaluate its excision from Britain’s clogged colonial policy and make a dash for a decorated prosperous future. The dash wash frighteningly and forcefully promising until the military abandoned their barracks to truncate Nigeria’s future between 1966 and 1970 and for long periods after that. Those wounds have simply refused to heal. Gratefully, Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999. With the reinstatement of democracy, elections returned as did institutions of government. The executive, judiciary, and legislature have been up and running since then. At the federal level, it…
Nigeria has been fighting terrorism for more than a decade now. The country has managed to keep the guns blazing, if only barely. The price of a war that is for the soul of Nigeria is quite heavy for a country that had known relative peace. Communities and families have been turned upside down, with livelihoods uprooted. As Nigeria has fought an assortment of well-drilled and well-oiled non-state actors, a common question on the lips of many Nigerians has been, who is doing the drilling and the oiling? Boko Haram, the umbrella terrorist organization fighting Nigeria for more than ten…
On a bright, sun-warmed day in Nnamdi Azikiwe University, a land of giants, a lilliputian came out and bared the full length of her fangs. For Precious Mbakwe, a third-year student of History and International Relations, an interruption to her TikTok video recording session was a mortal invasion of privacy, regardless of who the interruption came from and the circumstances of the interruption. So, when it happened, she fought back, ripping clothes, inflicting bites and drawing blood. Her lecturer, Dr. Chukwudu Okoye, who is with the Department of Theater Arts, suddenly became her victim for asking her to leave the…
Many Nigerians experience a sharp increase in the racing of their hearts whenever the question turns on the creation of new states. Could it really happen? Can Nigeria have more than the 36 states it has had since 1999? These questions have always engaged the mind of keen political observers and even the not so keen. Can names like Muri, Katagum, Okun and Apa suddenly become washed in the milk of statehood in Nigeria? It is not impossible, even if it seems more improbable by the day. One of the reasons it doesn’t appear like it will happen anytime soon…
For the first time in a long, long time, Nigerians well and truly have a mother in Oluremi Tinubu, Nigeria’s First Lady and Wife to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. For all that Nigerians have to say about the office of the First Lady, they have always been prepared to ignore their grouse if the occupant is using the office to touch lives. Since Bola Ahmed Tinubu was sworn in on May 29, 2023, as Nigeria’s sixth president, the First Lady has lent her signature compassion to give the government a human face in Nigeria. As First Lady, she has been…
At the instance of the vice chancellor and the entire management of the Nasarawa State University, Keffi, the hammer is slamming down hard and fast on the students of the school for doing nothing order than organize, make demands of the management and seek clarification. In fact, for even attempting to organize and protest, the university is making a withering example of some students. The university management took the extraordinary step of rusticating about 37 students for forming and joining a WhatsApp group with the aim of organizing a protest against the introduction of fees for a third semester. The…
In Kano State, the Hisbah Board (Hisbah) operates with all the power and authority of a religious police, which it is. Backed by the state government and drawing what it considers its extensive moral and spiritual authority from the Quran and Sharia Law, the body has been a force to reckon within the state for many years now. From seizing and destroying alcoholic drinks to prevent the consumption of alcohol in the state, to enforcing public decency by enforcing modesty among residents by sometimes shaving young boys, to banning the public display of mannequins by cloth sellers, the morality police…
Muhammadu Sanusi II, the emir of the ancient Kano emirate, certainly fancies himself. Gracious but gritty, he survived multiple plots at Nigeria’s Central Bank before ascending the royal stool of the ancient emirate. Six years into his reign, he was dethroned, deposed and exiled by a state governor who found his allegiance to his major opponent simply intolerable. Four years after he was dethroned he was reinstated even as a messily protracted litigation is threatening to cast the emirate as a house divided against itself. While Muhammadu Sanusi II was in exile from Kano, he remained his vocal self even…
As dangerous as Nigeria is for children, many of whom have to navigate complex and disheartening realities of being a Nigerian such as being out of school, facing the dangers of conflict, abuse and hunger, women and girls are even having it worse. In a country which insists on patriarchy even when it has absolutely nothing to show for it, women have and continue to be treated as expendable fodder. Between January 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024, according to the 2024 DOHS Cares Foundation femicide reports, 133 women and girls perished st the hands of gender-based violence in 2024…
In his most recent bid to beat about the bush of Nigeria’s bounteous problems as a country, Godswill Akpabio, Nigeria’s Senate President, declared that before 2023, Nigeria was on life support. The familiarly sweeping statement was a direct reference to the darkness that preceded the government of Bola Ahmed Tinubu and how his government has come to represent renewed hope in Nigeria. After avarice which is the signature characteristic of Nigerian politicians and public office holders, dissembling is probably next. Nigerian politicians are adept at describing one thing as another thing entirely and getting away with it. Akpabio’s description of…
The river of recriminations has continued to boil in Rivers state as a direct fallout of the acrimonious relationship between the former governor and current FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike and Similayi Fubara, his successor in office. All was rosy and cozy between the two men until shortly after Fubara replaced Wike in office as governor. What started as a minor turf war has since become a bitterly acrimonious fallout between two men who worked together for eight years enjoying unsupervised access to the resources of Rivers State. Fubara,the current governor, has stopped just short of saying that Wike wants to…
The light is dimming and dimming fast in Nigeria’s ‘light of the nation’ state as one security breach after the other has left residents fearing for their lives, and visitors keeping off the state as much as they can. Anambra state, easily one of Nigeria’s most iconic states is a pathfinder in many respects. Its politics was already charged long before an epochal Supreme Court decision broke the back of election riggers in 2006 putting Peter Obi in office. Battle after battle followed, but the trailblazing business mogul was to complete two four-year terms that completely transformed the state. In…
It is becoming increasingly dangerous to become a critic in Nigeria; at least the government is making it so. Whether employing social or traditional media, monitors appear out even as government officials tighten the screw, driving up rhetoric against those who would rail against Nigeria’s multifaceted and multitudinous problems. Some days ago, it was the Police PRO, warning those who curse public officers on social media. The warning which lacked the subtlety and finesse that a friend of Nigerians should possess was flayed by many Nigerians who bristled at its minatory tone. Dele Farotimi, the Promethean lawyer,must be trying to…
As the rollercoaster of the 2023 National Assembly Elections rolled into Kogi State, the long-suffering people of Kogi Central Senatorial District were unsparing in their unanimity: Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan was their choice and for good reason. After eight disaster-laden years of the Yahaya Bello administration and almost a decade during which his senatorial zone felt no impact whatsoever from his administration, the people needed a breath of fresh air, untouched by the rot that his administration had come to represent. The former governor had other designs, though. He fought tooth and nail in what was ultimately a losing battle as he…
Nigeria’s year of curious donations has continued at par with the First Lady, Dr. Oluremi Tinubu again leading the chasing pack. In anticipation and commemoration of the yuletide, the First Lady recently doled out the total sum of 1.9 billion Naira to older individuals across the country. The sum of two hundred thousand Naira given to each older person marked a sharp increase from the one hundred thousand Naira given out last year. Since becoming the First Lady, she has been donating massive amounts of money to causes close to her heart. When floods wreaked havoc in Borno State some…
The true measure of any society does not lie in its shiny buildings or bustling towns; neither does it lie in its defence capabilities or diplomatic capacities. Rather than these misleading metrics, the true measure of a society can be taken by how it treats its vulnerable members. Nigeria is a country of vulnerabilities. For one, Boko Haram’s destructive campaign in the Northeast and Northwest has left a country where millions are on the brink, having just survived potentially precipitous slides down the precipice. Terrorism in the parts of the North has cooked a humanitarian catastrophe that is giving Nigeria…
The EFCC’s stunning recoveries of public property stolen by thieving public officers offer hope that Nigeria may yet be on the road to recovery after many years of ruinous corruption and kleptocracy. It is a measure of the level of depravity and depredation present in public office in Nigeria that more than half of Nigeria’s thirty-six state governors recently wound up at the supreme court to seek a judicial extirpation of Nigeria’s crime-fighting agencies – EFCC, ICPC, and NFIU. In a far-reaching judgement that ensured public officers-turned-professional-litigants won’t be returning to court in a long time, Abba-Aji rebuked them describing…
Olukemi Badenoch, the Nigerian-born leader of Britain’s main opposition, the Conservative Party, has been copping a lot of criticism from Nigerian authorities since she was elected to the post. First was the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission which criticized her for snubbing it when it reached out to her. Recently, Kashim Shettima, Nigeria’s Vice President, weighed in with the strongest criticism of the MP yet when he accused her of constantly denigrating Nigeria, ending his criticism by suggesting she could change her first name. In this bizarre attempt to force patriotism down the throat of a woman whose only link to…
On the night of 6th December 2024, Syrians slept in chains and woke up the next day on the cloud, specifically on cloud 9. As rebels encircled Damascus, the country’s capital, a decades-long dynasty disintegrated. Who was it that had to scamper down from the high horse of power in Damascus and scurry like a terrified rat, tail between his legs to Moscow? It was Bashar al-Assad, the former strongman of Syria, suddenly reduced to its fleeing scoundrel. How Syrians wished they could have laid their bare, burning fingers on the spoiled scion of a family complicit in the ruin…
Another day in Nigeria, another jarring discovery in what is a herculean (maybe sisyphean) bid to clean up the Augean stables. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) recently fended off a laughably misguided attempt by no less than sixteen states to inter it at the Supreme Court. The commission which sometimes provides the rod for its back found conclusive solace in the judgment of the Supreme Court which preserved the founding legislations of the commission and ensured that the attorney-generals of about sixteen states returned from their wild goose chase empty-handed. It may be too hopeful to think that…
As democracy in Nigeria has triumphed finally and forcefully over creeping fascism, tyranny has adapted, morphing into other things. A book detonated like a bomb on the Nigerian public has set off a firestorm of controversy, dragging its author into the lair of the Nigerian police, a magistrate court in Ekiti State and then remand while cupping fistfuls of the robes of one Nigeria’s most distinguished nonagenarians and ricocheting off a prestigious institution in London. From time immemorial, the book has always been a burden on conscience, a boulder for haughty shoulders and a bastion for seekers and givers of…
In her seminal work Inheritance, philosopher, historian, and anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse explores what she refers to as” … the evolved biases that have, over thousands of years, been extended by our forebears and helped forge the peculiar world we now inhabit.” She describes these biases as conformism, religiosity, and tribalism. As the tax reform caravan of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has rolled into the National Assembly seeking to address some of Nigeria’s most pressing taxation issues, some politicians from the North have jumped on the bandwagon of parochialism and provincialism, dragging with them many of the region’s heavyweight. Together, they…
The Nigerian government is out to increase its tax revenues amidst soaring cost of living, pathological government borrowing, stratospheric costs of governance, and a general lack of public prudence. The outcry is entirely understandable. The administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a little more than a year in office, but there has been nothing auspicious about an administration that promised to renew hope among Nigerians. Rather, there has been a lot to make Nigerians suspicious that in the name of cleaning the Augean stables that Nigeria is, there is a carefully disguised attempt to lead them down the garden…
Nigerians love a feel-good story. When Chidinma Adetshina recently emerged first runner-up at the Miss Universe pageant in Mexico, Nigerians rallied to celebrate. In 2022, when Sprint Queen, Tobi Amusan, put Nigeria on the map of the World Championships for the first time ever, Nigerians were united in their celebrations. The same frenzied celebrations were displayed when Hilda Baci cooked her way into the history books in May 2023. This often rapturous celebrations of feats which warm the cockles of the heart can partly be pinned down to the fact that in sixty-four years of independence and 25 years of…
