US government’s 2017 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Nigeria must be a source of concern to President Buhari and the country in general. The 48-page executive summary of the report, which was released recently by the country’s State Department (the federal executive department that advises the President and represents the US in international affairs and foreign policy issues), was generally thumbs down for the Buhari government on human rights practices. The full executive summary can be accessed via this link: https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/277277.pdf. According to the report, the “most significant human rights issues included extrajudicial and arbitrary killings; disappearances and…

It is obvious that President Muhammadu Buhari does not always filter his words before they come out. If he filters them at all he does not fully appreciate the connotative and denotative meanings of the words he uses. All words have meanings, and can be subjected to literal or metaphorical interpretations. We have had several occasions when the President’s handlers have accused the public of misinterpreting or misunderstanding, or misconstruing what the President had said. Sometimes they claim that the president’s words were taken out of context or have been stretched to achieve a political purpose. I sympathise with the…

On Sunday, April 22, 1990, soldiers sought to arrest Mr Gani Fawehinmi, famous human right lawyer and activist. His offence? April 22 was his birthday and that was when Mr Gideon Orkar and his gang struck in a bloody coup attempt to topple Mr Ibrahim Babangida. The coup was said to have been financed by a wealthy fish-monger, Great Ogboru. One of the investigators got a brain-wave that the coup makers may have been dreaming of making Fawehinmi the head of a revolutionary government. The coup collapsed and the Babangida regime wobbled on to its inglorious end. Fawehinmi was spared…

A strong indication of both the quality and failure of politics in Nigeria, as the people look forward to the next general elections in 2019, is the manner in which virtually “every” Nigerian believes that he or she is good enough to be President of Nigeria. This may speak to a deepening of political consciousness, but it is also a reflection of the people’s anxiety and frustration about how the office and position of the President of Nigeria seems to have been mishandled and demystified. The process of that demystification has taken different shapes and tones since the return to…