Her funeral rites would have begun on Wednesday, January 11, but were postponed because her family, along with the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), is awaiting an autopsy report. As of the time of writing, the matter had faded from the headlines and a new date was yet to be announced. Obviously, the autopsy would serve the legal purpose of demanding justice for Bolanle Raheem, given that legal subterfuge can sometimes undermine evidence and change the strongest of cases in favour of injustice. Hopefully, Bolanle’s assailant, Drambi Vandi, will have his day in court – a right and privilege he denied…
Author: Azu Ishiekwene
I’m sure he expected the firestorm. As is his custom, he primed and released it to explode at his own time and season. If the letter by former President Olusegun Obasanjo endorsing Labour Party’s Peter Obi had gone unnoticed, uncriticised, and un-replied, then it would not have been Obasanjo’s letter. The letter had barely landed when the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and, in fact, the Presidency all pounced, with the mildest of them all from the PDP. Whatever the misgivings of the affected parties, I’m sure most might agree on the central message:…
Azu Ishiekwene The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) will be shaken to its foundations, but it will survive. The most problematic question for the party of course is who carries its presidential flag in the 2023 election, when President Muhammadu Buhari will step down…If Tinubu survives the ambush of the wolves in his party, the race is over – My precipitations, December 31, 2021 In the last three years, I have formed the dangerous habit of forecasting what the new year might bring, roughly speaking. The quote above was extracted from the piece I wrote on New Year’s Eve of 2022, six…
Azu Ishiekwene The shenanigans were always there, but until FIFA president, Infantino Giovanni, called them out in his down-to-earth press conference in Qatar, they remained the elephant in the room. The hint of displeasure goes back 12 years ago when Qatar won the bid, defeating Australia, Japan, South Korea and the United States. That outcome was unexpected. The Persian Gulf is good news for Western oil and gas supply and tales of mysticism and Arabian opulence, but an Arab World Cup was a different matter altogether. European interests pounced. They immediately insinuated that the process had been compromised and later…
Azu Ishiekwene If he could, he might have built a highway to Sharm el-Sheikh where the world’s great and mighty gathered between November 6 and 18 at COP27 to discuss climate change. But who knows, he might yet do so. Thirteen-year-old Musa Sani, who has already taken infant steps in civil engineering, might live a bigger dream someday. At an age when his mates are dodging bullets and running scared with nothing on their backs in the midst of the chaos that Borno, a Boko Haram hotbed in Nigeria’s North East has been for nearly two decades, Musa is building…
Former US President Donald Trump didn’t just happen to the United States. He hit the world like the climax of a horror movie. Scene after scene, act after act left the thoughtful in bewilderment, the reserved in shame, and even the incorrigible in doubt. Only the fantasts and ultra-right wing extremists were impressed by Trump’s macabre dance. It was a phase like no other when he freely abused the expression, “To make America great again”. Apart from his British double and ally, Boris Johnson, only clips from Uganda’s past, without their bloody trail, throw up a shadow of semblance in…
Governor of Delta State and Vice-Presidential Candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ifeanyi Okowa, has congratulated Leadership Newspaper Editor-in-Chief, Mr Azu Ishiekwene, on his emergence as ‘Columnist-of-the-Year’. Ishiekwene, a Deltan, was conferred with the award at the 30th edition of the Nigeria Media Merit Award (NMMA) in Lagos. In a congratulatory message by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr Olisa Ifeajika in Asaba, Okowa said the award was well-deserved, considering Ishiekwene’s consistency in public commentaries over the years. He said that Ishiekwene’s commentaries and media activism had continued to bring governments to account and urged him not to relent in speaking…
If there was a prize for Nigeria’s number one letter writer, journalist-turned-lawyer and one-time minister, Tony Momoh, would appear to be the undisputed champion. The late Momoh performed the difficult task of making sense of General Ibrahim Babangida’s largely messy and convoluted political and economic programmes by writing regular letters to “fellow countrymen”. His extensive and elaborate undertaking later packaged as a book entitled, Letters to my Countrymen, was, to put it mildly, a labour of misery. It was a thoroughly thankless job. But how can Momoh’s letters ever hope to compete with those of former President Olusegun Obasanjo? It’s not…
It’s a great time to be a football lover. It might not feel exactly so if your country is not one of the 32 taking part in the 22nd edition of the World Cup in Doha, Qatar. But being a fan means managing to love the game without having your dog in the fight. For example, Nigeria’s national team, the Super Eagles, won’t be in Qatar – the second time in eight years. But since the team crashed out to Ghana in February, fans have managed to reconcile with their misery, especially with forthcoming elections which essentially foist a choice between Tweedledee and…
Not so long ago, he was the poster boy of what looked like an African renaissance. Ghana’s President Akufo-Addo didn’t only know what to say, he also knew when and how. I still remember 2018. Barely one year after Akufo-Addo was inaugurated, he was on the big stage. He was the first African leader to address the National Governors Association (NGA), a cross-party platform of all 50 governors of the United States of America. At that meeting, he laid out his plans and dream to consolidate Ghana’s record as Africa’s gateway and the beginner’s paradise. The same year, he was…
Bad news has almost become a regular feature of Nigeria’s daily narrative and recently, it’s been like a flood of it (pun intended). But the news of the ordeal of two-month-old Miracle Chikwe at the hands of his father in Owerri, Imo State, takes the flood of bad news to the realm of an epidemic. We need to find a moral vaccine — and urgently too. According to press reports, the 31-year-old father, Confidence Amatobi, had beaten the baby with a plastic hanger in the middle of the night for disturbing his sleep. His wife had briefly left the room…
In a widely shared story last week, The Economist likened the political carnage in Britain to the situation in Italy in the 1940s. Italy was a major theatre of the First World War at the end of which the country was in ruins. It is so unstable that in spite of the tenuous hold of the Christian Democrats on power for much of the time, the country has produced 69 governments since 1945, an average of one and a half governments every two years. Italy’s instability is the joke of Europe. Britain is not doing badly. With three prime ministers in 50…
After eight months’ strike, one of the longest in the country’s history, university teachers finally returned, at gunpoint, to the classrooms on Monday. It was the 16th time university teachers would be striking in 23 years. Frustrated parents and distraught students just couldn’t wait to hear that the strike had been suspended and schools reopened. It does appear, however, that if all we’re interested in is to tick the box, it won’t be long before we’re back to square one. There is a clear and present danger that we’re kicking the can, with the teachers, down the road. And this…
Back in the day, weather forecasts were a joke. And I mean literally. The weather forecast segment which used to come at the end of the news bulletin on Nigeria’s national broadcaster, NTA, was the butt of cruel jokes amongst folks. Often when the forecasters said it would rain, we said they meant the opposite. Seven out of 10 times, we were right; and the other three times, it drizzled on one side of the street and was stone dry on the other. That was in the early 1970s and 1980s when either as a result of poor predictive tools,…
There is fire in Ouagadougou. And who’s to say where it’s catching next? For the second time in eight months, the military in Burkina Faso struck in a palace coup that removed military leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. The coup leader, Captain Ibrahim Traore, cited the same excuses Damiba gave for seizing power in January as reasons for his removal; namely, that the government has proved incompetent in containing the spread of Islamic insurgency, leading to increasing loss of lives among military and civilian populations. Things couldn’t get worse for the land-locked country (pop 22m) where 45 percent of the population…
If this were a compulsory exam question, a number of politicians would simply answer: it depends. On what? On what is at stake. What the opponent does and how. And, of course, how far the resources of the one at the receiving end can go to exact revenge, sometimes in spite of the rules. As campaigns for the 2023 general elections in Nigeria begin, everything is at stake. From the office of representatives in state houses of assembly to the positions of 28 governors, 469 national lawmakers, and the president. In all, about 1,520 positions are up for election and…
In six African countries the heads of government have been in power for 20 years or more. Attempts to replace them by ballot have either been stalled, frustrated or crushed. In a few, like South Africa where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has been in power for 28 years, new heads of government have been produced more by incest than by the ballot. The ruling by Kenya’s Supreme Court on Monday validating the election of the presidential candidate of the Kenya Kwanza party, William Ruto, offers an example that it is indeed possible to remove incumbents and their parties from within – strategically and peacefully, too. Whether Somaliland — that perennially troubled spot in the horn of Africa — would…
If you haven’t had a good laugh, you have not been with him. And anyone who knows him knows I’m not joking. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah, has the rare gift of humour. Not the run-of-the-mill kind that forces a courteous half-smile. It’s the kind that extracts the prey while putting the cat completely at ease; it just cracks your rib. It works in good times and in bad. And just as he has done in the last nearly over two decades of being clergyman and public intellectual, Kukah deployed this gift again in a conversation about…
One of the ironies of politics is how easily fiction becomes reality, and reality, precedent. Before our eyes, the president-elect of Kenya, William Ruto, who has played all sides of Kenya’s politics for at least three decades, has just won an election by claiming to be an outsider. Ruto’s electoral epic of “hustler vs. dynasty” appears to have wiped off all memory of his 30-year involvement in the good and bad of Kenya’s politics. This legend won him a razor-thin victory over Raila Odinga in the August 9 presidential election. Legends still work. Ruto is proof. It’s a tribute to…
“I’m going to waste my vote,” a friend told me recently. “And don’t argue with me,” he added. “It’s my right to do so.” I defied him. Regrettably, even though I also recruited help nearby to press home my point, my unsolicited advice fell on deaf ears. My friend’s mind was made up and nothing would stop him. What he intends to do, according to him, is to vote for a candidate in the 2023 presidential election that he knows would lose. He did not name names, though in the countdown to next year’s election, I have heard the suspect…
When a proud Oluwatobiloba Ayomide Amusan climbed the podium in faraway Eugene, Oregon in the United States, as the World Champion in Women 100m Hurdles, not a few equally proud Nigerians mounted with her in spirit. She had just set a new World Record at 12.12s breaking Keni Kendra Harrison’s 27-year record and leaving legend Michael Johnson wondering how she did it. Whether from their living rooms in Canada, in the consulting rooms of UK hospitals, or even on the streets of Indonesia, where they have all migrated in search of the good life that had eluded them in Nigeria, in those…
Seven weeks after the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar announced Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa as his running mate, the man not chosen remains the talk of the town. I’m not sure Abubakar (fondly called Atiku) expected this amount of pushback when he chose Okowa over Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. But just as it is with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) too, the choice of running mate has become a national obsession, exposing Nigeria’s deepest religious and ethnic fault lines. On the eve of Atiku’s announcement of his running mate when the media was awash…
After BBC Africa service promoted a story on Friday of an interview with the bandit warlords of Zamfara State, a senior Nigerian journalist, Kadaria Ahmed, called out the broadcaster in a tweet. Kadaria, an ex-Beeb, said the interview would give the terrorists oxygen, stoke hysteria and bring nothing but pain and misery to hundreds of victims and their families. In the thread that followed, the BBC Eye co-founding executive producer and others who weighed in disagreed with Kadaria. They said without understanding the enemy you cannot solve the problem. Or perhaps get the government to see the seriousness. Not long…
The advent of any significant changes in technology has often triggered concerns about the fate of journalism. Even at the infancy of social media, TIME covered one of its editions of February 5, 2009, with concern about the imminent death of journalism. To drive home the point, the graphic was illustrated with a copy of the New York Times wrapping a tilapia. The profession went through similar bouts of self-doubt and anxiety, after the introduction of the movable type and printing press. This same thing happened following the introduction of the telephone, radio and television. In hindsight, it would seem…
If the presidential flag bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu thought a placeholder would be a lightning rod, and maybe soften the blow of his final decision, he has seen by now that he is mistaken. There is a gathering storm. Those who are mad at him are not only upset by his decision on Tuesday, they are doubly upset that it took him five weeks to decide what they always suspected he would do: pick a Muslim running mate to complete what is now Nigeria’s first Muslim-Muslim ticket in nearly 30 years. Why is…
Nigeria is awash with arms – guns, bullets, charms, drugs and local stuff. Not just Nigeria. The entire Sahelian and sub-Saharan African region is drowning in deadly small arms and light weapons – so-called because of their portability and ease of use and adaptation. The firearms may be out of the line of sight, but they are making the rounds in cars and motorcycles or as headloads and hand luggage, concealed in unimaginable places. Many are also believed to be siphoned from the armouries of security agencies, and are making their way into the hands of “unknown gunmen” with destructive…
When I first read the news in People’s Gazette through a link forwarded to me by a friend, I prayed that it would not be true. My prayer was in spite of the evidence to the contrary provided in watermarked documents by the news platform. The letter read like the demand of unionised shop floor factory workers to their mean, grasping bosses upstairs. Except that even such correspondences occasionally contain a hint of shared Marxian humour. This one was different. It had no place at all for humour. It was from the most rarified recesses of Nigeria’s judiciary: a letter…
That the All Progressives Congress (APC) flag bearer, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is exactly where the party’s last presidential candidate President Muhammadu Buhari was when he got the ticket eight years ago, shows just how our politics has stagnated, if not regressed. After Buhari won the APC ticket in December 2014, the next major hurdle was getting a running mate. In what appeared to be a breach of the understanding he had with Tinubu to be his running mate before the election – and on the basis of which Tinubu moved heaven and earth to support him – Buhari changed…
After last weekend’s primary by the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) which produced former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as the party’s candidate for next year’s presidential election, political leaders in the South have been hurling abuses at the North for betrayal. According to pro-zoning interest groups in the South, it’s not supposed to be this way. After over two decades of an internal zoning arrangement in the PDP that has produced presidents from two other zones and sprung Atiku as candidate in the last general election, the groups are upset that the system is once again rigged to produce a…
Nigeria’s spectacular crises in almost every facet of its national life are inescapable. They cling like your skin. And for your sanity, you must detox from time to time. I hope this trip to Grenada, through Afghanistan, helps. Instead of writing about killings of the most bestial variety up and down the country, an economy on life support, insecurity, ASUU strike, men fighting for Allah and those defending them, the politics of 2023 that has left even politicians confused and enthroned delegates as royalty, I’ve decided to comment on a topic in which I recently renewed interest. In a recent…
