I went to a meeting in Abuja with the visiting Western Sahara –Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic- Foreign Minister. It was arranged by Ambassador Brahim B. Buseif, the country’s ambassador in Nigeria. I was received by Buseif and a friend, Mohammed Yeslem Beisat. Since 2020, he had been Sahrawi Ambassador to South Africa and Lesotho, and for […]

The world is full of parallels. But some parallels are stranger than others. Where, for instance, are the similarities between Nasir el-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man? On the surface, there’s clear blue water between them: one is a modestly successful technocrat, administrator and politician in Nigeria; the other is […]

Picture this: You’re crafting an important email to your boss. Do you write “Can you review this proposal?” or “Could you review this proposal?” That tiny difference might seem insignificant, but it could determine whether your request is received warmly or creates unintended friction. Welcome to the fascinating world of modal verbs, where “can” and “could” wield […]

Time was when the refrain, “See Paris and die,” reflected the global view that Paris, the capital city of France, was so magnificent that once you have seen it, you can happily die, having experienced the apogee of life’s splendour. It was a refrain that also echoed the Italian saying “Vedi Napoli e poi muori” – “see […]

Kola Oluwawole – Ekiti State (October 2018)   In October 2018, Kola Oluwawole, then Speaker of the Ekiti State House of Assembly, was abruptly impeached. The reasons for his removal were not clearly articulated in public discourse, a situation that underscores a recurrent theme in Nigerian state politics—lack of transparency. Seventeen members out of the 26-member assembly […]

“In politics, memories are sometimes very short, and sometimes very long”—Douglas Reed In my previous articles, “The North and the Burden of Being” and “The Sociology of the Northern Question in Nigeria” both of which were published in this column, I raised the issues surrounding the place of the North in national discourses such as the […]

When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu chose this year’s Democracy Day on June 12 to celebrate heroes of the anti-military coalition and other pro-democracy activists his critics, mostly the usual suspects of opposition elements who have turned political criticism into a career in finding faults by seeing nothing good about the President and his government, not only […]

There is something that age does to a man. It doesn’t just equip him with more rags than the Millennials, the Gen-Z or the Generation Alpha, as Chinua Achebe would have loved to put it in one of the greatest books ever, Things Fall Apart; age slows down a man and tempers his views with ancient […]

When Israel launched Operation Rising Lion in the early hours of June 13, 2025, most Nigerians were asleep. The footage came in fragments—precision airstrikes, sirens over Tel Aviv, defiant chants in Tehran. Within hours, Iran responded with Operation True Promise III, unleashing waves of drones and missiles toward Israeli positions. It was dramatic, brutal, and […]

From last week, continues the narrative  of how the General Victor Malu-led military tribunal on Tuesday April 28, 1998 sentenced General Oladipo Diya and other  officers to death for alleged coup plot. Four of the accused persons were convicted of “information gathering” and implication in the alleged coup plot, and sentenced to life imprisonment. They […]