I learnt an enduring lesson on the day General Sani Abacha died. It was June 8, 1998, and death had laid its icy hands on the maximum ruler, and the scepter had fallen from the grip of the king. I was deputy editor of National Concord, the newspaper owned by Basorun M.K. O Abiola, the man Abacha not only inveigled out of his mandate as democratically elected President, but whom he had also locked up in military gulag for five years. Mr Dele Alake, who was to become Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Lagos State for eight years, was…

Creative dysfunction is sometimes an unofficial government tool. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo occasionally set top government officials up against themselves to test their loyalty or ideas. But there was no doubt who was in charge. US President Donald Trump is reputed to have the worst cabinet in modern US history, comparable in its dysfunctionality only to Richard Nixon’s. But again, there’s no doubt who is in charge. In the last two weeks or so, there has been an outbreak of civil war in President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet, creating serious concerns about who is really in charge. Buhari’s medical leave could…

It was Sigmund Freud who first put forward a psychological concept called “projection". It’s an ego defense mechanism, which disposes certain people to attribute to others the unconscious negative (and sometimes positive) traits and emotions that dwell in them. So people who are compulsive liars always suspect that others are lying. People who have no capacity for altruism, who are self-serving narcissists, can’t understand that anyone can criticize an incompetent, clueless, bungling, unprepared, lying, propagandistic government without ulterior motives. They project their immorality, ethical deficiencies, ethno-regional and religious anxieties onto others. They project all of their inadequacies onto others because…

The Senate, for the second time, rejected President Muhammadu Buhari’s nomination of Ibrahim Magu as EFCC chairman on grounds of adverse report by the Department of State Security Services (DSS). His first attempt at confirmation was rejected in December 2016 on the same ground. Obviously the second time rejection has raised several questions and spawned some conspiracy theories: how come, some wondered, that President Buhari was out of the country on each of the two occasions Magu’s name was submitted to the Senate by Yemi Osinbajo as Acting President? Is the President actually behind the plot to reject Magu? Does…