The Crest

Category: Guest Columnist

  • What Happened to Your [Police] Special Branch? By Olutayo Adesina

    What Happened to Your [Police] Special Branch? By Olutayo Adesina

    Prof. Olutayo Adesina
    Prof. Olutayo Charles Adesina

    Nigeria is a country in travails. Africa’s most populous country has a troubled past and is no stranger to difficulties. Its present state appears quite worrisome. Its problems have no counterpart elsewhere in Africa. It is a country that has been operating on a frequency of panic, fear, and mutual suspicion. This is especially so in the aftermath of the serial abduction of men, women, and children. Seeing pupils, including toddlers, languishing in the forest and being dehumanised is horrendous. Nigerians are helpless. The state’s power is somewhat undermined by the rise of bandits and centrifugal forces spreading frenetically across the country. Nigerians have asked, to no avail, where our Special Forces are. From the east to the west, and from the north to the south, there are stories of death, agony, destruction, wailing, and unhappiness. People are disconsolate.
    Recently, a former expatriate scholar, now advanced in age but who had once lived in Ibadan in the early to mid-1960s, engaged me in a deep, face-to-face, soul-searching conversation about Nigeria’s sad situation. His question has become even more pertinent in light of recent events in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State, where gunmen attacked three schools, and in Nigeria as a whole, where all manner of kidnappings, abductions, and insecurity have reared their heads. His concerns arose from the rising tide of lawlessness and the dangers it poses to public safety, national stability, and livelihoods. Rightly so. The enemy within is now much more ferocious than the external enemies we had prepared the Nigerian Army for over the years. The Nigerian Army is now deployed to confront the enemy within, which, so to speak, should be the concern of the police and the domestic intelligence services. It is obvious and saddening that the Nigeria Police Force is beyond its depth in bringing the country’s sad situation to heel. But we all know that policing a terrorised population of over 200 million cannot be a tea party. Nevertheless, it raises a pertinent question. Is it too late to revamp our security architecture?
    On May 15, 2026, 39 students and seven teachers from some schools in Oriire Local Government were abducted; one teacher was killed in the process, while another, Mr Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded in captivity. Amid the problems caused by insecurity in the country, there have been calls to establish the State Police as a solution to insecurity and as an alternative to the overworked Nigeria Police Force. The mantra of self and community defence has also become frenetic. Almost everyone is invoking one solution or another. It is a cacophony out there. This was in the face of endemic terrorism, kidnapping, and intense criminality in the urban, rural, and ungoverned forest areas spread across the country. The cry for the dismantling of the centralised police force has also become extremely loud. Now, we are caught between history and the needs of the present. Insecurity in Nigeria led my elderly friend to ask me a single but pertinent question: ‘What happened to your [Police] Special Branch?’ He then went on to speak very highly of the yeoman services rendered by the Special Branch of the Nigeria Police Force, not only in intelligence matters but also in forestalling the breakdown of law and order within the country on a day-to-day basis. That is, beyond the politically induced problems fomented by our ruling elites.
    Why did he ask me such a question? His nostalgia for the period he was describing had apparently kept him in touch with happenings in Nigeria and the frenetic changes in administrative matters and other aspects of Nigeria’s development. Despite his age, he has remained riveted to Nigerian issues. Although his attention was surely more focused on the northern part of the country, where he had spent more years during his sojourn in Nigeria, he spoke so highly of the Special Branch’s ability to infiltrate criminal gangs and get the job done with clinical efficiency. But we can argue that the country had a smaller population, that life was less brutish, and that people were still friendlier. The population of our criminals was very low indeed. Even then, he thinks the Special Branch should have been allowed to grow in tandem with the country’s changes rather than being dismantled.
    In recent times, he has heard, as has everyone around the world, that Nigeria has become almost ungovernable, with crime multiplying at an alarming rate. The country has also developed a booming kidnapping economy, in which ransom payments have become an industry. What then is the Special Branch, and why did it come to the fore during our discussion? This is not an attempt to call for the restoration of the Special Branch. I am simply using it to understand what went wrong and how we may address the problems now staring us in the face.
    The Special Branch was the unit of the police force responsible for internal security and intelligence in the country. In other words, it operated as the Secret Service. This was before that branch was excised from the police following the 1976 military coup to form the Nigerian Security Organisation (NSO) under Decree No. 27 of 1976. Later, General Babangida restructured the NSO, splitting it into three separate bodies, one of which became the State Security Service (SSS). Apparently, the police lost their incisors with the excision of intelligence work from the structure. For my elderly friend, the dismantling of the Special Branch may have contributed to the police force’s loss of control over the country’s overarching security. He then went on to critically examine, from an experiential perspective, the possible reasons for the large-scale insecurity assailing the country. But unlike him, we are at the mercy of ‘opinions’ that are neither far-reaching enough nor have any historical depth.
    The looming breakdown of law and order in the country is obvious to everyone, near and far. But so is the police force’s lack of resolve to address the problems. In a recent article about Michael Oyedokun, the Mathematics teacher savagely killed by terrorists in the unfortunate Oriire incident, Lanre Ogundipe, the Public Affairs Analyst and former President of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, poignantly highlighted what should worry us all. The crisis before us, he proclaimed, is no longer about security failure. It is now a moral emergency. His stance further impelled me to work on this piece, given the widespread concern about our values and safety, and the calls for improved security measures across the country.
    The question now is how to counteract the negative effects of insecurity and decay. How well have the State Security Service and the police cooperated to ensure the country’s safety and security? How effective is security cover across the country compared with the days when the police force jointly handled policing duties and intelligence services? But, like the elderly gentleman’s question, we can ask in a similar vein, what happened to our very efficient Criminal Investigation Department [C.I.D]?
    The voices of reason and law are silent amid the wild excitement of crime, criminality, and insurgency. In what ways have the surviving old hands in the police force drawn the attention of the public and government to the lacuna in the handling of police duties in the country? In the face of looming anarchy, we must now step back to look at where things went wrong. We should attend to matters that provoke rebellion, such as the unjust and arbitrary use of public resources. Others include a lack of humane governance at all levels. The gentleman in question had asked me a pertinent and sensible question that I was unable to answer immediately, since I was neither a security expert nor someone who had paid significant attention to police matters.
    Now, I realise that amid the confusion across the country, we must pay close attention to what has happened and is happening to the Nigeria Police Force. This becomes clearer when we look at the past and its relevance to the present and the future. All these embarrassments can be traced back to past errors and a lack of vision. The Special Branch of the Nigeria Police Force combined policing and intelligence-gathering.
    With recent developments in the hitherto stable Oyo State, I decided to look more closely at his question, especially since it was in the same region where the elderly gentleman had lived safely for years. He had been quick to point out that it was not as if there were no thieves or criminals during that period; he told me the Police Special Branch had always been on top of the situation. But since he was also a frequent visitor to the northern part of the country, he was abreast of the Special Branch’s exploits in smashing criminal gangs there. But what happened to the Special Branch?
    In a country that has become increasingly chaotic and unsafe, there are still those who remember Nigeria as a land of peace and prosperity. We have seen poor judgement in several ways among those who have governed us. Nigerians can dismantle anything. One of our professors in Ibadan (now deceased) was once quoted as paraphrasing the old hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, written by Cecil Frances Alexander, while celebrating the beauty of God’s creation. In frustration, the professor mused, ‘All things bright and beautiful, Nigeria kills them all.’ Was his conclusion true and just? Or shall we take his remark as a mere wisecrack? Your guess is as good as mine. Lest I be accused of thinking in terms of structures and conditions that disappeared some decades ago and no longer exist, let me add that life is all about sowing and reaping. And for those who do not know history, it is also about making unpardonable mistakes and learning from them. This is drawing our attention to issues of national security, poverty, the collapse of values, and politics.
    Now, back to the NPF. I know that many historians, including Professor Kemi Rotimi of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, have delved deeply into the institutional history of the police. Yet there remains a significant gap in answering the Police Question. It is a major question indeed. The more you look, the less you see. It reminds me of a former British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who, addressing frustration over the Irish problem in British history, asserted, “Each time I find an answer to the Irish question, they change the question.” We can see the NPF in the same light. The NPF has become Nigeria’s conundrum. Thus, until the relevant issues, processes, grievances, and structures are thoroughly understood, they are unlikely to be fully addressed or remedied. That is the issue with the Nigeria Police Force.
    When Alozie Ogugbuaja, then a superintendent of police in the mid-1980s, began shouting out some of the foibles that were ruining the police force and the country, he was told by the powers that be that it was beyond him to speak out. In 1986, while giving his testimony before the Justice Mustapha Akanbi Tribunal probing the student riots in Nigeria, he pointed out that the rank and file of the police had been neglected and that the welfare of the police had been allowed to go into ruins. He was not only told to shut up but was also severely maltreated and shoved out of the force unceremoniously. The man and the campaign he undertook for a better police force have now been consigned to the dustbin of history. The chicken has now come home to roost.
    A massive perception gap has assailed the police force in recent years. Few realise that this stems from the debilitation and emasculation the force has suffered. It has been deeply buffeted by poor pay, the collapse of police kitting (which left many policemen wearing tattered shoes and uniforms, though they look better now), unserviceable and poorly maintained vehicles, decrepit barracks, loss of firepower (thank God they eventually replaced their Mark IV rifles after years of derision and severe loss of life to better-armed hoodlums), loss of morale, decaying infrastructure, a decline in the standards of recruitment, promotion and advancement, the extremely insensitive nature of police decapitation in recent years, and extreme politicisation.
    I am not sure that men and women in the police force themselves would deny this. It is little wonder that members of the public now deride officers and men of the force. But some of us who grew up in the 1970s still met a good police force and heard good stories about their exploits in the 1960s. The men and women of the Nigeria Police Force were brilliant. Their exploits, both locally and internationally, were heroic even into the 1990s. The Anti-Riot Unit (then known as the MOPOL, or more popularly as the ‘Kill and Go’) was well organised, effective, and disciplined. The use of the MOPOL during the Second Republic (1979-83) is a story for the future. They were later christened ‘kill and be arrested’ by Gen. Buhari in 1985.
    Some of us, born in the 1960s and who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, still remember a razor-sharp C.I.D. unit. The officers were smart and dutiful. Alagbon C.I.D. was extremely well known (is it still in operation?). The apocryphal (?) story is still told of the CID lady who infiltrated the stronghold of a group known as Agbekoya in the Western State of Nigeria. The CID also successfully dismantled numerous criminal groups across the country. But now that criminal groups and elements have ballooned out of control, one is no longer sure whether the CID (what do they call them now?) has the men, materials, time, support, funding, and patience to carefully plan such an infiltration. I do not have my facts at hand now, but I am sure they are doing their best under the circumstances.
    But what happened to the police? The military began to tinker with the police, their equipment and morale. The police radio and communications system, in place since colonial days, was highly effective and modern. The army feared it, and during the military era it lost some of its effectiveness. The political elites also joined in, humiliating and emasculating the police for reasons best known to them. Seeing this, members of the public also joined in, deriding and emasculating the police to make them amenable to their whims. The loss of morale killed the NPF’s spirit and respectability. It became a bastion of corruption and inefficiency.
    Finally, members of the police force themselves began to nail the force’s coffin shut from the inside. It became a crisis of self-immolation. Commentators assert that we now have a force that has been hollowed out and is almost beyond redemption. But is that so? Stories now abound of the bestial and inhumane conduct of our policemen on the roads, in the dark, in their cells, and even during riots and demonstrations. Yet many of our compatriots will quickly add that there are good and benevolent stories to tell about our policemen and women. I can identify with both sides of the spectrum.
    We should now begin to confront our past. Nigeria has become a country where many reforms adopted by past governments have led to disaster or stunted growth and vision. We can count them. I must say that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when General Ibrahim Babangida was huffing and puffing, slashing, cutting and joining together, I had misgivings about some of the institutions being put in place. But don’t get me wrong. Some of the programmes and institutions he introduced were quite good, but others, in retrospect, smacked of poor judgement. Since then, almost every government has followed his missteps in the so-called reforms. Our ruling elites have skewed public understanding of public issues while undermining the facts and realities of those issues. People in government have become adept at the blame game.
    There is now a strident call for the creation of state police, amounting to mass hysteria. This is the same way people began to call for more universities without considering the impact on quality and relevance. What should we expect? This immediately raises more questions than it answers. Who really thinks for Nigeria? What is the quality of our think-tank, and how much history and sociology do they know? Our ruling elite must begin to look closely at the need to establish a Grand Strategy that looks beyond the immediate. Do we really think that the formation of state police will be an answer to the problems or the beginning of anarchy? I cannot yet answer this question. I have not undertaken a thorough study of society’s needs in the context of the civilisational collapse we are witnessing. But we should not yet be singing the NPF’s nunc dimittis.
    There is still room to redeem the country and its decaying institutions. But beyond this, I have come to a realisation. My compatriots no longer have a sense of history, nor do they feel any need for it. Yet we must. Historians will do well to publish occasionally to help cultivate a more discerning public. We now have too many ‘educated illiterates.’ This is not good for the country. We should begin creating structures for real improvement across the country. When we eventually settle down to improve society’s knowledge base, do what is good and right in the country, and put the right people in the right places everywhere, we will focus on system reforms.
    We urge changes at every level of government and society, or we should be prepared for the worst. There is now an urgent need to recognise the unpalatable truth that Nigerians of all classes have a claim to a livelihood in the land of their birth and to utilise its resources for the betterment of their lives. What is good for the leaders’ stomachs and their children is good for the citizens. We now need to develop a Grand Strategy for the Nigerian State. When that is done, we will return to a rephrased version of Alexander’s song and sing it with gusto: ‘All things bright and beautiful, Nigeria makes them all.’ That is in the long term.
    Let us also consider another question before we conclude. Is the NPF beyond redemption? Don’t get me wrong. Those agitating for the formation of a State Police have the right to do so. The NPF is an existing institution that is decaying before our very eyes. Should we fix it or continue to excoriate it? Did we treat the institution well ab initio? The much-needed reform of our national police institution is a sine qua non for our progress as a nation and people. A major step in this direction is to treat our policemen and women as human beings, fair and square. They must have decent accommodation, welfare programmes for their wives and children, good and competitive pay for the rank and file, and, ultimately, recognition of an extremely robust life after service.
    In the face of acute insecurity, poverty, economic decay and neglect, are we not expecting too much of the men and women of the NPF? Here, I am not suggesting overturning the security architecture on the ground. There is a missing rib on the side of the police that must be restored. That will give the NPF the essence and robustness needed to restore its stature. The humiliation of the Nigerian Police should stop first, and a massive effort should be put in place to ensure deep and profound reform of that institution, rather than the cosmetic reforms that have been put in place over the years. Such a step will hasten the emergence of the best among the men and women of that important national institution.

    • Professor Adesina teaches history at the University of Ibadan

     

  • A Party for Nigeria’s Latest Abductors, By Azu Ishiekwene

    A Party for Nigeria’s Latest Abductors, By Azu Ishiekwene

    Nigeria’s main political parties are in the thick of their primaries ahead of the 2027 general elections. That politicians can still manage to hold primaries in the midst of a worsening wave of horrendous attacks on communities and kidnappings in parts of the country, not to mention the economic hardship, suggests we must be living in different worlds.

    It reminds me of what the British historian Orlando Figes said in his acclaimed book, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, about the situation among the Russian elite before the revolution.

    “The upper classes,” he wrote, “lived in a world of luxury and privilege that seemed utterly divorced from the reality of the vast majority of the Russian people.”

    Russia was sitting on a volcano, yet its elite was comfortably unaware.

    It’s either we’re lost or have grown so used to bad things that they no longer matter. Whatever the case, it’s a dangerous place to be.

    ‘It’s coming home!’

    After weeks or even months of attacks on communities and places of worship in Kwara State, the bridge to the country’s South, this monster is coming South in full swing, with the reported attacks on communities in neighbouring Oyo State on May 15, and the abductions of 39 students, seven teachers and a two-year-old child. At least two of the teachers have reportedly been killed in the most gruesome manner.

    There has been no shortage of mic-chewing, as usual. The Federal Government has condemned the abductions as “barbaric” and promised to intensify rescue operations, while the state government has acknowledged a “failure of intelligence gap.”

    Yet, before the last echo of these worn-out phrases faded, or any genuine comfort or help reached the distraught and broken families and communities, the politicians had bolted to monitor the results of their party primaries. This is how it was in Russia. Much of the aristocracy and court elite were attending dinners, theatre outings, receptions, ballets, and court ceremonies. Tsar Nicholas II was, in fact, outside the capital, writing about the weather, his meals and conversations with aides.

    Let them comfort themselves.

    What does it matter? After all, the May 15 abductions in Oriire Local Government were only just one more surge in a relentless wave, going back to the Chibok girls, the Dapchi girls and many other abductions that piled on. The families and communities affected will be fine.

    And so, in their misery, these families are left to scrape the promise of hope from useless press statements and the social media handles of politicians whose primary job is to keep them safe. There’s no sense of shame or feeling of loss, except for the families and communities to whom the loss of even one person means everything.

    No need to ask where these politicians came from. They’re from amongst us, and to some extent, our choices also helped to make them the monsters they have become. That’s why the party primaries are more important than the dozens of children kidnapped or the lives of their teachers murdered by abductors, despite the repeated promises of this and previous governments to implement the Safe Schools Initiative.

    Primaries like no other

    One thing I thought would never fail was politics – yet even the outcome of the recent party primaries makes you wonder just what our politicians are good for. The outcomes of the primaries, in many instances, were neither good for humour nor useful as a reference. They were grotesque jokes.

    Watching the political barometer across party lines is almost like waiting for floodwaters to recede before assessing the extent of damage. Direct, indirect or consensus arrangements have been the practice among parties in the current political dispensation since 1999. In all but a few instances, the ongoing ones have served a dual purpose – manufacturing winners and multiplying grievances among losers.

    Yet, the primaries are supposed to be meaningful exercises to decide not only which candidates will run, but also who really controls a party, generate internal cohesion, gauge the political pulse, and pave the way to the general election. It’s the party’s version of housekeeping.

    Of much concern, however, is that the primaries are assuming the image and likeness of the desperate politicians themselves. Increasingly, they have become a war in which politicians and party members practice on themselves what they intend to unleash on the electorate: ambition, self-interest, and power without responsibility.

    Without exception, the primaries or adoptions look like a mix of organised manipulation and elite horse trading. There’s no better evidence of high-cost tolling than the prices of nomination forms, which are pegged with the intention to exclude all except those armed with political long knives wantonly.

    The presidential primaries, especially, have always exposed the charade that passes for internal party democracy. Unfortunately, these theatres of absurdity not only provide the leeway for Nigeria’s underwhelming leadership recruitment process but also underpin the entrenchment of transactional politics.

    Counting in their millions

    The ruling All Progressives Congress’ (APC’s) presidential nomination form, priced at N100 million, favoured wealthy aspirants or those with strong patronage networks. It narrowed the field to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Stanley Usifo, providing the needed formality and a convenient but inconsequential challenge that gives legitimacy.

    President Tinubu’s vote tally of 10.99 million at the primaries surpassed the 8.79 million he obtained in the presidential election of 2023. The results point to one of two likely scenarios: either the 31 governors in the APC fold are working overtime to deliver a second term to the President, or the party has finally landed a bogey that approximates President Muhammadu Buhari’s legendary 12-million voter base.

    Same of the same

    Also, after Tuesday’s court eligibility ruling, there’s a huge guessing game about whether former President Goodluck Jonathan will contest on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). This party already has a factional candidate in Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State. But Jonathan is a scarecrow; he will not run.

    The African Democratic Congress (ADC), on its part, is living up to its billing as the party of Vice President Atiku Abubakar, formed by Atiku for Atiku. It’s painfully amusing that it has taken two aspirants, Mohammed Hayatu-Deen and Rotimi Amaechi, months to see what they didn’t need glasses to see.

    For its part, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has dispensed with the nonsense of the so-called direct primaries in which persons who cannot accurately count the fingers on their own hands are appointed to count voters. The party crowned Peter Obi as its consensus candidate, sparing him his mortal fear of a contested primary.

    The joke is on Banire!

    My good friend, Dr. Muiz Banire, SAN, who stubbornly insists that Nigeria’s political parties cannot grow without internal democracy, can now see that internal democracy is what the strongest faction of the party says it is.

    And in a system like ours, where party members are hardly financial members and have no idea how the party was formed or what it is about, the “owners of the party” will always have their way, which quite often, also means having not just the party, but also the courts in their pockets.

    Now that the wanton joke called party primaries are over – or nearly over – I hope politicians, and the security men taken off their duty posts as monitoring agents, will go after the Oriire abductors.

    It should concern politicians that winning the party’s ticket is one thing, but more important, having a country in which to contest the election and govern is quite another.

     

    This column will be rested until June 19

    Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.

     

     

  • The rebellion in APC, By Lasisi Olagunju

    The rebellion in APC, By Lasisi Olagunju

    For no reason beyond bad belle, Orishala urged Ogun to pull down Orunmila’s house. Why? Ogun asked. Orishala hinted that Orunmila had become a dangerous rival to his dominance in the pantheon of the gods.

    Like a hired killer, Ogun agreed. But how would he recognise Orunmila’s house? He had never been there. Orishala gave detailed directions and added one crucial clue: Orunmila’s house, unlike his own, had no white cloth on its roof.

    But Orunmila had ears everywhere. He heard the plot and acted swiftly. Under cover of darkness, he removed the white cloth from Orishala’s roof and placed it on his own.

    So when Ogun arrived in fury, the house he smashed belonged to Orishala, his client. Ogun killed everyone inside and left Orunmila untouched. Then Orunmila danced and sang: Aseni n se ara è. From that day, Orunmila became the boss.

    A few weeks ago, while writing about the splintering of opposition parties and the coronation songs in the APC, I wrote about a man who set fire to his neighbours’ huts, forgetting that flames obey no boundaries; they usually consume their owner too.

    I apply the Orishala-Orunmila story to Nigeria’s party politics. Orunmila’s survival sense is lacking in opposition parties. He survived because he saw the danger coming and acted. Nigeria’s opposition parties, by contrast, have often behaved like victims waiting patiently for the executioner.

    But karma is real, even the neck of one who beheads is not immune to the sharp sword of death. The APC once celebrated the demolition of its rivals’ political homes. Today, the bell tolls for the demolisher.

    And those leaving are not limping quietly into the night. They are talking; using words that de-market. A former Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, who resigned from the APC days after losing the party’s governorship primary in Nasarawa, said internal democracy, fairness, transparency and equal opportunity that should guide a democratic political party were absent in the ruling party. That is not a good testimonial for a party that wears ‘progressive’ on its forehead.

    Adamu was not alone.

    For the same reason, former Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, announced his resignation from the party. A day later, a former Speaker of the Delta State House of Assembly also quit. Their departure is not the issue. The issue is that the ruling party could itself suffer what it once mocked others for suffering.

    Even then, APC should worry less about those quitting; its death may be those who are staying put like the pest that has vowed to destroy kolanut from inside. Political parties are usually damaged more by the wounded who remain than by the angry who leave.

    So, from Nasarawa to Delta, and across much of the federation where primaries were conducted, the APC is struggling to contain the inferno ignited by the very process it called primaries. What was meant to be a season of coronation has become a season of rebellion. The fire it lit in other people’s compounds has found its way back home.

  • An epidemic of sorrow, By Lasisi Olagunju

    An epidemic of sorrow, By Lasisi Olagunju

    In Oyo State, a woman has four grandchildren and a daughter-in-law abducted from a school by terrorists. They are still in the bush; their abductors are unyielding.

    An Ekiti man took N10.5 million to kidnappers and still failed to secure the release of his 80-year-old mother.

    On Saturday in Katsina, a Major General, former spokesman of the Nigerian military and his wife were abducted in broad daylight and dragged into the bush.

    The woman with four grandchildren and a daughter-in-law in captivity was a ghostly sight to behold. Sobbing, she told Governor Seyi Makinde during his visit to her village on Saturday:

    “E nwo mi? As you are looking at me like this, I am naked; my four grandchildren and daughter-in-law who teaches at the school were taken away. My son’s wife is the one with a child in the video (released by the terrorists). We have never witnessed anything like this in our community. It is so sad. My grandchildren are there in the bush. The government should help bring them back safely. You are the only one who can do it.”

    As the woman sobbed, her tears echoed across the field. Even if you have feasted on the tortoise’s jinxed head and become immune to pity, the video I watched and the photographs of victims’ relatives who met the governor should still break your heart.

    Nigeria personifies Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet where we learn that grief with its synonym – heartache – can be unremitting in occurrence. The playwright writes that “sorrow comes not single spies, but in battalions.” What bandits have put in the Ogbomoso area is a full barn of woes.

    Death brings grief; unresolved abduction brings endless torment. Disappearance keeps hope and despair locked in a ceaseless struggle. As the Yoruba say, “Ọmọ ẹni kú, ó sàn ju ọmọ ẹni nù lọ”—painful as the death of a child may be, it is still better than the agony of knowing that the child lives in the house of death.

    As in the classical elegies, grief moved through the Oyo community like a dark procession, leaving behind shattered families, yet unanswered prayers and cries heavy with loss.

    Like Macduff’s Scotland, Nigeria weeps and bleeds; each day adds a fresh wound to its many scars.

    In April, the kidnappers in Ekiti demanded N10.5 million. They collected the money in a Kwara forest and still refused to release the 80-year-old woman and other captives, insisting that the community must produce another N40 million. Ogundele Ojo, the man who led the team that took the ransom to the bandits, is from a village called Eda Oniyo in Ekiti State. His ordeal was narrated to a radio presenter and is captured in a video now circulating online.

    The man said his mother, Rachael Aina, his younger brother’s wife, her only child, and several other villagers were abducted during a church service. The presiding pastor was shot in the back, the bullet tearing through his chest. In 2026 Nigeria, a place of prayer became a house of mourning; a gathering for worship ended in tears, terror and blood.

    “This is my mother’s photo, she just came back from the hospital the day she was abducted,” the man said and broke down in tears.

    Two weeks ago, Emeritus Professor Toyin Falola told me in an interview that Nigeria suffers from an epidemic of insecurity and an epidemic of death. He was right; his words perfectly capture a country where every day brings fresh tragedy.

    Shakespeare, writing in Macbeth, describes a broken nation where “each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven on the face that it resounds…and yelled out like syllable of dolor..” Four centuries after Macbeth was written, the line reads like a dispatch from Nigeria. Each new morning in Nigeria brings fresh widows, new orphans and new griefs. Sorrow, in relentless fury, seems to strike heaven itself in the face, compelling even the skies to cry out in anguish.

    The dam has broken.

    A friend and I asked ourselves last night: how many Nigerians are chained in forests, camps and hideouts across this country? Nobody knows. Not the communities. Not the security agencies. Not the government. If a figure is announced at 8 a.m., it becomes obsolete by nine.

    The abduction statistics are more elusive than Nigeria’s ‘faithless’ primary election figures. We have become a nation counting victims without knowing their number. Horror has become our country’s daily companion.

    Even as we speak, the epidemic spreads. Before Oyo, Ekiti and Katsina came other afflictions, arriving in waves like the plagues of Egypt, each one more frightening than the last.

    The tragedies are so many that one easily loses count. But Amnesty International, made of sterner stuff, keeps a tally. I have here some of the entries in its ledger of Nigerian sorrow:

    On 3 January 2026, gunmen attacked Kasuwan Daji community in Niger State’s Borgu Local Government Area and abducted 57 people.

    On 3 February 2026, armed men invaded Woro village in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State, killing about 200 people and abducting 176 others.

    On 3 March, Boko Haram fighters attacked Ngoshe town in Borno State’s Gwoza Local Government Area, abducted more than 400 people and laid siege to the town.

    In the first week of March, gunmen stormed Kurfa Danya and Kurfan Magaji villages in Zamfara State’s Bukkuyum Local Government Area and abducted 150 people, most of them women and children.

    On 19 March, Boko Haram fighters seized more than 100 displaced persons working in Kumbul Forest near Mafa in Borno State.

    On 22 March, gunmen attacked three churches in Kaduna State’s Kachia Local Government Area and abducted 30 worshippers.

    The list is long, as long as the line of hungry almajirai waiting for food in a northern town. These are not mere statistics. They are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, neighbours and friends. They are Nigerians swallowed daily by a widening geography of fear.

    The dead are not worse off than the living; the abducted are as traumatised as the spared. The grief of the afflicted is beyond words. Yet Amnesty International captured some of their voices:

    “They didn’t just kill; they stole our lives away. They abducted 176 people, including my second wife and my three daughters. One of them is only two years old. I have seen the video they posted on social media. I heard my wife’s voice. I saw my people. It has been almost two months now, and they are still in that forest,” said a man from Woro community in Kwara State.

    Another resident described the wider tragedy:

    “In almost all cases of these abductions, people were also killed while homes and shops were looted and razed. In some cases, families have had to dispose of everything they own to pay ransom, while villages often crowd-fund to rescue their people. Those who cannot pay are sometimes killed, disappeared or subjected to further torture. What we are witnessing in northern Nigeria today is an abduction crisis that increasingly endangers lives.”

    Those northern voices were recorded in April 2026. We are now in June, and the tears have spread beyond the North. The West is drenched. Last week, I said I feared a convulsion or a combustion. I still do. Each day of anxiety, grief and pain deepens a dangerous perception in the South: that the violence tormenting its communities is being imported from elsewhere. Every fresh abduction, every killing, every shattered family pushes more people towards a conclusion that the terror afflicting their communities comes from outside their homeland. That is a dangerous road for any country to travel.

    And the Nigerian state appears helpless—stuck and sinking in the mud of unregulated violence. Where do we go from here? Should citizens be trained and licensed to carry arms for self-defence? Increasingly, these are questions which frightened communities are asking.

    History offers an intriguing parallel to what we suffer. The Spanish countryside of the eighteenth century was insecure and poorly policed. Farmers and their harvests, travellers and their wares, were easy prey for bandits. In 1769, King Charles III of Spain responded by issuing a decree prohibiting the carrying of arms in the countryside after the hunting season. But he exempted farmers and travellers.

    The exemption was revealing. As Henk Driessen (1983) notes, it amounted to an implicit admission that rural areas were insecure and could not be efficiently policed by the state. The king restricted weapons, but he also understood that those who worked the land and travelled lonely roads deserved safety and needed the means to defend themselves.

    The question for Nigeria is whether we have reached the same point as eighteenth-century Spain, where the state tacitly admitted its inability to secure the countryside, or whether our rulers still refuse to accept that much of the country beyond the cities is unsafe and effectively abandoned to its fate.

    Above, I quoted Shakespeare’s “syllable of dolor.” In today’s English, the phrase means a cry of grief, a sound made by sorrow itself. As I write this elegy for a wounded country, the feeling is that every abduction, every ransom demand and every fresh grave adds another note to Nigeria’s long song of dolor.

    Something must change before that sad song becomes our permanent national anthem.

  • The TinuBOOM is Coming, By Ademola Oshodi

    The TinuBOOM is Coming, By Ademola Oshodi

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu promised reform at the start of his administration. Those reforms were necessary, but they have placed real pressure on many Nigerians. Families have had to make harder choices around food, transport, rent, school fees and energy costs, while traders and small businesses have had to rework their margins under the combined pressure of exchange-rate changes, credit costs and rising inputs. Any account of the administration’s early returns must begin with that reality, because reform loses public trust when government speaks above the experience of the people it serves.

    The fair question is whether the difficult decisions taken since May 2023 have begun to correct the distortions that weakened Nigeria’s economy, and whether those corrections are now strong enough to reach citizens more directly. On that question, the evidence points to an important but unfinished story.

    The Tinubu administration has not solved every problem in three years, but measurable early returns have begun to show across various national facets including reserves, revenue, oil production, capital inflows, growth, education financing and Nigeria’s standing before investors and development partners.

    President Tinubu came into office at a time when Nigeria’s public finances were under severe strain. Fuel subsidy was draining public money that could have funded basic services, the Central Bank had large foreign exchange backlogs, multiple exchange rates created room for arbitrage, oil production was below national needs, and public revenue was too low for the scale of Nigeria’s development demands. These were deep structural constraints that limited the ability of government to fund services, protect the currency, and support businesses and households. Avoiding them would have bought short-term comfort at the cost of deeper national damage.

    One early return is already clear in Nigeria’s external position. The Central Bank cleared around $7 billion in outstanding foreign exchange obligations which helped restore confidence in a system many airlines, manufacturers, investors and businesses had struggled to trust. Since then, Nigeria’s net foreign-exchange reserves have risen from $3.99 billion at the end of 2023 to $34.8 billion by the end of 2025, while gross reserves of reached $50.45 billion by mid-February 2026. The balance-of-payments position also turned around, moving from deficits of $3.34 billion in 2023 and $3.32 billion in 2022 to a $6.83 billion surplus in 2024. These are not abstract figures. They show a country rebuilding the buffers it needs to meet external obligations, support currency stability and regain credibility in the foreign-exchange market.
    That repair is also showing in investor behaviour. Capital inflows rose by almost 90 per cent in 2025, from $12.32 billion to $23.22 billion, with foreign portfolio investment carrying much of the increase. This should not be confused with a full factory-investment boom, but it shows that investors are returning to Nigerian financial assets. The stock market gives the clearest expression of that renewed confidence. In 2023, the All-Share Index stood around 53,000 and market capitalisation around ₦30 trillion. By 2026, the index had reached 250,000, with market capitalisation rising to ₦160 trillion, recording a near fivefold rise to a record 250,000 points. That kind of movement does not happen in a market where investors see only drift and uncertainty. It reflects a major revaluation of Nigerian assets and a growing belief that the reforms are positively changing the direction of the economy.
    Inflation is the most sensitive indicator because Nigerians judge policy by what they pay every day. When President Tinubu assumed office, inflation was already at 22.41 per cent in May 2023, before the difficult but necessary reforms around subsidy and the exchange rate pushed price pressures higher, reaching 34.80 per cent in December 2024. The more recent figure of 15.69 per cent in April 2026 points to easing, but it must be interpreted cautiously because the National Bureau of Statistics rebased the Consumer Price Index. The point is, inflation has moved down from the severe stress of the adjustment period, but food prices and household costs must fall further before many Nigerians can feel the full benefit.

    The growth and revenue figures show an economy drawing strength from outside oil. In the first quarter of 2023, before President Tinubu assumed office, the NBS put real GDP growth at 2.31 per cent, with the economy slowed by the cash crunch. By the first quarter of 2026, real GDP growth had risen to 3.89 per cent and is projected to rise above 4 per cent within a year according to international financial institutions. Manufacturing had grown by 3.29 per cent, and the non-oil sector accounted for 96.08 per cent of real GDP. Between January and August 2025, total government collections also rose to ₦20.59 trillion, from ₦14.6 trillion in the same period of 2024, with non-oil sources bringing in ₦15.69 trillion, about three out of every four naira collected. This shows the economy has continued to expand, and much of that activity is coming from where most Nigerians work and do business, and government now has more fiscal room to fund roads, schools, health care, security and social support. The more Nigeria can fund public obligations from a broader revenue base, the less it has to govern from a position of fiscal anxiety.
    Oil output strengthens the recovery case because it sits at the centre of Nigeria’s foreign-exchange and revenue position.

    In April 2023, before President Tinubu assumed office, Nigeria’s average crude oil and condensate output stood at about 1.25 million barrels per day. By April 2026, it had risen to 1.663 million barrels per. That is an increase of about 32.8 per cent in total crude oil and condensates from April 2023. For an economy that depends heavily on oil for foreign exchange and public revenue, that recovery gives the country more room to defend the naira, fund the budget, meet external obligations and rebuild investor confidence in the upstream sector.
    NELFUND is one of the clearest ways the reform agenda is reaching households. For many families, the hardest part of higher education is the pressure of paying fees and upkeep at the same time. By creating a public financing route for students, the administration is reducing one of the barriers that keeps capable young Nigerians out of school or pushes them to drop out. As of March 9, 2026, the fund had disbursed ₦206.29 billion to 1,164,222 beneficiaries, with ₦128.84 billion paid to institutions for fees and ₦77.45 billion paid to students as upkeep allowances. The figures show a policy meeting a real need across the federation: education financing is providing practical support for families. We are seeing continuous stability and growth in the education sector.

    The new minimum wage also belongs in this assessment, although wage policy alone cannot defeat inflation. President Tinubu signed the new national minimum wage into law in July 2024, raising it from ₦30,000 to ₦70,000 and the review period from five years to three years. The increase responded to a real problem: wages had fallen too far behind prices. Wage policy alone cannot defeat inflation, but it helps protect the lowest-paid workers during a difficult adjustment period. The larger goal remains an economy where incomes rise because production, productivity and business activity are rising with government adjusting the wage floor from time to time.

    Nigeria’s reform credibility is also changing how the country is read abroad. For foreign affairs, this has practical value. It affects how investors price the country, how lenders assess risk, how development partners engage, and how much confidence Nigeria carries into economic negotiations. Multilateral bodies like the IMF and the World Bank have linked Nigeria’s current stronger macroeconomic stability to reforms. Also significant, in May 2026, S&P positively upgraded Nigeria’s long-term sovereign rating, citing a stronger macroeconomic profile, higher oil production, domestic refining capacity and exchange-rate liberalisation. These are signals that Nigeria is beginning to recover credibility in the places where capital, credit and economic influence are negotiated.

    For those of us who work on foreign affairs, these domestic indicators are directly connected to Nigeria’s standing abroad. A country negotiates better when businesses trust its currency market, airlines and investors believe legitimate obligations will be honoured, partners see better fiscal management, and citizens abroad experience better service from the Nigerian state. Stronger reserves, a balance-of-payments surplus, renewed capital inflows, better revenue performance, oil output recovery and education financing shape how Nigeria is read by investors, development partners, diaspora communities and other governments.

    The strongest criticism of the administration may be that Nigerians still experience reform as pressure before relief. That criticism cannot be dismissed. But, three years after President Tinubu took office, the honest conclusion is that the early returns are real, and historically significant. Nigeria has rebuilt net foreign-exchange reserves from a very weak position. It has moved from balance-of-payments deficits to surplus. Capital is returning to Nigerian financial assets. The stock market has reached record levels. Public revenue has improved. Growth has continued under difficult conditions. Oil output has recovered from the low levels recorded before the administration. NELFUND has opened a new route for education financing. The minimum wage has been raised. These are serious developments.

    The responsibility now is to protect the gains, reduce inflation further, improve food supply, lower business costs, deepen infrastructure and energy reforms, strengthen security and demand better spending from every tier of government. The early returns are beginning to show. The next task is to make them more visible in the markets, classrooms, farms, workplaces, airports, hospitals and homes.

    Like Rome, Nigeria will not be built in one season. Development requires patient building, disciplined choices and steady execution. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is laying that foundation. That is the TinuBOOM effect: the early signs of a country beginning to recover its footing, rebuild confidence and prepare the ground for wider relief.

    -Oshodi is the Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Foreign Affairs and Protocol

  • #2027: Team Tinubu And ‘Danger Of Assumption’, By Martins Oloja

    #2027: Team Tinubu And ‘Danger Of Assumption’, By Martins Oloja

    Martins Oloja
    Martins Oloja

    At this time when politicians smile out of meeting rooms where they often bury truth in a grave, it is also the right time for social commentators and oracles to tell them some inconvenient truths that will assist them in their reflection, deflection and even defection.

    So, permit me today to begin a serial to our leaders at all levels on the danger of some assumptions that may set off their abysmal failure in office. First, let me confess that this title isn’t original to me. Read below a story of how I got fascinated by the title through a public affairs writer/speaker from Katsina State, Mallam Sani Ibrahim Dabai who once spoke to it at a colloquium. Below is the original copy that got me cracking:
    “A few months ago, I was invited to a programme somewhere  as a guest speaker.
    When I entered the auditorium, I saw some guests I knew sitting in one corner. I went up to them and started to greet them one after the other. I shook their hands, even with the ones I didn’t know until I got to one guest. I didn’t know him and when I extended my hand, he ignored it. After few seconds, I withdrew my hand. All my thought was, “what arrant nonsense?” I kept asking the question from myself. I felt very embarrassed and angry. Embarrassed for myself and angry at the man. What was he feeling like, I thought. All those other guests accepted my greeting. And to my knowledge, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I gave him a very scornful look, greeted the remaining guests and went to take a seat. Even after I sat down, I was still pissed. I kept stealing glances at the guest to see how he would react to other people.
    Then I saw it… Amazingly he was blind!!!
    His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see at all! The other guests who came to greet him had to touch him first, then take his hand if they wanted to shake hands with him.
    To my great surprise, he is my hidden protege who really appreciates my lectures. I never knew he came purposely because his wife informed him that I would be the guest speaker for this year’s programme. In fact, he was waiting to hear someone bemoan my name so as to stand and hug me. When I heard this, my embarrassment level tripled. In addition to that, I felt stupid, very stupid. I was still angry, just angry at myself. In fact, I could not say a word to him until I got to the podium and my speech for that programme changed from “Recovery” to  “DANGER OF ASSUMPTION”.
    ‘How they shape our perceptions and limit our potential’
    We’ve all done it. A quick glance at someone’s outfit, a passing remark, or an incomplete piece of information leads us to conclusions that feel true but are often far from it. Assumptions are a part of human nature, a mental shortcut designed to save time and energy. But what happens when these assumptions lead us astray? Making assumptions about people, situations, and outcomes not only limits our understanding but can also rob us of opportunities for growth, connection, and success. Let’s dive into why assumptions are so tempting, the risks they carry, and how we can reframe our thinking for better outcomes.
    Assumptions are rooted in our brain’s need for efficiency. Instead of processing every detail, we rely on past experiences, societal norms, and biases to fill in the gaps. While this can be helpful in certain scenarios (e.g., assuming a car will stop at a red light), it often backfires when applied to complex human interactions or unpredictable situations.
    I have to borrow from the brilliance of Mallam Sani Dabai who realised that he had to change his topic from ‘Recovery’ to ‘Danger of Assumptions’ to talk to our very presumptuous political leaders at all levels today so that Nigeria, our Nigeria would not come to harm through their #2027 ‘politricks’ that isn’t suggesting redemption songs at the moment. At this time of staccato voices that are clearly devoid of wisdom, reason and responsibility, this is a time to speak nothing but truth to the power of our duty bearers, our leaders who are believed to have had some assumptions that they don’t need the people’s votes or even support to be elected and re-elected at this time.
    When elections begin as a process in most parts of democratic worlds, leaders are always afraid of the people who are expected to vote for them to be or remain in power. But in Nigeria, the people have been wired to be afraid of their leaders who have curiously assumed that indeed as it is written, ‘wine is for merry making but money answereth all (their political) things’. They assume very dangerously that what money cannot do during elections, more money will do.
    From their body language and gleaning from their third anniversary speeches, we can deduce that there is no reference to their responsibility to a constitutional provision that, “security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. Yesterday, our leader told us, among others on “SECURITY AND NATIONAL UNITY”:
    “…Security remains central to our national mission and to the creation of a virile and prosperous society. Our Armed Forces and security agencies have intensified operations against terrorists, bandits, kidnappers, oil thieves, and criminal networks. While challenges remain, many communities and highways are becoming safer and more economically active. We continue investing in intelligence, surveillance, logistics, technology, and inter-agency coordination. We are improving the capabilities of our armed forces and security agencies, and reclaiming the authority of the Nigerian state wherever criminality threatens peace and order. While we continue to confront the challenges head-on, progress is being made. I want to assure you that this government will not relent until every Nigerian can live, work, travel, and dream in safety…”
    Even in a well-written anniversary article as part of wrap-around advertorial in major newspapers in Nigeria, the Information and National Orientation Minister, Alhaji Mohammed Idris posited:
    “…On this third anniversary we are very proud to affirm that President Tinubu has kept faith with the Nigerian people on all counts. We have an economy that has grown to ₦441.5 trillion in 2025, up from ₦309.5 trillion in 2023. Inflation has more than halved – from the 34.80% recorded in December 2024 to 15.69% in April 2026. Nigeria’s non-oil exports surged to $6.1 billion in 2025, an 11.5% increase over 2024; while Federation tax revenue collection rose from ₦19.9 trillion in 2023 to ₦28.3 trillion in 2025. Monthly disbursements by the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) have doubled to over ₦2 trillion, from less than ₦1 trillion in 2023, while foreign capital inflows have grown nearly 90% – from $12.32 billion in 2024 to $23.22 billion in 2025. External reserves have this year hit a thirteen-year high of $50 billion…”
    The President and his Information Minister have spoken and written well for the optics at this time. But there is a danger in their assumptions that the people who are expected to cast their ballot in most parts of the vast country of more than 90 million registered voters will be swayed by the flowery and elegant words used in the 3rd anniversary self glorification. Let’s face the brass tacks: I believe it is dangerous to assume that the core northern states of Sokoto, Kebbi, Katsina, Zamfara, Borno and Yobe where terrorists have kept them away from their farms and homes are persuaded by the grandiloquence of our leaders.
    Isn’t it dangerous too to assume that most parents in some Katsina communities where they have to release their daughters to terrorists for regular abuse and rape are persuaded that this administration “will “continue to confront the challenges head-on”? Will they believe the anniversary assurance “that this government will not relent until every Nigerian can live, work, travel, and dream in safety…”?
    The Information Minister’s statistics can’t be easily faulted but we can rely on a classic from a guru who claims that it is dangerous to assume sometimes that statistics can be used to confound the populace at all times. This is what a scholar, Aaron Levenstein, a professor of business management, teaches those who use statistics anyhow:
    “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital”
    Malam Idris, is doubtless, a good man but his anniversary statistics may have concealed the existential threats that most people face with insufferable food inflation, unaffordable energy prices, high cost of imports because of forex rate, low income, youth unemployment and multi-dimensional poverty of the people in the last three years.
    Specifically, the president has directed people generally to ask their governors in 36 states and Abuja what they have done with increased allocations as a result of savings from subsidy-is-gone ‘presidential order’ three years ago. There is therefore some danger in assumptions in Abuja that the governors have used the funds allocated to them to take care of the people in the state.
    Meanwhile, our leader’s third anniversary speech didn’t deepen the people’s assurance about security of the people, including in Oyo state where 46 children and teachers are still being tortured in the wilderness of the wicked. At press time, there was a report that two negotiators dispatched to strike a deal with the terrorists were killed too this week. This is how the wickedness from the wicked in Oyo was contextually reported by Albab Abdullahi:
    ‘In every civilized country and in every true religious teaching, negotiators are sacred. They are messengers of peace. They carry hope where there is fear. They speak for life when death is close. Even when talks are hard and danger is real, their role is respected. Their lives are not to be touched. History remembers them as heroes who save souls without firing a gun.
    But in Oyo, that sacred rule was shattered in cold blood.
    Two negotiators went into the bandits’ hideout to secure the release of abducted children. Their only weapons were words and goodwill. They went to find a way for peace, to bring terrified kids back to their parents. What did they meet? Death. The bandits did not see human beings. They did not see peace ambassadors. They saw targets. Another massacre happened. Blood was spilled on the very ground where negotiation was supposed to bring life. This is not just murder. This is a deep insult to humanity itself…
    When those who risk their lives to save others are slaughtered, it sends a clear and bloody message: these criminals want more than money. They want fear. They want control. They want to prove that no one is safe, not even those trying to end the nightmare.
    This evil is not only in Oyo. It is happening across Nigeria. Kidnapping for ransom has become a deadly business. Families cry, communities live in terror, and negotiators are increasingly becoming victims themselves. Each time this happens, it proves the same painful truth: the system is failing…”
    We can see from the sad news on the Oyo 46 and others in Borno, already a killing field, that there is a danger in assumptions of our leaders that all these economic and security issues threatening existence of Nigerians aren’t serious enough to stop their election and re-election, after all. This is just a wake-up call on how not to plan to win election and lose the country in 2027. We will continue next week on other vital areas where there are dangers in assumptions that mismanagement of national priorities doesn’t matter in an election year, after all. God bless Nigeria!
  • INEC, Judiciary on the March Again…to June 12, By Lanre Adewole

    INEC, Judiciary on the March Again…to June 12, By Lanre Adewole

    Last Tuesday, respected human rights and public good advocate, Femi Falana, SAN, raised the alarm that the Bar and the Bench (lawyers and judges) were gradually emerging as the main threat to peaceful 2027 general elections and possible transition.
    In picking his culprits, he hoisted the conflicting judgements from two federal courts of coordinate jurisdiction (same/parallel authority) on the power of the Independent National Electoral Commission to fix dates and deadlines for the processes and political parties’ activities that would culminate in their participation of the elections.
    While Justice Mohammed Umar of the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja invalidated INEC’s current timeline and deadlines for political parties to complete their nomination processes including an early submission of their membership registers, days after, his brother justice, just across the same Abuja street, Justice J.K Omotoso upheld the invalidated portions of the timetable, throwing the polity into a spin.
    You wonder what is the big deal about INEC’s timetable being partially disrupted by a court of competent jurisdiction. The tweaked Electoral Act requires political parties to submit their membership registers before their primaries and dual membership is an electoral crime. With the ruling party packed to the hilt with aspirations and ambitions, the decision of its leadership to keep the nomination exercise till the expiration of the membership register submission, was widely read as a trap to “hold down” (that Wike/Makinde coinage) disgruntled aspirants and make platform-change impossible for them, for the ventilation of their ambitions after being edged out in the ruling party.
    After the usual mumbling and grumbling about the ruling party’s perceived “legislative coup” in the alteration of the Electoral Act to allegedly confer undue advantage on itself, everyone appeared to be settling into the usual “cooling down” and resignation to helplessness when Justice Umar suddenly prised open the “prison” gate, for ambitions to start flying out of the “cocoon” they were trapped.
    It was a judgement practically unexpected. When I broke the story to the camp of a frontline APC governorship aspirant in a North Central state, (he was eventually muscled out of where he is currently and where he was aspiring to), the first reaction was “please who engineered this (the judgement)” and I was like “why the concern when you can just take the advantage and seek a new platform if you are certain you can win a statewide election”. But his camp was intent on knowing who were “behind” the plaintiff, the Youth Party, and eventually a name came up; a staunch member of the ruling APC who once vied for the presidency.
    There is a Yoruba adage about the family of concubine retaining as much scheming/sense as the husband’s (bi a se gbon nile oko la gbon nile ale). Nobody has monopoly of shenanigans. There is also another assuring truism about muni-muni (arrester) and the gbani-gbani (redeemer) being available in almost equal measure. Within hours of Justice Umar’s surprise “chain-breaker”, aspirants began porting, mostly wounded APC soldiers, resigning from the ruling party and joining opposition platforms, to confront their former allies in the general election. Of course, they are also not going to work for the presidential candidate of their new opponent. What a circular movement and a circus!
    But it would appear those who wanted to hold others down won’t let the “bondage” end easily. Pharaoh, despite the 10 plagues, wouldn’t even let the children of Israel easily out of bondage of about 114 years (history says they weren’t enslaved for the whole of the 430 years spent in exile. They were first well received because of Joseph until a Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph, now late, came into power. About 215 years of the 430 years were also spent in Canaan after leaving Egypt, going by historians’ accounts). He pursued and almost overtook before the Divine stepped in, loosened the ball joints of the pursuers’ chariots and drowned them all, including Pharaoh. That was in the Bible days, someone would say.
    Instead of chasing to the physical Red Sea, it is the proverbial one in Nigeria’s courtroom the pursuers and freedom-seekers landed. Within days of the let-my-people-go judgement of Justice Umar, the Red Sea situation reemerged in Justice Omotoso’s court. Despite INEC’s appeal of the earlier judgement and application to stay enforcement, Omotoso seemed much in a hurry to stop the “crossing” of the sea in-between. He had to issue a new order just like Pharaoh who wanted to reimpose “captivity”.
    Falana’s tone suggested indignation, knocking Omotoso and asking the National Judicial Council (NJC) to step in before the wigged ones (lawyers and judges) derail the barely-balanced civil rule in the country.
    Remonstrating, he said, “The judgments of the both courts of coordinate jurisdiction has caused unnecessary confusion in the polity. While Justice Muhammed Umar of the Federal High Court has limited INEC’s powers by barring it from imposing deadlines that conflict with statutory provisions, Justice A. K. Omotosho of the same Court has affirmed INEC’s authority to issue timetable that includes timelines for party primaries. INEC has been empowered to choose and pick which of the judgments to complied with.
    “The National Judicial Council had repeatedly cautioned Judges to desist from issuing conflicting orders whilst lawyers have equally been warned by the Nigerian Bar Association to stop filing cases that are programmed to cause Judges to issue conflicting orders.
    “In the instant case, Justice Omotosho ought to have allowed the Court of Appeal to determine the validity of the judgment of Justice Muhammed Umar instead of issuing conflicting orders.
    “The National Judicial Council and the Nigerian Bar Association should speedily investigate the circumstances surrounding the issuance of conflicting orders in the cases of Youth Party v INEC and Social Democratic Party v INEC.
    “Unless the Judges and lawyers involved in the legal charade are called to order, the 2027 election may be sabotaged by Judges and lawyers as was the case in 1993 when the Ibrahim Babangida military junta anchored the annulment of the results of the June 12 presidential election on conflicting orders of Nigerian courts” he warned.
    When I reached the judiciary leadership last week with the Falana jurisprudential epistle, providence arranged it in a way the leading lights were huddling, but in faraway place from home. But they got the message. The Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun CJNship is too radical to let a situation like this, slip and sleep. While I can’t assure on the number of heads that may go with the judicial embarrassment and recklessness, it is certain the return of the leadership to Nigeria would almost mirror the famous ipada bo Abija story (the return of Abija, the dreaded one).
    Proverbs 22:15 says “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him”.
    Only God knows what Bishop Ajayi Crowther was thinking in his translation of Bible to the Yoruba language from English Language when he rendered “foolishness” as “were” (madness in Yoruba), laying the scripture out as “aya omode ni were di si, pasan ibawi ni yio le jade”.
    Of course it is madness to keep doing same thing and expect a different outcome. If judges continue to behave like the proverbial/Biblical child with professional “madness” bound to their hearts, Me Lord should continue using her rod of correction. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is undoubtedly embroiled in its own electoral/succession crisis (many are alleging that ex-Lagos governor Fashola is uncharacteristically trying to foist a surrogate on the Body against the wish of majority of South West lawyers) but the outgoing leadership (also being accused of imposition), would have to pause with the Bar politics and join hands with the CJN in taming the monster about consuming our democracy. If two seniors lawyers receive heavy punishment, others will think twice before embarking on “negotiated” forum shopping again, though their sponsors in the political arena, may be untouchable for now.
    In the ensuing lawfare against the 2027 poll, there are other notable public good advocates who are picking another culprit for the ill-wind about consuming the democratic experience. Their pick is Joash Amupitan’s INEC. There are times God will just work you out of consideration for what is considered a chummy job to keep hassles away from you.
    Government institutions are becoming so patently partisan that defending them in certain instances, would ridicule even the best of image managers. Yes, INEC is the respondent in the Youth Party’s suit that opened a floodgate to aspiring defectors but the electoral body is expected to be neutral, which should normally see it complying with judicial orders and not fight them on appeal. The question is, will Amupitan be challenging the outcome of the judicial move if initiated by the ruling party or opposition elements sympathetic to the ruling party? Why would his INEC be quick to embrace the other judgement in the suit initiated by SDP which has been suspected of playing the ruling APC’s devil’s advocate and with alacrity, appealed the earlier order, on the same subject matter? There are times defending Amupitan’s alleged lack of partisan insularity, or not to hide words under the tongue as the Yoruba will describe tongue-in-cheek, his APC or more like Tinubu-centric disposition to his national job, is like defending Judas Iscariot and his 30 pieces of shekel bribe money, to “sell” Jesus.
    Amupitan should remember history. Only Attahiru Jega, in recent memory, can be pointed as former INEC chair who barely escaped with his integrity. History is spitting on the rest.
    Last Friday, firebrand Oby Ozekwesili, Olawale Okunniyi, Usman Bugaje and a host of other activists operating under the banner of Movement for Credible Election (MCE) unloaded on Amupitan’s INEC for choosing the appeal way against just obeying the declarative orders of Justice Umar.
    Just a scenario will justify their vituperation. The same Amupitan’s INEC rushed to obey the odds-and-ends ruling assumably “sacking” the David Mark-led national leadership of the leading opposition; African Democratic Congress (ADC) despite same not being the final judicial pronouncement on the leadership crisis in the party, believed to have been engineered by the ruling party.
    Will history not piss on Amupitan’s memory like this?

    Sent from my iPhone

  • Segun Osoba: Teacher, Scholar, Activist and a Rare Gift to the World, By Akanmu Adebayo and Olutayo Adesina

    Segun Osoba: Teacher, Scholar, Activist and a Rare Gift to the World, By Akanmu Adebayo and Olutayo Adesina

    How do you write the obituary of a man who achieved near immortality through his works and ideas? That is the question we, Dr Segun Osoba’s academic children and grandchildren, have ruminated on. Osoba, the Ijebu-Ode-born veritable Marxist scholar and one of the best-known radical historians of his generation, graduated from the University of Ibadan with a B.A. (History) in 1959. He also earned a Ph.D. in History from Moscow State University in the Soviet Union in 1967. He joined the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife) in 1967 as Lecturer Grade II. He remained at the institution until 1991, when he formally retired. Dr Osoba had rare intellectual vigour and a predictive capacity that permeated his teaching career, many, if not all, of his published works, and his public engagements. He also became extremely well known as a clear-headed ideologue in the aftermath of the Minority Report [of the Constitution Drafting Committee], which he jointly authored with his soulmate, Dr Bala Usman of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

    Dr Osoba was among the ‘49 Wise Men’ assembled in 1975 by the Murtala/Obasanjo administration for membership of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC). As a patriotic Nigerian, he led an exceptionally courageous life of service to humanity. Despite his infirmity in his later years, he remained actively engaged with his family, friends, and colleagues. His last public engagements were in 2019 and 2024. The former was the public re-launch of the Minority Report and Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1976; the latter was his 90th birthday ceremony in Ijebu-Ode, organised by his compatriots, family, and friends. On both occasions, despite diminished strength due to age, Osoba never gave up on Nigeria or on the necessity and possibility of radical change. His membership of associations and bodies that fought for equity, progress, and development underscored his commitment to human rights. During his time at the University of Ife, he helped make the Ife Collective a vibrant association of Marxist scholars and sympathisers, a veritable instrument of change. He also helped develop a younger generation of scholars who carried the light of Ife aloft in the global academe. He successfully supervised the Ph.D. theses of Professor Toyin Falola and Professor Akanmu Adebayo, both of whom went on to illustrious careers in the United States of America.

    Following a distinguished intellectual career, Dr Osoba’s public writings, first published in newspapers, and his hitherto unpublished public lectures and addresses were compiled and edited by Akanmu Adebayo and Olutayo Adesina. The compilation, published by John Archers Publishers Limited in 2023, is entitled Selected Writings in Defence of Human Rights, Social Justice and Equity by Segun Osoba. Within a short time of its publication, it sold out in bookshops. It is a compendium of major issues and developments experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. It comprises Osoba’s critique of the ruling elites and their handling of governance and the economy of the period. The younger generation of Nigerians would do well to read the compilation to understand the tragedy of the country’s development.

    Also, with his scholarly depth and intellectual engagements in mind, Osoba’s academic papers, originally published in journals and as book chapters, together with his previously unpublished academic writings, were compiled and edited by Akanmu Adebayo and Olutayo Adesina and published by Obafemi Awolowo University Press in 2024. The book is entitled Critical and Contentious Issues in the Modern and Contemporary History of Nigeria: Collected Writings of Samuel Olusegun Osoba. The depth, vigour and rigour that characterised his analysis and interpretations of diverse issues and experiences in Africa during the colonial and immediate post-colonial periods will make the book extremely important for understanding the ideological battles he fought over development, underdevelopment, neo-colonialism, accumulation, and the struggle for African emancipation. The book will serve present and future scholars and the general reader worldwide as a key source for understanding Nigerian and African issues.

    Finally, his compatriots and mentees organised a conference in his honour at the Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijagun, Ogun State, in December 2023 to celebrate his 90th birthday. The conference’s theme was History and the Persistent Struggle: Social Change, Nation-Building, and Constitution-Making in Post-Independence Africa. Stellar papers selected from the conference presentations form the content of the festschrift, Nigeria: History, Society, and Social Change in the Twenty-first Century, edited by Akanmu Adebayo, Olutayo Adesina, and Rasheed Owoyele Ajetunmobi. The book is in the final stages of publication by Bloomsbury Publishing, U.S.A. The dedication page of the book reads: “This book is dedicated to, and in honour of Dr Olusegun Osoba, Teacher, Scholar, Activist.”

    Segun Osoba departed this world on May 14, 2026, a day after we signed off on the carefully produced festschrift prepared in his honour, to make printed copies of the book after it had undergone rigorous proofreading. The chapters of the book were written by scholars from diverse generations in Nigeria, Liberia, and the United States. We are happy that he was honoured while he was alive. This book and others will serve as powerful testaments to the fact that he was a man of ideas, deep conviction and honour. But he is not going to be forgotten so soon. A palpable sense of loss and grief has been expressed by a wide range of people from around the globe, including some of his former colleagues and students. Two of our frontline professors at Ife who worked closely with Osoba gave testimonies about his intellectual sagacity and responsiveness. For Professor Richard Adeboye Olaniyan, the Diplomatic historian who was his colleague and friend, Osoba was a good man, friendly, amiable and helpful. To Akin Olorunfemi, retired Professor of Economic and Social history, who was also taught at Ife by the deceased, ‘Osoba was the teacher I enjoyed and loved most in OAU [Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife].’

    The eulogy by his colleagues, ideological friends, and a member of the new generation was also deeply significant. Jacob Adesina, one of our young Postgraduate students whom we detailed to work closely with Dr Osoba, described him as ‘the last of his kind. An organic intellectual to the core. The learned community will miss him… Unfortunately, he was not given enough flowers for what he represented in Nigeria’s political and economic struggles.’ For Professor Omotoye Olorode, his comrade and associate for several decades, Osoba was a foremost patriot, a committed socialist, an exemplary teacher, and a humanist. In a brilliant fusion of the past and the future, Comrade Professor Chief G. G. Darah gave new depth to Osoba’s ideals, affirming that they would outlive him: ‘the passing of Osoba did not constitute a time to mourn, but to mobilise and provoke more Africans to accomplish the anti-imperialist revolution that awaits us all.’

    Until his last breath, Osoba fought against the virulence of neoliberalism and tyranny. He remained a revolutionary whose mentorship extended beyond the socialist praxis that defined his lifelong intellectual and social work. His contributions to national and human development were pragmatic and effective. Present and future generations of intellectuals will continue to engage with Osoba’s ideas, struggles, and legacy. His intellectual production, now available, will remain relevant for generations to come. Adieu, great scholar, father, friend, and patriot. Rest in Peace.

    Akanmu Adebayo, Kennesaw State University, Georgia, U.S.A.

    Olutayo Adesina, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

  • Boko Haram comes South, By Lasisi Olagunju

    Boko Haram comes South, By Lasisi Olagunju

    The military high command has come out to say that the gunmen who abducted schoolchildren and murdered their teachers in Ogbomoso were JAS men. JAS (Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad) is a splinter of Boko Haram. One of the kidnapped teachers was beheaded on camera by the terrorists who flung the video into cyberspace to our collective horror. So, finally, in Yorubaland, they have come.

    I can count two, three, four people around me who watched that video and fell ill. Yet those who did it felt normal and may do it again because they always do. “Any savage likes to collect heads,” Iris Murdoch writes in ‘A Severed Head’, a story of victims who think they are survivors. And why the head, of all parts of the human body? Murdoch says heads are “the apex of our incarnation.”

    Nigeria’s contemporary terror has historical roots. Almost exactly 200 years ago (1826 /1827), in that same Ogbomoso axis, Edun of Gbogun, an Aare Ona Kakanfo, suffered what the murdered teacher suffered at the hands of the Fulani.

    Recorded as one of the notable figures of the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars, and the last major shield defending the northern Oyo frontiers against Ilorin, this Aare was defeated in battle by the Fulani, and the unthinkable was done to him. Samuel Johnson, in ‘The History of the Yorubas’, writes that “his head was taken off, put on a pole” and carried “in triumph to Ilorin.”

    Because reuniting Kakanfo Edun’s head with his body was necessary if his spirit would rest, Johnson wrote that “Edun’s son afterwards went to Ilorin, and did obeisance to the Emir, who then allowed him to take his father’s head away; it was brought back and buried with the body at Gbogun.” Obeisance was the ransom exacted before the family could complete the Aare’s burial rites.

    Now, almost exactly 200 years after that publicly displayed human head and humiliating ransom, the marauders are back. Has the body of the murdered teacher now been released for burial? No. The terrorists are possibly waiting for ransom. Ransom and a severed head? Read Edun’s story and remember history’s record of something similar.

    I also read somewhere that the abductors holding the Oyo schoolchildren demanded that the state governor speak directly with them. Interesting and intriguing. What really was the motive behind all these? The abduction and the conditions attached to it jointly signal the possible arrival of Boko Haram in Yorubaland. So, unless this household wakes up and drives away the invading army, more heads may yet be hoisted on poles and carried as trophies by triumphant killers.

    The president and Commander-in-Chief reacted to the Ogbomoso abduction and murder last Monday. A friend was angry that it took the president four days after the tragedy to react. I told my friend to relax. He should not blame the president. What if he was warned or advised not to say anything until he was cleared to speak?

    “Who would clear the president?”

    “His advisers.”

    “Who?”

    Only the naïve asks questions whose answers everyone already knows.

    Yesterday, I bought a copy of General Yakubu Gowon’s autobiography. The first “secret” I saw divulged there is the role marabouts played in the running of our country. In the very first chapter, and within the first eight pages, the old man writes about how his office as Head of State was “bombarded with messages by several clerics and marabouts from Dakar, Senegal, and an astrologer from Mali” asking him to be wary of the very people who gave his government meaning.

    In the 1990s, we heard stories of how spiritualists from these “religious” countries wielded enormous influence over our leaders, particularly key figures in the government of Sani Abacha. Go out today, don’t go out tomorrow. Hire this man, fire that man. We heard stories that they completely caged Abacha inside the Villa so that he would not die. But because he who wants to save his life shall lose it, Abacha died right inside the Villa.

    We have always read that clerics wielded enormous powers, but what many probably never knew is that they also did security work. Gowon said the marabouts were “agents of the French Intelligence Service” whose motive was to infiltrate his government and rule or ruin it from within. He said he ignored them and handed over his life and affairs to God.

    Not all leaders avoid marabouts; many court and worship them, often to their ruin. It happened to Afonja, another Kakanfo whose attachment to spiritualists brought Sheikh Alimi into the very centre of his power, and to his sorrow.

    How much of that cleric content do we have in our own power bottle today? Gowon said the marabouts who sized him up were French agents; so, whose agents are today’s mystics?

    Some ten years ago, Nigerians were told that the country spent N2.2 billion hiring clerics for national prayers against insecurity. The money and the prayers went with the wind. Today, what happens behind the curtains of power? We still have marabouts as drivers of our politics and governments. Many African presidents, we are told, do not sleep, travel or even make appointments without consulting unseen “controllers.”

    How much influence do these invisible advisers wield today in Abuja? That is a question worth asking whenever power behaves strangely in Nigeria, especially now that government is afraid to call terror and terrorists by their name.

    “I can’t stop thinking of the abducted pupils and their teachers. Many will be traumatised for life. If they were forced to watch the beheading of their mathematics teacher, many will suffer mental health issues. All of them will never be the same again.” An old schoolmate and health practitioner in the United States sent me those words. You should have no difficulty agreeing with her.

    I set out to write that Nigeria is the factual setting of the classic horror film or detective novel: bloody, harsh, cold, intriguing and insane. But there is one difference. No matter how long the night of blood and darkness, detective fiction traditionally ends with order restored. The guilty are exposed, justice is served, and society breathes again. Nigeria’s bad story does not end; it remains trapped in the middle chapters where chaos walks forever freely and innocence bleeds till eternity.

    Nigeria suffers urban chaos and rural terror. Stand on the terrace of your home and look at the street. What stretches before you is a horizon of insecurity, untamed terror and collapsed social order. The cloud and its storm are not fleeting, yet we individually comfort ourselves with the hope that our own roofs will escape the rain.

    The president last Monday expressed similar optimism. He promised bandits and their collaborators hell in the hands of hunters. He said they would face the law. What law? What justice? He spoke as if we do not know that in Nigeria, terrorism moves swiftly while justice limps behind it.

    I cite an example. The trial of a kidnapping suspect commenced in an Oyo State High Court only a few days ago. The abduction happened in March 2019. A farm guard from the North masterminded the abduction of his own employers. A ransom of N25 million was paid, one worker was killed, confessional statements were obtained and arrests made almost immediately. Yet, seven years later, the case has only just started crawling through the courts, with witnesses now recounting their ordeal before a judge.

    Because terrorism here rejects the certainty of punishment, terror in the South-West has now moved from farms to schools. In Yorubaland, schools are inviolable symbols of innocence and civilisation. Strange men with strange ideas have now turned them into theatres of horror.

    The first school in Nigeria, ‘The Nursery of the Infant Church’, was founded in Badagry in 1843 by Mr. and Mrs. De Graft. For the first time since that epoch, Yoruba parents are now genuinely afraid of sending their children to school. You blame them? “The wise sees danger and hides himself, but the fool proceeds and suffers for it.”

    If the Yoruba child can no longer go safely to school, then the enemy has scored a terrifying victory over the land. The classroom was once where Yoruba society hid its future from danger. We took it for granted that it was the safest place in any modern civilisation. Nigeria’s special breed of terror has now turned the school assembly ground into a hunting ground. It used to be said only of the North-East that gunmen invaded schools with the confidence of landlords returning to their property. Now it has happened in the South-West. Pupils are marched into forests; teachers are abducted and beheaded like plantain trees. The blackboard and gravestone have become frightening companions.

    When the sacred is violated, what should the guardian priest do? Befriend the violators? Celebrate them as cousins and pardon them as prodigal sons? The body language of today’s politics increasingly suggests that the wages of sin should not be death — all because of the calculations of election and re-election.

    Nigeria’s deepest tragedy may therefore not even be terrorism itself, but our growing accommodation of it. The country has become a vast jungle of predators and prey. In that jungle, the hierarchy is fixed: the hunted remain hunted; the spared merely await their appointed hour. No matter the severity of a tragedy, society moves on as if nothing happened. We consume reports of massacres and abductions with weary resignation. We debate horror like football scores. We place lush artificial grass of normalcy over the ugly surface of our nationhood.

    In that same Ogbomoso corridor of abduction and beheading, politicians spent last week harvesting primary votes. The ruling APC held governorship and presidential primaries undisturbed. Even in the traumatised Oriire Local Government Area, locals queued while votes were counted. Across the nation, winners sang and danced; the president gave a victory yesterday to a defeated nation. That is how Nigeria rolls. It wears the mask of peace while its people live the reality of war.

    Nigeria will eat its corn meal even while the house burns and robbers roam freely: Bí ilé njó, bí olè njà, won á jè’ko. A dark pall now hangs over the country. Hitherto safe territories are slipping beyond state control; schools no longer feel sacred; roads have become ambush corridors and farms are theatres of war. Bandits even invade homes now to harvest preys.

    Nigeria was conceived as a covenant against barbarism. Yet barbarism now walks openly across the land.

    I see a huge problem coming. Unless those who breed these hounds restrain them, the country may soon convulse. Across the South-West, communities increasingly speak the dangerous language of self-help because the Nigerian State appears weak, hesitant and indecisive. Laws, courts and governments exist to prevent society from collapsing into primal violence. The terrorists who abduct children and behead teachers are not ordinary criminals; they are enemies of civilisation itself. Their attack on individuals is symbolic; their true target is the very idea of sanity.

    Now, what next? Will this flood stop its southward sweep? That question can only be answered positively if this other one is answered first: Does the present system possess enough competence and moral will to rescue its classrooms, defend its children and reclaim civilisation from the merchants of fear? A state that cannot defend its classrooms has failed at the first duty of civilisation.

    America recently shut its embassy services in Abuja. Like competent weather forecasters, they sensed a coming hurricane and took cover. Our own “seers” see nothing; our “hearers” hear nothing. A friend wonders what our intelligence community does beyond searching for threats to power and its temporary occupants. Why are these roaming terrorists never detected before they strike? Should intelligence work prevent disaster or merely arrive afterwards to count corpses? People answer “detective” without interrogating the meaning of the word itself. ‘Word Stories’ in the Oxford English Dictionary takes a deep and scintillating dive into that history. It should interest those whose profession is the detection of evil before evil acts.

    From Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, the classic detective novel presents the investigator who restores moral order to chaos and pursues truth even when society fears confronting it. Nigeria today desperately needs such intelligence, competence and moral courage. People are paid every month to see danger before it erupts. Why do they arrive only after disaster?

    My teacher taught me that the old detective stories of English literature were built on a simple assumption: civilisation is fragile; beneath every appearance of order lurks chaos waiting to break loose. That is where the detective comes in. He exists to uncover hidden plots, stop carnage and restore moral balance. But what happens when society itself loses the will, the competence or the courage to confront and punish evil? In such a place and situation, even the watcher becomes helpless. He may see danger clearly, announce it promptly and warn repeatedly, yet because of politics, audacious catastrophe still marches forward unchecked. I pray Nigeria has not reached that tragic point of no return.

  • The Magician of Ikenne, By Lanre Adewole

    The Magician of Ikenne, By Lanre Adewole

    Lanre Adewole's logo
    Lanre Adewole’s logo

    The question can’t be “have you heard about him?”. It should be “have you met him?”.
    Billionaire businessman, adroit administrator, humanitarian, noiseless philanthropist and youth builder; Kunle Soname, will effortlessly don the epaulette of “Pillar of Football in Africa”, going by his exploits in football development home and abroad. Talk of power of enthusiasm backed by conviction.
    So last Thursday, a beloved uncle invited me to visit the moneyed one with him. Despite my worries about Ogun State roads, the terror of the highway; articulated vehicles (trailers in local parlance) which recklessly ply the axis in their numbers and the regular reports of carnage, I accepted the offer. So off we went to Ikenne which also needs no introduction. The sage; Chief Obafemi Awolowo already ensured it as one of the most famous geographical entities in Nigeria, situating his place of birth alongside his evergreen memory in the heart of millions. Ikenne, in brief, is a centrepiece of Nigerian history.
    The efforts of Fuji star, Adewale Ayuba in projecting the town, can’t also be overlooked. When we drove past a building with “Ereke” something, truth be told, I didn’t immediately remember Awolowo whose 1949 Nigerian Tribune dream has accommodated my journalism career for more than a quarter of a century. That was because appraising the town from the cognomen angle would not be Awo’s thing, but it was surely Ayuba’s. Different men, different epochs, different callings. But the undisputed is never in doubt; immortal Awo.
    It would seem another immortality is being meticulously inked. By Soname. Building today; for now and lifetime.
    My uncle is a big football buff. It was only in the course of the trip I learnt that but for medicine that chose him, he would have earned a living and a name, tapping the round leather! Even now at 73, his eyes always carry a twinkle when he talks football. Such passion.
    His path crossed Soname’s in Lagos as council administrators in years gone by, but the bond is now araldited by mutual love, respect and wait for it, passion for developmental football!
    Uncle is so enamoured of Soname, he practically wrote a mini biography of him, in my head, as we drove into his massive sports complex, with a 6,000-seat capacity stadium, approved by the Confederation of African Football (CAF), hosting continental matches and frequently utilized by other African countries for training camp ahead major competitions.
    Again, one man’s dream. Just like Awo.
    By every stretch of contemplation, Soname is a huge success story and though I recently saw him on television during his last birthday, the visit was the first time of seeing him flesh and blood and what a man behind the monumental strides I encountered!
    Almost as we were stepping into the reception of the massive complex, complete with a soccer academy, and of course serving as Remo Star FC (solely owned by him again) home ground, he showed up to usher us into his office. Simple, almost casual but classy outfit. What humility. The usual airs about deep pockets? None.
    Uncle introduced us. Soname didn’t have to “form” big man. God has done that for him. His smile, no scratch that, his resonant laughter, was contagious. In no time, everybody was so relaxed in the circle, that it didn’t seem we were just acquainted. His warmth, all-pervading.
    Done and time to leave, I had no choice but to compliment the future-centric use he has put the much God has directed his way. He would bend to take your handshake! Just saying, without getting into free advertising, his investment is almost everywhere; though he is most famous for his airline, sports betting platform, football clubs home and abroad and an office cabinet bursting at mainframes with awards! And the ringing laughs!
    You consign him to his most-known investments at your own ignorance but it is not from my mouth you will hear he is also playing big in banking, agriculture, petroleum, and a host of other landmark investments, with his land of birth, warehousing his umbilical cord, being the major beneficiary. That is how to give back; to your own, to humanity!
    Of course as a journalist, I was itching to engage him reportorially. But the Yoruba will say there are times there would be things to discuss but no time to spare and times when there would be time to spare but nothing worthwhile to talk about. But there will always be that day that both time and worthy stuff would jam. During the visit, it would be most inappropriate to jump on him for an interview even when he wasn’t pre-notified a journalist was in tow. And the visit was originally what the Yoruba will call o to’jo meta (social/casual/good will) visit.
    Even when he demonstrated great fecundity in dissecting politics, governance and the economy (obviously his forte as a major global player), it would still be wrong ambushing him to do something to be documented for future references, extemporaneously.
    That doesn’t mean he would get a cheat-list when he consents to an interview. Spontaneous stuffs can be intriguing. No advance questions. So for this visit, there was plenty to talk about, but literally, no time. I doubt the second situation will ever apply. For time to be available and nothing to talk about? Journalists are trained to get even the mum-under-oath talk when necessary and the gentleman billionaire has been playing big home and abroad, in some kind of media space, for a long time, even when he’s not always out there, doing what the Yoruba will call se ka ri mi (self-advertising).
    So I know someday will be the right time to engage.
    I took an authorized, semi-supervised (uncle) tour of the facility. I saw young boys in their kits readying for training. Their dream, palpable. Ronaldo lives rent-free in the hearts of millions of their kind from Belgrade to Ikot-Ekpene. They want to be global superstars. I have them in my house, training in our compound corner in blistering sun; not even succumbing to the threats of forcing bitter Malaria drugs down their throats when the sun goes down and malaria kicks in. The Soname haven is incubating many of those dreams and the dreamers; the order around, the serenity, the pure joy on the faces of those boys and the finicky neatest of everywhere, including the walls. Maybe I will relocate to Ilesa too, carve a portion of Iwaraja and live my give-back dream like Soname! Only that I stopped loving football because of heartaches. Politics is also gradually easing out of my system. The only thing I can’t seem to shake off is not discussing it. Practically everyone around me is participating one way or the other!
    I’m writing about the Soname Ikenne miracle because it’s real. That was no packaging. There was no notification a journalist was coming with his longtime associate. It was while seated we were introduced and there was no time, to try rearranging the environment to suit scripted narratives. The security guys at the gate took their job like job, as the Yoruba will acknowledge dutiful fellows; they would not let us in until clearance with the “chairman”, who of course, is Soname. Security of the facility is top-notch.
    I wish Mr. Soname would be more out there; delivering lectures across classrooms and boardrooms, interacting more with young people on pedestals he has conquered; governance, administration, entrepreneurship, politics, business development and youth leadership programmes. Beyond the accomplishments, it is important for both old and young, rich and poor, stragglers and the successful, to learn from him how lorry-load of cash can easily jell with humility in one man, brimming with joy, living like the person next door. That is how to enjoy special grace. God doesn’t resist his kind.
    But I can’t help notice something about him. It was his wrist. In a shift I can’t readily explain, swanky wristwatches have become collector’s items for me. I checked out Soname’s. It didn’t disappoint, though the overall simplicity of his appearance, carriage and euphonious personality can’t be denied. May God deliver us from the love of wristwatch. Amen.

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