Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

ON the eve of Nigeria’s 65th independence anniversary, I reflected on Harold Smith. He’s not widely known in Nigeria. And that’s probably to be expected for a man whom the British establishment ostracised for decades for daring to be different, before his death. He was everything the British colonial authorities didn’t want him to be, and he paid for it. But for his book, The Harold Smith Story, published by Lawless Publications four years ago, Smith would have died with the knowledge of how a promising country was sabotaged by Britain, with consequences that would last for generations. Sixty-five years…

THE Dangote Petroleum Refinery, Nigeria’s lifeline from decades of rot in the petroleum downstream, has to fight every inch for its turf. The fight started 18 years ago, when the refinery was only an idea. In 2007, those who swore that a refinery, any refinery – public or private would only work over their dead bodies forced President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to reverse the sale of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna Refineries with a gun over his head. Among the vested interests, the unions pulled the trigger on the $670 million sale to Blue Star, the Dangote-led consortium. Since then,…

IN the incredibly sad courtroom drama of Tali Shani v Chief Mike Agbedor Abu Ozekhome (2025) UKFTT 1090 (PC), two ordinary Nigerians from unlikely quarters, each doing what would appear to be their daily work, made the difference. The first was Ibrahim Sani, a superintendent of police at the Force Intelligence Department of the Nigeria Police Force in Abuja, a notoriously corrupt department under retired DIG Mike Ogbizi. Sani had received a request and complaint from Chief Ozekhome (the Respondent in this case) to investigate alleged forged documents, including a “9 mobile” number, stated to be that of Tali Shani…

ZAMFARA State Governor, Dauda Lawal, is hardly in the news. Lawal has enough on his plate in a region struggling with banditry and insurgency, and in a state whose political heavyweights oppose him over political differences. He has learned to mind the state’s business, hardly ever throwing stones except when attacked by Abuja politicians who live in glass houses. It was, therefore, a surprise last week when he released a viral video that made headlines. Following the increase in banditry in the region, especially in Zamfara and neighbouring Katsina State, which left at least 17 dead in two weeks, the…

AFTER the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) announced last week that it would zone the presidency to the South in 2027, some names have been widely mentioned as possible frontrunners. Former President Goodluck Jonathan and the Labour Party’s presidential flagbearer in the last election, Peter Obi, are perhaps the two most serious contenders. With Obi confused and trapped by his volatile “Obidient” base, Jonathan has been framed as the more viable option, but. The “but,” widely considered to be potentially Jonathan’s biggest obstacle, is a legal risk that the courts might overturn his candidature because of a constitutional amendment…

WHEN I wrote that the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) is an animal that eats its curator for lunch, it sounded like a stretch. But so far, the tenure of Bayo Ojulari as group chief executive officer is proving it. This might not be obvious if you look solely at Nigeria’s current crude oil sales. The figure has climbed from about 1.6m bpd when Ojulari was appointed last April to about N1.9m bpd. That is good news for a cash-strapped country plagued by oil theft, weak infrastructure, divestments and thousands of barrels in swap deals. The bad news is…

EUROPEAN leaders often portray Russian President Vladimir Putin as a tyrant, a land grabber, and a Russian bear. And following the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War three years ago, the deadliest in Europe since World War II, Putin has gone from being a bad guy in Western European eyes to being something worse: a war criminal. Yet, the biggest enigma across many Western capitals is why US President Donald Trump, the leader of the free world, is eager to embody everything that the West despises about Putin. Trump is enamoured with Putin. His admiration for the Russian President was once…

THE Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) is an animal that eats its curator for lunch. To survive it, either do not get close or prepare to feed this beast with an endless supply of oil deals, the country’s lifeblood. When former Governor Nasir El-Rufai accused NNPC of being a parallel government and added that if Nigeria does not kill NNPC, corruption will kill it, he was right. After the bazaar of the former Petroleum Minister Diezani Allison-Madueke era, and those before it, the hope was that President Muhammadu Buhari would use his wealth of experience to fix NNPC. His…

PETER Obi has the best chance against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027 of all opposition candidates. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) may have received a slightly higher percentage of the votes (6.9 million or 29.1 percent) in the last presidential election; still, that was poor for Atiku, a sixth-timer in the presidential race. Obi had less than one year to prepare after his former party, the PDP, shafted him, followed by the bitter struggle for control between Atiku and the former Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, which left the party in ruins. Outside the…

I MET him several times after he became Nigeria’s president in 2015, but the meetings did not change my impression of him as an enigma. Yet, as history peels back layer after layer of Muhammadu Buhari’s place, we may discover the essence of his beguiling simplicity. Tight-lipped and taciturn, a soldier in bearing and character, his life was marked by complex dimensions that shaped his political and personal trajectory. Escape route Born on December 17, 1942, in Daura, northwest Nigeria, in a region now fraught with banditry and violent crimes, Buhari began his military career by joining the Nigerian Army…

IT’s hard not to love US President Donald Trump. He is the world’s most powerful president and wears his preeminence on his sleeve. Not for him the crooked modesty of the Chinese or the boring self-effacement of the British. Six months after his second inauguration, it’s been one day, one Trump. Two of his latest alter egos have been his invitation to the White House to five African heads of state, and his threat to impose an additional 10 percent tariff on any country that gets too close to the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa –…

THE proper thing to do when readers respond to a newspaper article is to respect their right of reply. There were two irate responses to my article last week, “Not the Iran We Thought It Was: What Has Changed in the Persian Gulf.” One, entitled “Not the Azu We Thought He Was,” by Yakubu Musa, a guest author for 21st Century Chronicle, an online newspaper, and the other, “Basking in the Euphoria of Narrative Origami,” by Mahfuz Mundadu, a friend of one Hassan Karofi, who claimed he is a journalist. Both articles could have been from the spiteful fingers of…

ON paper, it looked like a mismatch. Iran is not only one of the oldest and most established places in the Persian Gulf but also at least 75 times the size of Israel, with a population nine to ten times larger. Size for size, it’s a modern-day David and Goliath match-up, with ancient history squarely on Iran’s side. At the height of its reign, especially under Cyrus the Great (545-525 BC), the Persian Empire, modern-day Iran, extended as far as Egypt, and its military might was unassailable. In more contemporary times, Iran defended itself against the aggression of Saddam Hussein…

I ENCOUNTERED the relic of his presence long before I met Sam Amuka, known as Uncle Sam. Inside a room in the far corner of the old Kudeti PUNCH building, predominantly constructed of plywood and steel frames, there was a wooden armchair that had been a fixture in Uncle Sam’s office when he served as managing editor. When I joined PUNCH as a staff writer eight years after his departure in 1981, this piece of furniture was in my first office, sitting like a totem in a shrine, while stories about Uncle Sam floated in whispers. The stories could not…

BOARDING announcements were not an issue when I used to commute in Lagos by danfo, the ubiquitous yellow buses, or molue, the mass-transit lorries, which were improvised for public transportation. The conductors often had a melodious and entertaining way of calling passengers that was enjoyable to hear. They called out in a drawl, accompanying each announcement with a warning for passengers to board with their change in hand or risk a “forced marriage,” which meant giving a fixed sum, usually a bank note, to two or more passengers to share at disembarkation. Flying is a luxury – or should be…

THE world has never been short of demagogues and fools, but the remedies have often matched the supply. In 1990, during President Nelson Mandela’s thank-you tour of the world, he was asked at the City College of New York, Harlem, NY., why he remained friends with Muammar Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro. He replied that he didn’t think it was the business of any country to choose South Africa’s friends. These people stood by South Africa in its hour of need; why should he betray them now? His interlocutor turned tail, and Mandela received a standing ovation. British Prime…

THE last time a public official wept on national TV, Nigerians regretted offering her towels instead of buckets to collect her tears. She was acting, but we didn’t know it. Diezani Allison-Madueke had just been appointed Minister of Transport and went on a tour to assess some major roads. At the Benin end of the Lagos-Benin highway, she broke down and wept. She was seeing for the first time, outside her bubble, what Nigerians knew and endured daily: poor, hazardous roads. Her tears changed nothing. She left the roads in a worse state than she found them, but Nigeria being…

BURKINABE leader Ibrahim Traore is acting like a rock star. It’s not entirely his fault. He’s receiving a lot of help from dozens of social media users, especially TikTokers, who are desperate to anoint him as the best thing to come out of Burkina Faso since Thomas Sankara. Traore must be enjoying it, because even though he is pretending, he knows he’s not Sankara. He is an opportunist, happy to capitalise on the current frustration in his country and the Sahel for his benefit. A recent report by The Africa Report summarised Traore’s fictional character. “In dozens of viral TikTok…

THE President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina, ruffled presidential feathers on Monday when he said in a speech during the 20th Anniversary dinner of the financial services company, Chapel Hill Denham, that Nigerians were better off in 1960 than they are today. The Special Adviser to the President (Information & Strategy), Bayo Onanuga, immediately disagreed, saying that Adesina used a narrow, perhaps one of the most contested metrics, to measure the country’s progress. Both Adesina and Onanuga were right and wrong. What’s In A Measure? Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the most common measure of the size of…

THERE’s a concern that Nigeria could soon become a one-party state, not by law, like in China, but through subterfuge – or in legal terms, de facto – similar to Cameroon, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, or even Rwanda, where the ruling parties are inflicting a slow, painful death on the opposition. Those who express this concern have given many reasons. The clearest and most troubling, it seems, is the wave of defections to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) that has depleted the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Wave After Wave Apart from Federal lawmakers from Osun to Kaduna and…