Those familiar with road travel before fancy luxury buses and jeeps displaced wooden-back Bedford light trucks, famously called mammy wagons, might remember this ubiquitous message in cursive, bright colours scrawled on the rear and sometimes on the sides of trucks plying highways in Nigeria’s Southeast: “No condition is permanent.” I’m not quite sure what the motivation was. My guess is that it was a message of comfort to the despairing and a warning to those who take life too seriously: No condition is permanent. True in life as in politics, that message rang again this week with wide-sweeping changes announced…

This time eight years ago, Nigerians still basking in the euphoria of having a martinet president began to ascribe all kinds of wonderful happenstances to his body language. So excited were the supporters of former President Muhammadu Buhari about the country’s potential under him that they attributed some magicality to otherwise routine happenings. Civil servants resume work at 8 am as expected of them? It was Buhari’s body language that motivated them to their newfound sense of responsibility. Did the electricity company supply power for 18 hours a day instead of their habitual six hours? Yes, that must be Buhari’s…

On Saturday, 25 February, Nigeria conducted an election for the position of President, which was widely regarded as the most fiercely contested in the country since 1999. On 1 March, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Tinubu, candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), as the winner and President-elect. On 29 May, the Chief Justice of Nigeria swore him in as the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces and 16th president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. While the reaction of the international community was mixed, the two major opposition parties, the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour…

We live in an age of wonder in which half the world now has access to a technology – the internet – that supports people’s health and education, can be a lifeline in a time of disaster or disease, and was designed to be open to everyone but owned by no one. And the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted both its importance and its potential by forcing the world to connect remotely, contact-free, and in real time. Unfortunately, we also live in an age of fear and suspicion. You don’t even need to “doomscroll” to find claims that the internet is…