WOLE Soyinka was in the news last week for a comment he made to Zainab Badawi on Hardtalk, an interview programme on the British Broadcasting Service, BBC. Badawi started by asking if Soyinka thought his generation of older Nigerians have failed the people and he responded in the affirmative. The hope that led many in his generation who studied abroad to rush back home to join in the transformation of Nigeria, he said, has not materialised.

IN his response to the Easter Sunday coordinated attacks on mosques and hotels during which more than 200 people were killed, President Muhammadu Buhari sent his heartfelt condolences to the government and people of Sri Lanka.  Anyone reading about the president’s response to the mindless carnage in Sri Lanka would be pardoned to think that killings on such a scale are alien to Nigerians. The truth, however, is that it has become normal to read, if not witness, mass killings involving hundreds of innocent Nigerians quite frequently. Nigerians now live under the looming shadow of unprovoked attacks perpetrated by criminals operating with hardly any fear of reprisals for their action. All over the country, Nigerians are randomly rounded up and killed while their property are carted away and their communities are sacked by groups and individuals that are not entirely unknown to their attackers or the law enforcement agents that have responsibility for such activities.

Onnoghen’s decision to fight the accusation against him might look wise if only for the reason that it gave him the opportunity to clear his name

With members of the PDP and, perhaps, a few others ready to play ball, Ndume may be banking on pulling another Saraki-like sleight-of-hand on leaders of his party

HOURS before Nigerians across 18 states of the Federation returned to the polls to conclude the unfinished business of the last presidential and governorship elections in a so-called supplementary elections, a spokesperson of the President, Garba Shehu, let out word that President Muhammadu Buhari had promised not to impose on Nigerians persons they don’t want as their leaders.

The greatest challenge facing the democratic process in Nigeria, as in most developing nations, has to do with the management of the post-election transition process. The political tension and acrimony between parties and politicians peaks at the polls and tends to escalate during collation and announcement of results, giving electioneering a “do-or-die” tendency. This situation impacts negatively on the democratic process as election-related violence often takes a heavy toll on lives and property, disrupts elections and ultimately threatens national stability.

The decision of the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, to wage a legal challenge against the proclamation of President Muhammadu Buhari the winner of February 23, 2019, presidential election has not received the encouragement of a few informed minds in the country. One respected voice, for instance, thinks that Atiku should instead join hands with other well-meaning Nigerians, the civil society and like-minded politicians to help to properly set up and strengthen democratic structures capable of hamstringing the repeat in future elections of the large-scale malpractices that allegedly marred the last elections – an issue that constitutes the main plank of Atiku’s suit.

THE video recording didn’t look staged and the little girl’s outburst also sounded credible. In this age of social media when everyone has become a performer determined to drive attention in their direction, it makes sense not to take everything one sees at face value. But so far, nothing has happened to make anyone question the authenticity of the little girl’s ranting bout as one made for the cameras.

JUST the morning after the governorship and state assembly elections, it had become clear that Nigerian voters might have found their voice and are beginning to talk. All too often Nigerians are urged to vote as their vote is supposed to be the means through which they demonstrate their power of choice. But many times the voice of the voter hardly counts. The norm in the last 20 years of the country’s return to democratic practice or civil governance, if it would seem too optimistic to describe what we’ve had until now as democracy, has been for the voice of the people to be stolen.

IN a national election that in the main featured two Fulani politicians as presidential candidates, the Yoruba and Igbo are again at loggerheads, locking horns over a matter that some would say at best makes them meddlesome busybodies and mere bystanders. The tension between the Yoruba and the Igbo which is the fallout of the February 23 elections reflects the age-long political fault lines between the two largest ethnic groups from the southern parts of Nigeria. Dog eat s—t, na goat mout’ dey smell!

THE Presidential and Nationals Assembly elections held on February 23 against the background of fears and speculations that they would again be postponed. They were to have held a week earlier before Mahmood Yakubu, the chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission, announced they had been postponed just a couple hours before the polls were to open.

THE Mahmood Yakubu-led Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC,  has once more demonstrated for the whole world to see just how incompetent we could be as a people. The electoral body that had spent the better part of the last one year preparing for the 2019 general elections, comprising the presidential and National Assembly elections, called off the elections within a couple of hours before the polls were due to open.

FIRST a quick clarification, one that I have variously restated in this space in the last few months: I do not see a Peoples Democratic Party-led government being radically different from the Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress government. That is in the event of that party winning this Saturday’s election as some pundits have predicted in what looks like a very tall order. Which is to say that our way out of the crippling corruption, the singular disease that has misbegotten the countless others by which Nigeria is plagued and has destroyed the future prospects of Nigeria, will not be charted by the same people that brought us where we are now.

THERE has been so much talk and indeed assumptions made about the Buhari administration’s anti-corruption fight that it’s so easy for the President to slip into corrupt practices without owning up to them. The reason the President would be so eager to remove the crease of corruption in the eyes of others while ignoring the log of the same disease in his own eye is because of his very narrow definition of what constitutes corruption. This column has on several occasions pointed to the failure of the All Progressives Congress, APC,  party-led Buhari administration’s hidebound perception of corruption in terms only of politicians’ crude accumulation of unearned wealth or, indeed, cash in holes dug in their backyard, toilets or local and foreign accounts.

NIGERIA is reeling in the throes of age-long tribal politics, now made worse by the provincial instincts of a president who lacks the capacity to see the country beyond the constricted lenses of his small part of our richly diverse society. The last four years of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has mostly served to sharpen Nigerians’ sense of identity. Rather than coming together in a demonstration of our much touted ‘unity in diversity’, the people of this country have grown more apart than together.