As Nyesom Wike, the FCT Minister, continues his long-standing attempts to wrestle his embattled former protégé (Sim Fubara, the Rivers State Governor) to the ground, I find myself mystified. Why? Most of the Rivers people I know are loudly hailing Fubara for rebelling against Wike, his erstwhile mentor, and “rejecting godfatherism”. When I tell them […]

MY fellow countrymen and women are surely in for a very rough ride along a very rough, bad road that leads to nowhere through a wilderness created and sustained by politicians and civil servants. You might like to ask why I’m writing this, or what led me to this conclusion. You see, sometime last year, […]

By Femi Fani-Kayode Sixty years ago, in the early hours of the morning of January 15th 1966, a coup d’etat took place in Nigeria which resulted in the murder of a number of leading political figures and senior army officers. This was the first coup in the history of our country and 98 per cent […]

When the Benin Bypass was commissioned in 2002 in the first term of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency, the idea was to make the life of motorists less harrowing. Before the road, built at a cost of N10.2 billion, was opened for public use, cutting through the Benin City traffic gridlock was always a nightmare. The 24-kilometre […]

Barely a week after President Donald Trump sent the US military to launch air strikes in Nigeria on Christmas Day last year, he dispatched them to Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cicilia Flores, both handcuffed, blindfolded and shipped to the US. While President Trump said the air strikes in Nigeria were to […]

Last month, a colleague told me about a brilliant researcher she wanted to collaborate with. Before reaching out, she did what we all do: she Googled him. What she found was… nothing. No ORCID profile. No updated Google Scholar page. A LinkedIn profile with a blurry photo from 2015. “I felt like I was taking a […]

“Foreign policy is not sentiment; it is interest disciplined by circumstance“—Hans J. Morgenthau Chinese Foreign Minister Wang  Yi kicked off his Africa tour in January 2026 with visits to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, followed by Somalia, Tanzania and Lesotho. This itinerary is more than symbolic. It reflects a carefully structured and holistic engagement with the African […]

We are in the second week of the new year that appears to have got off to a very dramatic start on the political front. The opposition against the implementation of the tax reforms is suddenly muted, now all four bills that constitute the law are in full throttle. Two of them took off on June […]

Early in the new year, the telecoms industry seems to have grown a healthy appetite to accommodate a perennial discomfort by subscribers. More than discomfort, the accommodation actually returns the money spent by subscribers on every failed activity initiated on the network, whether voice or data. This really provides some comfort. Even with all the progress […]

“A bridge is repaired only someone falls into the water”. African proverb. A huge quantity of our political values, fortunes and assets are critically endangered. This does not mean they are irretrievably lost. It means they are on margins that require  major efforts to retrieve them, or considerable incompetence or indifference to lose them. Human […]