There has been a remarkable shift in the political landscape of West Africa in the last few years. Soldiers are again making an odious entrance into the corridors of power. Silently but steadily, they are returning and the martial strains of their voices are getting louder. It’s becoming fashionable to speak of soldier-rulers in the same […]

“The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards”,– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks In the nineteenth century, many African communities exchanged their lands and even their kin for beads, mirrors, trinkets, and other fanciful objects of vanity that European traders dangled before them. These […]

The emergence of Senator Bola Tinubu as the “winner” of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, governorship ticket on December 21,1998, unknown to many, marked a major historic turning point for Lagos State. Ordinarily, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, the man in charge of the party’s primaries in Lagos, should have insisted on a rerun. He did not, mainly […]

I am fascinated by the packaging of Arise News. History is unfolding before our very eyes and we hardly know it. Global TV depends on premium TV programming to attract TV eyes. Everyday, Arise News delivers something substantial, always leaving enough juice to titillate the senses of those who love or hate them. And they come […]

By Obas Esiedesa, Abuja Power generation companies, yesterday intensified pressure on the Federal Government (FG) to urgently address the worsening liquidity crisis in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) as debts owed to them have risen to N6 trillion. The Chairman of the Association of Power Generation Companies (APGC) Board, Col. Sani Bello (Retd), expressed concern […]

From last week continues the narrative on the Benue-Plateau crisis based on early encounters with Chief Solomon Lar in Jos and Chief Joseph Tarka in Makurdi. I visited Makurdi for the first time in 1977, courtesy of Chief Joseph Sarwuan Tarka.  On March 30, this year, it was 45 years that Chief Joseph Sarwuan Tarka (July […]

On all matters of national security, the responsible thing to do is exercise restraint, discretion and distance as dictated by one’s proximity to facts and commitment to the general good. Precisely for the same reasons, however, matters involving lives and livelihoods, peace and public safety cannot be left entirely to leaders. There is a huge […]

By Dele Sobowale “Our refinery has recorded 22 incidents of sabotage” — Dangote Nigerian history, since my return from the US in 1974, has always made me to thank God, that I not only read History as an elective subject as an undergraduate in the US; but, that the interest remains abiding. In fact, if I […]

Aliko Dangote has become the first African-born billionaire to reach and surpass a $30 billion net worth. This October, 2025, with a new valuation gain of $430 million, he achieved a net worth of $30.3 billion.  But, his on-going quixotic contestations with the Nigerian Constitution and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UDHR,  may turn […]

In April 2020, then governor of Kano State in north-west Nigeria, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, took time off his expensive preoccupation with denying the ravages of the Corona Virus on his state to preside over the “conversion” to Islam of two adolescent females.