Opinions

‎The easiest way to rile Nigeria on the matter of public finance is to throw a number of endless zeroes at us and call it missing money. Nobody needs to explain the ledger from which it was drawn, or the accounting convention that produced it, or whether the sum describes cash that once sat in […]

There is an interesting conversation unfolding around Nigeria’s Net Foreign Exchange Reserves. Predictably, opinions have become divided. Some see the announcement as vindication of the Central Bank’s reform programme; others question the figures and the methodology behind them. That, in my view, misses the larger story. The issue before us is not simply whether Nigeria’s […]

I invite you to join me on this journey to the Central Bank of Nigeria headquarters in Abuja, where I shall be meeting with the CBN Governor, Mr Olayemi Michael Cardoso. The meeting is neither official nor scheduled, but its importance highlights the potential harm a recent CBN directive portends for the nation’s banking sector. […]

It is unbelievable that it took former President Olusegun Obasanjo all of eight years to become aware of what was written about him in the 2018 memoirs of accomplished journalist, Aremo Olusegun Osoba. In the memoirs entitled: Battlelines: Adventures in Journalism and Politics, Osoba recalled how Obasanjo sold a dummy to the then Southwest governors […]

The abduction of a sitting High Court judge from his home ought to shake any nation to its core. When the news broke that Hon. Justice Faruku Hassan Bunza of the Kebbi State High Court had reportedly been kidnapped by armed men who stormed his residence in the early hours of the morning, it was […]

For the umpteenth time, United States Senator Ted Cruz has accused the Nigerian government of substituting public relations for public policy in response to allegations of religious persecution. The accusation is uncomfortable because it contains an inconvenient truth that no amount of expensive lobbying can erase: governments do not rebut insecurity with press releases. They […]

If you have not discovered this special gem, this is the moment to do so. It is LASG’s powerful, truly smart digital information tool. The objective: to bring over 300 essential public services in the state to the fingertips of its citizens. “Everything you need from payments and permits to registrations and public services on […]

In the lexicon of Nigerian statecraft, there is no greater admission of leadership failure than the invitation of a foreign auditor to inspect one’s own front yard. When Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State; now doubling as an aspirant to the presidency under the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), recently demanded a UN-backed investigation into the […]

A democracy is tested not by how it treats those who govern, but by how it protects those who seek to replace them. That is why the recent alarm raised by Peter Obi, the 2027 presidential candidate for the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), that he may not be alive to contest the 2027 presidential election […]

The architecture of despoliation, wherein the Nigerian State abandons the tedious inconvenience of the judicial process and a court trial to embrace the profitable efficiency of confiscation under the guise of “reasonable suspicion” speaks directly to a distinct, metallic flavor to Nigerian justice these days. We have entered the era of the “non-conviction-based” expropriation; a […]

There is something profoundly insulting about a government that stages a victory parade every time citizens are rescued from criminals who should never have captured them in the first place. It is rather like a fire brigade demanding applause for extinguishing the blaze after spending months neglecting the fire. The rescue of the abducted pupils […]

For a nation that prides itself on being Africa’s giant, Nigeria has developed a curious habit of behaving like a timid bystander whenever its citizens abroad are brutalized. The latest warning to South Africa over the killings and xenophobic attacks targeting Nigerians is welcome; but it arrives with the familiar stench of diplomatic delay, bureaucratic […]