WHEN Lt. Colonel Abdullahi Hassan Ali, 49, assumed duties as Commanding Officer of the 181 Amphibious Battalion of the Nigerian Army, all his mother, Hassana, could do was pray. Three years ago, Ali’s younger brother, Jamilu, a captain, had been killed in action by bandits in Katsina State. As an officer in the North-East, Ali himself […]

THE press has been unkind to Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales. I find it hard to understand why, of all the problems at this time, from the cost-of-living crisis to the war in Ukraine, and from the war in Gaza to the near total loss of trust in politicians, it is Kate’s unguarded photoshop moment […]

THE journey to Kuriga in Southern Kaduna, North-West Nigeria, did not start with the kidnap of 287 students last week. In the early 1990s a neighbouring town, Zango Kataf, was the boiling point. About a decade later, the beast of sectarian violence, which had reared its head in Kaduna, surfaced several hundreds of miles away in […]

I don’t know how it is in your part of town. But it’s been a nightmare in mine, a supposedly middle-class residential area in Abuja, Nigeria’s federal capital. Rolling blackouts do not begin to explain the depth of the misery. It’s been a dreadful time of rolling and erratic blackouts. Like surfing an angry wave, if […]

Nigeria’s politicians have perfected the art of burying themselves with one foot sticking out. And it appears that the All Progressives Congress, APC, will, once again, stage this rite of self-destruction in the forthcoming governorship election in Edo State. The party’s primaries on Saturday was such a shambles, it has now been forced to conduct […]

AS the troubled Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, convenes its Ministerial Council meeting in Abuja on February 8 to discuss the quit notice served by three of its members – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – the situation in Senegal might well be the elephant in the room. Three weeks to the presidential election […]

MALI and Burkina Faso obviously have a lot more in common than squaring off in a game of football like they just did in the Round of 16 knockout stage of the African Nations Cup, AFCON, in Cote d’Ivoire.  Along with Niger, these countries have been a great source of misery for the continent in the […]

THE report was treated like a footnote in the main press, but social media and online news platforms gave it a wider play. It’s the story of the launch of a nomadic vigilante service by Miyetti Allah, a group of herders turned political pressure group, comprising mostly Fulani.  The national president, Bello Bodejo, said in Lafia, […]

I HOPE Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, can finally get some sleep. He deserves it. After the ruling of the Supreme Court on Friday, upholding his election, the governor told a crowd of his supporters who came to rejoice with him at the State Government Lodge in Abuja, that he had not slept for seven days, […]

I knew Femi Adesina when he was “Daddy Tobi.” He still is, of course. But back in the day when we were neighbours in “Olowora Inside”, a Lagos suburb, when you could call to a neighbour from your frontage, often by using the name of their first child, that was how we called Femi: Daddy […]