Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

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…

THREE – maybe three and a half – stories go to the heart of why Nigeria appears stuck in a rut. And for some strange reason, all of them are rooted mainly in energy and power. The first is about a project, the Mambilla Hydroelectric Project. If you live in Nigeria – except you’re the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu – there’s a good chance you would have heard about this project, which is located in Gembu, Taraba State. In that case, there’s a chance you might also have heard that the national power grid, more in the news for…

THIS was tough to write. My heart resisted it, but I yielded to my head. The petrol in my car, a 2.0-litre 2012 Tokunbo Camry, was at half-tank the day before writing. When pump prices went from 195/litre to 617/litre between May and June 2023, I parked my Jeep and, despite being occasionally mistaken for an Uber driver, opted for the saloon, which, as of the third fuel price increase by September this year, cost about 65k to fill up. After petrol pump price went up again by about 15 percent last week, it would now cost about 80k to…

WHEN the Israeli-Hamas war started one year ago, it didn’t look like it would last long. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to avenge the deaths of over 364 Israelis killed and dozens taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 at a music concert left little doubt it was going to be a bloody phase. But how long, ugly or bloody, it would take for Netanyahu to kill the last Hamas, which was his minimum condition for peace, was hard to tell. Unfortunately, with over 42,000 killed in Gaza, including women, children, UN workers and journalists, over 1500 Israelis killed…

SEVERAL good things happen in the bedroom, often the place of rest and renewal. Sometime in 2004, Sam Nda-Isaiah and his wife Zainab conceived the idea of a newspaper there. She told the story before of how her husband got up in the wee hours, scribbled a few things in a jotter, and asked what she thought of the names and the sketch. That was not the day the newspaper started, of course. But it was only a matter of time. That idea, which later became LEADERSHIP, has evolved from the feisty flimsy of decades ago into a news content…

THE Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had barely finished announcing the result of last Saturday’s Edo governorship poll when I got a call to eat the humble pie. Senator Adams Oshiomhole, the man I called a product vendor in my last article, had pulled off another big one! Why? I had no dog in the fight. But I got the drift. I had warned that given Oshiomhole’s reputation for campaigning for candidates for whom he often ended up apologising, voters could hardly ignore the warning label on his candidate, Monday Okpebholo, and that, at any rate, if it wasn’t that…

BY his admission, Senator Adams Oshiomhole is a lousy product vendor. In the real commercial world, his premises would have been closed and his products banned. But in politics, crime multiples grace. Oshiomhole dragged Godwin Obaseki into the governorship race in 2016 when the odds were against him. Obaseki’s daytime job was minding his business at Afrinvest, a financial services company he founded. But he soon landed a side hustle as chairman of the Edo State Economic and Strategy Team in Osadebey House, Benin. When Oshiomhole wanted to hand over the baton in 2016, after two terms as governor, Obaseki,…

I DON’T get involved with what the security services do or how. Their ways are so complex and their motives so unsearchable that sometimes you’ll be forgiven for thinking that working from the answer to the question is the standard operating procedure. Of course, you are told that whatever happens in between is in the public interest. As far as fiction imitates life, there is a striking resemblance between the recent hyperactivity in Nigeria’s security services and what happened in a novel set in mid-17th century England. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry…

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.…