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Although traces of Islam first came to Yorubaland through the Trans-Saharan Trade (from about the 8th century through the 16th century), which saw Arab traders travel from Arabia through North Africa to parts of West Africa in search of gold, salt, and human labor, it was the mass migration of Malians to the area from […]
Continue ReadingYou don’t promote unity by simply glibly mouthing off infuriating platitudes about unity being “non-negotiable.” You promote it through meaningful symbolic gestures to reassure estranged groups that they, too, matter. Unity is promoted when conscious efforts are made to heal national wounds, to accommodate disadvantaged groups, and to make political concessions to restore faith in […]
Continue ReadingMany readers of this column—and of my social media interventions—have asked me to endorse a candidate for the 2023 presidential election. Although I have my mental archetype of the kind of person that should be president, I won’t endorse a candidate for at least three reasons. One, I am not important or influential enough for […]
Continue ReadingThe two most disadvantaged groups in Nigeria’s representational politics are northern Christians and Southern Muslims. In Nigeria’s internal geopolitics, these two groups are structurally invisible, politically subjugated, and told to be content with their political and symbolic marginality. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Muslim from Osun/Lagos states, and Yakubu Dogara, a northern Christian from Bauchi State, […]
Continue ReadingAlthough I have said in the past that next year’s presidential contest will be a short in the dark in light of the continually shifting political variables in the country, the auguries for Bola Ahmed Tinubu to clinch the nomination of APC aren’t looking pretty. Unless something really dramatic happens between now and the next APC convention, […]
Continue ReadingIt has turned out that it was actually Buhari himself, not the Aso Rock cabal, who wanted Goodluck Jonathan to succeed him in 2023! Apparently, even members of the cabal were disquieted by this. The cabal played along for a while (knowing Buhari’s well-known cognitive impairments and imperviousness to reason) and, at the right time, […]
Continue ReadingAnyone who has monitored Nigerian political punditry in the institutional news media and on social media in the last few weeks would be led to suppose that only candidates of the improperly named All Progressives Congress (APC)—who are actually a bunch of opportunistic, conservative fascists— would be participating in the 2023 presidential election. The bulk […]
Continue ReadingThere is probably no “indigenous” Lagos family that is more famous than the Tinubu family. But, although the family is now clearly culturally Yoruba, its ethnic provenance is traceable to what is now Borno State, according to Lagos historians, underscoring the historical and sociological inaccuracy of notions of ethnic purism in Nigeria. The patriarch of […]
Continue ReadingIn his interview with Arise TV recently, Ovation publisher and presidential hopeful Dele Momodu talked of the “owners of Nigeria” who teleguide the selection of political leaders, particularly presidents, and to whom we’re helpless victims. They are an amorphous group of crafty old stagers with enduringly deep roots in the structure of Nigeria, and include such people […]
Continue ReadingA quotation in which Bola Ahmed Tinubu called Muhammadu Buhari a “bigot” and an “agent of destabilization” has resurfaced on social media and is being shared by people who are opposed to Tinubu’s presidential aspirations. But Tinubu supporters are countering the quotation with a February 7, 2020 rebuttal by Tinubu’s media aide by the name […]
Continue ReadingGroup Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Malam Mele Kyari, said on November 23 that the Buhari regime will inflict yet another pain at the pump by jacking up petrol prices to N340 per liter in February 2022. If this materializes, it would be the fourth time the regime has increased […]
Continue ReadingI salute the courage of Joke Silva, wife of legendary actor Olu Jacobs, for publicly revealing that her husband is battling what she called “dementia with Lewy Body.” “It is a degenerative disease that affects the brain, and is almost like Parkinson’s disease,” she said. “It affects the brain and affects the person.” My heart goes out […]
Continue ReadingAmid the grief of the heartrendingly tragic collapse of the 21-storey luxury apartment building in Ikoyi, Lagos, a sadly familiar, barely acknowledged but nonetheless insidiously widespread anti-Muslim bigotry in Yoruba land came to light. A Yoruba Muslim by the name of Adebowale Sikiru revealed in an interview with a YouTube news channel called AN 24 that he […]
Continue ReadingOn July 18, 2021, so-called bandits shot down an Alpha Jet belonging to the Nigerian Air Force on the boundary between Zamfara and Kaduna states. Then on October 7, 2021, the Wall Street Journal, whose news section is adjudged one of America’s most credible, got a scoop that the Nigerian Air Force paid N20 million to bandits to buy back […]
Continue ReadingOn October 12, I received a message on WhatsApp, which the platform flagged as being “forwarded many times,” about how former Emir of Kano Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (or whatever he calls himself these days) caused Governor Nasir el-Rufai to fire his Chief of Staff for the “offence” of referring to Sanusi as the “former emir […]
Continue ReadingThe past few months have ignited impassioned and frenzied political brickbats between the elites of the South and those of the Muslim North. Plus, over the years, the differences between the people of the regions are often magnified and their similarities papered over. In today’s column, I show how this is all elite manipulation. Centuries […]
Continue ReadingI’ve stopped bothering to listen to or read Muhammadu Buhari’s speeches for quite a while now not only because I’ve given up on the regime he leads but also because he has some of the most inept speech writers Nigeria has ever had, particularly in the last two years. But a portion of the speech […]
Continue ReadingIt emerged late last week that Communications and Digital Economy Minister Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami (or his agents) possibly instructed Zamfara State governor Bello Muhammad Mutawalle to place an advertorial in the Daily Trust to congratulate Pantami on his “promotion to the Rank of Full Professor of Cybersecurity” by an unnamed university. (In the advertorial, Mutawalle repeated […]
Continue ReadingThe attack on and abduction of military officers at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) are at once unprecedented, humiliating, and dispiriting, but they are not in the least shocking because they merely represent a predictable pattern of Nigeria’s tragically progressive declination into the low-water marks of extreme precariousness in the last six years. I perfectly […]
Continue ReadingMuhammadu Buhari is a magnet for both extravagantly flattering myths and stubborn falsehoods. Here are the top five: 1. Muhammadu Buhari’s very name is wrapped in a curious omission. In most parts of the world, people’s last names are usually either their family name or their father’s first name. Not for Buhari. Muhammadu (which his teachers […]
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