“The state is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”—   Frédéric Bastiat There are moments in the life of a nation when decline can no longer be explained away by rhetoric, postponed by political slogans, concealed beneath the fanfare of official optimism or justified by false patriotism. Nigeria […]

“The emancipation of the poor must be the act of the poor themselves”—   Classical Socialist Thought  In the ever shifting terrain of Nigerian politics, where power has increasingly become the preserve of entrenched elites, the re-emergence of populist currents is both inevitable and necessary. Indeed, it is both a historical and contemporary need that must come […]

“The true measure of a man is how he bears up under misfortune”—   Plutarch If the early phase of Alhaji Ado Bayero’s reign was defined by adaptation and consolidation, the later decades were marked by endurance, influence, adversity and the quiet exercise of statesmanship. By the 1970s and 1980s, Nigeria had entered a prolonged period of […]

“A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone”—   Paul Valéry To do justice to the life and times of so illustrious a personality as the late Alhaji Ado Bayero, CFR, Emir of Kano, would require the pen and erudition of historians of the calibre of Ibn Khaldun, Edward Gibbon […]

“Between the strong and the weak, it is liberty that oppresses and the law that sets free“—   Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire My sustained engagement with questions of sovereignty, strategic autonomy and global order is shaped not only by my background as a career diplomat, but also by a lifelong study of world history. In “The Martyrdom of […]

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other“—  John Adams Few observations capture the enduring dilemma of democratic governance as succinctly as this warning by John Adams. Long before the modern age of mass democracy, Adams understood that constitutions and institutions, however carefully […]

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children“—  Dietrich Bonhoeffer A complex and peculiar crisis is facing the international community today. This is the erosion of ethical norms in countries that should provide leadership to the world through example. For norms to retain their authority, they […]

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”—  Antonio Gramsci I recall vividly that I was in New York City when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were locked in their historic contest for the American presidency in 2016. Within diplomatic circles, media houses, academic institutions, […]

“No longer anything but a decoration which is useful for nothing”—  Paul Cambon  The withering description of a once-revered political figure in France by the diplomat Paul Cambon, applies with equal or perhaps greater force, to the state of politics in Nigeria today. Even objects of decoration, no matter how worthless, may still retain some redeeming […]

“All things are possible in politics”— Douglas Reed After two weeks of examining the language and practice of loyalty in Nigerian politics, one conclusion stands out with unsettling clarity: the phrase “I remain loyal” has become both a confession and an indictment. It confesses the fragility of conviction in our political culture and indictes a system […]