On the first day of November every year, my mother calls to remind me that my birthday is just 9 days away. I don’t know why she does it, but it has since become the tradition. Just as it is a tradition that she reminds me every ‪10th of November‬, when it actually is my birthday, that I am destined to birth her granddaughter – seeing as she only has “grandsons everywhere”. At first, it was cute and I actually would secretly pray that my siblings keep producing sons and leave the mother-given-destiny for me, but as I have gotten…

Perhaps the biggest news this week so far, has been the attempt by the Presidency to debunk the allegation that President Muhammadu Buhari has been kinder to Northerners and Muslims in the recruitment of persons into his administration. The published list, itself a response to an earlier indictment by the BusinessDay newspaper, has been dismissed as incomplete, selective and misleading but all of that draws attention to a crisis at the heart of Nigerian politics, nay African politics. Matthew Hassan Kukah once described this in our context as “the-myonisation-of-power”. That is when a Nigerian from a particular part of the…

The aim of this condensed article is not to invite readers to join me in remembering the late Soviet Union. Rather, the aim is to recall the thunderous birth, a hundred years ago, of a state which put workers’ power and socialism on the agenda of global political contestation, a mighty revolutionary event which sharply changed the course of world history. But I am recalling that event not nostalgically. I am recalling the birth of the Soviet state for the enduring lessons which its 74-year history offered to humankind, lessons that are continually being renewed and expanded especially for those…

The October Revolution, organized by Vladimir Lenin exactly a century ago, is still relevant today in ways that would have seemed unimaginable when Soviet Communism collapsed. Marxist-Leninism (albeit in the unique capitalist-Maoist form) still propels China, the world’s surging hyperpower, even as that same ideology ruins Cuba and Venezuela. Meanwhile, North Korea, a dystopian Leninist monarchy with nuclear weapons, terrifies the world. Even more surprisingly, Communism is experiencing a resurrection in democratic Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, that quasi-Leninist comfortingly disguised as cuddly grey-beard, is the most extreme politician ever to lead one of Britain’s two main parties, and he is inching…