FAMOUS or infamous as the Chibok and Dapchi school girls’ abduction cases have been, the Nigerian government is still in the game of spinning stories about what is going on. The government has not been able to do what it has severally promised: secure freedom for all the girls. Neither have their parents, families and friends been allowed closure after these many years of endless promises and chest-thumping about beating Boko Haram at its own game.

THE images from the scene of attack, what political mourners and others of their ilk have variously described as a ‘dastardly act’ and other words to that effect, are not only graphic but are as gory and disturbing as they could possibly be. This episode harks back to the murder in 1976 of then Head of State, General Murtala Ramat Muhammamed, by renegade soldiers of the Nigerian Army during a botched attempt at a forceful takeover of government.

ONE of the few things for which the 2018 debate for the vice presidential slot will be long remembered are the quips round the fight against corruption. Peter Obi, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, candidate had, while arguing that corruption is not an economic policy, gone on to add that one cannot close one’s shop to chase thieves. To which the All Progressives Congress candidate and current Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, had instantly retorted that one couldn’t leave one’s shop open to be plundered by thieves or there would be nothing left to sell.

ANYONE in doubt about Nigeria being a country of political journeymen, jobbers and wheeler dealers, only has to look at the fate that has befallen the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2018 to be convinced. The ding-dong between the executive arm, specifically, President Muhammadu Buhari, and the National Assembly, tells any discerning person that this country is under the vice grip of politicians blinded by self-interest. Nigerians themselves have not been impartial arbiters in the ongoing cold war that the Electoral Act Amendment Bill has made inevitable.

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari must have surprised many Nigerians when he took the quite unprecedented step of writing an op-ed that was obviously meant for Nigerians in a foreign newspaper, Christian Times. The surprising thing about the entire episode is that a notoriously taciturn President, one who apparently finds it difficult to talk, to say nothing of him offering an explanation for any of his action, chose to put down his thoughts in print.

IT was the day formal campaign into elective positions in the 2019 elections commenced and incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, had seized the moment to begin in earnest a campaign that he and his subordinates had until that time taken formal and casual moments to do on and off.

IT is both unexplainable and depressing (for what it says about his public persona as a lawyer, and erstwhile critic of previous governments) that of all possible options open to him in his apparent dissatisfaction with media report of his administration, Rotimi Akeredolu, governor of Ondo State, could think of nothing better than to ostracise sections of the media perceived as critical of his administration from the Ondo State Government House Press corps.

WHEN  Adam’s Oshiomhole, erstwhile Labour leader and governor of Edo State, took over as chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, party few months ago, he was in dead earnest. He made clear that he was a new broom that would not only clean the mess that the party he was heading had become but was determined to break with the past and make a change. He told anyone who cared to listen that he was different from everyone that had had the fortune or misfortune of holding any leadership position in the APC.

IN  deciding to embark on a nationwide strike to press home its demand for a significant increase in the minimum wage payable to workers, the Nigeria Labour Congress , NLC, and its affiliate bodies have chosen on, perhaps, their only and most potent weapon of offence against a recalcitrant government. In this battle, the NLC is pulling all plugs and its members, it would appear, have been adequately mobilised and braced for the success of the exercise.

AS the 2019 elections  hot up , Nigerians are once again clamoring for President Muhammadu Buhari to produce evidence that he attended secondary school up to school certificate level. This is not just an idle but a constitutional demand that requires contestants for the office of president to be secondary school graduates at the very least. Mr. Buhari, as Nigerians well know, has not been able to produce this evidence. His explanation is and has been that the original copies of his school certificate are with the Board of the Nigerian Army where he submitted them at the point of enlistment in the military.

TO say that the All Progressives Congress, APC,  is a party currently in turmoil is stating the point mildly. The APC is reeling in trouble, stumbling from one crisis to another even as the country inches ever closer to the 2019 election. The just concluded party primaries through which the various political parties produced candidates to stand for elective offices from February 2019 have left in their wake armies of discontented stalwarts across the different parties.

THE President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration has once again provided further evidence of why many Nigerians continue to view the administration as at once anti-democratic and incompetent. The latest gaffe of this fumbling administration comes via a so-called ‘executive order 6’ or EO6 that the President’s Senior Special Assistance on Media, Garba Shehu, announced last weekend. A salient element of the executive order is the placement of some fifty Nigerians on a security watch list that demands the seizure of their passport and by that the restriction of their movement to Nigeria until cases of financial crime brought against them by the state have been determined.

These should be sober times. They should be times of introspection and self-appraisal when we all should be mindful of the days ahead. But our politicians are hyper excited, engaged in buying votes, casting votes and returning incredible figures even in primary elections in which only card carrying party members are involved.

Should our worry about a cabal running the presidency not begin with questions about a strange group paying for the President’s nomination form? Where does corruption begin? Where will it end?

IT is the season of madness and it suddenly seems strange to be normal. Fiction trails reality as Nigerians move from one scandalous episode to another. One doesn’t even know where to begin or from whom to  seek some explanation of the apparent mindlessness that has overtaken the land. As with all things at these times, Nigerian politicians are at the centre stage of the unfolding tragedy. As 2019 comes dangerously close (there seems to be many reasons why the people of this country have to be apprehensive of the approaching election), Nigerians can very well look forward to more  drama of bizarre composition.