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Ghana has taught both Nigeria and the US a masterclass in electoral integrity and democratic maturity in its just concluded election. For Nigeria, the takeaway is that electoral integrity is the cornerstone upon which trust and order rest. When an election is conducted with the meticulous precision of a weaver at a loom — its […]
Continue ReadingA few weeks ago, I spoke at a symposium in my university here in Georgia on the implications of the U.S. presidential election for the African diaspora. To the bemusement of my audience (who were a mix of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters), I explained the curious phenomenon of African support for Donald Trump, […]
Continue ReadingNigeria is doddering on the edge of never-before-seen economic desolation, but President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration’s major preoccupation is not to bring ministration to a badly hurting nation but to prosecute harmless, impoverished, malnourished, and undernourished minors of northern Nigerian origin who, months ago, joined millions of Nigerians to protest for their right to a […]
Continue ReadingI fully anticipate that most Nigerians will figuratively call for my head after reading this headline. How could it be that a leader who has inflicted such profound and unrelenting hardship upon the populace, and who appears utterly disinclined to offer even the smallest relief, could ever be missed? (Tinubu’s wirepullers at the World Bank […]
Continue ReadingThe World Bank’s Senior Vice President by the name of Indermit Gill, who is originally Indian, incited mass panic in Nigeria on October 14 when he said Nigeria would need to sustain its current soul-sucking, agonizingly punishing, and self-destructive “reforms” for “at least another 10 to 15 years to transform its economy.” Gill’s speech at […]
Continue ReadingThe torment of incessantly escalating petrol prices and the consequent surge in the cost of everything have plunged Nigerians into a precipitous decline in quality of life. This dire situation is exacerbated by insensitive, almost mocking remarks from those responsible for inflicting this pain. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, aptly nicknamed “T-Pain,” recently stated from London […]
Continue ReadingThe unfailingly abiding emotional investment I have in the wellbeing of common people springs forth from my experiential and mediated identification with the twinge of hunger and misery that poverty breeds. As people who read my columns know, my father, who died on December 31, 2016, was an Arabic/Islamic Studies teacher at a government-owned primary […]
Continue ReadingThe 10-day nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that end today, known by the reduplicative compound “Zanga-Zanga” in Hausaphone northern Nigeria, have ruptured the coalition that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu managed to build with a portion of the northern Muslim political establishment since 2014, which put Muhammadu Buhari in power in 2015 and 2019 and him in 2023. […]
Continue ReadingPresident Tinubu’s self-serving speech–which basically sang his own praises, said he’d heard the people’s anguished cries but won’t do anything about the cries and then threatened that the people shouldn’t cry for much longer or they’d be crushed– signposts the making of an unfeeling tyrant. If the people close to him don’t stop him and […]
Continue ReadingIn light of his planned astronomical hike in petrol prices euphemistically called “subsidy removal” in 2023, which his opponents also promised to implement and caused Nigerians embrace as inevitable and desirable, I foretold the imminent social convulsion that is gathering momentum across Nigeria now. “I can assure Tinubu that if petrol price hikes deepen people’s […]
Continue ReadingKano’s Muhammad Sanusi II has been rethroned the exact way he was initially enthroned and dethroned: in the melting pot of the politics of vengeance and recrimination. And he just might be dethroned yet again by this, or another subsequent partisan government, given Sanusi’s infamous incapacity to rein in his tongue and to understand the […]
Continue ReadingAt the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium on March 29, 2019, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then only a powerful but unofficial pillar of the APC, gave us an ominous presage of his administration that we all either ignored or sniggered at but which is now eerily materializing. “If we reduce the purchasing power of the people, we […]
Continue ReadingAfter three months of bootless committee meetings in the comfort of air-conditioned offices at the cost of one billion naira (President Bola Tinubu approved 500 million naira to “start with… first”) and about a month after the expiration of the last minimum wage approved in 2019, the Tinubu government has not been able to approve […]
Continue ReadingThe Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) aroused the rage of Nigerians this week when it revealed in its periodic newsletter called “EFCC Alert” (which it shared with news organizations on Monday) that it had recovered up to 30 billion naira of the money allegedly stolen by suspended Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation minister Betta Edu. […]
Continue ReadingPresident Bola Ahmed Tinubu is so inordinately inebriated by his IMF-motivated decision to remove subsidies on petrol that at every opportunity he has he brags about it in giddily superlative terms. For example, during a meeting with the Nigerian community in France on June 24, 2023, he couched his decision to impose the Tinubu fuel […]
Continue ReadingWhen my uncle called me over the weekend, he had no time for the customary conversational courtesies that typically preceded our phone chats. He was agitated and wanted to know straight away why President Bola Ahmed Tinubu wanted to relocate Nigeria’s federal capital back to Lagos. His questions were pregnant with anger, befuddlement, and a […]
Continue ReadingThe searing torment that everyday folks are going through in Nigeria right now is so dire, so unbearably extreme, and so unexampled in its rawness that even diasporan Nigerians like me who live tens of thousands of miles away from home can feel it not just vicariously but also experientially. The unending streams of requests […]
Continue ReadingThe Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), one of Nigeria’s most prominent pro-democracy NGOs, invited me to make a virtual presentation from my base in Atlanta to a national seminar it organized last Thursday on “targeted judicial reforms and enhanced judicial integrity in post-election litigation.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it, but here are the thoughts […]
Continue ReadingIn a predictable, premeditated, and carefully choreographed judicial charade, the Court of Appeal on Friday upheld the verdict of the Kano State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal that reversed the electoral triumph of NNPP’s Governor Abba Yusuf of Kano State. I sincerely hope this assault on justice isn’t the spark that ignites an inferno in Kano—and […]
Continue ReadingThe idea that the “judiciary is the last hope of the common man” is a banal, flyblown cliché that is habitually huckstered in Nigerian judicial circles and uncritically repeated in the Nigerian commentariat. But that’s mere hype. There has never been any moment, at least in my lifetime, when the judiciary was the unalterable guardian […]
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