At the beginning of his long and well-lived life, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in politics was always prosaic, acquired, by way of a grandfather, the name of a British poet and priest (George Herbert, 1593-1633). He acquired much else from family inheritance. The future 41st president was descended from a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — from financier George Herbert Walker, whose name is on golf’s Walker Cup — and from a U.S. senator: his father Prescott, of Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wall Street investment house whose partners included Robert A. Lovett, a future secretary of…

For some time in the early part of Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979-1983), several groups in the Nigerian Left debated what the movement’s relationship with the opposition People’s Redemption Party (PRP) should be. Several Leftists had been involved in the formation of the party while several more joined after formation. But the bulk of “hard core” Leftists, particularly Marxists, remained outside the party which, today, would be described as “radical left-of-centre”: left-of-centre on account of its ideological placement and radical in its methods. Of the 19 states into which the country was then divided, PRP controlled the governments of two: Kaduna…

Sometime in year 2000, being his next of kin, I received a scraggly letter by post from the Nigerian Army that my younger brother Bankole, then of the Sokoto Battalion, had been killed in the Sierra Leonean war. A part of me was killed too. Till today, neither his corpse, his entitlements nor any other solitude did we, his family, receive from the Nigerian Army. Riled and disconsolate, I remember writing a piece in the Sunday Tribune then entitled My brother, the soldier hero where, parodying Mazisi Kunene the Zulu poet, I told God He had drawn a battle line…

Whistle for 2019 has finally been blown as Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) lifted the ban on partisan politics and campaigns on Sunday, November 19 2018. The same day President Muhammadu Buhari unveiled his campaign manual, which he called The Next Level. Mr Atiku Abubakar, PDP’s presidential candidate also unveiled his, known as #TheAtikuPlan - the following day. The campaign documents of the two parties are likely to come under greater scrutiny in the coming days as the two parties try to de-legitimize each other’s campaign promises. Already, APC, through its own carelessness, seemed to have offered its opponents the…