Opinions

When something truly curious happens, such as the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) scandal, we pivot to outrage. But that is when you learn the most about yourself and the world around you. It is time to tread cautiously, not breathe furiously. The facts appear to be that a bogus but significant presidential agency […]

It is an established maxim of English constitutional history that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. The Nigerian state, it appears, is currently being governed under a similar psychic condition. How else is one to comprehend the wondrous tale of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC); an agency […]

It would appear there is no limit to the odium Nigerians will suffer at the hands of the administration of President Bola Tinubu, because just when the regime seems to have hit rock bottom in governance capacity; it somehow manages to find a way into further depths of ignominy. The latest spectacle, the raging scandal […]

In the grand, chaotic theater of Nigerian politics, power is often measured not by the longevity of one’s ideals, but by the volume of currency; both literal and metaphoric, that one can successfully pocket. For a long time, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje was the master of this physics. To observe him at his zenith was to […]

With barely seven months remaining before Nigeria’s next general election, the architectural plans for President Bola Tinubu’s re-election are becoming flagrantly obvious. It is a strategy that relies less on convincing a severely impoverished electorate of his economic merits and far more on ensuring that when voters finally enter the polling booths, they find no […]

President Bola Tinubu’s Democracy Day address was an exercise in a peculiar form of political optimism: the sort that flourishes most luxuriantly when reality is at its bleakest. One almost admired its audacity. The address read more like a dispatch from a parallel republic, blissfully detached from the grim realities of the nation he governs. […]

Every nation eventually confronts defining moments when history demands not hesitation, but courage.  Nigeria has arrived at such a moment. Across the country today, fear has become an unwelcome companion of ordinary existence. Farmers abandon fertile farmlands because criminal gangs roam forests with impunity. Parents send children to school with silent prayers of safe return. […]

  Nearly three weeks have passed since 39 schoolchildren and eight of their teachers were abducted in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State. Three weeks of rain, hunger, fear, and unimaginable trauma. Three weeks of parents living in a purgatory of hope and despair. Three weeks of children sleeping on wet forest floors while […]

Nigeria has endured military juntas, oil shocks, and the occasional bout of democratic brigandage. What it has rarely endured, at least not with such consistency, is a government so exquisitely thin skinned that it treats a returning writer as a national security emergency. Yet here we are. Professor Okey Ndibe, acclaimed novelist and academic, arrived […]

Nigeria has many problems. A shortage of public holidays is not among them. The latest example came when the federal government declared two public holidays for Eid-el-Kabir. Not one day. Two. A few weeks earlier came another nationwide holiday for Workers’ Day. Before long there will be more. By the end of the year, Nigeria […]

Few responsibilities are more fundamental to government than the protection of life and property. On that measure, Nigeria’s security crisis has graduated from a chronic embarrassment into an existential scandal. President Bola Tinubu arrived in Aso Rock promising competence and a break with the complacency that once let Boko Haram ravage the northeast. Instead, his […]

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme reaches a remarkable milestone this month, marking its 53rd anniversary. Established on May 22, 1973, by Decree No. 24 under General Yakubu Gowon’s administration, the scheme was born of a profound and urgent historical necessity. It was a deliberate, visionary vehicle designed to stitch a fractured nation back […]