“She was called Phillis, because that was the name of the ship that brought her, and Wheatley, which was the name of the merchant who bought her. She was born in Senegal. In Boston, the slave traders put her up for sale:
-she's seven years old! She will be a good mare!
She was felt, naked, by many hands.
At thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language that was not her own. No one believed that she was the author. At the age of twenty, Phillis was questioned by a court of eighteen enlightened men in robes and wigs.
She had to recite texts from Virgil and Milton and some messages from the Bible, and she also had to swear that the poems she had written were not plagiarized. From a chair, she gave her long examination, until the court accepted her:
Nigeria is the only OPEC nation where individuals, not the state, own oilfields. Nowhere else do national assets transition so seamlessly into private hands under the pretense of legality. But who are these individuals? And why is their ownership never questioned in court?
Road contracts are inflated by as much as 5000%—a scale of fraud that should provoke outrage. Yet, no investigations follow. Who is orchestrating these crimes? Why are there no legal consequences for looting on this scale?
The banking sector is an extension of this racket. CEOs with questionable credentials wield unchecked power, siphoning wealth greater than that of entire states. Banks openly exploit depositors, manipulate currency policies, and facilitate money laundering—yet no regulator dares to intervene.
I offer my opinion on the coalition against President Tinubu's second term.
In 2027, Tinubu Won’t Win; The Opposition Will Lose
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If economic health, social vitality, and the raw pulse of public opinion were the only indicators relied upon to prognosticate the chances of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s reelection in 2027, I would say with cocksure certitude that he is condemned to be a one-term president.
Not even the most hopelessly unthinking defenders of the Tinubu presidency can deny that his reign so far has been defined by unrelieved economic hardship, staggering inflation, a collapsing naira, and a deepening sense of despair among Nigerians. In other words, the objective conditions for his political repudiation are overripe.
Nonetheless, elections, especially in Nigeria, are not won on the basis of public frustration alone. They are won — or lost — on the strength of political organization, elite consensus, strategic emotional manipulation, and the ability to convert popular anger into electoral mathematics. Call those the subjective conditions of electoral triumph, if you like. And this is where the tragedy of the opposition begins.
The opposition is undisciplined, hopelessly spineless, irredeemably fragmented, strategically bankrupt, and is falling cheaply into the trap set for it by Tinubu.
First, the opposition is shaping up to be disappointingly provincial. It is dominated by elements from a slice of the North that seems to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms from loss of political power.
This is reminiscent of the narrow-minded opposition to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, which helped him to create a coalition of southern Nigerian, Christian northerners, along with portions of the North that felt excluded from the regional mainstream.
Protest Against Marginalization of the South East in the CBN
@cenbank
A thread
We, the umbrella body of South East Socio-cultural Associations in the diaspora, express deep concern and disappointment over the recent directorship appointments at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). A particular publication by Rufai Oseni, a respected columnist and TV personality, has brought to light serious allegations of lopsided and exclusionary appointments within the CBN. The article, which can be found here veonewsng.com/index.php/2025… provides a detailed and well-researched analysis of these appointments.
Of utmost concern is the marginalization of South Easterners in the CBN under the leadership of Governor Olayemi Cardoso (@olayemicardoso1). As highlighted in the publication, the South East currently has only one director in the entire CBN—an outright injustice.
The Tinubu-Wike alliance is not a political partnership; it is an unholy merger of ambition and ruthless pragmatism. Together, they have reduced Nigerian politics to a zero-sum, winner-takes-all game – a dangerous, short-sighted strategy that threatens democracy, economic stability, and national cohesion.
But while Wike plays the game for relevance, Tinubu is operating at an entirely different level. His moves are not reactionary; they are premeditated and calculated. Unlike his political allies and opponents, Tinubu does not play for survival – he plays for absolute control.
What is his endgame? How does he intend to manipulate 2027? What will be the consequences for Nigeria?
This is not just a battle for power; it is a battle for the soul of Nigeria. And if history has taught us anything, it is that unchecked ambition often leads to self-destruction.
The Tinubu Strategy: A Blueprint for Domination
Tinubu’s tactics are not about governance; they are about control. His strategic blueprint is built on economic subjugation, institutional capture, and political infiltration:
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
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“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.
It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
Abiola Invited Abacha To Overthrow Shonekan And Handover To Him After. - SDP Party Chairman.
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“I was returning from one of such trips to a prominent Emir one afternoon when I heard from my car radio Chief Abiola calling on General Abacha to come and ease Chief Shonekan as he eased out Babangida, I was shocked.
I called Chief Abiola and asked for an explanation of what I had just heard.
His reply was, “Mr. Chairman, I am very happy to have worked for you. You are a strong-willed man, but you see, if you want to go to Kano by road and you later decide to go to Kano by air, as long as you get to Kano, there is nothing wrong with that”.
At this time, the party did not know and I did not know Chief Abiola was having discussions with General Abacha who had promised him that if Chief Abiola supported, and if he, General Abacha, took over from Chief Shonekan today, he would hand-over the reins of Government to Chief Abiola the next day, and Chief Abiola bought the idea.
We later got to know that there were series of meetings in Ikeja where names of those who would serve in Abacha government were discussed and forwarded. When we found out that things were not moving well and that the interim government was a lame duck, I went to have a meeting with the then Secretary for Agriculture, Alhaji Isa Muhammed, and I expressed my disgust at the way the government was being run.
On two occasions, I addressed the Federal Executive Council under Chief Shonekan when the two Chairmen were invited.
On the first occasion, I told Chief Ernest Shonekan that the relationship between the governors and the interim government left much to be desired as there was no discipline. Chief Shonekan picked up a copy of the constitution and said, “Chairman of SDP, I will go by this document. I have to obey this constitution. If any governor has misbehaved report him to the police”.
The second time we were called on an issue in the chambers when the Federal Executive Council was meeting, again I raised the alarm and I again told Chief Shonekan that one day, the military boys will come and drive him out of his seat.
Chief Adelusi Adeluyi (Juli Pharmacy) who was the Secretary for Health got up and told his colleagues that the Chairman of SDP had twice given warning signals and no one seemed to be taking the warnings seriously.
We again left and allowed the Federal Executive Council to continue its meeting. On this very day, I went to the Secretary for Agriculture, Isa Mohammed, and had discussions on the unsatisfactory state of affairs. He was a personal friend and he promised to see Chief Shonekan that evening with a promise to get back to me, no matter how late.