I’ve just been told that Senator Barinada Mpigi, who represented the Rivers South East senatorial district, has died, aged 64, following a protracted illness. Barry, as many of us called him, was a fellow Ogoni from the Tai Local Government Area segment of our ancestral terrain. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2011 […]

President Donald Trump regularly insults and     discriminates against black people; and I don’t understand why African heads of state are not giving him much – or any in some cases – serious pushback. When racists closely linked to Trump depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes on his social media account, he refused to apologise […]

When President Bola Tinubu returned to Abuja a month ago after a prolonged holiday in Paris and brief stopover at a summit in Abu Dhabi, a newspaper headline sardonically announced that the “Nigerian Ambassador to France pays his first official visit to Nigeria in 2026”. Tinubu, frequently criticised for his frequent sojourns in foreign locations, France […]

Much has been said and is being said about the Federal Government’s controversial tax reforms. They got off to a very bad start when some legislators claimed that the version of the law passed by the National Assembly was not the same as the document President Tinubu signed. Ali Ndume, the former Senate Leader, is one […]

Thanks to a gale of defections from opposition parties (the PDP mostly), 29 out of 36 governors are now fully-fledged members of the APC; and there are rumours that the Kano governor will soon join them. I find this situation immensely depressing. But I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. Nigerians are always complaining about the near-total absence […]