Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

MANY years ago, when my teacher said nothing sells like sex, crime, and money, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. Yet, over the years, I’ve repeatedly seen that a judicious mix of these socio-economic ingredients is a spellbinder. Apart from the tragic news about banditry, the suspense in Rivers State, and the heightened prostitution amongst politicians crossing carpet or finding new harems, nothing has hugged the headlines as relentlessly as the salacious tango between Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. After weeks of trying to see, hear, and say no evil, I’m compelled to overcome the temptation…

THE live drama staged in the Oval Office on February 28 between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was such that Zelenskyy might never have rehearsed in all his former life as a comedian. Except that it wasn’t funny. It was unprecedented. You would need to go back 64 years to find anything nearly as nasty as the Trump-Zelenskyy shouting match, with Trump’s deputy, JD Vance, enthusiastically fanning the flames. The showdown between John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev before the Cuban Missile Crisis was hair-raising, but it wasn’t before a global audience or live…

YOU cannot quarrel about how a man tells his story. It is his business. However, the pseudo-autobiography of the former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, is more than the retired general telling a story of his own life. A Journey in Service is a long, tortuous journey to penitence, which arrives at its destination, if it does at all, leaving its memory behind. After 32 years of deflecting, dissembling, dodging and denial, the former military president finally gets as close as possible to remorse, then stops short of saying sorry for his betrayal of his country by blaming several dead…

MANY Nigerians experience visa refusal daily. They don’t need the National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, to invoke hell against any country to make the point. Unfortunately, Ribadu’s fury after the Canadian High Commission refused visas to Chief of Defence Staff General Christopher Musa and other officials for the winter Invictus Games in Vancouver Whistler was directed at an unlikely target. Canada can be criticised for many things, but Ottawa’s faults do not include consular meanness. In the last five years, Canada has been the third-biggest destination for Nigerian immigrants, especially students, after the US and the UK. Multiple sources,…

MANY years ago, when my son was completing paperwork for a job with the Lagos State government, he was required to fill out a form that included his State of Origin. He paused. It had been marked a compulsory field, and he wanted to know if not filling it would affect his chances. I said it would. He replied that he wouldn’t fill it, even if it meant losing the job. It didn’t make sense to him that his chances might come down solely not to his competence, merit, or the fact that he was born in Lagos where he…

IT’S nearly 20 years since Mark Steyn wrote a non-fiction book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Steyn, a Canadian newspaper columnist, could not have known that the kicker of this book title, which extolled America as the last bastion of civilisation as we know it, would become the metaphor for a wrecking ball. Steyn thought demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam would ruin Western civilisation. The only redeeming grace was American exceptionalism. Nineteen years after his book, America Alone is remembered not for the threats Steyn feared or the grace of American exceptionalism but…

I CAN understand if many people outside the US wish to forget about President Donald Trump and get on with their lives. However hard you try, you can’t keep up with the chaos in the White House since January 20. It would be a defamation of the animal kingdom to call Trump a bull in a China shop. He is worse. Regrettably, Trump is inspiring copycats around the world, and it won’t be long before they start following his example, especially his anti-immigration hysteria. Trump didn’t create the migrant crisis facing the world. He wasn’t there when the Huns, Goths,…

IT’s hard to argue when U.S. President Donald Trump says that God saved him to save America. Not only is a rational argument often suspended or lost when God enters the matter, but Trump’s return as the 47th president defies logic. A leader’s job is never done. But how do you rationally explain Kamala Harris’s defeat in the presidential election and, along with it, the routing of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in the Congress? If the election were a boxing match, it would have beaten the record of Vitali Klitschko vs Shannon Briggs’s 2010 fight as one of…

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the U.S., on January 19, 2017, I wrote an article I could easily write now. It was entitled “A Memory of America on Obama’s Last Day.” With minor edits, it’s worth repeating as Trump happens again as the 47th President of the U.S. ONLY exceptionalism could have offered that opportunity. Only exceptionalism could produce a Barack Obama and, eight years later, bring forth a Donald Trump—one neoliberal and the other a neo-anything-is-possible. The peculiar aspect of the U.S. is that everything is extraordinary. If any doubt remains, the…

“Arsenal fans are currently over the moon, testosterone pumping – and why not? The story will not change in 2024… the odds are not in Arsenal’s favour… My forecast is that despite setting his ducks in a row, (Godwin) Obaseki’s candidate would lose in September. His biggest undoing would be the large army of political enemies he has created in the last eight years – some inevitably from the reforms he introduced, but others, and in a far larger number, avoidably from his mean-spirited, opportunistic politics.” – What You Might Expect in 2024, December 29, 2023 THIS is the fifth…

PERHAPS three will be the lucky number. After at least two previous failed attempts, a peace deal between Israel and Hamas might be reached by January 20 or in the early days of Donald Trump’s second term. Or… It’s a matter of perhaps, with a big P. Optimism is a rare commodity in a region with the longest-running conflict and the largest river of bad blood. Yet, after over 450 days of war with its predations, traumas and devastations, a bit of optimism is not a bad thing. In that spirit, I accepted the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs invitation…

APART from General Sani Abacha, I have met one-on-one with every Nigerian leader since 1992, from General Ibrahim Babangida. However, I have only participated in one televised live group media chat with former President Olusegun Obasanjo. If you have met Obasanjo before – whether for an interview or anything else – you might agree that he’s a handful and more. You never know what to expect with Obasanjo, especially when he is in his lair. I narrowly missed being punched by the former president during an untelevised interview in his Library in the Villa in 2004 for asking why his…

IF I’ve learned anything these past 35 years of journalism, it’s looking for a story in every situation. It wasn’t different when I left home for the airport on December 14, except that this time, the story found me. My Uber driver started the conversation: “Are you Mr. Azu of LEADERSHIP?” he asked. I confirmed I was but didn’t make much of his question since he could have gotten the information from Truecaller. I also found from my Truecaller that he was identified as “Doc. Jibrin.” However, in a country where people love big titles that mean nothing, anyone can…

THE news from Ghana was not how John Dramani Mahama’s opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), defeated Nana Akufo-Addo’s ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). The news was how Akufo-Addo managed to survive a full second term. Towards the end of his first and for much of his second term in office, he governed with his head on the block, just waiting for the axe to fall. His party’s loss in the December 7 presidential election was a defeat foretold. It was barely two years after Akufo-Addo assumed office in 2017 when doubts about his party’s viability began to surface.…

I WAS watching the evening news on Monday night when two presenters used a word at different times that jolted me. I’ve heard and seen that word used often, especially by millennials and Gen Z, but I didn’t entirely pay heed because they were mostly in informal settings. Anyways – I meant to write, anyway – I was jolted to hear that word, anyways, twice from two TV presenters on different programmes on the same station just minutes apart! My Use of English teachers would have beaten the straying “s” out of me if I had used that word even…

DONALD Trump’s election overshadowed Kemi Badenoch’s emergence as the leader of the Tory Party of Britain. Yet, no one gets the worst political job in one of the world’s oldest political parties and walks away quietly. This is especially the case when the candidate is a straight-talking, ideological woman and a child of an immigrant in a largely conservative society. It was not a mistake that a section of the British press framed the last contest for the Tory leadership as one of the worst match-ups in recent times, if not in its history. Here was Badenoch, a black woman…

IT’S a famous story in Christendom. Palestine, a vassal territory under the Roman Emperor Caesar, was obliged to pay tributes and taxes to Rome. A radical teacher in the territory, Jesus, taught things that the teachers of the law and local administrators in Palestine were uncomfortable with. After setting traps for him but missing, they pitted him against Caesar by asking him a question that could have gotten him in trouble and possibly gotten rid of him for good. “Is it lawful to pay taxes?” the Pharisees asked him. “Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is…

ONE year ago, on November 15, 2023, the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) invited me to speak on “Nigerian Media, Sustainability and Existential Threats by Big Tech.” Being asked again this year is a privilege, but I won’t be surprised if this is my last invitation. Perhaps I won’t need to come as a presenter next time. A learning machine, Anaba possibly, might be here to do the job. This may sound incredible, but increasingly, with improvements in infotech and biotech, it seems that what AI cannot do does not exist. In its most basic definition, generative artificial intelligence (AI)…

I UNDERSTAND wealthy US citizens and conservatives of the evangelical hue rooting for Donald Trump. The rich believe he would loosen regulations and protect them and their businesses from excessive taxation. Conservative evangelicals believe he is the bulwark against wokeism, especially the ultra-liberal variety. And white folks want their country back. But Africans at home and in the Diaspora – what is their business supporting a guy who described their continent as a “shithole” and has worn his anti-immigrant rhetoric on his sleeves? It didn’t seem to make sense that anyone who saw Trump 1.0 would ever dream or wish…

Dear former First Lady, YOU asked the question that millions outside the US have been asking for weeks if not months: Why can’t America see former President Donald Trump for who he is – a congenital liar, a narcissist, a fascist, and a demagogue? At a campaign rally in Michigan on October 26, you criticised those holding Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to a higher standard than they have held Donald Trump despite his four chaotic years as president and his even more crooked lifestyle, long before that. “I’ve got to ask myself,” you said, “why on Earth is the race…