Category: OP-ED

A serpent will ordinarily evoke anxiety. Fear is added if that nocturnal creature were found slithering up from the depth of a communal well. To the superstitious in these parts, such spectacle can only be indicative that the surrounding community had either come under a plague or arrived at its threshold. So, when reports came last week that the “hallowed… Read More

In the spirit of the anti-corruption drive of the Buhari regime and given the way and manner this drive has gone to fumigate the public finance sector of governance, especially at the federal level thereby freeing humongous resources that were hitherto fleeced by operatives of government, there is this wish writ large in the minds of Nigerians that the Buhari… Read More

The decision of the Nigerian government to proscribe the Shiite Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and to declare it officially as a terrorist organization is a catastrophic blunder.  In the first instance, the decision is illegal and unconstitutional.  It is a blatant infringement on the freedom of religion guaranteed under the Nigerian Constitution.  But even more than this, it is… Read More

When youth corps member Precious Owolabi and Deputy Commissioner of Police Usman Umar were felled by protest-ground bullets, we thought we had seen the anticlimax to last week’s clashes between the Islamic Movement of Nigerian (IMN) and security agents. Speaking in tangible terms, we were probably right. A budding journalist still trying to make sense of his profession and a… Read More

In the mid-1980s, I became friends with a legendary Nigerian soldier known as “Black Scorpion.” His real name was Benjamin Adekunle, smallish stripe of a man who had acquired the reputation of a killer during the civil war. Tales abound about how he could reduce opposing military formations—and men twice his size—to dissolution and tears.  When we met, I was the editor of ThisWeek magazine,… Read More

Nigeria is dangerously dancing on the brink of complete collapse and unimaginable catastrophe. Ethnic chauvinism and ethnic strife are on the ascendancy. The cloud of doom is hovering over the present and future of this country; and the unending spiral of terror, scattered and organized instances of violence, and widespread insecurity continues to ruin whatever is left of our national… Read More

On Sunday 21st July, 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the killing of 37 people by suspected bandits in Sokoto State. “This frequent and large scale killings of poor villagers by gangs of mass murderers must be met with the fiercest force the government can mobilize,” President Buhari said in a statement by his spokesman Garba Shehu. Premium Times reports that… Read More

The escalating crisis between members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) and the Federal Government of Nigeria appears to have come to a head following a violent clash between members of the sect and the police in Abuja, on Monday, in which live ammunition was used against the protestors and at least one journalist—a Channels TV—reporter was reportedly shot… Read More