Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

WHEN I was invited to Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, in June, I didn’t know what to expect. I had not visited the place since 2005. Even though I had been to nearby Rivers and Delta States several times, Bayelsa didn’t cross my mind. To make matters worse, the state was often in the news for the wrong reasons. Not that it was an exception, but press headlines seemed to suggest that if you wanted the most depressing news about intra-party wrangling, post-election disputes, or the scariest stuff about kidnapping and youth militancy, Bayelsa was the place to go. Bayelsa, the home…

ALMOST everyone thinks they know what is wrong with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his government, except Tinubu himself. And to show that it’s not just bellyaching, there are plenty of examples to beat the president over the head. Headline inflation has risen from 22.2 percent in April 2023 to 33.7 one year after – and is still growing – while attempts by the government to tame it have been largely ineffective. Food inflation has nearly doubled. The naira has been devalued by 70 percent in one year, and poverty levels, even among the once-comfortable urban population, have risen dramatically.…

WE met last on April 21. I went to Asaba from Lagos to promote my new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It, at Delta State University, which, according to JAMB statistics, is one of the country’s highest subscribers to Mass Communications in 2021. Senator Ifeanyi Ubah was on the flight to Asaba that morning. I didn’t see him until we entered the arrival hall. He seemed to have added some weight for a man his height. I teased him about his robustly prosperous looks. He replied that journalists like me tend not to add weight because we’re too busy…

AFRICA’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, is not a stranger to adversity or its more sinister cousin, sabotage. One of the bitterest battles he has fought in the last 25 years – the cement war – was against his kinsman and founder of BUA Group, Abdulsamad Rabiu. Folks close to both men have tried to patch them up, but the embers are still smouldering. Dangote’s face-off with the Kogi State Government under former Governor Yahaya Bello over rights and royalties from Dangote Cement, Obajana, for the local community, was a skirmish compared to the cement war with Rabiu. Wealth and comfort…

THE assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on July 13 at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania has sucked the oxygen from the debate on President Joe Biden’s fitness for a second term. The discussion will resurface, but Democrats should forget it. The party is stuck with Biden. The odds are daunting. It must feel like a difficult marriage heading for a shipwreck. However, with only four months to the election, facing the odds is the only way to overcome them. Expectedly, Biden doubled down on his decision to run after the presidential debate with Trump left the president looking…

I’VE written this before. Ten years ago, but this man’s story is new every time. To me. And to many who have crossed his path. On his 80th birthday on July 14, I’m repeating this story with the zeal and delight I shared it ten years ago: If the lot had fallen on Chief Ajibola Ogunshola to be the undertaker, not many would have blamed him for the fate of PUNCH. He was 40 when he was appointed director. Though he was a star in the insurance world (former Managing Director of Niger Insurance) and one of Africa’s leading actuaries…

TEN years ago, this article appeared under a different title, “The Debt I Owe.” Professor Olatunji Dare was 70 at the time. Ten years later, on Dare’s 80th birthday on July 17, I’m republishing the article with minor changes. Without this man, I might have turned out to be a literary plumber or perhaps a motor park journalist, but nothing near the second-eleven of a craft that I owe so much. I have also attached a fairly comprehensive file record of Dare in case my updated article is deficient – as I’m sure it is: I met him in 1985.…

BRITISH Prime Minister Rishi Sunak came to the job as an afterthought, yet his days in Number 10 were numbered before he received the ceremonial blessings of King Charles III. For a long time after Brexit, the Tories and sections of the British public, still in post-Brexit ecstasy, were madly in love with Boris Johnson. He was incompetent and a congenital liar but a good poster boy of that era. After David Cameron fell on his sword, the Brits wanted someone to extend the comedy of post-Brexit, and Johnson was a good fit. Then came COVID-19, a global crisis that…

IT was different 16 years ago. Very different. At that time, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was relatively new and walking where angels feared to tread. That was unusual for a government institution, especially a law enforcement agency. So unusual that one of Nigeria’s most courageous social crusaders, Gani Fawehinmi, a thorn in government’s side, joined forces with the commission in the fight against corruption even when the man he loved to hate, Olusegun Obasanjo, was president. But you couldn’t blame Gani. The first decade after transitioning to civilian rule in 1999 was an “enough moment” for Nigeria.…

IT’S been 31 years since a seismic event triggered by the June 12, 1993 election nearly brought Nigeria to its knees. The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), M.K.O Abiola, was on the cusp of a resounding victory when the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida interrupted and later annulled the election. That action sparked nationwide protests that ultimately consumed Babangida’s government and his successor, General Sani Abacha. It set the stage for a transition that, over Abiola’s dead body, produced Nigeria’s luckiest former military leader, Olusegun Obasanjo, as civilian president in 1999. Every May – and later…

I’M opposed to minimum wage. And I know I’m saying this at the risk of losing readers. The minimum wage hurts the poor and vulnerable in whose name and interest Labour claims to strike. Sounds foolish, right? How can more naira in the pocket of the Nigerian worker currently on a minimum wage of N30,000 be bad? In a country where each of 469 lawmakers earns N13.5 million monthly, minus allowances, and office holders in the executive branch use large convoys and maintain large personal staff at the public expense, why should there be any fuss about the government paying…

FOR the deposed Kano Emir, Aminu Bayero, it was not a matter of if, but when. The moment the Supreme Court upheld the election of Governor Abba Yusuf in January, Bayero knew the governor would need the throne to pay his debt. The governor had promised during the campaign that if he was elected, he would revoke the sharing of the Kano Municipal Emirate between two Bayeros among the four emirs and restore its singular pre-eminence. Of course, he won. But before the ruling of the Supreme Court in January affirming his election, two lower courts had ruled in favour…

IT wasn’t five months after President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office when folks started asking, how far? In middle class and elite social circles in Nigeria, that question, or its variant – how market? – is often reserved for people whose sympathy for a cause or person is imperiled. I often pushed back by saying that given the enormity of problems that the Tinubu government faced at inception, five months or so were inadequate to judge. And that was not just a convenient deflection. There are, of course, American presidents who made a mark after 100 days in office, notably,…

I WAS chatting with a friend last week, who, mid-speech, redirected our conversation to the situation in the Middle East. She wanted to know what the mood in the US was. Over 6,000 miles away in Nigeria from where she was calling, she didn’t quite trust the media accounts. Since I was visiting the US, she thought I might have a better reading of the pulse. Her call coincided with the decision by Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a ground offensive in Rafah, in spite of warnings about compounding the current humanitarian disaster in Gaza where over 32,000…

THERE are probably more books on how to sell everything than there is sand by the seashore. I have read a few myself and might say that when it comes to selling, even though what you have read might help, nothing teaches like what you learn by doing it. For some, selling feels natural. I cannot remember how many times I have bought stuff that I really didn’t need because the seller made me feel like they were offering the moon on a stick. Good for those who have such skills but when it comes to selling, I’m far from…

EARLIER this week, I teased on my social handle about my encounter with a deity. Of course, not in the sense that one might meet a deity in the groove of a village forest. Yet, those who have met this man – who know him – might agree that Sam Amuka, fondly called Uncle Sam, is a deity of sorts. The trail that forged the seasons of his career goes back many decades to his years at Daily Times which at its prime, was Africa’s leading journalism shrine. On Sunday I went to see Uncle Sam, to talk about my…

NIGERIA’s three main political parties – the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the Labour Party (LP) – are in turmoil. They have been infested by little foxes that threaten to damage and, potentially, destroy them. I know that discipline is not a virtue of political parties in a presidential system. In Nigeria’s own version, however, indiscipline governs everything. Whether the political parties are winning or losing – of course, it is worse when they’re losing – politicians never forget that the party is simply a convenient tool, serviceable only when it can help them get…

THIS was the question a friend of mine in his late 20s asked me when we woke up on April 14 to the news that Iran had launched over 300 drones and missiles towards Israel. Apart from video war games, the young man has not seen any wars. Nigeria’s civil war ended nearly two and a half decades before he was born. Of course, you don’t have to experience war to feel it. There’s a sense, for example, in which the more recent wars in the West African subregion or the more distant ones in Northeastern Africa or Europe tend…

THE words of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye were honey to taste. Following the bitter ending of the 12-year rule of Macky Sall, highlighted by the widespread belief that France is at the heart of Senegal’s misery, a forlorn country enthusiastically lapped up Faye’s promise of a future untainted by French shenanigans. At a stage, it was not clear who was the public enemy #1: Sall or France? Sall started well. He came to office in 2012 with solid credentials, looking every inch like what Senegal needed to break away from the incompetence and cronyism of Abdoulaye Wade under whom the…

BEFORE The Human Flow was published, Jonathan Power, one of Europe’s most accomplished foreign affairs columnists and journalists, had talked with excitement about the book. It was his first novel. Like a woman who became pregnant when she thought she was past child-bearing, Jonathan, 82, couldn’t wait to make Mary Wesley look like a child prodigy. Sam Omatseye’s book, Beating All the Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Tinubu Became President, on the other hand, is part diary, part essay. The diary would have been difficult to script, even if a fiction writer had tried to imagine the outcome of…