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Opinion

Tuesday, 13 August 2024 04:49

Nigeria is in the hole and Tinubu is still digging - Majeed Dahiru

Following the twin policy decisions to remove subsidy on petrol and the floatation of the naira against major world currencies by President Bola Tinubu upon assumption of office a little over a year ago, the predictable consequences of these IMF/World Bank induced neoliberal economic experimentations have exploded in the faces of its promoters. Tinubu’s widely advised but ill-informed policy decision to remove petrol subsidy and float the naira has seen the price of Nigeria’s most utilised energy product quadruple from less than N200 a litre to between N700 and N800 a litre, thereby setting off the worst inflation in the…

Monday, 12 August 2024 04:41

In the matter of the yam eating division of the FCT High Court - Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Two years after his inauguration in October 2021 as Chief Judge of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT High Court), Husseini Baba Yusuf, decided in November 2023 that it was time to indulge in a sport of institutional mating games with the newly installed Minister of the Federal Capital, Ezenwo Nyesom Wike. By a stroke of coincidence, both men are members of the Body of Benchers, which describes itself as “the legal body of practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession.” To initiate the mating, the Chief Judge relocated to the office of the Minister…

Sunday, 11 August 2024 04:45

Celebrating Oba Frederick Adegunle Aroloye, the departed Owa of Idanreland - Folu Olamiti

There were no signs that something ominous would happen that day. No foreboding of any sort. For me, Thursday, August 1, 2024, began like any other day. I woke up feeling healthy and sound, grateful to my Maker for allowing me to see the dawn of another day. However, to my shock, in the eerie hours of that Thursday, news filtered in that the highly revered paramount ruler of my town, Idanre in Ondo State, Oba Fredrick Adegunle Aroloye, Arubiefin IV, the Owa of Idanreland, had gone to join his ancestors. For 30 minutes, I was dumbstruck, bewildered, and speechless.…

Sunday, 11 August 2024 04:42

Zanga-Zanga and Tinubu’s crumbling Northern alliance - Farooq A. Kperogi

The10-day nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that ended yesterday, known by the reduplicative compound “Zanga-Zanga” in Hausaphone northern Nigeria, have ruptured the coalition that President Bola Tinubu managed to build with a portion of the northern Nigerian Muslim political establishment since 2014, which put Muhammadu Buhari in power in 2015 and 2019 and him in 2023. But this Zanga-Zanga-inspired rupture also reveals the initial precarity and fragility of the strange-bedfellows coalition. Buhari and Tinubu were previously fierce political adversaries who distrusted each other’s motives and undermined each other. Their alliance was more accurately a political scaffold that papered over their contradictions for…

Sunday, 11 August 2024 04:41

The python and Tinubu-North’s matrimony - Festus Adedayo

Undoubtedly, the political matrimony between President Bola Tinubu and Northern Nigeria is at Talaq stage. Talaq is the Islamic unilateral repudiation of a marital union. There are no sobs, no wails. No dabbing of the face with a handkerchief. But, the dusts provoked by the matrimonial dislocation hang notoriously in the sky. Even bystanders miles away can see them. The marriage is only 15 months old but the couple’s patience for each other is rope-thin. As our elders say, right in the presence of the kolanut seller, irreverent worms slide inside his pods. A matrimony celebrated with pomp and ceremony…

Sunday, 11 August 2024 04:40

Sir, we would see Jesus - Taiwo Akinola

There were certain Greeks … the same came therefore to Philip, …. and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus ~ John 12:20-21. Introduction Over the ages, the wonderfulness of Jesus Christ has been a subject of poignant interest among believers. And, rightly so, as Jesus Christ is the One who defies every adjective that attempts to qualify Him in limited terms. He is, in all respects, wonderful - in all He is and in all He has. History, both ancient and modern, is replete with various examples of the wondrous works of the Almighty God – from making…

Sunday, 11 August 2024 04:39

Article of Faith: My church is bigger than yours - Femi Aribisala

They contradict the counsel of the Lord without batting their eyelids. They plant church parishes like supermarkets on every street corner. They build cathedrals and church monuments like World Trade Centres, each one striving to be the biggest and most splendiferous in the universe. They gather thousands, even millions, of “worshippers” in front of television cameras every so often in the mountains of Kilimanjaro. They are the new spiritual superstars; the mega-pastors of the mega-churches. In this conceit, one of my former churches takes the cake. While its emphasis on branch networking and exponential growth might be a wonderful policy…

Friday, 09 August 2024 04:44

The trouble with Tinubu - Azu Ishiekwene

Almost everyone thinks they know what is wrong with President Bola Tinubu and his government, except Tinubu himself. And to show that it’s not just bellyaching, there are plenty of examples to beat the president over the head. Headline inflation has risen from 22.2 percent in April 2023 to 33.7 one year after – and is still growing – while attempts by the government to tame it have been largely ineffective. Food inflation has nearly doubled. The naira has been devalued by 70 percent in one year, and poverty levels, even among the once-comfortable urban population, have risen dramatically. Hardship…

Thursday, 08 August 2024 04:56

Think like Tinubu for a change - Abimbola Adelakun

Since Sunday, when the president finally addressed the country in response to the ongoing #EndBadGovernance protests, analysts and critics have not stopped rewriting his speech. They think he should have proposed more than the usual platitudes he blandly delivered, and I agree. He offered neither reprieve nor concessions, just vaunted some chest-thumping achievements that have had little bearing on the reality of those for whom the initiatives were allegedly designed. For a man whose managerial prowess was sung to the high heavens, Bola Tinubu serially comes up short in anticipating and responding to national issues with the panache of someone…

Tuesday, 06 August 2024 04:37

Tinubu: A tyrant in the making - Farooq Kperogi

President Bola Tinubu’s self-serving speech--which basically sang his own praises, said he'd heard the people's anguished cries but won't do anything about the cries and then threatened that the people shouldn't cry for much longer or they'd be crushed-- signposts the making of an unfeeling tyrant. If the people close to him don't stop him and the masses of the people let him get away with it, he'll transmogrify into a terrifyingly ruthless monster that may end Nigeria as we know it. A famous Arabic proverb goes: "They asked the Pharoah, 'What made you a tyrant?' He said, 'No one…

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Monday, 05 August 2024 04:45

Lethal illegitimacy and the right to protest in Nigeria - Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing incompatible with the character of the Yoruba people, and (which) has no place in their constitution…. Hyper-sensitive officials may come tomorrow who will see sedition in every criticism and crime in every mass meeting.” Sapara Williams was Nigeria’s first articulate defender…

Monday, 05 August 2024 04:44

#EndBadGovernance: Misplaced outrage, incongruous comparisons and straw man arguments - Seun Kolade

It is always interesting to read the reactions of Nigerian to various national and international issues. You get a full mix of brilliant arguments, morally compelling admonitions, sensationalist illogic, and watery defense of the establishment often couched in flowery language. More often than not, when individuals realise their interventions are morally vacuous and intellectually wanting, they take a recourse to ad hominems and veiled- and not so veiled- threats. In this short piece, I’d like to invite you join me in examining some of the specious arguments being put forward by apologists of the Nigerian state, in the wake of…

Sunday, 04 August 2024 03:21

Five lessons from the ongoing hunger protests - Farooq Kperogi

The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests. One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy…

Sunday, 04 August 2024 03:18

The protest, M̀gbekē and her cutlass - Festus Adedayo

There is this anecdote in Igboland of M̀gbekē and her cutlass. By the way, M̀gbekē is a synonym for an unrefined and unsophisticated girl. Each time M̀gbekē’s farmer colleagues visited her in the farm, they saw haphazardly tilled land and a female farmer lazily fondling her farm implement. Whenever Mgbeke was asked the reason for her snailish work, she complained of an old and ineffectual cutlass. Knowing M̀gbekē as the female version of Nnoka, Okonkwo’s lazy father in Things Fall Apart, it was difficult to believe the implement was the culprit. The villagers thereafter concluded that it was either M̀gbekē’s…

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