Lawan and Supreme Court of Shameless Judicial Bandits
I was awoken on this side of the world by news of the reversal by the Nigerian Supreme Court of Senate Pres. Ahmed Lawan's primary election loss. I was already mentally prepared for it after the same Supreme Court affirmed Godwin Akpabio's fraudulent primary win a few days ago. It's a well-planned judicial choreography. The Nigerian Supreme Court is straight-up the most hopeless Supreme Court in the history of the world's supreme courts. The same Court violated common sense and the will of voters

Obidients are the new Buharists

“Obi-dients” are the new Buharists. Better get ready for their rank stupidity and pigheadedness should Peter Obi become president. They’re perpetually angry. They're narrowminded, verbally primitive, ignorant, tunnel-visioned automatons who think their illiterate trolling can stop people from expressing views that're contrary to theirs. They constitute a risible horde of unthinking troll brigade on the Internet & are incapable of the most basic level of cognitive complexity. If you’re not one of them, you're against them.

A Plea for the FG to Pay Lecturers
Although ASUU strike has been called off and schools are scheduled to resume academic activities from next week, all is not well in most universities. I'm hearing heartbreaking stories of university lecturers who can't feed their families, who can't buy the medications they need to survive life-threatening illnesses, who can't pay their children's school fees, and who can't even afford the cost of transportation to their schools because they haven’t been paid salaries for the 8 months that they were on strike. It looks

Tinubu’s Church Rat Reference to Climate Change Isn't Wrong

I frankly don’t get what people are mocking in Bola Tinubu’s characterization of climate-change policies for poor countries as “a question of how do you prevent a church rat from eating poisoned Holy Communion.” Tinubu mere deployed familiar ecclesiastical metaphors to capture the dilemma that developing countries face over the dire existential adjustments that climate change policies require of them. He used “church rat” to symbolize a poor nation (Nigerian English speakers often say “as poor

Obi’s Campaign Council Shows He Isn’t Different from APC and PDP

Peter Obi's initial presidential campaign council proves the point I've always made in private to his fervid fans: after all is said and done, Obi is just another Establishment Nigerian politician who has neither the willingness nor the capacity to be the different and transformational leader that his supporters think he will be. He's merely riding on the crest of the wave of mass discontent with the status quo. The list isn't just inexcusably insular (Igbo men are even state coordinators

Aisha Buhari’s PTSD Diagnosis of Buhari

Aisha Buhari said she "suffered the consequences" of Buhari's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which she said was triggered by the Civil War, his 1985 overthrow, and his serial electoral losses until 2015.

She claimed that she "became a physiotherapist" to nurse him to sanity. Well, we know her highest legitimate academic qualification is a diploma in beauty therapy and cosmetology.But even if she truly became a physiotherapist (which Americans call a physical therapist), the fact is, physiotherapists

Why Nigerian Medical Doctors are the Best

In Nigeria, if you have excellent quantitative skills, you gravitate towards numerate disciplines like engineering, computer science, accounting, etc. If you have aptitudes in language, argumentation, logic, or are simply a voracious reader, you study courses like law, English, history, communication, etc. But if you have both of these skills in more or less equal measure, you study medicine. That’s why most Nigerian medical doctors are polymaths and often stand out anywhere they go in the world. My friend

How Can Anyone Hate Peter Obi?

Peter Obi comes across as a humble, conciliatory, mild-mannered, and good-natured person—in contrast to his toxic, obnoxious online devotees whose rhetorical causticity he habitually has a need to restrain with words of caution. I honestly have a hard time understanding the untempered hate often directed at him by his critics. You may disagree with his politics, but he has such a peaceful, restrained, and likeable public persona. He never requites the unkind digs thrown at him by his opponents. He always rises superior to

Symbolic Violence Against Muslim Pupils by Lagos State Gov’t
At least 3 questions in a GENERAL KNOWLEDGE exam that public primary school students in Lagos State took for the common entrance this year asked questions that only Christians—or people who’re familiar with Christianity —can correctly answer, putting Muslim and other non-Christian students at a disadvantage. That’s objectionable symbolic violence, and it must redressed forthwith in the interest of fairness and justice. See questions 11, 12, and 14. Even I, a journalism professor who attended

Why Buhari is More Loyal to Niger Republic Than Nigeria

It has come to light that Muhammadu Buhari has approved N1.4 billion from Nigeria's coffers (without the approval of the National Assembly!) to help the Republic of Niger buy vehicles for its government officials to fight insecurity while insecurity engulfs Nigeria and while ASUU is still on strike. Many Nigerians are understandably angry and are asking why Buhari seems to have more loyalty to Niger Republic than he does to Nigeria. Well, here is what I wrote about that in my June 12, 2021, column

Kadaria Ahmed’s Anti-BBC Article a Disservice to Journalism
Kadaria Ahmed is my senior in the profession for whom I have tremendous respect not only because of her matchless brilliance but also because of the record she set at Bayero University’s Department of Mass Communication from where I also graduated years after her. But her fuzzy attempt to criminalize BBC’s—and Daily Trust’s— praiseworthy investigative reporting on the heartrending terroristic banditry in Zamfara, her home state, which gave the inept federal government the justificatory lifeline

Buhari is World’s Most Successful Mass Hypnotist

No president in the history of the world has been able to hypnotize citizens of a country with as much roaring success as Buhari has in Nigeria in the last 7+ years. Not even Adolf Hitler comes close.For example, like clockwork, every petrol price hike in Nigeria since 1966 used to be met with mass protests, but Buhari jacked up petrol prices multiple times by steep margins (the latest being last week) without as much as a whimper from citizens. In fact, Buhari's first petrol price hike was greeted with

#OsunDecides2022: Osun as a Predictor of Presidential Elections

Since 2014, Osun State has emerged as Nigeria’s bellwether state, as Americans call states whose voting patterns almost always align with the winning presidential ticket-- with mathematical exactitude. APC’s victory in Osun in 2014, in spite of the intense, all-out PDP-controlled federal effort to swing the election in PDP's favor, presaged APC’s odds-defying victory in the 2015 presidential election. In 2018, PDP’s Adeleke didn’t lose the 2018 governorship election in Osun; APC stole it

Where Are Tinubu’s NYSC Records?
People who’re questioning Tinubu’s Chicago State University degree are barking up the wrong tree. A Bola Ahmed Tinubu indeed graduated from there after earning a 2-year community college diploma from Richard J. Daley College in Chicago. (Whether that Bola A. Tinubu is the same as the APC presidential candidate is another matter🤣).Contrary to some people have been saying, you don’t necessarily need a high school diploma to get admission to a college in the US. You can present scores from the General Educational

Justice Tanko Has Neither Honor Nor Integrity
Honor is the norm society expects you to abide by and integrity is, to quote British writer C. S. Lewis, “doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” Justice Ibrahim Muhammad Tanko lacks both.He shouldn’t have been the Chief Justice of Nigeria in the first place. He was suddenly promoted to the position only as a strategy to give legal imprimatur to Buhari’s electoral fraud in 2019. Walter Onnoghen was illegally removed as CJN because he was suspected by influence peddlers in Buhari's Aso Rock to be

PVCs as "Poverty Verification Cards"
If what happened in the Ekiti State governorship election is any guide, the party that will win the 2023 presidential election would be the party that bribes voters the most. Even people who sang passionate anti-APC songs on election day, according to news reports, buckled under at the sight of wads of naira & voted for APC!I no longer trust social media and environmental signals as reliable predictors of parties' performance at the polls in 2023.Vote-buying abilities, not mass support or rigging, would determine

Ahmed Lawan, Akpabio and INEC's Discriminatory Lawlessness
What's the basis for INEC's recognition of Senate President Ahmed Lawan as APC's senatorial candidate for Yobe North? The 2022 Electoral Law that Lawan and his colleagues enacted says parties can only produce candidates through direct primaries, delegates, or consensus. Bashir Machina who won the primary election to emerge as APC's candidate for Yobe North has refused to stand down for Lawan. How can Lawan then be recognized by INEC as the rightful candidate when he didn't participate in the

Okowa Will Neither Help Nor Hurt Atiku
Atiku Abubakar decided to play safe in his choice of a running mate. Okowa is a meek, lackluster, barely politically visible governor who may neither help nor hurt Atiku's chances in 2023. As a "Delta Igbo" person, he has never been known to deny his Igbo ethnic identity, as many people from his part of Nigeria do--or used to do. So, the worst emotion he will stir among "mainstream" Igbo people is indifference. Nonetheless, he's unlikely to achieve political and emotional identification with Southeastern Igbo people

Ahmed Lawan's Sweet Karmic Punishment

Sen. Pres. Ahmed Lawan wanted to set his party--and the country-- on fire by conspiring with the Aso Rock cabal to not only discard the North-South power sharing formula his party agreed to but to also sidestep a primary election so that he he would've been arbitrarily imposed as APC's "consensus" presidential candidate. He didn't care that his narcissism would have inflamed raw ethnoregional passions, ignited disabling tensions, and convulsed the foundations of the country. Well, thankfully, instead of the country,

2023 Presidential Election Should be Cancelled; It’s Already Predetermined
With the help of Tambuwal, Atiku has defeated Wike to win the PDP presidential primaries. I’ve seen people exultingly proclaiming that Atiku will give APC a bloody nose in 2023. That’s misplaced optimism. Your votes won’t count—like they didn’t in 2019—because INEC is anything but independent. It’s a dutiful, groveling poodle of APC and Buhari and has no capacity or willingness to provide a level playing field for all contestants. I think there’s no point wasting billions to hold

INEC is in Bed with APC and Can’t Be Trusted
The only major political party that INEC's 6-day extension of the primary election timetable is designed to benefit is APC. There's no question about that. PDP has already screened its presidential contestants and is ready to conduct its primary election this weekend. APC, on the other hand, hasn't screened its contestants even when it publicly it said it would conduct its primary election on Sunday. It at once shows irresponsibility, impunity, & an indication that it knows it can manipulate INEC at the last