Opinions

“Happy New Year!”   It always has a joyful ring to it. On New Year’s Day, and perhaps for a short while after, it is heard and shared around the world.   The greeting, sometimes offered in the local language, usually elicits a grateful or similar response, often accompanied by a smile and, where appropriate, […]

Before, during, and after every election cycle in Nigeria, the role of the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission has remained shrouded in ambiguity. He does not emerge from the will of the people but from the corridors of presidential discretion, cloaked in the illusion of neutrality and armed with a whistle that rarely […]

  Nigeria has always lived with the drama of oil. From the first gush of crude in Oloibiri to the unending fuel queues that mark our daily lives, oil is less a resource than a stage where power, politics, and survival collide. Now the latest act unfolds not in a government office or an offshore […]

It is not often that a gavel struck in a faraway land reverberates with the sound of thunder in Abuja. Yet with one ruling, the Canadian Federal Court has shaken Nigeria’s democratic house to its foundations, placing Nigeria’s democracy in the dock and declaring its political titans – the ruling All-Progressives Congress (APC) and the […]

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s latest working vacation – departing Abuja on September 4, 2025, for France (followed by plans to visit the UK), only to return ahead of schedule – highlights a worrying pattern: an administration increasingly defined by long foreign stays rather than sober leadership at home. While these travels are often justified by […]

Fuel scarcity in Nigeria is no mere inconvenience; it is a national ritual of dread. For the average Nigerian, the words “fuel strike” summon images of serpentine queues, swollen prices, and the paralysis of daily life. Fuel scarcity is to Nigerians what winter is to Europeans: inevitable, dreaded, and socially disruptive. That spectre looms again, […]

On Thursday, 18 September 2025, the six months state of emergency declared in Rivers State on 18 March would have expired and this has led to high expectations among the people. The hope that this would be the case was further raised when Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), former Governor of […]

In the hallowed chamber of Nigeria’s Senate, where laws should be shaped in reason and justice, an ugly spectacle is unfolding. It is not the debate of ideas, not the clash of principles, not the contest of visions for a troubled nation. No, what Nigerians are being subjected to is the grotesque theater of impunity, […]

Draped in the glow of self-congratulation, President Bola Tinubu recently declared that Nigeria had already met its 2025 revenue target. “We have met our revenue target for the whole year, and we met it in August. Nigeria is not borrowing a dime from local banks,” the president boasted, adding: “The economy is stabilized; nobody is […]

In the darkness of Nigeria’s death-row cells, the nation’s conscience lies shackled. Here, 73 women – our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives – await the hangman’s noose, while society wraps itself in complacent indifference. These 73 women represent a ghastly minority whose stories are eclipsed by indifference—but whose plight demands fury. They are part of the […]

On Sunday, August 31, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s former Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development (2011 – 2015), completed his maximum ten-year tenure (five years each per election) as President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), the premier development finance bank in Africa which effectively began operations in 1964, and more robustly on July 1, […]

In the kitchen of Nigeria’s democratic experiment – where the smell of reform and the smoke of recycled promise swirl together – the Independent National Electoral Commission has once more delivered a dish so audacious it has left the electorate confused and the opposition holding their guts.   Yiaga Africa’s question, “Is INEC the chef […]