Category: OP-ED

“I am very sorry. Mr. President, to have to do it, for you are the chief of the nation and I am nothing but a policeman, but duty is duty, sir, and I will have to place you under arrest.”         – William Henry West, the African AmericanPolice officer who arrested President Ulysses Grant. He had the knack… Read More

The last time an amendment was made to the laws governing elections in Nigeria was in the year 2010. That is clearly ten years ago, when the Electoral Act was amended. From that period up until now, several issues and problems arising from the conduct of elections make an amendment of the subsisting law even more imperative. From Imo State… Read More

The Yoruba nation has been bemoaned with recent vain narratives of comparing our sage and the icon of progressive politics, Chief Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo with Jagaban Bola Ahmed Tinubu.  I initially loved to title this piece: AWOLOWO VS TINUBU: THE CONTEST OF LEGENDS. but I was shocked at the rage exhibited by some of the respected personalities I contacted as… Read More

At the beginning, I was tempted to think of the author as a reluctant memoirist. Hon. Justice Sunday Akinola Akintan says his two greatest motivations for writing Reminiscences: My Journey Through Life  are 1) to fortify the slender repertoire of written records in Yorubaland and 2) to heed the counsel of famous lawyer T.O.S. Benson that the only way for… Read More

Left to our 19 Northern states’ governors and Nigeria’s Education Minister, Adamu Adamu, the over 1.5 million candidates that sat this year’s West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) would have probably waited for another year before taking the exam. We owe the West African Examination Council (WAEC) thanks for sticking to its timetable in the face of intimidation and… Read More

The growing calls for the regulation of social media platforms in Nigeria by the country’s politicians are absurd and a misplaced priority. Rather than reduce hate speech and fake news as the policy proponents hope, it would only give the government needless powers to determine the extent to which Nigerians enjoy their God-given freedom of expression. Moreover, there are more… Read More

The #EndSARS protests which lasted for about two weeks until the crisis in Lagos on October 20, 2020, now known as the Black Tuesday in Nigeria’s contemporary history, may have abated, with the disappearance from Nigerian streets of the horde of protesters, looters, hijackers, and miscreants who together lent a new dimension to the protests. But essentially what we are… Read More

The country, United States of America, has grown its tentacles so big among countries of the world that its stand on international organisations has effect in both the funding and recognition of such agencies. It became a huge blow for the United Nations specialised agency, World Health Organisation (WHO), when President Donald Trump moved to withdraw US participation from the… Read More

I read with a putrid feeling of nausea and utter shame a statement credited to the Hon Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Mr Abubakar Malami, wherein he was quoted to have said it was possible that hoodlums dressed in army fatigues could have been responsible for the shootings at Lekki Toll Gate during the recent #EndSARS protests.… Read More

In the Nigerian polity, there have been heated discussions around the regulation of social media. This discussion was brought to the fore again after the #EndSARS protest, which was anchored largely on social media. The social media was used for mobilization, reaching the international community among many other purposes. It got to a stage that the Chief Executive Officer of… Read More