Given the often false bravado and braggadocio of Nigerian politicians, it would not be hard to find among those who make up the putrid ranks of the All Progressives Congress (APC) those who would swear on their lives that Bola Ahmed Tinubu won the February 25 polls. Among many of those who would put forward this spurious argument would be some people who claim to be more Nigerian than others. However, beyond the triumphalism of the All Progressives Congress at another suspect victory, and the monumentally embarrassing performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC), would be found those who lament…
Author: Kenechukwu Obiezu
Peter Obi: the name on the lips of Nigerians; the luminous lantern in which Nigerians have kindled the light of their legitimacy; the prudent, pragmatic and popular former governor of Anambra State. He is the man who took a party languishing in obscurity to more than six million votes that would have been far more were the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) up to its constitutional responsibilities. He is the man who today continues to send jitters down the spine of opposition parties in the country. For many Nigerians, Peter Obi’s identity is simple: he is the people’s president. He…
With the horrendous performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the just concluded presidential polls which performance has left Nigerians bitter that their choice was violated, the battle royale is poised to move to the courts whose independence and impartiality Nigerians have become increasingly skeptical of. However, from all indications, while the teams of lawyers fine-tune their strategies for the legal fireworks, Atiku Abubakar, the vanquished candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would most likely retreat to his palatial Dubai villa to lick his wounds. Other PDP big wigs and even scallywags may yet join him in…
When the dust finally settles on what has gone down in the collective memory of Nigerians as an unprecedented attack on the people’s choice thanks to the iniquitous performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),Nigerians will read and re-read the venomous messages sent through their votes, and perhaps find the most fleeting of consolations. It was about 1998 that the Peoples. Democratic Party(PDP) was formed together with a handful of other parties to fill the vacuum as the military finally brought an ill-advised excursion into power to a close. The PDP was to put forward Olusegun Obasanjo who would…
The macabre poetry that went into the voice of Professor Mahmoud Yakubu, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), as he read out the final results of the February 25, 2023 election spelt a death knell for the hopes of many well-meaning Nigerians that the country would work again any time soon. In hotly contested and disputed elections during which Nigerians trooped out to their polling units across the country to challenge the status quo that had been eight years in the making, many Nigerians thought that something could come out of the ballot. However,the handwriting was soon…
Five days after the horses of hope and expectation charged through Nigeria, harrying many to vote in such a way to preempt change,a hush has fallen on Nigeria with the announcement by a thoroughly compromised and discredited Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) won the election. For many Nigerians who have been reading the handwriting on the wall since the collation began by INEC,it is not such a surprise. Yet,it is still such a devastating blow to the gut that the man most Nigerians wanted has been shortchanged for one most…
Nigeria has failed to make the cut as one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most innovative economy prompting questions about the efforts made so far to ensure that the country’s current economic slump is only temporary and does not become a problem that lingers. In November 2022 the population of Nigeria was put at 217 million. This is massive by any standard. But the massive revelation also got off a missive for a lot of people: was a country that had seen its population surge to such record number ready to to carter for everyone? Nigeria’s struggle to plan is a historic…
After four years during which the All Progressives Congress and President Muhammadu Buhari have ridden roughshod over Nigerians ,the country is in the pangs of childbirth, with anxiety washing through many people about what a difficult birth will bring forth. On Saturday February 25 2023,Nigerians descended like locusts upon different polling units across the country to take their destiny into their hands and decide their fate. Armed with their voter cards and possessing faith in the power of a vote, many Nigerians braved the inclement weather, their suspicions of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and their residual fear of…
It is telling of itself that Nigerians have wholeheartedly embraced a man who only broke away from the fold of Peoples Democratic Party in May,2022 to begin a movement that is about to claim yet its biggest scalp in this year’s presidential election. Ask any Nigerian about Peter Obi, the man of the moment, and they will most likely do one of two things: vigorously respond in adulation or fall brokenly silent. Those who want a new Nigeria and so would support Peter Obi at the polls cheer every mention of his name everywhere while those who would rather Nigeria’s…
In countries where shame is a public staple, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the Governor of Kano State, would be eating some as his prescribed diet. But because Nigeria is so starved of shame, and instead cursed with those for whom shameless is a virtue, Ganduje and those that make up his particular gang of public officers who have been caught with their hands in the till can afford to be noisier and more boisterous than everyone else. In Nigeria, they have a voice that thunders, swallowing up the voice of everyone else. Nigeria may yet need to take many steps into…
Slowly but steadily ,the shades are being swept away by the light that is determined to dispel the stygian darkness that has enveloped Nigeria for the better part of eight years. As the country stands on the cusp of historic general elections, what exactly is on the minds of Nigerians? What are majority of Nigerians thinking? Crucially, what do Nigerians want from the elections? With President Muhammadu Buhari and his team having ruled the roost for close to a decade now, it has been eight unsatisfactory years. There may be mitigating circumstances, say the rot which ate deep into the…
It was good while it lasted but with the codification of the judicial intervention in the excesses of Ebubeagu in Ebonyi State in the judgment of the Federal High Court Abakiliki which ordered the disbandment of the outfit, a historic indictment fell upon what was originally conceived as a robust regional security initiative, but has come to be so thoroughly misused. Formed in 2021 after governors of the five Southeastern States met and agreed that insecurity was the biggest threat to their states, the group quickly found its feet in Ebonyi and Imo States, while it has been slow to…
With days before the 2023 general elections is upon Nigeria like the pangs of childbirth, a tempest of reactions have continued to trash around the country, digging out even those who were hitherto comfortable in their holes and forcing them to say something. In the fuel queues which stretch from Karu to Kotangora and the ATM queues which stretch from Akwanga to Argungu, Nigerians can see the vile imprints a darkened vision can live on a country, and more damningly, the tear incompetence can leave in its walls. Nigeria is at a crossroads. After eight years during which the All…
To have a child is usually an indescribable feeling. Even for people who have children they never planned for or even wanted, at some level, the joy of bringing a new life into the world must be indescribable and irrepressible. To bring a child into the world and to watch that child grow, to be responsible for that child and to see that child become somebody who can take care of themselves as well as be responsible for other people must be very satisfying. It is why parents and teachers take such joy and play such critical roles in the…
To live in a dysfunctional society is to die slowly as everything else malfunctions leaving one on the edge of despair. In many ways and quite astoundingly, the Giant of Africa has become the poster child of the countries that are not working at the moment, and damningly do not look ready to work anytime soon. Nigeria trudges into another election after the last cycle in 2019.Gratefully for a lot of people President Muhammadu Buhari and his army of apologists are about to drink from the trough of oblivion that has so gratefully given drink to other Nigeria presidents who…
In the history of the affairs of mankind, wherever and whenever democracy has thrived as the Government of the people, by the people and for the people to give people the best available option and the best shot they can have at good governance, a vibrant, virile and visionary judiciary is never far away. In fact, whenever a society has been able to forge a content citizenry out of an otherwise disgruntled mismash of men and women who would ordinarily favour a survival of the fittest, it was usually because a proactive judiciary was always around to resolve conflicts and…
If Nigerian politics had a single currency, language, sign language or definition, it would be money. But very close to it would be the concepts of betrayal and opportunism. To preclude political opportunism and fry the chances of its elite practitioners in Nigeria,the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 makes salubrious provisions to arrest the vice of cross-carpeting. Yet, with many of the politicians who have engaged in it over the years succeeding in getting away with their spoil, it appears judicial interpretation and enforcement have failed to arrest the scourge. So, for many politicians here, especially those…
It was in the late 1880s that Nigeria nay a large part of Africa was divided like some spoil of war between European Countries at the abominable Berlin Conference of 1884-85.The Conference ended with Africa partitioned among European countries whose identities and ambitions could not have been further from what many African countries truly needed – countries that were soon to be viciously plundered. Till this day, countries like the DR Congo and South Africa still bear the scars a heinously stealthy war. Even the country Nigeria a child of colonialism. There was no country until Lord Lugard amalgamated the…
Every country that aspires to elite status in the league of developed countries is usually clear about one thing: that security is an irreducible ingredient that goes into the making of that status. It is until people feel safe and secure within a country and are able to have some degree of certainty over the safety of their properties and interests at all times, people cannot really be said to enjoy the citizenship of a developed country. Nigeria’s independence in 1960 could not have come at a better time. Four years after Nigeria discovered the ‘black gold’ in the fields…
In these times when the credibility of many has been plunged into crisis, there are many who are hard at work to show that there is still some distance left to explore on that road. Nigeria is counting days to critical general elections and with each second that ticks by anxiety mounts about how a people will decide and whether the majority of a people that have not always pulled in the same direction will someone contrive to make the right choices. Those who feel the most anxiety about the outcome of the elections are those who know in their…
What do standards look like in Nigeria afterall? Where are the measuring rods? What do people aspire to? Where do people see as their destination, or at least what do people see as their journey in Nigeria? In a country that aspires to elite status in the pantheon of developed nations it beggars belief that Nigeria allows itself to be continuously served a diet of crumbs when its table should be full of ambrosia. In a country where everything is a problem, it is perhaps only little surprising that everyday new problems continue to spring up with potency to torment…
For Nigeria’s rural poor, so much of life is a struggle. This struggle amidst plenty is akin to thirst in the midst of water and is especially true for rural children for whom poverty and insecurity have made education an impossible journey. Luckily for the Akwaita community of Nasarawa State, one Nigerian is out to change the narrative. For Mr Babayemi Olaniyan, an Abuja-based lawyer, touching lives comes naturally and is tantamount to transforming communities, their children and their families. This unwavering belief informed his recent donation of the first-ever block of 3 classrooms and two toilets to the New…
The world over Nigerians are renowned for their remarkable fortitude. Whether at home or abroad, Nigerians are known to show grit and grind their teeth as they glide through situations that would ordinarily prove the undoing of others. With the everything that has gone wrong in this country, and everything going wrong even now, there is no other explanation for the fact that Nigerians are not broken save an exemplary fortitude. The point at which such fortitude becomes a problem, or is a problem already, is debatable. All around the country, Nigerians have lived a traumatic experience for many years…
The credibility challenge that confronts the judiciary in Nigeria is one which is as old as the return of democracy in 1999.Given all that has happened especially with court decisions drenched with dubiety, many Nigerians look at the courts with only suspicion. When forced to court the courts by the costs of not doing so, it is more often than not with barely concealed contempt. On their own part, the courts wait with condescension for the contempt to spill into the open so they can sufficiently punish such open rebellion. The judiciary in Nigeria was famously branded the last hope…
Where should people start from in Nigeria? From where exactly are people expected to pick up the pieces when entirely avoidable tragedies bring with them a truckload of pain, anguish and loss? At what point do people step beyond their threshold having had enough? Just when should a people who seem to have bottomless fortitude finally say they have had enough? Of course, at the end of many ponderous days, the recent airstrikes which killed more than fifty people in the Doma Local Government area of Nasarawa State will be put down to a deadly accident, another deadly accident. That…
It would appear that there is no end in Nigeria to the obstacles children have to surmount as the youngest members of Nigeria’s population. Whether it is being picked off like cherries by deadly diseases like cholera, battered by malnutrition or tossed all over the place by conflict, it appears there is always something for children to contend with in Nigeria. The many challenges children face in Nigeria accusingly point the finger at a country shockingly unprepared for a future, or at least a prosperous one. A country where children have become practice targets for the many archers of death…
It was towering South African anti-apartheid hero Desmond Tutu who once quipped that if he was standing out in the crowd, it was because he was carried on the shoulders of others. For Mr. Kenechukwu Nwosu,a legal practitioner and alumnus of the Law Faculty of Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, it is not enough that the Faculty helped make him a ‘giant’ more than a decade ago, he is now out to make ‘giants’ himself by giving back. This informed his recent announcement of an annual scholarship award to be given the best graduating student from the Faculty. The scholarship known…
The dream of most children who successfully finish their primary education is to successfully get into a secondary school to continue their education. For most children however, making the transition is a formidable challenge. For 12-year-old David, who successfully scaled through LEA Primary School Kubwa II in July 2022, secondary education should have started for him in September 2022 when the new academic session began. However, even as he celebrated finishing primary school and looked forward to his dream of secondary education, he knew that it would be a dream delayed by financial reasons. “I don’t know how much it…
In Southeast Nigeria, amidst a sprawling violence that harks back to the worst atrocities of the Nigerian Civil War, there is a resurgence of some of the crimes that were considered plain abominable. A region of memories firmed up by fratricide is again being forced to relive the soundbites of those bloody days when bit by bit the spirit of a people was butchered. However, it is a region that has always managed to bounce back. In fact, there must be some kind of unbreakable fortitude that is inherent in the people of the Southeast that enables them to always…
It is a conversation mostly conducted in whispers, in hushed tones, that signal a submergence in secrecy. Like a couple up in the middle of the night to quietly discuss a sensitive matter because they do not want the children to hear, the conversation about corruption in Nigeria is usually subdued because many of those who should coordinate it are also affected by it. A cankerworm driving the cancer eating up Nigeria’s core, in the last two decades, corruption has come to be wedged into the Nigerian system as surely as Rivers Niger and Benue are etched into the Nigerian…
