Broken politics: Deeply flawed primaries point to a messy 2027, by Olu Fasan
The morning foretells the day. Early signs can indicate how a day will unfold. In that sense, the recent presidential, gubernatorial and legislative primaries foretell a very messy general election next year. Over the past two weeks, the media have been awash with endless stories about deeply flawed party primaries. The primaries betray a political […]
Tinubu’s tax laws: Tainted by bad faith, integrity deficit, by Olu Fasan
Hardly anyone disagreed that Nigeria needed a new tax regime. The erstwhile tax rules were complex and cumbersome, their administration ridden with corruption and inefficiency. So, when, in August 2023, barely four months in office, President Bola Tinubu inaugurated the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms, he was on to something truly transformative if […]
January 15, 1966 : The day the military upended Nigeria’s future, by Olu Fasan
Every year, Nigeria celebrates the Armed Forces Remembrance Day on January 15. But that date represents two epochs in Nigeria’s history. The first, January 15, 1966, was when junior officers of the armed forces executed a coup, which, though aborted, triggered a chain of events that led to the civil war. The second, January 15, 1970, […]
The right and wrong of Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, by Olu Fasan
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 […]
Dodgy data: The fallacies about Nigeria’s economy in 2025, by Olu Fasan
Mark Twain, the American writer and humourist, famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics.” This aphorism is truer in Nigeria than in virtually any other country. Put bluntly, one must be utterly gullible to believe official statistics in Nigeria. The unreliability of official data in Nigeria is known universally, with […]
‘Guns-a-blazing’: Trump’s unilateral strike betrays Nigeria’s weakness, by Olu Fasan
The year 2025 ended with the humbling of the Nigerian state by a foreign power. That humiliation began in November when Donald Trump, the US president, described Nigeria as “that now-disgraced country” and designated it as a “Country of Particular Concern” after alleging it harboured “Christian genocide”. Having tagged Nigeria with those derogatory labels, Trump threatened to […]
