HAPPY New Year Nigeria! It is my hope and prayer that this year will be the best we have so far known under the Muhammadu Buhari regime.

ONE of the immediate gains of the pro-democracy fight against military rule was the shift of power from the north to the south. At the time Olusegun Obasanjo was inaugurated as an elected president in 1999, the country had been under northern leadership for about thirty-five years!

AISHA Buhari, wife of the president, aka Nigeria’s First Lady, has always been in the news. The only difference now is that since she returned from her last extended vacation in the United Kingdom, she has dominated the news more than has been customary with her predecessors as first ladies.

THAT a grievous act, bordering on the criminal, was committed by the Department of State Services, DSS, when it invaded a courtroom of the Federal High Court in Abuja, presided over by Justice Ijeoma Ojukwu, is now beyond contention.

EARLIER this year, Aisha Buhari, Wife of the President or First Lady as she now wants to be known, revealed that she was planning to set up a university in the name of her husband, Muhammadu Buhari. Even though the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, thought of Aisha’s plan as some kind of joke, the woman seemed in earnest.

SPECULATIONS are increasing that President Muhammadu Buhari might be interested in running for a third term as president. Femi Falana, the human rights campaigner and lawyer, may not be the lone voice in the wilderness calling attention to this.

THE much-anticipated governorship elections of Kogi and Bayelsa states have been won and lost. It has now been three days since both states were called for the governing All Progressives Congress. Their candidates were declared winners in the charade that played out as an election before local and international observers.

AT his last appearance at a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja, Abdulrasheed Maina, former chair of the Pension Reform Task Team, PRTT, was in a wheelchair.

NIGERIA’s Niger-Delta has had a long history of struggle, being one region populated by some of the so-called minority ethnic groups in the country. It has always been a struggle for self-recognition from the larger ethnic groups either individually or as a collective.

ON this day last week, an   Abuja Federal High Court presided over by Justice Inyang Ekwo ordered the Inspector General of Police, Muhammed Adamu, to stay action on the employment of 10, 000 recruits into the Nigeria Police Force. The engagement of the recruits for community policing has led to bad blood between the Police Service Commission, PSC, chaired by a former Inspector General of Police, Musiliu Smith, and the Inspector General of Police. Each side claims it is the right authority to preside over the employment of the recruits. The issue got so bad that the warriors dragged themselves before President Muhammadu Buhari who many Nigerians thought should call the combatants to order. But in his usual way, the President took a vague position that only amounted to kicking the can down the road.

THE ongoing feud between the Musiliu Smith-led Police Service Commission, PSC and Muhammed Adamu, the Inspector General of Police, over the recruitment of police personnel reflects how high and deep the culture of corruption, driven by self-interest, has permeated all sections of the Nigerian society, with or without the roof-top anti-corruption crusade of the Muhammadu Buhari administration.

Following the cold-blooded murder of five members of the Inspector General of Police Special Intelligence Response Team, IRT, by renegade elements of the 92 Battalion of the Nigerian Army in Jalingo, Taraba State, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered investigation of the incident. The Defence Headquarters, DHQ, set up a seven-man joint investigative panel, comprising officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, the Police, Department of State Services and the Defence Intelligence Agency under the headship of Rear Admiral. I. T. Olaiya. Their remit was to unravel the circumstances surrounding the murder of the IRT men. The Olaiya panel released its findings about a week ago without appearing to have moved the investigation any further from where pandemonium struck, leading to the back and forth between the Police and the Army, after the premeditated killing of the IRT officers on August 6. The summary of the panel’s report has an echo of General Yakubu Gowon’s reconciliatory statement at the end of the Nigerian Civil War: No victor; no vanquished.

In July 2015, Abdulrasheed Maina who was last week arrested by operatives of the Department of State Services, reportedly escaped from the country to Dubai in the United Arab Emirate. He was the Director of Human Resources in the Ministry of Interior. But it was in his capacity as Chair of the Pension Reform Task Team, now defunct, that Maina had a run-in with the law. Or so it was reported. Maina alongside Steve Oronsaye, former Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, OsarenkhoeAfe and Fredrick Hamilton, among others, were charged before a Federal High Court in Abuja on 24 counts bordering on fraud and obtaining by false pretences (is that a euphemism for 419?) to the tune of N2.1 billion in their management of the pension funds. Generally, the Nigerian Civil Service is a cesspool of fraud but perhaps this should not be surprising considering that heads of the Civil Service somehow manage to get entangled in issues of fraud and corrupt practices. It was only weeks ago that Winifred Oyo-Ita was sent on terminal administrative leave following corruption charges. As was the case with Oronsaye and the pension funds, Oyo-Ita was forced to forfeit properties and funds worth billions of naira.

This is the third straight week this column will be commenting on the arrest (properly speaking, abduction) and detention of Omoyele Sowore, the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, in the February 2019 election, publisher of Sahara Reporters and convener of the #Revolution Now protest.

AGENTS of the Department of State Services, DSS, arrested Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, in the February 2019 elections and founder of Sahara Reporters, in Lagos. Sowore neither was in a bush hideout or camp training to invade Abuja or any of our cities nor was he found with arms or an invading army that could suggest he was indeed getting ready for a bloody revolution, as state prosecutors have described his call for accountability.