Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

IF President Bola Ahmed Tinubu hit the ground running, it was because problems chased him into office. Yet, it wasn’t long before he tripped on a matter in which his genius has been acknowledged: forming his cabinet. One of his credentials for eight years as governor of Lagos, and even outside public office for 16 years, has been his gift for spotting talents and putting them to work. He campaigned on this record in the last election. You can therefore imagine the disappointment in some circles when he not only waited 60 days, nearly exhausting the time allowed by law,…

NOT only are military coups becoming frighteningly frequent in West and Central Africa, virtually all of them, it appears, also speak French. For the fifth time in three years in West Africa, soldiers struck again in Niger, Nigeria’s Northern neighbour, where former President Muhammadu Buhari had teasingly longed for refuge from Nigeria’s hostile press. With the recent turn of events, however, it appears that Buhari’s speed train to Maradi, Niger’s ancient city, may have to find another destination. It’s the fifth successful military coup in that country since 1960. Apart from the worn-out reasons of “deteriorating security and poor economic…

WHEN I first voted in an election in Nigeria in 1983, the Internet was just newly born. It had not even been properly named. Forty years later when I voted for the fifth time, my daughter who attained voting age only 13 years ago and has since voted only once, as far as I know, was telling me from thousands of miles away, where she now lives with her family, how she thought I should have voted and for who. I laughed. This was by no means a unique experience. A very close friend and managing director of one of…

THERE’S a trending video from nine years ago. If you watched it casually, you might in fact think that it was done yesterday. It was a clip of Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, narrating what happened in 2014 when a delegation of African heads of state was asked by AU to mediate the Libyan crisis at the time. Museveni’s account of the outcome of the assignment, which has so far not been denied by NATO, was a scandal – an African shame – on steroids. It’s surprising how the incident remained largely unreported until this video resurfaced again recently. It wasn’t…

I’M not sure what breaks the heart more: her insistence on her innocence or the prospects of a future that now hangs in the balance. For a young adult with a promising future, the emerging facts only suggest one thing: it doesn’t rain, it pours. Mmesoma Ejikeme was one of the numerous students of Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS), Nnewi, Anambra State, who took the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) in May 2023. The first child in a family of four whose father eked out a living as an Okada rider, Mmesoma remained not just the pride of her parents,…

IT doesn’t make sense to weigh tragedies on a scale. How do you measure them? Leo Tolstoy got it right in Anna Karenina when he said whereas all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And so indeed it was on June 14 when it was reported that a boat carrying 750 migrants had capsized near Greece in the Mediterranean killing over 500 with dozens missing. It was one of the most horrific tragedies in recent times, claiming the lives of hundreds of migrants mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan and Palestine who put…

THOSE familiar with road travel before fancy luxury buses and jeeps displaced wooden-back Bedford light trucks, famously called mammy wagons, might remember this ubiquitous message in cursive, bright colours scrawled on the rear and sometimes on the sides of trucks plying highways in Nigeria’s South-East: “No condition is permanent.” I’m not quite sure what the motivation was. My guess is that it was a message of comfort to the despairing and a warning to those who take life too seriously: No condition is permanent. True in life as in politics, that message rang again this week with wide-sweeping changes announced…

WITHIN minutes of the release of the video of President Bola Tinubu signing the students’ loan bill into law, it was trending on Twitter as was the name of Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila, who sponsored the bill in his former life as Speaker. Apart from the Nigeria Maritime University which was charging N81,500 per semester in 2019 – the highest in a federal university – the average tuition is about N45,000. State universities charge between N60,000 and N120,000, while polytechnics and colleges of education charge less of course, but only slightly less than federal universities. Strangely, the word, “tuition,”…

PRESIDENT Bola Ahmed Tinubu is under fire for announcing that petrol subsidy is gone from day one. His inauguration address also touched on a unified currency exchange, high interest rate and power, among others. Of all these, however, the one that got the headlines was petrol subsidy and the most frequently expressed concern, is why now? To say, in his first speech, that fuel subsidy was gone, that a unified exchange rate was vital, and that the current interest rate was anti-people and anti-business, was the economic equivalent of an earthquake. Of the four preceding presidential inauguration speeches since 1999…

AFTER weeks of being at daggers drawn over the results of the last general elections and with only days to the inauguration of a new government on May 29, one of Nigeria’s three biggest pastimes – food – appears to be bringing people together again. On a good day, the country swoons over football or music. In the last two weeks, however, Nigerians up and down the food chain have been flocking to the pot of 27-year-old Hilda Bassey Effiong, fondly called Hilda Baci, who is on the verge of confirmation as the new holder of the Guinness World Records…

TWO presidents in the last 24 years provide interesting examples of how to relate with the National Assembly. And between the two, the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, can decide how to model his relationship with the 10th National Assembly. The first example is President Olusegun Obasanjo. He was not only head of the executive branch, he was leader of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the de facto head of its Board of Trustees. But it didn’t end there. Obasanjo was also, in a manner of speaking, head of the legislature. That may sound like a misnomer in…

IT started like a grudge match. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, was dealt a bad hand in a failed transaction. Later, he vowed revenge. Not in a pound of flesh, but by venturing to make his own success where he had been ambushed. At issue was the decision of the government of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2007 to reverse the sale of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna Refineries (two of Nigeria’s moribund refineries) to Blue Star, the Dangote-led consortium. Blue Star had paid about $670million for the plants in the twilight of the Obasanjo administration, and gone away thinking it…

WE have a measurement problem eloquently illustrated in a Yoruba tale about a Mecca has-been. The fellow in this tale had just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, apparently the first to do so in his community. Upon his return, folks were understandably curious and wanted to know about the Holy Land. Thinking of what would best illustrate the majestic splendour of Mecca, the sojourner decided to use a native fowl as an example. “You all know our native fowl?,” he began. “Of course!,” his curious, attentive listeners chorused. “The fowl in Mecca is as big as a cow, if…

NIGERIA’s February/March elections undid many things. One of them was the 63-year-old myth that no wealthy and ambitious candidate could emerge president. Until the last presidential election. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s president between 1963 and 1966, came close. But while ownership of his extensive and authoritative newspaper chain made him influential, he was not wealthy. In any case, he was only a ceremonial president. The other leaders, especially the elected ones, up till now, had neither money nor ambition. And all, without exception, were also not prepared for office. A number of them even said so publicly. Bola Ahmed Tinubu…

DONALD Trump consolidated his record in demagoguery when he became the first former US president ever to be criminally indicted and arraigned in a Manhattan court on April 4. He was the first US president to complain about an election he won and also the first to openly express support for the body-slamming of a reporter. He has the distinction of introducing “shithole countries” into the presidential lexicon. And on top of this improbable political career, Trump is also the first US president to be impeached twice. With 34 counts of criminal conduct hanging around his neck, mostly charges of…

WHEN King Charles, the head of the Church of England, is crowned on May 6, there would be two very unusual non-Protestant special guests at the ceremony, among others: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who is Hindu; and the Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and next First Minister of Scotland, Humza Haroon Yousaf, a Muslim. Not two unusual guests. Three, actually. The third, Ireland’s Prime Minister and son of a Hindu Indian doctor, Leo Varadkar, is openly gay; one of the only five openly gay world political leaders. It gets even more interesting. Before King Charles’ arrival at…

FROM Accra to Cape Town images of Nollywood, Nigeria’s popular movie footprint, are a common staple in homes across the continent as are the sights and sounds of its pop icons who are also amongst Africa’s biggest.  When politics is on the menu, however, it does not appear that the rest of the continent has the same appetite for what Nigeria has to offer as it does for the country’s jollof rice, its captivating movies or perhaps the Afrobeat of superstar, Burna Boy. Between February and March 2023, Nigeria held its general elections; the seventh since 1999 when the country…

SOMETIMES it feels like we have been childhood friends. That we have known each other forever. For over 30 years since our paths crossed, I can’t remember how many times I’ve called him “Louis,” much less “Louis Osaretin Odion.” Even now, it feels awkward to write it. I call him by the name that the closest circle of his friends has come to know and call him for nearly three decades: “Capacity!” And that’s what he calls me too, even though he retains the proprietary right to the moniker. He earned it from the odysseys of a life of sailing…

FOR the third time since 1999, I voted at a general election on February 25 and did so without much hassle. I knew my candidates would lose at the unit where I voted, but that didn’t matter. Voting mattered more. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) processed me so quickly it was almost like magic. I had no reason to suspect my experience would not be the norm that day. As I walked away from the booth a family friend who had just voted caught up with me. “Thank God that I have voted,” she said. “What gives me even…

TRYING to fit him into a mold can be sometimes problematic. I have always thought of him as a teacher and mentor. And later, only much later, as a friend. For over three decades he has been more than enough in each of these roles. My path with Dr. Yemi Osinbajo, as he then was, first crossed at the University of Lagos when he was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law and I was a student at the Department of Mass Communication at the same university. Just a busybody trying to indulge my fantasy of becoming a pocket lawyer,…