Abimbola Adelakun
Party spraying is not what damages the naira
Since the arrest of another Nigerian socialite, Pascal Okechukwu (aka Cubana Chef Priest), I have come across jejune assertions justifying the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s pursuit of t...
25th April 2024
Finally, they came for Bobrisky
At an academic conference some years ago, two students walked up to me after learning I was a Nigerian. They had based their academic projects on popular cross-dresser Idris Okunenye (Bobrisky) and th...
18th April 2024
Adelabu and power management
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, must have smarted from the embarrassing fallout his comments about Nigerians and their habits of energy efficiency generated. While addressing the public last...
11th April 2024
But how much should a Nigerian household earn?
Recently, the CEO of Air Peace, Allen Onyema, got on the wrong side of the internet when he said anyone earning N200,000 monthly in Nigeria is better off than someone earning £2,000 in the United Kin...
4th April 2024
Binance escapee and Nigerian gragra
From the description of the VIP treatment given the two Binance executives abducted by the Nigerian government in a Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton style, one gets the impression that they did no...
28th March 2024
Okuama: Beyond the talk of reprisals
Much of the conversations regarding the sad and unwarranted attack on the men of the Nigerian Army in Okuama community of Ughelli South Local Government Area of Delta State have bordered around repris...
21st March 2024
School kidnaps: Another APC hen comes home to roost
Exactly one month to this day in 2014, Nigeria became the subject of international interest when 276 students of Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, were kidnapped by the terrori...
14th March 2024
Erisco vs Egodi: The police is the villain
Here is what happens every single time a Nigerian “big man” and the common man enter a contest of wills: the ethically bereft Nigerian police is more than likely to fight the battles of the rich a...
7th March 2024
This present hunger should not be politicised
One of the oft-repeated myths in this country is that when the poor are hungry enough, their final resort will be to eat the rich. But when one considers the Nigerian situation, one wonders just how m...
29th February 2024
Nigerians have done nothing but endure
Officials of the present administration do not seem to have any other platitude to offer Nigerians than appeal to them to just “endure.” When they mount any available pulpit to comment on the ongo...
22nd February 2024
Gbajabiamila is the social menace that must be regulated
At a recent public event where he represented his principal, Chief of Staff to the president, Femi Gbajabiamila, used the opportunity to retrieve the hackneyed topic of social media regulations. While...
15th February 2024
APC is now crowdsourcing wisdom?
At a recent function in Abuja, Vice President Kashim Shettima expressed his disappointment that some Nigerians would rather be amused by the free fall of Naira value than pour ashes on their heads. Ac...
8th February 2024
Governor Makinde and his explosion report
On the unfortunate explosion that rocked Ibadan earlier this month, Governor Seyi Makinde has demonstrated an adeptness that is probably unequalled anywhere. Within 24 hours, he had announced that the...
1st February 2024
Ransomed by the police or with money?
By now, you must have read the story of the Al-Kadriyar family. Their five daughters and a female relative were kidnapped for ransom on January 2, 2024, following a gun battle that left several police...
25th January 2024
Nigerian Army and the ‘discipline’ problem
In the recent instances where some officers of the Nigerian Army have brought the institution to some disrepute, the defence in their official statements tends to emphasise the military ethos of ‘di...
18th January 2024
There is no defending TB Joshua
For those of you who watched the BBC Africa documentary, Disciples: The Cult of TB Joshua (three episodes), an expose on the Synagogue Church of All Nations’ late founder Temitope Joshua and still i...
11th January 2024
Plateau people, and the right to bear arms
Following the attacks on some communities in Plateau State during the Christmas season, groups from the South to the Middle Belt regions of the country, have once again re-ignited the call to the gove...
4th January 2024
Tinubu’s one year assessment started in February
On Sunday, while visiting the president, Prof. Wole Soyinka told a journalist who asked him to assess the present administration that he typically gives presidents one year into their respective tenur...
28th December 2023
Rivers: Another political situation ‘resolved’
Stories of godfathers and godsons falling out in Nigerian politics are tales as old as Nigeria’s democratic time; there is no new angle to them. They all follow the same plot: a monied godfather spo...
21st December 2023
Edo poll: I'll support whoever emerges as PDP candidate, says Obaseki
The Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, said he will support whoever emerges as the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party for the State Governorship Elections slated for September 21, 2024. Obasek...
14th December 2023
Kaduna victims need justice, not charity
My first encounter with a critique of charity was Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. I was maybe 15 or 16 then, but his take—speaking through his character—was indelibly etched in my mind...
14th December 2023
Ondo is not better off with Tinubu’s intervention
The revelation by the Ondo State Commissioner for Information, Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, that the presidential intervention in the state’s political crisis climaxed in demanding a signed resignation...
7th December 2023
What Obasanjo’s ‘Afro-democracy’ forgot
The argument that democracy is not working for Africa due to our historical and cultural factors is not new. Critics after critics have posited that Africans must evolve indigenous methods of democrac...
30th November 2023
Who will hold prodigal governors accountable?
The various reports of the profligacy of some states in the country accentuate a crucial defect in our system of governance: the absence of autonomous entities that can hold leaders accountable. In se...
23rd November 2023
Lagos State should bear responsibility for LAWMA siblings’ deaths
This will be hard to see through in Nigeria, but it is an idea worth exploring: the families of the two sisters employed by the Lagos Waste Management Authority and crushed to death on Monday by a mot...
16th November 2023
15 useless airports and Nigeria’s concrete democracy
The news report that about 15 airports that gulped no less than N301bn altogether failed to meet an annual threshold of passenger traffic exemplifies Nigeria’s white elephant peculiarity that I call...
9th November 2023
Are we now doomed to perpetual politicking?
The stories that dominated the news cycle in varying degrees the past week have something in common: they reported on the true nature of our politics as an infinite cycle of warfare among combatants w...
2nd November 2023
“Satan” in the FCT
It is said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled on humans was to make them doubt his existence. The quip, dating back to as far back as the 1836 book by John Wilkinson and memorably quoted in...
26th October 2023
Now that Abuja men are losing their manhoods
Last Friday, the Federal Capital Territory Commissioner of Police, Haruna Garba, while intimating newsmen about the epidemic of “stolen manhoods” in the nation’s capital and adjoining towns, not...
19th October 2023
Nigeria needs a magician president
Since 1999, there is hardly any Nigerian president who has not said—or of whom has not been said—that he is no magician. So when the wife of the president, Mrs Remi Tinubu, made the same statement...
12th October 2023
Tinubu’s certificates, Atiku’s moral victory
With the United States court mandating that Chicago State University release some of President Bola Tinubu’s records, Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party candidate and Tinubu’s rival in t...
5th October 2023