Category: Leaders

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

Ahmad Lawan has been dutiful in his obligation of inking ‘’rubber stamp’’ on the senate. Though he had said the senate, which he leads, would not dissolve into the executive as an appendage; his actions have betrayed this gasconade. Soon after he became senate president, Lawan assumed the ‘’volunteer role of unofficial spokesman’’ of President Buhari and saddled himself with ‘’interpreting… Read More

The population of my home state, Bayelsa, is 2,000,000 and we all live in single-digit Local Government Areas of eight. 2,000,000 people are not too many people. Bayelsa has the least number of local government areas in Nigeria. How difficult can it be to administer 2,000,000 citizens living in a paltry eight local government areas, compared with Lagos and Kano… Read More

The second leg of the 2019 CAF Champions League final promised to be a spectacle of two North African clubs with very passionate supporters, it was all marred by CAF inability to deploy and manage the Video Assistant Referee, VAR. For an international organisation the size and stature of CAF, this equated to making a mess of eating boiled egg.… Read More