The bare concrete parade ground of Eagle Square will tomorrow be animated by the symbolism of state ritual. Like most structures in Abuja’s homeless architecture, Eagle Square was originally designed by soldiers in power as a tribute to the legacy of parade grounds, a venue for rehearsing their trade....
Chidi Amuta
His distinctive deep baritone with a heavy German inflected accent testifies to a man of world historic mission and accomplishment. Henry Alfred Kissinger has in one life time graduated from an outstanding scholar and global diplomatic icon into a foreign policy institution and veritable oracle. As he turns 100...
The politics of democratic transition is hardly ever a beauty pageant. Oftentimes, the dazzling brilliance of campaign media displays conceal an underlying ugliness in the substance of what is on offer. It is all an ancient marketing gimmick in which the public is sold the new messiah as the...
In a tragic sense, Sudan is somehow lucky. Its leading political figures, who also happen to be combatant generals, have not hidden their differences beneath a façade of mutual deceit. They have instead allowed their differences to blossom into an open bloody confrontation. The two top generals who also...
Of all the cards that I carry around with me, none is a political party membership card. I have never and do not belong to any political party in Nigeria. Nor have I ever belonged to one or aspired to belong to any. My attitude to political party membership...
The period between a general election and the swearing in of a successor administration ought to be filled with excited anticipation. It is usually a time of pleasant speculations on the new faces that will soon grace television screens and newspaper front pages. For the masses in a polity...
Under the Buhari presidency, Nigeria’s security police, the DSS , has gradually acquired a political costume. Like all adept political masquerades, the DSS chooses its moments and sides. At one such moment during this president’s first term, the agency woke up one morning and sent out hooded goons to...
The ballot elections are over now. The next stage of Nigeria’s democracy warfare will soon shift to courtrooms at various levels of the judiciary. The morning after, we are in a nation that looks and feels more like the scene of a recent battle. After the bitter fights, now...
Yesterday’s governorship election closed a season of anxiety over democracy in Nigeria. After 24 years of democratic transitions, imperfect as they may have been, Nigerians have a right to claim that they now live in a democratic country. Even American democracy is still reeling from the injuries of Donald...
The governorship election on Saturday 18th is more decisive for Abia state than many others. It is an opportunity to end the tragedy of a long night of disastrous governance that has plagued the state in the last twenty four years. It is a unique opportunity to etch a...
In a bid to retain power beyond 2015, former president Goodluck Jonathan ran a campaign with a somewhat foolish and simplistic slogan: “Neighbour to Neighbour”. I believe the aim of it all was to emphasize the sense of communal good neighbourliness that had been the kernel of national unity...
Nigerians are a very impatient people. Our hunger for instant outcomes should have made us the nation that invented the microwave oven. But our impatience is directed at other ends. We can at least content ourselves with the many unusual things that we have reinvented and perfected our instincts...
The general atmosphere of violence and anarchy threatening to overwhelm the South East portends ill for our national security. A spate of senseless killings, random arson and general insecurity has since become a veritable signature of the region in recent years. The trend has recently intensified. The subsisting regional...
President Buhari’s Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, is a man who likes to take himself seriously. In ordinary circumstances, he should pass as one of the islands of some enlightenment in the arid cabinet of the outgoing administration. A long standing regional newspaper columnist and commentator on public...
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has stirred an unnecessary storm and in the process may have scored an inconsequential victory. Last week, the NBS revised the definition of poverty by shifting from the now proverbial living on $2 a day to something called “multidimensional poverty”. This has unsettled...
Ordinarily, the hidden hands of an ancient Italian devious thinker should have no relevance to Nigeria’s 2023 election. But Machiavelli lived in a bad time and in a treacherous political terrain pretty much like the Nigeria of 2022. Like in the Florentine city state, our politics has been reduced...
An urgent threat hovers over Nigeria’s democracy. It is not just the spectre of bad elections or the predominance of atrocious politicians. It is instead the rise and increasing numbers of authoritarian governors all over the country. Though enthroned by our often murky democratic process, an increasing number of...
The distance between political campaign promises and their fulfilment is an infinity. Between when these promises are made and the end of the tenure of those who usually promise paradise and deliver hell, people are often too dazed to remember. As it were, empty promises seem to be part...
The crowds of power wear amorphous but identical faces. It does not matter whether they are the Roman plebeians, renegade factions of the Athenian metropole, or the rough racist hounds that accompanied Donald Trump to defile the US Capitol on 6th January 2021. They are all roughly the same....
Tyrants and mad men suffer a common ailment: they are condemned to a feeling of loneliness and a routine of endless wandering in search of what they alone understand. No other world leader at the present time better illustrates this ancient folk wisdom than Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin...