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…
Author: Jideofor Adibe
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…
In recent years, ‘vote buying’ has become a popular phrase in our political discourses. But what does this really mean? Is it the same as ‘vote trading’? Does it have any impact on the country’s efforts at deepening its democracy? And what can be done to contain it? There are several issues involved here: One, does ‘vote buying’ mean the same as ‘vote trading’, which are often used interchangeably in political discussions about voters’ behaviour in the country? While both are used to describe the same phenomenon of using the power of the purse and other incentives to induce voters…
Nigeria has a long history of religious tensions against which the current spate of violence against Christians must be seen. There are a number of factors that have heightened religious tensions in Nigeria. The first is the competition for space between the two main religions of Islam and Christianity. Secondly, there is the perception that Nigerian leaders use the state to promote their religion or faith at the expense of others. Thirdly, there’s a culture of insensitivity to the feelings of minorities. The root of Islam in northern Nigeria can be traced to the 11th century, when it first appeared…
Many Nigerians were taken aback that at the last presidential primaries of both the PDP and the APC, an overwhelming majority of the delegates from the South-east geopolitical zones failed to vote for candidates from the zone – despite the perennial clamour for a President of Igbo extraction, and the Igbo use of the ‘marginalization’ argument to engage the national political process. Many have also noted that while Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambah State, has become a metaphor for a pan Nigerian movement that is seeking to upturn the political status quo, prominent Igbo political elite are hardly part…
On May 18 2022 I had an engaging interview with Radio Free Europe (also known as Radio Liberty), a US Congress-funded news organization founded in 1949, which focuses on Eastern Europe. It is remarkable that Radio Free Europe, which was founded at the early stages of the Cold War, remains active long after the Soviet Union unraveled, officially ending with it the Cold War era. The interview was on Russia’s role in Africa and how that role might likely be impacted upon by the war in Ukraine. Todd Prince, who contacted me for the interview, said he did so on…
