Enough of this corruption and abuse of public office by this form of the personalization of important public property. This is exactly what Buhari promised to put to an end!

Osinbajo may yet fail to read the writing on the wall. He must not make Jonathan’s mistake of appeasement of special interests while ignoring real Nigerians. And he should, right now know that with the rapid and unfolding situations, there will be no second chance

What the Biafran activists have demonstrated is that you cannot force people against their will to participate in, and belong to a nation, where they feel abandoned

Right up to, and through the 1990s, it was anathema to discuss Biafra openly. It all began with the end of the civil war in 1970 and the attempts by the Federal government to suppress and erase every sign of the conflict in the public mind, and revise the causes of the Biafran conflict in the historical records.

Three Okigbos startled the world in the 20th century: Pius, the economist, the poet Christopher, and Bede, plant pathologist and geneticist. Bede Nwoye Okigbo was the last of that trinity – that is, the last to leave the earthly scene by his death in April. It is the final closing of the chapter of a remarkable era.

It certainly is dull, possibly insane to believe all this, about Nigerian conspirators and British shenanigans, but conspiracy theories are also exciting because they are like thriller novels and action movies

Nigeria must not continue to rub this into the historical wound which is still sharply felt in these areas

Segun Adeniyi’s just recently published book, Against The Run of Play, makes a very startling and disturbing revelation, one confirmed by the former President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan himself, that the United States government and the governments of the UK and France jointly interfered very directly to manufacture the outcome of Nigeria’s presidential election in 2015.

And I think that one of the real strengths of Igbo culture is “Ita ukwa, jaa Eze” – to eat the roasted breadfruit, husk and all, and to bare one’s messy teeth thereafter. It is to position one’s self in things without artifice. It is the Igbo metaphor for denoting the primacy of truth-telling and critical self-appraisal. It is the strenght of a people who are not afraid to examine their own failures and weaknesses, accept their own failures and ugliness, in order to better reposition, and chart new courses.

I arrived, Thursday morning in London, for the “Legacies of Biafra” conference at the School of African and Oriental Studies in London. Part of the highlights of the program was the “Obi Nwakanma in Conversation with Olu Oguibe” event at SOAS on Friday afternoon, and my talk on “Okigbo’s War: Biafra and Afterwards” yesterday. More on this later. But on Thursday evening, as part of the opening of the events, was the showing of a documentary on the Asaba massacres, one of the most deadly events of the civil war. Again more on this next week, when I shall, I promise, give a fuller account of the conference at SOAS.

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Emir of Kano, is an Islamic modernist and reformist. I arrive at this conclusion by the sheer weight of his contributions to contemporary Islamic thought, particularly on the question of Islamic Economic thought and Law, and particularly in its applications in what we now generally call “the Muslim North.” I am always a bit careful about a blanket description of the North as “overwhelmingly Muslim,” because we have no credible census to determine that. No one knows the number of Christians and Muslims living their lives daily in that part of the upper North of Nigeria.

The consequences of the president exemplifying a disregard for the courts is quite clear. Soon, ordinary citizens themselves will begin to see the court of justice as an inconsequential organ of the state, and will disregard either the courts or the rulings of the court

There is a dangerous wave of anti-Fulani feelings across Nigeria, fanned by a scurrilous form of political populism now riding on the back of the fiction of a Fulani hegemony in Nigeria.

An executive office with the kind of power it has in Nigeria is a recipe for corruption. The president is a god, and issue decrees. Such decrees may be self-serving nonetheless, and it would not matter. And such a power gives coverage to the kind of disregard functionaries appointed by the president accord the National Assembly.

Nothing adds further to the significance of the lives of Robert Adeyinka Adebayo and Sam Ogbemudia other than the lives they have led, and the values that they now typify in the minds of those who have been inspired by their public service