Author: Oseloka H. Obaze

Disfranchised Nigerians continue to rebuke the Tinubu Administration for its lackluster governance performance. That is as it should be. On balance, the APC Administration also has its defenders and apologists. That too, is as it should be. Both are essential parts of any democracy. Democracies tend to mimic a broad spectrum; there are left and right-wing extremists and centrists aka moderates. There are also the rulers and the opposition. Ultimately, the sweep and sway of the pendulum can be wide. The All Progressive Congress’s (APC) weak electoral mandate still dominates the discourse in Nigeria’s political space. As if that was…

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A befuddling vagary of Nigerian politics is that some who seek political power on getting into office don’t seem to know what to do.  Yet, the abandonment of Nigerian political space to transactional politicians is deeply rooted in the “Sit George faciam” and “Laissez George le faire” culture. The English counterpart, is “Let George do it.” The language notwithstanding, the mantra underpins the willful abdication of moral responsibilities; good men abandon politics to fraudsters and elected officials lack of the political will to take hard-headed decisions, or take responsibility for governance successes or failures. An adjunct to that leadership hubris is The…

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History and diplomacy often mix in very curious ways. The just-concluded AFCON football tournament in Ivory Coast, unearthed parts of Nigeria’s failings to honour her history and stay true to her past diplomatic accomplishments. Sibling and sporting rivalry between South Africa’s team Bafana Bafana and Nigeria’s Super Eagles, showcased how emotive aspects of the football competition and inexplicable xenophobia made some South Africans to forget Nigeria’s role and what Nigerians did collectively for them, in ending apartheid.  Every Nigerian civil servant was made by the Obasanjo regime to mandatorily donate a percentage of their monthly salary to the Southern African…

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A recent trending photo of the leaders of the BRICS nations hobnobbing and holding hands across-the-chest, spoke eloquently to the group’s vital missing link and presumptive member. That photo brought to mind missed opportunities and lessons learned. It also brought to the fore, the fate of Nigeria; a country that is prima facie qualified to be the sixth member of that intergovernmental organization, but is not. Nigeria’s membership would have expanded the name of the group to BRINCS; expanded her sphere of global influence, market, acceptability and balance. Her exclusion from the BRICS expansion coincides with the imminent implosion of…

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Impunity, duplicity and deceit are negative attributes of personal character. When these are wittingly contrived to become attributes of our national character, then, we are as a nation mired in a quagmire. Edmund Burke, along with some great philosophers, offers insights as to why terrible things happen to good people and nations. In principle, they agree that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That is the state of our nation. The scope of our national deceitfulness has become a pandemic. Present day Nigeria is a manifestation of Socrates’ postulation on…

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Tribute by Hon. Oseloka H. Obaze, MD/CEO Selonnes Consult And Former Secretary to the Anambra State Government At the Chinua Achebe Colloquium 40th Anniversary of “The Trouble with Nigeria”/10th Anniversary Celebrations Co-hosted by Princeton University & Christie and Chinua Achebe Foundation Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 30th September 2023 Introduction I am immensely thrilled and honoured to be among the select few who were asked to speak at this event in honour of Professor Chinua Achebe. As far as history and clichés go; I am not worthy to lace Achebe’s sandals, least of all speak about him, even if in…

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Realpolitik and commonsense have long validated the nexus between domestic strength and foreign policy actions. Yet, presumable statesmen frequently fall prey and segue into quagmires by assuming that forays into intractable foreign policy realms will validate their bona fides or redress and strengthen their domestic weaknesses. Some leaders also assume that immersion into foreign conflicts will result in their nationals rallying behind them and around the national flag. History and experience have proven such considerations to be mostly pretentious and fallacious. Indeed, such thinking is more often than not delusional. The unfolding crisis in Niger Republic presents as a test…

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Well before the 25 February date arrived, it was predicted that the 2023 general elections will be another milestone in Nigeria’s political journey: if effected with transparency and fairness, it will launch Nigeria on the path of democratic consolidation, and if poorly managed; degrade the democratic process further. Beyond imponderables, the fervour with which the 2023 campaigns were conducted had never been experienced in Nigeria. The emergence of a credible third party, the Labour Party (LP) that was implicitly a Movement was least expected. LP was a revolutionary outlier; anti-norm and anti-old order. Its impetus derived from the authentic national…

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 Oseloka H. Obaze The sandglass is a befitting metaphor for Gov. Willie Obiano’s eight years governance of Anambra State. By depiction, the sandglass is perceptibly colourful and efficient, yet a crude, coarse and fragile time-keeping instrument. Obiano’s government mimicked those traits. Despite Obiano’s governance disambiguation, and effective masking of frivolities with social media flourish, the only variable that mattered was time. In the fullness of time and by constitutional dictate, time ran out for Obiano. His sandglass came crashing, proving the transient nature of power and Plato’s contention that “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”…

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By Ejeviome Eloho Otobo & Oseloka H. Obaze Ahead of the 2023 presidential elections the clamour for the zoning of the presidency has intensified. The zoning arrangement in the fourth Republic has a unique historical antecedent. Its genesis can be traced to the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections. The annulment not only led to a major political upheaval, but also created a deep sense of injustice on the part of the geo-political zone from whence the winner came. To assuage the ensuing sense of grievance, the two main political parties that emerged to lead the transition from…

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  By Ejeviome Eloho Otobo & Oseloka H. Obaze In the past few months, three major developments have pushed the 2023 elections to the fore front of national public discourse. In the order they transpired, these were the 5th July Communique of the Southern Governors Forum advocatingfor the next President of Nigeria has to come from the south. Ex-President Ibrahim Babangida’s interview of 6th August with ARISE Television, wherein he suggested that Nigeria’s next president should be in the 60s age bracket. The front-page cover story of Thisday of9 August titled “2023: Who Leads Nigeria”, in which it published the…

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By Ejeviome Eloho Otobo & Oseloka H. Obaze There was a time when Nigeria’s leadership role in African affairs was taken for granted. Nigeria was deemed Africa’s bellwether, a notion that gave credence to her “manifest destiny” – an inherent right to speak for and be listened to on African issues. Hence, a generation of Nigerian leaders and diplomats exuded extraordinary confidence in leading regional and international efforts to rid the continent of the vestiges of colonial rule and white minority regimes. Nigeria’s exertion of influence, well accepted by her cohorts, fostered seminal recent regional initiatives as the New Partnership…

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By Ejeviome Eloho Otobo and Oseloka H. Obaze Police is an integral part of every country’s national security architecture, and police reforms are a vital part of security sector reform and an important component of peacebuilding/state building. Against the backdrop of the ongoing national policy debate on the Senate bill on police reforms, we offer these reflections on reforming policing in Nigeria. In principle, every police reform effort is country-specific, but guided by a set of global best practices. The specific context of Nigeria is that it operates a federal political system. Regardless, the best policing practices entail adherence to…

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In Nigerian politics, oftentimes expediency trumps morality. Honour is also a scarce commodity. Sadly, this norm has gained toehold. As the 6 November 2021 Anambra State Governorship election approach, the issue of zoning is now front and centre and fraught with controversy for most parties. This is more so for my party, PDP. It should not be, for anyone who expects a modicum of morality in politics. At issue, is whether it is the turn of Anambra South senatorial zone to produce the next Governor; that is after Anambra North senatorial zone would have governed for eight years – 2014…

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By: Ejeviome Eloho Otobo & Oseloka H. Obaze In Nigeria, two important traditional food and agricultural occupations face existential threats. The fishermen in the coastal areas of the country and the herdsmen in the North are beleaguered by environmental challenges. The environmental challenge confronting the herdsmen arises from naturally occurring desertification; while thatconfronting the fishermen is mainly man-made, and the result of years of oil exploration-related environmental degradation of the Niger Delta.  These environmental challenges are detrimental to the lives and livelihoods of both fishermen and herdsmenand have deleterious impact onthe national economic output. Meanwhile, a recent book, titled“Insecurity in…

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A chain is as strong as its weakest link. That cliché underlines certain assumptions, oftentimes, dangerous and egregious. As a public figure and member of the Nigeria’s attentive public, I took some measures, personal and otherwise, to protect my family, staff and myself from Covid-19. I shut my office well before FGN announced a nationwide lockdown in 2020. Thereafter, my office had zero tolerance for casual visitors; non-mask wearing guests and guests not attuned to social distancing rules. I trained my staff in preventive measures. Such measures, I knew, entailed some financial burdens. I assumed them and it all seemed…

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Remarks by Mr. Oseloka H. Obaze, MD/CEO Selonnes Consult, During the Women for Women Community Zoom Webinar Session At 6:00 p.m. Thursday 15 October 2020 Introduction Across the globe, women make up majority of the World’s poorest and least educated. Nowhere is this reality and demographics most stark, than in Africa and in Nigeria, where gender disparity is egregiously pronounced in political and leadership positions. There has been an obvious gender inequality in the political space. While globally women do not have the corresponding representations in political offices, even in the old and established democracies like the United States and the…

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AWKA – 12 May 2020: Mr. Oseloka H. Obaze is a diplomat, writer, public policy and governance expert and politician. He was the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the Anambra State governorship election in 2017. A former United Nations official, he served as Secretary to the Anambra State Government under Governor Peter Obi and Governor Willie Obiano from 2012 to 2015. In this press encounter with Awka-based national media correspondents, Obaze responds to the Covid-19 issues and other pressing national challenges. How have you been Sir, and how have you coped with the Covid-19 challenges and lockdown? Obaze: By God’s grace I’m…

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In one week Africa garnered a 43% jump in its Covid-19 cases. These numbers are relative to Nigeria despite her recorded numerical being low. Nigeria’s low infection and fatalities are loss leaders. They correlate her a rather huge testing gap; limited contact tracing, and voluntary acknowledgement of infections. Policymakers must bear these worrying facts in mind. Our national response must henceforth be robust as Nigeria’s pandemic exponential surge has commenced. To mitigate the scope of fatalities, Nigeria’s leadership must recalibrate, seek bi-partisan measures and act boldly to avert a possible systemic collapse. Policy, partisan and ideological pussyfooting will not serve…

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It ought not to be a hard sale to convince anyone, that try as we may and have, Nigeria is well behind the emergency response curve required for tackling the Covid-19 pandemic. Hence, now is the time to escalate the national resiliency level holistically, and in an unfettered manner. Luckily, we have global response examples, best practices, and lessons learned to borrow from, as well as mistakes that should be avoided entirely. My assessment of this matter in non-partisan and purely from the policy and complex emergency response perspective. First, I believe that those who are against shutting down non-essential…

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Nigeria faces an existential threat. Slowing but surely, Nigeria is dying. Its demise will not be by implosion and a bang as some had forecasted but by agonizing segmental dissipation, and a whimper. The National Assembly’s recent kneejerk effort to review the Constitution panders to the incremental approach when the needed review should devolve to the people as was done in 2014. With ongoing zonal coalescing and alignments, the nation is already at risk of a constitutional force majeure. Nigeria will not decline into a categorically failed state; it will just disintegrate, courtesy of bad leadership and the crass unwillingness to…

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Legal, political and social dissents are part of the grounding principles of functional democracies. Hence, the dearth of dissent anywhere marks the birthing of subliminal and irreverent revolution. And so it is with Nigeria. By definition “dissent refers to having a different opinion from the commonly held or prevalent opinion or ideology.” Thus, dissent is vital in the executive, legislature and judiciary arms of government. Lamentably, Nigerians are witnesses to the suppression of dissent in all three arms; most egregiously within the judiciary. In his keynote speech titled “Dissident in a Democratic Polity: Options in a Presidential System,” delivered at the 1991…

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Keynote Address  By Hon. Oseloka Henry Obaze MD/CEO Selonnes Consult Ltd. & Member C.K.C. Onitsha Class of ‘73 At the 20th Class Reunion of the C.K.C. Onitsha Class of 1999   At the Golden Tulip Hotel,  Agulu, Anambra State  Saturday 28th December 2019  [Protocols] It is a pleasure to be here amongst esteemed students of a great old legacy school; Christ the King College, Onitsha.   It is my honour and pleasure to salute the entire C.K.C. Onitsha Class of 1999, as you mark the 20th Anniversary of your graduation and journey into a life of service and leadership, predicated…

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Has Nigeria as a nation done well at 59.    OHO: Anyway the answer is proffered, it will be relative. The perceptions and standards will always vary due to unmet expectations. We have done well by clinging together against all odds, by the nation not imploding. But we have not done well by way of development and accommodation of broad interests of segments of the nation. As a person from the south east, I feel that our other compatriots believe they can contrived conducts that offend every sensibility of decency and equity and get away with it. They continue to…

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Two recent governance events underlined the waning strength of government in our democracy.  Contextually, the waning strength of government is unrelated to the capacity to defend the nation; but instead, refers to the diminution of democratic institutions, the very pedestal on which any democracy is built. In a democracy, the three arms of government – executive, legislative and judiciary – are constitutionally considered separate but equal. Yet Nigeria’s Executive Branch, in show superiority, has been muzzling the legislature and judiciary. The optics is bad, as the ruling APC controls the Executive and Legislative arms. By way of a backgrounder, in 1968…

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The spasmodic xenophobic attacks, which commenced around 2000 and escalated recently, has placed South Africa front and centre of global criticisms. It is also fraught with correlations. This would have been anecdotal, if it wasn’t tragic. Between 2000 and 2019, there have been 12 xenophobic attacks in various cities resulting in over 152 fatalities. In the 1980s, when Nigerians felt exactly how South Africans feel now, they compelled government use of executive fiats to expel Ghanaians and other African immigrants. This gave rise to the “Ghana Must Go” mantra.  The tables have turned. South Africans shouting “Nigerians Must Go” should…

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Dorian© Dorian, Dorian, And so came pouring rains, Awninged clouds and comingled winds, An alchemy; ruthless, with ominous potency. August’s cruelty seemed passé, As Dorian’s awesome squall arrived, Unto September it stalled to connive, Wobbling its eye over island divides, Before brandishing its high Category Five, Uncontrollable Nature pelting rain pebbles, As if in rebuke for abounding iniquities, Battering the archipelago; bombing Abaco, Decimating Grand Bahama to a pall, Vesting a generational devastation, With unfettered burst that made all fall. Dorian, Dorian, and so came the strains, Its shattering ill-winds truly alive, Wreaked havoc in its turbulent hive, Trafficking disaster…

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Public policies are made in the public and collective interest. Essentially, policy experts agree that public policy making is a process and not a one-off event; it is thus “characterized as a dynamic, complex, and interactive system through which public problems are identified and countered by creating new public policy or by reforming existing public policy.” Where any policy is contrived to advance sectional or vested interests, that policy ceases to be in the common interest. And that is exactly where Nigeria finds itself with the controversial Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA) herdsmen settlement. The folly and falsities of that policy…

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QUOTE: “We are a nation in denial. Rising insecurity in Nigeria did not happen in a vacuum. The “indicators of conduciveness” were discernible. We compartmentalize security to our own detriment.” Nigeria is security challenged. No national interest issue has singularly dominated Nigeria’s political and socio-economic discourse as insecurity and government’s antipathy towards related public outcry. No nation is insulated from security challenges. Some nations have well-developed response systems and mechanisms. In contrast, Nigeria’s systemic modalities for responding to insecurity focus on “safeguarding” establishment and policy options that are not working.­ Concerns are being expressed of a diametric failure in the security sector; the…

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