Category: Opinions

I must start this piece by confessing that I have never met Comrade Omoyele Sowore in person before. While it is true that for the past decade I have been writing on his SaharaReporters website we only communicated via email. I hold Sowore in high esteem because when he was in the University of Lagos doing his higher education I… Read More

Predictably, APC won the Ekiti State gubernatorial election. Abiodun Oyebanji garnered 187, 057 votes. As usual, the election wasn’t free from vote-buying, ballot stuffing and snatching, and other surreptitious rigging tactics – the trademark of elections in Nigeria.It is instructive to emphasize that any election in Yoruba land or Nigeria, in general, would not deter or delay the departure of… Read More

Whenever the academic staff union of universities (ASUU)calls off its strike, we all begin to countdown to the next. That is because we know the government will fail to commit to the agreement, and ASUU will always be ASUU. Everyone is fed up with this fruitless cycle, and it is time for the union to renew its tactics. ASUU wants to renegotiate the 2009 agreement – which was built on a 2001 agreement – and it is an excellent idea.  The union should begin… Read More

“It was about the pidgins,” he said to us by way of explanation. “The pidgins wouldn’t fly,” he said again. Perhaps he was under so much pressure from people who were so disappointed that, like an emperor, he had prophesied that President Goodluck Jonathan would lose the 2015 election because of the pidgins who refused to fly. They wanted Rev Fr Camillus… Read More

Only Sowore put his hands to the plough! The moment Buhari’s government assumed power, it militarized our democracy and disabled the civic space, thereby subjecting dialogue, dissent or disagreement to a foreclosure. Hence, the state rolled out its full arsenal of coercion, armed to the teeth, men (and a few women) of the secret police, elite squads of the police,… Read More

The apology issued by the Church of Scotland for its role in capturing and torturing alleged witches in early modern Europe is an example and an initiative that churches in Africa must emulate. In a historic gesture of mea culpa, the Church of Scotland has, at its General Assembly, in May, acknowledged their role in the persecution and execution of… Read More

The 2022 industrial action by Nigeria’s academic staff union of universities (ASUU) is worrying on many grounds, but it is nothing new in the Nigerian context. It is the fifth industrial action in the last ten years – 2020, 2017, 2014, and 2013 – and this is becoming more like a tradition. As an academic and an active union member in the higher education sector, I empathise with the ongoing industrial action by ASUU. I also worry for the… Read More

That the All Progressives Congress (APC) flag bearer, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is exactly where the party’s last presidential candidate President Muhammadu Buhari was when he got the ticket eight years ago, shows just how our politics has stagnated, if not regressed. After Buhari won the APC ticket in December 2014, the next major hurdle was getting a running mate.… Read More

Nigerian political leaders are evil. They possess a “dark core of personalities.” They put their own interests ahead of the Nigerian people. They take pleasure in causing pain to Nigerians.  Nigeria is the only country in the world where workers are not being paid while the political elites take home millions. Look at the National Assembly. Do you see any… Read More

On Monday, August 4, 2004, one week after he made a speech at the Democratic Party’s convention in Boston, I wrote a column for the Nigeriaworld called “Obama: An audacity of hope?” Here is how the column started. “Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Congresswoman, recently visited the White House with a congressional delegation. Making her way out, she passed President Bush,… Read More