This is a subject I have long wanted to address. It first caught my attention when I watched the inauguration of Professor Charles Soludo as governor of Anambra State in March 2022. As he recited the oath of office, I was struck by how many times he mentioned the words “Federal Republic of Nigeria”, “President […]

ONE of the popular myths around Bola Tinubu, stemming from his time as governor of Lagos State, was that he had an uncanny ability to pick competent teams of technocrats to run the affairs of state. Indeed, some genuinely wanted Tinubu to be president and “run Nigeria as he ran Lagos.” But the myths have […]

In and out of power, PDP can’t manage itself; internal wranglings cost it the 2015 presidential election and, largely, this year’s presidential poll; in both elections, a ruthless APC aggressively exploited PDP’s crises

MUHAMMADU Buhari, Nigeria’s immediate past president, had a post-power syndrome. He once said he would find life difficult if a president from another party succeeded him. He genuinely feared that a successor from another party would treat him and his allies the same way he treated his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and his loyalists in 2015. […]

If government cannot afford a universal student loans scheme, it shouldn’t create such a discriminatory scheme that excludes large sections of society; that’s bad policy and may be even unconstitutional, as some senior lawyers argue!

Truth is, Nigeria won’t have credible elections until INEC is truly independent of the government and ruling party; sadly, INEC cannot escape allegations of partiality in this year’s elections

For over eight years, since I started writing a weekly column in 2014, I repeatedly called for the abolition of the fuel subsidy. It distorted the economy and fed massive corruption. So, when, on his first day as president, Bola Tinubu scrapped the subsidy, I should be thrilled and excited. But far from it! Why? […]

In theory, Nigeria is a representative democracy; in practice, it is not. Unlike in a direct democracy, where people determine how they are governed by voting on policies and laws themselves, in a representative democracy, they elect those who govern them, who make policies and laws for them. However, to be truly “representative”, a democracy […]

Mallam Nasir el-Rufai is an unrepentant religious bigot; a militant Islamic supremacist, who believes Islam is superior to Christianity and should be privileged in national leadership. He doesn’t just hold these views, he actively pursues them. As governor of Kaduna State for eight years, until May this year, El-Rufai ran an Islamic government, with a […]

General Ibrahim Babangida erred tragically and did a great disservice to Nigeria by annulling the presidential election of June 12, 1993. But nothing has deepened the wounds more than the deception and betrayal of the so-called “June 12 activists”, who turned the annulment into a self-serving political lodestar and built their political careers around it, […]