Author: Azubuike Ishiekwene

IN the Bible, Keren-happuch was the youngest of the three beautiful daughters of Job, who against the norms of a patriarchal society, inherited her father’s vast latter-day wealth along with her two other sisters. But in the sometimes inexplicable twist of fate, this is the story of another Keren-happuch whose sun set before it rose. Her story as told by her mother was hard to follow. Even if I had eaten the head of a tortoise, the fabled medicine for anhedonia, the woman’s story, especially her futile search for justice, would still have broken my heart into many pieces. Perhaps…

FOLLOWING the G-20 summit held in India, I have been amused by the debate about whether or not Nigeria should be more than a guest again at the next G-20 meeting in Rio, Brazil. If South Africa is a member, why not Nigeria? How do you offer Africa’s largest economy only a complimentary ticket every time to such an important global event, leaving it with the rather humiliating option of begging for a place? I thought that we had outgrown the belief that respect is earned by size or by simply hanging out with the right crowd, regardless of performance.…

IT’S not often that you meet Supreme Court justices, serving or retired. I first met retired Justice Sunday Akinola Akintan casually at a reception in Abuja, for my friend and radical lawyer, Yinka Olumide-Fusika, who had been admitted to the inner bar. Then, we met again about one year later, this time, through his book. Years after his retirement from the Supreme Court in 2008, Justice Akintan wrote a book, entitled, “Reminiscences: My Journey Through Life,” which Olumide-Fusika, SAN, asked me to review. What struck me was one of Akintan’s motivations for writing the book. It was an answer to…

IT’S more than one year to the next governorship election in Edo State, which prides itself on being the “heartbeat of the nation”. But in a maelstrom that has forced the state’s heart to beat faster than is good for it, you would be forgiven to think the election is tomorrow. The bad blood between Governor Godwin Obaseki and his deputy, Philip Shaibu, is so bitter and so strong it has spilled beyond Osadebe House in Benin, splattering as far as Abuja courts, and daily smearing the front pages of newspapers. Reports last week said the governor, fed up of…

ABUJA is not in a hurry to change. However, in a city famous for its bad habits fostered by wayward politicians, I think the dial may have moved a bit in the right direction. It’s hard to say if this slight movement has been fortuitous, or whether it had anything to do with the threat of the new minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, to tackle lawbreakers with an iron hand. I have noticed that one week after Wike’s swearing in, more traffic lights in and around the Central Business District began to work. More than I can…

IT was not meant to be this way. But like a good number of things Nigerian, the story is hardly complete without a twist in the tale. And so it has been for at least three years now with the story of the gas car that was supposed to lessen, if not end, Nigerians’ petrol misery. Sometime in 2020, state oil company, Nigerian National Petroleum Company (now NNPC Limited), launched what it advertised as the National Gas Expansion Programme (NGEP). The major objective of the programme, according to NNPC Group CEO, Mele Kyari, was to harvest gas for car fuel.…

A GOOD number of people, including me, seems opposed to Nigeria leading the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to war in Niger. In one of the most telling anti-war metaphors, a Nigerian columnist and Editor, Lasisi Olagunju, likened military intervention to rubbing buttocks with the porcupine. Doves everywhere are flying the flag of peace. Protesters are also waving placards reminding Nigeria’s President and ECOWAS Chairman, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, not to start a war he cannot finish. As if he doesn’t know, Tinubu has also been reminded, among other things, that there’s already too much trouble at home –…

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…