Guest Columnists

It is time to talk about Big Money!   President Tinubu signed the 2026 Appropriation Act of a massive N68.32 trillion on April 17.   Remember: Between presidential submission and National Assembly passage, the budget value jumped by a whopping 9 per cent, from N58.18 trillion. There was no public scrutiny as to what was […]

Beyond the suffocating air of Nigerian politics, which gets far more problematic by the day, with its unending twists and turns, there are more sober happenings within this same polity, which while politics depresses the soul, uplift it, reminding us all too plainly why we are human. Over the weekend for example, the 12th edition […]

Perhaps.  We have heard from Senate President Godswill Akpabio many times, sometimes in strange ways, including embarrassment, such as when he could not pronounce a number he had written down and brought into the chamber.   There have been gaffes of various dimensions, indicating a man who arrived unarmed.   But perhaps his most distressful […]

Africa has long traded not only in goods and borders, but in something more elusive and more valuable: a sense of shared fate. From the liberation struggles of the 20th century to the pan-African rhetoric that followed, the idea however imperfectly realized, was that Africans, wherever they found themselves on the continent, belonged. That compact […]

The most remarkable incident in Nigeria in less than a week, is all things considered how a political coalition has turned out as a collision, literally and figuratively, in the lead up to the 2027 general elections. On Saturday, April 25, 2026, there was a meeting, the National Summit of Opposition Leaders, hosted in Ibadan […]

Nigeria’s opposition has, for much of the 4th Republic, resembled a crowded waiting room: full of ambition, short on coordination, and chronically incapable of converting grievance into victory. The formal alignment of Peter Obi and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso under the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) may represent the first serious attempt to break that pattern; not […]

In 2016, the presidency announced what might have been a turning point in Nigeria’s anti-corruption history: 300 companies and influential individuals, including retired and serving military officers, were indicted by a committee investigating contract awards by the Office of the National Security Adviser between 2011 and 2015.   President Muhammadu Buhari, who had come into […]

West Africa’s security map has been redrawn with startling speed. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, once the reluctant pillars of France’s counter‑terrorism strategy, have expelled Western forces, embraced new patrons and declared themselves liberated from foreign tutelage. The result is a vacuum stretching from Timbuktu to Niamey, where jihadist groups roam with unnerving confidence and […]

When President Bola Tinubu announced that Nigeria would extend the 2025 budget implementation deadline to June 30, 2026, three months beyond the original March 31 closure, the decision barely registered as a scandal.   Instead, it was packaged as practical governance: a mere extension to “allow for full utilisation of funds for ongoing infrastructure projects.” […]

There is a moment in every national catastrophe when accounting must be done.  Not later, not after the next election, not when the dust settles over the next mass grave.   For Nigeria, that moment is now.   Since President Bola Tinubu stood at the Yakubu Gowon Airport in Jos on April 2, 2026, and […]

There are politicians who chase power, and there are those who come to embody the chase itself. Atiku Abubakar belongs firmly in the latter category. For more than three decades, he has pursued Nigeria’s presidency with a persistence that is at once admirable and, increasingly, self-defeating. As the country drifts toward the 2027 election, the […]

Nearly 40 years ago in London, I was invited to dinner by a Nigerian woman I knew in Lagos.   She had described the place in general terms, but I arrived at an upscale home with some serious luxury.  She was kind enough to show me around, and following a stylish dinner, she described how […]