The members of the Abuja branch of the Association of Nigeria Authors, ANA, had the pleasure of receiving one of Nigeria’s greatest poets, Odia Ofeimun, on Thursday, September 4. As is always the case with Ofeimun, it was a wonderful occasion to be enthralled with rhythmic verses, philosophical musings on…

My heart bleeds for Chibok. Today is 84 days since terrorists kidnapped over two hundred girls, students studying for their examinations and there is no information of any serious effort to rescue and return them to their parents. We can only imagine the trauma of their parents, and indeed all…

I am so depressed by the ambient literature and statements on the Nigerian state that I need to find solace in political science 101. State collapse in Nigeria first entered the literature between the botched census of 1962 and the fraudulent elections of 1964. Some of us have therefore lived…

At 4:19 a.m. yesterday morning, INEC declared Ayo Fayose of the PDP as the winner of the Ekiti governorship election. It was an outcome that surprised many. The sitting governor had the privilege of incumbency. Above all, he had acquired the reputation of being one of the best performing governors…

With over 30,000 security officials deployed in the rather small 6353 sq. km of Ekiti State, the place does look like a police state. I was not surprised when the APC Chairman of Ekiti State expressed the opinion to stakeholders that the security presence was so massive that ordinary people…

I start my column today with an apology to my teacher and mentor, Prof A. D. Yahaya who taught me that the idea of radicalism and emirship are completely antithetical. The Northern Aristocracy, he taught us, were incorporated into the British system of Native Administration to oppress the people as…

On Friday and Saturday, we witnessed an image that most of us had hoped we would never see again. It was that of armed soldiers seizing newspapers from distributors and vendors so that Nigerians would not read the word. It was an alarming development because it was not for the…

Reading the Sunday Press yesterday gave me the overwhelming impression of a President that has been extremely reluctant to take action to search for and rescue the Chbok girls. In Thisday on Sunday, we read the interview by former President Olusegun Obasanjo where he claims that for the first 18…

On Thursday, the #BringBackOurGirls Movement marched on President Goodluck Jonathan to ask him certain questions and to give him our Charter of Demands. He was not there. It was a huge opportunity he lost to start rebuilding his battered credibility by engaging us and showing he as a person and…

The death of Kaye Whiteman, the well-known journalist and author was announced 17th May, he was 78 years old. In announcing his death, Kayode Soyinka in a statement said: “It is with great sadness that I am writing to let you know that our dear friend and colleague Kaye Whiteman died…

Many Nigerians were startled with the rude and crude statement by Senator John McCain of the United States that - “We shouldn’t have waited for a practically non-existing government to give us the go ahead before mounting a humanitarian effort to rescue the (Chibok) girls”. Many would wonder what has…

The Abuja #BringBackOurGirls Movement concluded its Rally on the 30th Day after the abduction of the Chibok girls at 12:30 a.m. this morning. We are now in the second month and our government and our armed forces have still not brought our girls back. And this is the point about…

There has been an extremely positive outcome of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign so far. It has placed the question of why the Nigerian State is not doing the work the Constitution stipulates – providing for the welfare and security of Nigerians on the table.  Over three hundred girls were abducted from…

On Tuesday, David Mark, the Senate President declared during their deliberations of the girls abducted from Chibok that Nigeria is at war and called for a decisive military response from Government. As a retired general, he should know what he is talking about. The insurgents have been on war against…

Last Wednesday, the National Conference Committee on Devolution of Powers had a heated debate in which they were bifurcated between those for and against resource control. The invention of the term “resource control’ is an excellent example of political branding in which an apparently neutral concept has been transformed into…

Violence, mass murder, abductions, hate, sex slavery and other crimes against humanity are killing Nigeria while the governing class watch with a sense of helplessness, fear, foreboding and paralysis. The class in power from the local government level to the presidency remains focused on stealing the national wealth and self-aggrandisement.…

As the National Conference goes into committee work this week, one of the key issues that will be before it is that of return to regionalism similar to what we had in the First Republic. The issue has been popularized through consistent advocacy by the Yoruba political class. It was…

  Yesterday, our dear country Nigeria leap-frogged South Africa and became Africa’s largest economy. We did this by changing the base line for calculating our GDP from 1990 to 2000. This rebasing boosted our economic growth by about 75%. The economy grew from $292 billion dollars to $510 billion in…

Over the next three months, (or longer, as I understand some delegates are already campaigning for an extension of the life of the Conference), I plan to write a number of columns following the issues and debates at the National Conference. I have always been a keen supporter of the…

One question agitating the minds of every thinking person today is – what is the state of the Nigerian State? Are we drifting into the abyss? Are we being governed and what is the state of governance in the country today? The state as we know it from political science…

The images of hundreds and thousands of Nigeria’s youth in stadiums all over the country desperately trying to go through aptitude tests for employment in the Nigerian Immigration Service is one of the saddest images I have seen in recent times. Its also one of the most evocative and it…

Last week, I was in Niger attending a workshop organised by the Centre for Democracy and Development marking the take off of a research project on a perspective study on the prospects for peace and political stability in West Africa over the next three years. The research is focused on…

Last week, someone from the Presidency finally admitted that there is a war going on. Dr Doyin Okupe, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs declared to the press that “we are in a war,” he has been the last to find out, Nigerians have known that…

Nigeria’s Second African Peer Review of our governance systems is currently on going. It is conducted by a broad based Steering Committee under the chairmanship of Senator Ken Nnamani. Last week, a stakeholder’s sensitisation workshop for the six states in the North East took place in Gombe on the objectives…

It was the chairman of Virgin Group, Richard Bronson who used the adjective insane to describe the Nigerian ruling class and its technocracy. He was explaining the reasons that led him to withdraw Virgin from the Nigerian aviation sector. He said that after putting together a very good airline-the first…