The Pacesetter Frontier Magazine

Category: Opinion

  • [OPINION] Political Assassination: Should We Take Obi Seriously?

    [OPINION] Political Assassination: Should We Take Obi Seriously?

    By Etim Etim 

    Murder for  political reasons is not rare in Nigeria, so when Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) presidential candidate, Peter Obi, said the other day that he might be assassinated before the 2027 elections, I was considerably alarmed. Only last February, Obi and his team were shot at in Benin in what his supporters claimed was an assassination attempt. Since then, the former Anambra State governor has been hinting at his frustrations with the government. It is therefore important that we listen to his recent fears.

    Speaking in an interview with Chude Jideonwo this week, Obi said Nigerian authorities are systematically frustrating his activities and targeting other opposition politicians. ‘’Every single thing I do for a living, this government is frustrating it. Deliberately so. So, there is even a possibility, if they have the opportunity, I will not be alive’’, Obi said. He however pointed out that he was not making a direct accusation against any individual, but noted that his experiences pointed to deliberate efforts to frustrate him or obstruct his activities. He cited an incident in Lagos airport in which his vehicle was clamped for ostensibly for wrong parking, whereas other vehicles were also parked at the same area and the officials ignored them.

    But in a quick response, President Tinubu’s spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, said Obi was raising false alarm to ‘’attract undue sympathy’’. Onanuga said: ‘’His claim that he may not be alive for the January 2027 election and that people are being pressured not to invite him to social events is nothing more than a fabricated narrative, a page from his book of lies and propaganda.’’

    But should we ignore Obi? Is he crying wolf to attract public sympathy as Onanuga claims? What do our experiences teach us as far as politically motivated murders are concerned? On February 24, 2026, Obi and other opposition politicians were nearly assassinated when armed men opened fire on a political convoy in Benin City, Edo State. The incident occurred following an event hosted by the African Democratic Congress (ADC), to which Obi belonged then. Other ADC dignitaries in the gathering were former Edo State Governor John Odigie-Oyegun and former Edo Labour Party governorship candidate, Olumide Akpata.

    The event was a rally staged to welcome Akpata into ADC. Unmarked vehicles trailed the convoy from the ADC state secretariat where the rally was held to Oyegun’s private residence. Peter Obi and top political leaders escaped unhurt. But multiple vehicles sustained bullet damage and shattered windscreens. Several party members and supporters sustained injuries during the clashes at the secretariat and the residence. ADC and Obidient Movement representatives blamed political opponents for orchestrating a premeditated attack, with some pointing to previous security warnings issued regarding Obi’s visits to Edo State.

    On December 23, 2001, Chief Bola Ige, the serving federal Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, was shot dead inside his bedroom in Ibadan, creating a massive political crisis. He was a member of the Action Congress (AC), and was murdered for allegedly blocking someone’s governorship ambition.

    On March 5, 2003, Dr. Marshall Harry, the National Vice-Chairman (South-south) of the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), was murdered at his Abuja home. The following year, Chief Aminosoari Dikibo,    PDP’s National Vice-Chairman (South-south), was ambushed and killed on a highway in Delta State on February 6, 2004. Both men were assassinated for the stance they took in the  politics of their home state of Rivers.

    On January 25, 2010, Otunba Dipo Dina, a prominent politician, chartered accountant and Action Congress (AC) gubernatorial candidate was returning to his Lagos residence from a political meeting in Abeokuta, Ogun State. Near Sango- Ota, an unmarked vehicle blocked his SUV. Armed men forced him out of his vehicle into another car, abducted him and shot him dead at close range. It is almost 20 years to the day Chief Funsho Williams, a leading Lagos State PDP gubernatorial aspirant, was killed in his home at Dolphin Estate, Lagos on July 27, 2006. He had earlier defected from Action Congress (AC) when it was clear to him that he was not the favoured candidate of the party for the 2007 election. The then-outgoing governor of Lagos, Bola Tinubu, had another person in mind as a successor.

    In March 2011, Akwa Ibom ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria) governorship candidate in that year’s election, Senator John James Akpanudoedeghe, was almost killed when his convoy was ambushed on his way from Uyo to Ikot Ekpene for a campaign event.  My younger brother, who was in his convoy, escaped by a whisker and called from the bush where he and other ran into. But others were not that lucky as they were hit by bullets. Akpanudoedeghe was challenging then-governor, Godswill Akpabio, who was going for reelection. Even before this ambush, many opposition figures in the state were kidnapped or murdered in a rash of violence that rocked the state between 2009 and 2011.

    Nigeria has many cases of unsolved politically motivated murders. Many of the victims are typically persons who dared to challenge the incumbents or the preferred choices of the incumbents. We should therefore not dismiss Peter Obi’s alarm. The Federal Government has a responsibility to protect all leading politicians and save us from the agony of another  political violence. It is therefore quite irresponsible of Onanuga for him to rush to judgment and dismiss Obi’s unease so casually.

    Etim, a journalist, writes from Abuja. 

    Culled From ThisDay

  • PFIPC Saga: The Joke is on Aso Rock

    PFIPC Saga: The Joke is on Aso Rock

    By Ikechukwu Amaechi

    Nigeria is a country where scandals break at the speed of light. As a public commentator, you can hardly keep pace.

    On May 15, 2026, terrorists raided three schools in the Oriire local government area of Oyo State, abducting 46 people, including 39 schoolchildren. The victims, who include seven teachers and a toddler, have spent almost two months at God knows where. Two teachers were killed – one of them during the raid while the other, Mr. Michael Oyedokun, a mathematics teacher, was beheaded in captivity.

    On the same day, terrorists also struck in Borno State, whisking away more than 50 schoolchildren from Mussa Central Primary and Junior Secondary schools in Askira-Uba local government area. Most of the children are below the age of 10. Despite the initial outrage, Nigerians have moved on as they are wont to do.

    Scandals have very short lifespan in Nigeria. And our leaders know that for sure, which is why they always sit it out no-matter how ruinous, knowing that after one week, the rage will be over and the whole matter will be forgotten.

    One month after the schoolchildren abductions, retired Major General Rabe Abubakar, former Director of Defence Information, who was abducted alongside his wife on May 30 in Katsina State, died in captivity. It is scandalous that till date, no one can exactly say what caused his death. While the Katsina State government claimed that he died from complications related to diabetes and hypertension while in captivity, his family strongly disputed the claim, stating instead that he died from a snakebite. Why the state government officially attributed his tragic death in the kidnappers den to his underlying health conditions, even as his children insisted he had no history of diabetes remains an unanswered question. And I dare say it will never be answered. The outrage is over. He has been forgotten and Nigerians have moved on.

    More students have been kidnapped since the Oriire abductions. On June 29, terrorists attacked Government Day Secondary School, Lassa, in the beleaguered Askira/Uba local government area, abducting dozens of students writing NECO examination. Two teachers and one soldier were killed during the assault.

    Notwithstanding the fact that troops of Operation Hadin Kai swiftly rescued 10 of the victims, including a vice principal, teachers, and NECO candidates, 37 of the children and women selling food items within the school premises remain unaccounted for. Barely one week after families of the victims staged peaceful protests demanding urgent government intervention, nobody is talking about the remaining captives again. Nigerians, inured to scandals, no matter how horrendous, have moved on.

    Whether it is the scandal of children being abducted from their schools moments after soldiers deployed to provide security were withdrawn without any explanation or people without the requisite educational qualifications finding themselves in the corridors of power or the absurdity of politicians claiming to have attended schools that were not in existence as at the time of their purported graduation and going ahead to submit such patently fake credentials to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), nothing shocks Nigerians anymore because scandal has become a staple diet.

    In-between these scandalous security breaches, there are financial scandals. On Wednesday, July 1, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) resident representative in Nigeria, Christian Ebeke, said the country had about 2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) worth of public spending (about N8.83 trillion) not recorded in recent official budgets.

    The implication as Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in the 2027 elections, noted is that the Tinubu administration is awarding multi-trillion naira contracts, moving massive public capital, and commissioning infrastructure projects entirely beyond the reach of the Auditor-General, the nation’s procurement laws, and the legitimate oversight of the National Assembly. Atiku calls it “a parallel fiscal universe” governed by executive whim and shielded from constitutional accountability. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) calls it “horrible.”

    But who cares what Obi and Atiku think or say when the people know that it is a matter of days, if not hours, before news of another scandal breaks. It is a vicious cycle – a self-perpetuating chain of negative events. We are a people trapped in an endless downward spiral. So, less than one week thence, the story that ordinarily will make any sane country quake has disappeared, literally, from the news. Nigerians have taken it in their putative stride.

    Why? Because another scandal has supplanted it. This time, it is one Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), an agency the Tinubu administration claims is non-existent.

    Adeyemi demurs, insisting that the agency not only exists but has the imprimatur of the presidency. The problem, he claims, is his refusal to give President Tinubu’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, 48% of the agency’s N27.4 billion takeoff grant as allegedly demanded after paying a N400 million bribe to secure the job, with an outstanding N200 million to pay.

    The presidency hurriedly queued behind Gbajabiamila, one of their own. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga urged Nigerians not to allow Adeyemi, a “con artist” with a history of fraudulent misrepresentation to hoodwink them. The police, Onanuga further claimed, had investigated the matter and established that the agency Adeyemi headed was fake. The police also found out, according to the presidency, Gbajabiamila’s primary constituency, that Adeyemi forged his appointment letter, falsely paraded himself as a government appointee, falsely solicited a note verbal from the Foreign Affairs Ministry to enable him and his staff to obtain US visas, operated 34 bank accounts, used fake documents to open a CBN account. Only in Nigeria!

    And then, an unforced error. The police also uncovered, Onanuga revealed, that the middleman between Adeyemi, the con-artist, and Gbajabiamila, Tinubu’s guardian angel, one Dolapo Babatunde Tanimola, “died in a fire incident at Kachi Hotel in Abuja” on October 22, 2025, five days before Adeyemi’s arrest. The suspect’s star witness died mysteriously before the police mustered the courage to file charges against him in court. How convenient!

    But the presidency’s defence of Gbajabiamila has raised more questions than it provided answers. How possible is it for one private citizen to invent a presidential agency, forge his own appointment letter, secure office space inside the Federal Secretariat, recruit staff, hold meetings with diplomats, correspond with government institutions, open a CBN account through official channels and wangle his “fake” agency into the Appropriation Act with a N1.3 billion allocation. If one man can pull off this scam, Nigeria has, indeed, become worse than a banana republic under Tinubu’s watch.

    But the truth remains that Onanuga’s narrative, as usual, beggars belief. There are, simply, too many moving parts. The questions that need to be answered are: Who assigned the office space at the National Secretariat? Who created the budget line for the “non-existent” agency? Who approved it? Who authorised staff postings? Who facilitated CBN account opening? Was the N27.4 billion takeoff grant paid? If yes, by who? If no, with which funds was the agency run? Already, the Senate has washed its hands off the mess, pushing it back to the executive.

    Apparently, the Tinubu regime takes Nigerians for fools. Onanuga as Special Adviser on Information and Strategy speaks for the president. In his July 1 statement earlier referenced, he claimed that the police having thoroughly investigated Adeyemi on the strength of Gbajabiamila’s October 17, 2025 petition to the DSS and police, found him solely responsible for his crime, arrested him on October 27, 2025 and filed an eight-count charge against him at the Federal High Court in Abuja on November 27, 2025. The matter was subsequently adjourned to July 27, 2026.

    Simply put, Adeyemi is currently standing trial on charges of conspiracy, forgery and impersonation, prosecuted by the Tinubu regime, with Gbajabiamila and 10 others as prosecution witnesses.

    So, how can the same Tinubu order another “thorough investigation” when he had already cleared Gbajabiamila of culpability? In any case, the same president who is ordering a thorough investigation just appointed Gbajabiamila a member of the Presidential Working Group saddled with the responsibility of preparing the legal framework for implementing state police across the country. To the discerning, that appointment at this critical moment is a loud statement from the president. It is tantamount to saying, “This is my beloved aide in whom I am well pleased.”

    Ideally, if Tinubu wanted a “thorough investigation,” Gbajabiamila would have been asked to step aside until the investigation is concluded. That is global best practice. Stepping aside is not a pronouncement of guilt on him. It is the right thing to do. It strengthens the process and engenders fairness. The president’s body language communicated through the state police assignment has foreclosed that.

    Instead, the presidency is trying so hard to convict Adeyemi in the court of public opinion and using state might to crush him even before he gets the chance of having his day in the court.

    On Monday, police raided the Ogbomosho home of his parents and arrested his father. The same day Gbajabiamila threatened a N10 billion suit over what he called Adeyemi’s defamatory remarks. His counsel, Kemi Pinheiro, gave him 72 hours to take down all videos and comments in which he made allegations that are “malicious, reckless and entirely without factual foundation” and targeted at showing Gbajabiamila as “corrupt, morally bankrupt, and a murderer.”

    This is sheer legal subterfuge and presidential high-handedness. Nigerians are not impressed. The PFIPC saga is one scandal, too many. The joke is on Aso Rock. What exposed the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council scandal is not the altruism of some high-minded public officials. No! It is as a result of a sharing formula that went awry because the conspirators refused to abide by the “there is honour among thieves” dictum. Nigerians should be worried about the legions of illegal MDAs still in operation because the villains running them are faithful to their agreed sharing formula.

  • PFIPC Scandal and Culpability of 10th National Assembly

    PFIPC Scandal and Culpability of 10th National Assembly

    By Iyobosa Uwugiaren

    There is a popular old saying that when something smells bad, you do not spray perfume over it; you find the source of the odour. Nigeria’s latest budget controversy surrounding the alleged Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC) is producing an unmistakable  political disgusting odour. The temptation is to look only toward the Presidency, where denials, counterclaims and allegations continue to dominate the headlines. But that would be only half the story. The other half sits comfortably inside the National Assembly.

    The PFIPC affair has exposed something that many Nigerians have long suspected but could rarely demonstrate so blatantly: legislative oversight is increasingly becoming a constitutional ritual rather than a constitutional responsibility.

    The institution that should serve as the nation’s first line of defence against questionable public spending now finds itself confronting difficult questions about whether it is still capable of performing that role effectively. This is not merely a partisan dispute between government and opposition; it is a fundamental question about institutional integrity and the credibility of Nigeria’s democratic architecture.

    The Presidency’s attempt to contain the controversy has done little to answer those questions. Indeed, the statement issued by the Presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, appeared to raise almost as many questions as it sought to answer. While the statement firmly dismissed the PFIPC as a fictitious organisation and sought to distance the Presidency from its activities, it offered little that advanced public understanding of the institutional issues now at the heart of the controversy.

    If the council never legally existed, how did it reportedly gain sufficient recognition to engage public officials and present itself as operating within the corridors of power? More fundamentally, how did an entity now described as non-existent reportedly find its way into the 2026 Appropriation Act with a budgetary allocation of N1.3 billion; and opened an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)?

    Rather than confronting these questions directly, the official response appeared more concerned with repudiating the organisation and dismissing those associated with it. Consequently, it has done little to dispel public suspicion or strengthen confidence in the systems that are supposed to prevent such anomalies from occurring in the first place.

    If, as the Presidency insists, the PFIPC never legally existed, Nigerians deserve to know how an allegedly non-existent body reportedly found its way into the 2026 Appropriation Act with a budgetary allocation of N1.3 billion. Budgets do not simply materialise. They pass through ministries, the Budget Office, the executive, standing committees, appropriation panels, harmonisation processes, plenary debates and, ultimately, the votes of elected lawmakers.

    Somewhere along that chain, someone should have paused to ask the most basic question: under what law does this agency exist? Whether that question was never asked or was asked and ignored, either possibility raises serious concerns about the quality of legislative scrutiny. These are not political questions; they are constitutional ones.

    The National Assembly cannot plausibly present itself as an innocent bystander in a controversy involving a document that it painstakingly debated, amended and enacted into law. Appropriation is among the legislature’s most significant constitutional powers, and every budget line approved by parliament bears its institutional imprint. Every allocation represents a mindful exercise of legislative authority. That is precisely why this controversy should concern Senator Godswill Akpabio-led National Assembly far more than it appears to.

    For years, legislators have defended the enormous cost of maintaining one of the world’s most expensive legislatures by arguing that democracy is inherently expensive because effective oversight is indispensable. Nigerians have repeatedly been told that parliament must rigorously scrutinise executive proposals, interrogate expenditure, investigate abuses and protect taxpayers’ money.

    Those arguments are persuasive in theory. However, episodes such as the PFIPC controversy inevitably raise doubts about whether the scrutiny promised is consistently reflected in practice. The legislature cannot simultaneously enjoy the prestige that comes with constitutional authority while disclaiming responsibility whenever serious questions arise concerning the exercise of that authority.

    Oversight should never be measured merely by the number of committee hearings convened or reports produced. Its real measure lies in outcomes. Did Parliament identify questionable allocations before they became law? Did it detect procedural irregularities? Did it insist that every agency receiving public funds possessed a proper legal foundation? Did it prevent waste before it occurred? These are the questions that define the effectiveness of legislative oversight. If the answer to too many of them is negative, Nigerians are entitled to ask what oversight has become and whether it is fulfilling the constitutional purpose for which it exists.

    The PFIPC controversy is especially troubling because it does not stand alone. It arrives against a backdrop of recurring public concerns about budget padding allegations, cloudy constituency project allocations, duplicated projects, unexplained insertions into appropriation bills and legislative investigations that often generate considerable publicity but seldom produce lasting institutional reforms.

    Each controversy gradually erodes public confidence, reinforcing the perception that transparency is frequently demanded from other arms of government while not always being demonstrated within the legislature itself.

    Perception, admittedly, is not always reality. Institutions should not be judged solely by public cynicism. Nevertheless, public trust cannot be sustained by declarations alone. It must be earned through openness, accountability and noticeable competence. Trust cannot be legislated into existence; it must be cultivated through conduct that consistently inspires public confidence.

    This is where the National Assembly confronts its greatest challenge. Rather than embracing a transparent inquiry into how the PFIPC allocation emerged, there is a risk that familiar institutional instincts will prevail: committee referrals that disappear into bureaucratic silence, partisan exchanges that obscure constitutional questions and official statements that explain everything except what citizens most wish to understand.

    Nigerians have witnessed this cycle repeatedly. A scandal erupts, investigations are announced, public attention gradually shifts elsewhere and, before long, another controversy emerges exposing many of the same institutional weaknesses. The cycle continues because its underlying causes remain insufficiently addressed.

    However, this moment presents an opportunity. The National Assembly possesses every constitutional instrument necessary to restore public confidence. It can establish a genuinely bipartisan inquiry into the appropriation process that produced this controversy. It can publish committee records relating to the relevant budget deliberations.

    It can identify where institutional safeguards failed and recommend reforms that make future budget insertions more transparent, more traceable and less susceptible to abuse. Such measures would strengthen parliament rather than diminish it because strong institutions do not fear scrutiny; they invite it. Democratic institutions mature when they are prepared to hold themselves to the same standards they demand of others.

    The controversy should equally stimulate a broader conversation about Nigeria’s budgeting process. In an era increasingly defined by digital governance, there is little justification for budget amendments that remain difficult for citizens to trace or understand. Every legislative adjustment should be digitally documented.

    Every budget insertion should identify its originating authority. Committee recommendations should be publicly accessible, allowing citizens, journalists and civil society organisations to follow the legislative history of every appropriation. Transparency should not depend upon investigative reporting or whistle-blowers; it should be embedded within the very architecture of public financial management.

    The National Assembly frequently reminds Nigerians that it is a co-equal branch of government, and constitutionally that is beyond dispute. However, co-equality necessarily entails equal responsibility. It is impossible to celebrate legislative independence while resisting legislative accountability. Parliament cannot credibly present itself as the nation’s watchdog while appearing reluctant to answer legitimate questions about its own vigilance. No democracy can function on selective accountability.

    If ministers must explain their actions, lawmakers must also explain theirs. If government agencies are expected to defend their budgets, parliament should equally be prepared to defend the integrity of its oversight processes. If the executive must answer for institutional failures, the legislature cannot claim immunity from criticism whenever those failures appear to have passed through its own constitutional responsibilities.

    The PFIPC affair may ultimately reveal fraud, administrative incompetence or systemic procedural weaknesses. Whatever the eventual findings, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid: the controversy has exposed significant questions about the effectiveness of Nigeria’s legislative oversight. Those questions deserve substantive answers rather than  political slogans.

    The National Assembly should regard this episode not as an attack upon its authority but as an opportunity for institutional renewal. Democracies become stronger when legislatures willingly subject themselves to the same standards of transparency and accountability that they expect of the executive.

    Otherwise, the unpleasant smell surrounding this controversy will linger. And the longer legitimate questions remain unanswered, the more Nigerians may conclude that the deeper problem lies not merely with one controversial budget allocation but with an oversight system that too often identifies problems only after the public has already discovered them. No democratic institution should find comfort in such a verdict, least of all the one constitutionally entrusted with safeguarding the nation’s purse. ThisDay

  • RENEWED HOPE IN ACTION: How Dr. Kingsley Tochukwu Udeh, SAN, is Turning Science and Innovation into Nigeria’s Economic Engine

    RENEWED HOPE IN ACTION: How Dr. Kingsley Tochukwu Udeh, SAN, is Turning Science and Innovation into Nigeria’s Economic Engine

    By Professor Ani Casimir

    When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu rolled out his Renewed Hope Agenda, critics and allies alike watched closely to see how its ambitious pillars of economic diversification, job creation, and industrial growth would manifest in the federal civil service.

    Few ministries have captured this transformative shift quite like the Federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology (FMIST). Since taking the helm, the Honourable Minister, Dr. Kingsley Tochukwu Udeh, SAN, has aggressively repositioned science and technology from a quiet, academic enclave into a high-octane economic driver.

    Upon assumption of office, he has evidentially activated the potency and capabilities of the departments and agencies which were lying dormant for a long time.

    This deliberate and intentional technocratic efficiency came through high-profile executive actions and orders to implement the President’s Renewed Hope Agenda, interpreting the strategy into realizable policies and programs in the departments and agencies in his Ministry. From a past record of relative passivity, the Ministry has come alive and the President’s mandates are manifesting with uncommon speed through new partnerships the Minister is orchestrating in the 36 states, the academia, foreign development organizations and the private sector.

    For close observers of Nigeria’s governance landscape, Dr. Udeh’s explosive, execution-first approach comes as no surprise. The brilliant jurist and administrator comes directly from the highly corporate and technocratic stable of Governor Peter Ndubuisi Mbah’s transformative “Tomorrow is Here” team in Enugu State. Having served distinctively as the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in Enugu State, Dr. Udeh has successfully imported that same governance ethos—characterized by disruptive innovation, institutional transparency, and rapid economic scaling—to the federal stage.

    He is obviously justifying with his sterling performance, Governor Mbah’s strategic political shift to the ruling party, APC and to log on to the destiny of a progressive President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a move seen by many as strategic, fruitful, and supportive of sustainable development for Enugu state citizens in good and record time.

    Nigerians, not only Enugu state, are reaping the good fruits of a prepared Ministerial human capital who was well prepared under the Tomorrow is Here ethical leadership mantra of Governor Peter Ndubuisi Mbah.

    Under Dr. Udeh’s leadership, the Ministry is actively demonstrating that the Renewed Hope Agenda is not just a political framework, but a tactical blueprint for national survival and global competitiveness. We can take the pragmatic lens of good milestones already achieved to confirm his effectiveness.

    Breaking the Laboratory Walls: Research to Industry

    For decades, Nigeria’s brilliant scientific minds suffered from the “shelf syndrome”— breakthrough academic research gathering dust in university laboratories rather than solving real-world problems. Dr. Udeh has moved decisively to change that, deploying the same legal and policy frameworks he used to de-risk investments during his time in Enugu. For him, the university is meant to be the think tank for real time scientific, innovative and technological challenges facing every nation.

    Speaking recently at a national stakeholders’ engagement in Abuja, the Minister made the administration’s stance clear:

    “The world is currently being reshaped by knowledge-driven economies powered by innovation. We are not just funding research and innovation for academic purposes; we are funding them to reach the market and industry. The Renewed Hope Agenda provides a clear opportunity to reposition science, technology, and innovation as a strategic driver of economic growth and job creation.”

    To achieve this, Dr. Udeh is championing the operationalization of the National Research and Innovation Fund (NRIF). By actively engaging with lawmakers and key stakeholders, the Minister is building a transparent, unified funding mechanism designed to rescue innovative projects from fragmentation and scale them directly into commercial products.

    Going Global: Strategic Alliances with the United Nations and WIPO

    A key marker of Dr. Udeh’s ministerial strategy is leveraging international partnerships to scale local ideas — a skill sharpened during his prior roles managing development aid coordination.

    In a high-level engagement with United Nations Resident Coordinator, Mohammed Malik Fall, the Minister forged a powerful structural alliance. The resulting UN–FMIST Working Group is moving beyond standard diplomatic pleasantries toward actionable frameworks. The partnership focuses on:

    -Developing pipelines of bankable, investment-ready technological projects: Advancing green technologies, such as clean cooking solutions and green hydrogen. In real-time domestication of innovation, this amounts to downloading scientific breakthroughs into homes, into transportation hubs and percolating them to the grassroots of Nigeria urban and rural areas.

    -Maximizing value from Nigeria’s critical solid minerals.

    -Harnessing youth entrepreneurship through structured national tech hackathons.

    Simultaneously, Dr. Udeh has engaged the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to tighten patent registration and technology incubation structures, ensuring that homegrown intellectual property is fiercely protected as it moves to market.

    Bridging the Subnational Divide: Federal-State Synergy

    Realizing that national growth cannot happen in isolation, Dr. Udeh is aggressively taking the gospel of innovation to the states. At the recent PLASSTIFEST, the Minister emphasized that FMIST is treating Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) not as a standalone federal asset, but as an infrastructure layer for subnational development.

    Drawing from his intimate understanding of subnational administration under Governor Peter Mbah, he has ensured that federal incubation programs are seamlessly pairing with state governments. This synergy helps local startups scale, upgrades science laboratory standards, and deploys tech solutions directly into regional agriculture, healthcare, and manufacturing.

    A New Chapter for Nigeria’s Future

    As a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, a stellar academic, and seasoned public administrator from the elite Enugu school of governance, Dr. Udeh’s analytical rigor and execution-first mindset are precisely what the ministry needs to inject life into the Renewed Hope Agenda.

    By forcing a handshake between researchers and industrialists, formalizing elite global partnerships, and building deep subnational synergy, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology is proving that Nigeria’s path to prosperity will be written in code, powered by homegrown patents, and actualized through decisive leadership.

    Professor Casimir Kingston Chukwunonyelum Ani, is the Team Lead/Director, Ethics, AI and Higher Education Strategy Team (EAISTRAP) and a member of the strategic UNESCO Technical Implementation Policy Team for Ethics of Artificial Intelligence Team for NIGERIA since 2023). He can be reached at casimir.ani@unn.edu.ng

  • This Will Not End Well for South Africa

    This Will Not End Well for South Africa

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    The 30 June deadline issued by the Afrophobic marchers in South Africa  to African migrants to leave South Africa has now passed into history. History will remember the infamy of those who turned on their fellow Africans, looted their shops, terrorised entire communities, and forced many to flee South Africa with nothing but their lives and painful stories of a nation that once proudly called itself the Rainbow Nation. Official silence and ritual condemnations have done little to erase the memory of repeated attacks that have scarred countless African migrants, Nigerians included. For Nigerians, these recurring episodes of Afrophobia are no longer isolated outbreaks of mob violence; they have become part of a dangerous historical pattern. Each cycle of attacks, followed by familiar promises of investigations and assurances that the violence does not reflect official government policy, only deepens the conviction that African solidarity has become an empty slogan.

    Across Nigeria, public patience with diplomatic caution is rapidly evaporating. It is against this backdrop that Senator Adams Oshiomhole’s call for retaliatory measures against South African companies operating in Nigeria must be understood. Remarks that might once have been dismissed as political grandstanding now resonate with a broad section of the public because they express accumulated anger rather than momentary outrage. History teaches that when grievances are ignored for too long, they eventually acquire the force to shape political action. South African businesses have flourished in Nigeria for decades. MTN built one of the largest telecommunications operations on the continent and has invested billions of dollars in the Nigerian market. MultiChoice turned DStv and GOtv into household names. Stanbic IBTC became a major player in banking and financial services through its connection to South Africa’s Standard Bank Group. Protea Hotels established some presence in the hospitality sector. South African retail and consumer brands have also operated in Nigeria at different periods. These businesses arrived in Nigeria because they found a large market, substantial profits, and an environment that welcomed foreign investments. They benefited from the openness of a country whose government and citizens played a significant role in supporting the anti-apartheid struggle when South Africa was isolated from much of the world.

    Many Nigerians increasingly ask the simple question: how long can economic hospitality survive repeated images of Nigerians being hunted, beaten, or killed in South African streets?

    Nobody should underestimate the political consequences of that question.

    History offers several warnings. The anti-Asian expulsions in Uganda under Idi-Amin produced economic and diplomatic consequences that damaged Uganda’s international standing for years. The anti-Chinese riots that erupted in Indonesia during the dying days of the Suharto era reshaped social relations and left scars that remain visible decades later. In many parts of the world, violence directed at minority communities eventually provoked commercial boycotts, retaliatory campaigns, diplomatic disputes, and long-term reputational damage. Economic relationships depend on confidence; but confidence disappears when citizens begin to associate foreign-owned businesses with a country perceived as hostile to their compatriots. Nigeria already witnessed a glimpse of what retaliation could look like during previous outbreaks of xenophobic violence. Demonstrators targeted South African-linked businesses, but security agencies had to protect some commercial locations from attacks.

    The anger was real, even if it eventually subsided.

    Future retaliations which may unfold differently will not end well for South Africa.

    The next major Afrophobic episode in South Africa could trigger coordinated consumer boycotts, and even violent attacks on its economic interests everywhere when politicians discover electoral advantages in demanding punitive measures, trade unions pressure governments to review bilateral arrangements, activist groups organise campaigns against prominent South African brands, and social media amplify every incident within minutes. In such a climate, companies like MTN, MultiChoice, Stanbic IBTC, Protea Hotels, and other South African-linked businesses could become symbols in a conflict they did not create. Their offices, retail outlets, infrastructure, and public image would carry the burden of public anger directed at South Africa.

    This possibility should concern business leaders in Johannesburg far more than quarterly earnings reports.

    Corporate investments do not exist in isolation from politics. They rely on goodwill. Once that goodwill evaporates, even profitable businesses become vulnerable. South Africa faces a deeper challenge than the protection of foreign nationals, as is the question of what kind of continental leadership it seeks to exercise in the coming decades. The country possesses considerable economic influence, with its banks, telecommunications firms, retailers, mining companies, media corporations, and investment houses operating across Africa. Such influence carries obligations. A state that aspires to continental leadership cannot repeatedly witness attacks against fellow Africans without suffering reputational consequences.

    The consequences extend beyond Nigeria. Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Malawians, Ethiopians, Somalis, Mozambicans, Congolese, and many others who are today the victims of the mindless mobs in South Africa are watching and considering the next steps for the future. After all, what once appeared as isolated anger now resembles a growing reservoir of resentment waiting for a catalyst. Public sentiment across the continent is changing. Conversations on social media reveal a level of bitterness that would have been difficult to imagine twenty years ago.

    South African policymakers still have an opportunity to prevent a future rupture through effective law enforcement and sustained political campaigns against Afrophobia. Diplomatic statements alone will not achieve that objective. The government in Pretoria must be told that history teaches that grievances rarely remain confined to the place where they originate. They travel across borders, enter public consciousness, influence political calculations, and reshape economic relationships. No nation repeatedly exports fear and expects to import goodwill forever.

    Surely, this will not end well for South Africa.

  • [OPINION] The Akara Economy that Nigeria Runs on But Won’t Fund

    By Akinola Morakinyo (Ph.D)

    Nkechi Okonkwo has been awake since 3:45 in the morning. By the time most of Oshodi is still arguing with its alarm clock, she has soaked beans, queued at the neighbourhood mill, lit her coal pot, and begun producing one of the most economically efficient food products in Nigeria.

    An akara ball costs between one hundred and five hundred Naira. It requires no supply chain from Rotterdam or The Strait of Hormuz. It requires beans, palm oil, a frying pan, and a 3:45am discipline that would make most MBA students reconsider their choices. Nkechi does not have an MBA. She has a waiting list.

    On the last Wednesday in late June 2026, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu addressed State House correspondents after the Renewed Hope Initiative’s second-quarter meeting with wives of state governors. She encouraged Nigerians, particularly women, to start selling akara, roasted corn, and kuli-kuli, noting that these businesses require little capital.

    A video surfaced online by Friday. By Saturday, the country had started approximately one million satirical akara businesses on social media. The debate that followed was heated, widespread, and largely missed the actual economics. This article attempts to recover them.

    Nigeria’s informal economy, of which the akara stall is one of the recognisable faces, is not just peripheral to the national economy. It is the national economy. The International Labour Organisation’s 2024 Nigeria policy brief places the informal sector’s share of total employment at 92.3%. Among women specifically, the figure is 96% compared with 88.7% of men. World Economics estimates Nigeria’s informal economy at about 57.2% of GDP, using its own methodology.

    According to SMEDAN, Nigeria has approximately 40 million micro, small, and medium enterprises. The dismissal of the akara economy as beneath serious policy attention is not sophistication. It is innumeracy. The First Lady was not advising Nigerians to embrace poverty. She was describing the sector that employs nine in ten working Nigerians and produces more than half of national output. The satire got ahead of the statistics.

    The economics of a ₦50,000 capital injection into a micro-enterprise are more consequential than the mockery suggested. The switch from charcoal to a 3kg gas cylinder costs below ₦5,000 per refill but yields faster output, lower fuel cost per unit, and a cleaner product over the course of a month’s trading.

    The akara seller who cannot afford the upfront cylinder deposit stays on coal, paying more per unit of heat and producing less per hour. Working capital also unlocks bulk purchasing: the seller with ₦50,000 buys beans wholesale at discounts of up to 20% versus the retail prices she pays on a daily cash cycle. These are not marginal gains. They compound into the difference between subsistence and modest accumulation. Not all fingers are equal, but a hand needs all of them. The akara economy needs its fingers to have working capital, and the formal system has been largely unwilling to provide it.

    The First Lady’s remarks were correct in substance and poorly timed in context, and the honest analysis requires holding both judgements simultaneously. She was right that starting a food micro-enterprise requires little capital and can generate sustainable income. Come to think of it, most Nigerians are already active participants in the country’s largest informal financial institution: the Extended Family.

    Its lending policy is simple with no collateral, no interest, no repayment schedule, and no realistic expectation of ever seeing your money again. The Bank of Mum, Dad, Uncle, Auntie, Brother, and Cousin dispenses perpetual grants with remarkable consistency and rarely asks for repayment. This is a visible thing needing no microscope. She was right that grants are a more appropriate instrument than loans for the lowest-income tier of the MSME base, as an annualised interest rate on loan of up to 60%, aside from other hidden fees, for a seller on a daily cash cycle, transfers income to the bank rather than capitalising the enterprise.

    What the video could not carry was the distinction between akara as an entry point into accumulation and akara as the ceiling of national aspiration. If a child washes his hands clean, he will eat with elders. The graduate mechanical engineer who cannot find work commensurate with her training has washed her hands. The table is not yet set. Telling her the frying pan is available was heard as a dismissal of her preparation rather than a bridge to opportunity. That is not what I think the First Lady meant. It is what the timeline heard. The two things can be true simultaneously.

    The scale problem that the debate missed is the most consequential number in this story. Of Nigeria’s 40 million MSMEs, only 4% have access to formal bank credit, per PwC’s MSME Survey 2024. SMEDAN’s 500,000 active loan beneficiaries represent 1.25% of the MSME base. The World Bank’s FINCLUDE programme, approved in December 2025 with $500 million in capitalisation, targets 250,000 additional MSMEs a combination of commercial banks, microfinance institutions, fintech lenders, and credit guarantee mechanisms, bringing the potential formal reach to roughly 750,000 enterprises out of 40 million, less than 2%.

    The federal government’s N1 billion MSME grant disbursed in April 2026 is correct in instrument and wholly insufficient in size. The Moniepoint Informal Economy Report 2025 found that 51% of informal businesses have never taken a formal loan and do not intend to, up from 30% the year before. The informal economy has not refused capital. It has concluded that capital has refused it, through interest rates, collateral requirements, credit bureau conditions, and processing timelines that have nothing to do with the economics of an akara stall and everything to do with a system designed for a different kind of borrower.

    Unfortunately, an idle hand is the devil’s workshop. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not the unemployment itself, but where that unemployment leads. An idle labour market has become a waiting room for criminal enterprise. This is why employment policy is also security policy.

    Every new factory, every thriving SME, every apprenticeship, every digital skills programme, and every successful farm enterprise does more than increase GDP by competing directly with criminal organisations for the time, talent, and aspirations of Nigeria’s youth. The safest communities are often those that provide the greatest opportunities for legitimate work.

    Four interventions and a rhetoric question are immediately available. First, the World Bank’s FINCLUDE programme must be implemented at speed and expanded in scope. Its December 2025 approval targets 250,000 MSMEs over several years. The sector’s 57.2% of GDP share warrants a target of 2.5 million over the same period. The difference is between a pilot and a policy.

    Second, SMEDAN’s zero-interest N500 million revolving fund and single-digit loan facility are correctly designed instruments at wholly insufficient scale. N500 million distributed across 40 million enterprises is N12,500 each if all were reached, which they are not. The fund needs to be fifty times larger to be proportionate to the growing sector it is supposed to serve.

    Third, the movable collateral registry under Nigeria’s Secured Transactions in Movable Assets Act must be operationalised at the micro-enterprise level, allowing businesses to borrow against inventory, receivables, and equipment rather than land certificates most informal operators will never hold. Fourth, grants rather than loans are the correct instrument for the smallest enterprises: a N50,000 grant combined with basic business training can move an akara operation from coal pot to gas stove, from retail to wholesale sourcing, from one shift to two, from one employee to three. That is infrastructure investment in the sector that employs 92.3% of the workforce.

    Finally, let’s face it: is it not high time we established a dedicated government ministry fashioned after South Africa’s Department of Small Business Development (DSBD) explicitly focused on the providing funding and business toolkits to informal entrepreneurs and traders?

    The scenario projections in this article show the scale of what is at stake. Scaling formal capital access from 1.25% of MSMEs today to 18% by 2030, through expanded grants, single-digit rate loans, and collateral reform, could move more than 6 million additional micro-enterprises toward the small enterprise tier. The status quo trajectory delivers approximately 1.8% by 2030, a marginal improvement while the coal pots stay on and the wholesale discounts remain uncollected.

    Nkechi Okonkwo does not need a debate. She needs a gas cylinder, at least N50,000 in working capital, a city council that does not confiscate her table every other Thursday, and a government that counts her in the programmes it announces rather than only in the statistics it publishes about sectors it does not fund.

    The First Lady was right that the akara economy is real, accessible, and important. The government’s job now is to match the scale of the advice to the scale of the sector. 92.3% of the workforce cannot be served by programmes that reach 1.25% of enterprises. The akara is frying. The policy is not.

    Akinola Morakinyo (Ph.D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA. 

    Originally Published on Nairametrics.com

  • Nigeria and South Africa’s Xenophobia: A Passport Must Be More Than Paper

    Nigeria and South Africa’s Xenophobia: A Passport Must Be More Than Paper

    -By SNC Nwagu

    “Life is sacrosanct. It cannot be regained once lost. Ghana evacuates. Malawi shields. Nigeria reacts — but only after the caskets are counted.”

    Since 2008, South Africa has recorded repeated waves of anti-foreigner violence known as “xenophobia” or “Afrophobia.” Nigerians have paid the price in blood and business every time. As a fresh and more dangerous wave tears through Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban in 2026, the pattern is painfully familiar: Nigeria moves, but only in crisis mode — and only after other nations have already moved first.

    THE BLOOD AND DATA

    The record stretches back nearly two decades. In 2008, at least 62 people were killed nationwide in South Africa’s first major xenophobic uprising, the wave that set the template for every one since. Just over a decade later, the 2019 riots in Johannesburg and Pretoria left at least 12 Nigerians confirmed dead and roughly 50 Nigerian-owned businesses destroyed or damaged; Nigeria’s government announced a target of repatriating 640 citizens, and while the first Air Peace flight carried only 187–189 people, the total eventually surpassed 600 across several flights and a private real-estate firm’s donated fares.

    The toll since has only deepened. The Nigerian Union South Africa (NUSA) and the Nigerian Citizens Association South Africa (NICASA) say at least 105 Nigerians have been killed in South Africa over the past seven years — including roughly 8 deaths in 2024, another 8 in 2025, and a sharp spike of more than 20 deaths since January 2026 alone, blamed on shootings, mob violence, and deaths in police custody. That spike traces directly to the latest unrest: between April and June 2026, vigilante movements “Operation Dudula” and “March and March” led mass protests across Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban demanding the removal of undocumented foreigners, reportedly setting a June 30 deadline for migrants to leave. The killings of Nigerians Amaramiro Emmanuel and Ekpenyong Andrew triggered Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to summon South Africa’s Acting High Commissioner — a step in the right direction, but one still driven by outrage after the fact rather than a standing protocol.

    To its credit, this time Abuja moved faster than in 2019: President Tinubu approved five Air Peace evacuation flights, more than 1,000 Nigerians registered for voluntary return, and over 600 had been repatriated by early July — with the Acting High Commissioner now also compiling records of abandoned businesses and property to pursue compensation from Pretoria. That is real progress. But it remains improvisation, not institution: chartered when the cameras are rolling, not built into law long before the next mob forms.

    WHAT OTHERS DID WHILE WE WAITED

    Ghana offers the clearest contrast. In 2019, 187 of its citizens were airlifted within 72 hours using a standby evacuation arrangement and coordination with the Ghanaian community union in South Africa; in the 2026 crisis, Ghana was again among the first nations to begin repatriating its citizens, ahead of Nigeria. Malawi partnered with the IOM in 2015 and again in later waves, moving citizens toward the Beitbridge border corridor before looting peaked, drawing on an existing evacuation relationship rather than assembling one from scratch each time. Mozambique, too, repatriated hundreds of its nationals in the opening weeks of the 2026 crisis, moving in step with Ghana and ahead of Nigeria’s own evacuation approval. Zimbabwe, for its part, has run a standing “Harare Desk” in Pretoria in past waves, with SMS alerts and community safe houses feeding early warning back to citizens on the ground.

    Nigeria’s pattern, even now, is to scale up dramatically once a crisis is already underway — five chartered flights, a High Commissioner summoned, a compensation claim opened — rather than to run a permanent early-warning and evacuation system that activates automatically. We have three missions in South Africa, but still no standing crisis protocol and no pre-funded evacuation fund written into law. Bilateral trade between the two countries stood at roughly $2.3 billion in 2024 — Nigeria’s crude exports to South Africa alone worth close to $1.9 billion — yet that leverage is invoked only in the heat of a crisis, never as sustained pressure beforehand.

    THE COST OF FAILURE

    The failure to act early carries a price on both ends. At home, past waves have triggered reprisal attacks on South African-owned businesses in Lagos, Abuja, and Ibadan, and this year’s crisis has again seen Nigerian police publicly warn against reprisals on South African nationals and interests. When citizens see the state respond only after the fact, some take matters into their own hands — and that is how law and order unravels on both ends of the relationship. Abroad, the cost is just as plain: a passport that cannot protect its holder before disaster strikes is just paper. Even a well-funded emergency airlift, however commendable, is an admission that protection came too late for the ones already buried.

    THE REMEDY: NIGERIA’S FIRST PROTOCOL

    The starting point must be law. Nigeria should enact a Nigerians Abroad Protection & Evacuation Act, mandating a fixed share of the Foreign Affairs budget for emergency response, automatically triggered when a defined threshold of attacks on Nigerians is recorded within 30 days — rather than relying on presidential approval assembled flight-by-flight, as happened again in 2026. That law should fund concrete operations on the ground: a 24/7 hotline and USSD app in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town linked directly to NiDCOM; pre-identified safe houses in each city, run jointly with the Nigerian Union South Africa; and standing evacuation contracts with Air Peace and other carriers negotiated before a crisis, not five ad hoc flights approved mid-emergency.

    Diplomacy needs teeth to match. The South African High Commissioner should be summoned within a fixed, published window — 24 hours — of any fatal attack, as a standard rather than a reaction to public pressure, and the pattern should be raised at the AU Peace and Security Council. Continued failures to prosecute attackers should be made to carry a cost, affecting the ease of doing business for South African firms operating in Nigeria. None of this works without data: NiDCOM and the NBS should publish a quarterly “Nigerians in South Africa Safety Report” tracking deaths, assaults, extortion, and business losses in one place, rather than leaving the count to community associations like NUSA and NICASA to compile and defend against official denial. And accountability must run through the system itself — the Foreign Missions Act should be amended to sanction heads of mission who fail to act promptly during a crisis. The current compensation claim for abandoned Nigerian businesses is a welcome step; it should be standard practice from the first day of any evacuation, not a follow-up idea raised weeks in.

    CONCLUSION

    Ghana, Malawi, and Mozambique prove that political will, not just budget size, determines how fast a nation can move for its people. Nigeria has shown in 2026 that it, too, can move — five flights, a summoned High Commissioner, a compensation claim — once the crisis is already burning. The unfinished work is turning that emergency improvisation into permanent law, so the next wave of violence meets a system already built, not one assembled in the same week as the funerals. A Nigerian life in Soweto must matter as much as one in Sokoto — and it must be protected before the headlines force our hand, not after.

    SNC Nwagu writes on Foreign Policy, Strategy and Diplomacy. 

  • State Police and the Growing Challenge of Centrifugal Forces in Nigeria

    State Police and the Growing Challenge of Centrifugal Forces in Nigeria

    -By Daniel Ndukwe

    State police might mean safer neighborhoods. But can Nigeria’s institutions and shared values hold firm against the centrifugal forces a more decentralized model might unleash?

    Nigeria just took another step towards decentralized policing with the Senate’s passing of a constitutional amendment bill establishing the state police. Most of the discussions surrounding this potential reform has focused on its merits and dangers. But we need to address the bigger picture: what does a future with state police signify for the nation’s unity, especially in a country where ethnic, religious, and regional identities often wrestle with our collective national identity?

    This is not solely about security. State police is just one facet of a larger devolution process that could either fortify Nigeria’s federal structure or widen the centrifugal forces that have, time and again, attempted to tear the nation apart.

    What exactly are centrifugal forces? Political scientists define them as forces that push people apart, away from a shared national identity, towards regional, ethnic, religious, or class affiliations. The flipside of this, the unifying factor, is called centrifugal forces: the institutions, values, and shared experiences that tie us together under a common purpose.

    The history of post-independence Nigeria has been defined by the interplay of these two forces. The Civil War, separatist movements, ethnic and religious violence, regional politics, terrorism tinged with ethnic and religious motives, as well as enduring mutual suspicion among different groups all attest to the difficulty of building a cohesive nation out of our sheer diversity.

    However, despite these immense challenges, Nigeria has remained a single nation. Why? In part, due to the institutions that have functioned as centripetal forces: our armed forces, the Nigeria Police Force and other federal security agencies, the National Youth Service Scheme, federal universities, and even national sports. Specifically, the Police Force has remain one of the pivotal institutions symbolizing and fostering national unity.

    Imperfect as they may be, these institutions have helped weave a thread of common nationhood. This is where the state police discussion finds itself, in this crucial context.

    Now, it is understandable to be drawn to the argument for state police. Proponents are quick to point out that local control would provide intimate knowledge of each community, improve intelligence gathering, and facilitate quicker responses to security issues. In the context of the multifaceted security challenges plaguing Nigeria, this argument certainly holds water and warrants serious consideration.

    However, let us not get caught up in just the intended benefits of any reform. The truth is, every major reform carries unforeseen consequences. State police represents yet another transfer of power from the centre to the states. While this can be a recipe for better governance and accountability, it could also magnify centrifugal tendencies, particularly if measures to consolidate national unity are not pursued alongside it.

    For the sake of clarity, this is not an argument that decentralization is intrinsically dangerous. After all, federalism depends on the delicate balance between central authority and regional autonomy. Rather, the concern here is that in countries where national identity is yet to solidify, decentralized institutions may become easily swayed by local pressures emanating from politics, ethnicity, and religion.

    Nigeria’s political landscape makes ignoring this possibility difficult to swallow. Our elections are often viewed through a sectarian, religious, and regional lens, and political affiliations too often align with ethnic affiliations. In such a climate, institutions designed to be impartial arbiters could easily end up serving partisan interests.

    History from across the world shows that decentralization fares best when strong, central institutions and a deeply entrenched sense of shared citizenship already exist. When these pillars are shaky, decentralization can unintentionally amplify divisions and intensifies competition amongst constituent groups.

    Nigeria stands in this uneasy middle ground – a federation trying desperately to strike a balance between its diverse parts and its unified whole. Thus, our discussion of state police cannot solely focus on operational efficiency. It must broaden to embrace strategies to protect and strengthen the institutions that keep the federation together.

    If state police becomes a constitutional reality, we must also recommit to reinforcing Nigeria’s centripetal forces. This means making federal institutions more robust, inclusive, and trustworthy. It means civic education that emphasizes shared citizenship and national responsibility. It means policies that actively encourage inter-group and inter-regional cooperation rather than aggravating existing fissures.

    Crucially, political leaders must resist rhetoric that elevates group identities above national interests. A nation endures not because its regions or groups are identical, but because its citizens believe in a shared future.

    Therefore, the debate on state police reaches far beyond just law enforcement. It goes to the very heart of nation-building and the future trajectory of Nigeria’s federal experiment. As demands for greater regional autonomy grow, it is paramount that we approach each step of decentralization with an equally conscious effort to foster national unity.

    Yes, state police may improve local security and bolster operational efficiency. But the pressing question that looms is whether Nigeria’s centripetal institutions are robust enough to withstand the mounting centrifugal pressures of greater power devolution.

    In the long run, Nigeria’s federal system will succeed not based on the distribution of power, but on the willingness of Nigerians to see themselves as participants in a shared national destiny. For any nation that is pulled apart more strongly than it is held together, cannot possibly stand the test of time.

    Daniel Ndukwe is a public relations and strategic communication practitioner, and a governance, social change and development specialist. He writes from Enugu, Nigeria.

  • NDLEA and the Fight Against Drugs: An Operational Assessment

    NDLEA and the Fight Against Drugs: An Operational Assessment

    By Sebastine Chukwuebuka Okafor, Ph.D

    ​Since its establishment on December 29, 1989, by Decree No. 48 of 1989 (now the NDLEA Act), the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency began full operations in January 1990.

    ​Prior to this, Nigeria was experiencing a sharp increase in drug trafficking and substance abuse that threatened to turn the country into a major transit hub for international drug cartels, severely damaging its global reputation. The need to meet the country’s obligations toward curbing illicit narcotics under international frameworks—including the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances—became paramount.

    ​Under the act, the core functions of the NDLEA include combating the cultivation, manufacture, sale, and trafficking of illegal drugs; the arrest and prosecution of drug offenders; the seizure and destruction of illicit substances; public education on the dangers of drug abuse; and collaboration with international law enforcement agencies to dismantle transnational syndicates.

    ​Over the years, the agency has recorded remarkable successes. It has intercepted several tonnes of cocaine, heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine, tramadol, and other dangerous synthetic drugs at international airports, seaports, and land borders. Thousands of suspected drug traffickers have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted by competent courts across the country. Illegal cannabis plantations have been discovered and destroyed in several states, while the agency continues to partner with international organizations to prevent Nigeria from being exploited as a transit corridor.

    ​The introduction of the War Against Drug Abuse (WADA) campaign has also bolstered awareness among young people, students, and local communities regarding the dangers of substance abuse. Through counseling and rehabilitation programs, numerous individuals battling addiction have received support to rebuild their lives.

    ​Despite these achievements, deep concern remains at the grassroots level, where drug abuse has become a daily occurrence. In many communities, illicit drugs are openly sold on streets, in neighborhoods, and at notorious local joints, yet the presence of the NDLEA is rarely felt. Unlike the military or police, which often establish forward operational bases in flashpoints facing serious security challenges, the NDLEA rarely maintains a sustained operational footprint in areas notorious for retail drug distribution. Most often, the agency executes sporadic raids and withdraws, allowing cartels and dealers to reclaim the streets almost immediately.

    ​Another structural challenge is the severe shortage of personnel. Considering Nigeria’s vast population and expanding narcotics market, the agency’s workforce is insufficient to effectively monitor every local government area. This human capital deficit directly impairs localized intelligence gathering, counter-narcotics surveillance, and rapid responses to drug-related distress calls.

    ​Public engagement also remains constrained. Compared to other law enforcement organizations, the NDLEA rarely holds regular media briefings, community town halls, or collaborative sessions with traditional rulers, youth groups, and market associations. Consequently, many citizens remain disconnected from the agency’s strategic goals, and a significant portion of the populace does not know how to contact or locate the nearest NDLEA command.

    ​Furthermore, there is a widespread perception that enforcement efforts prioritize high-profile international traffickers, while retail drug networks operating openly within neighborhoods are left to thrive. Since the youth primarily access narcotics through these local distribution networks, a strategic shift toward community-level enforcement is critical to curbing addiction before it feeds organized transnational trafficking.

    ​As Nigeria navigates this growing public health crisis, there is an urgent need to strengthen the NDLEA through aggressive recruitment, expanded funding, modern logistics, and community-oriented policing models. Establishing permanent operational outposts in high-risk communities, scaling up public enlightenment campaigns, and institutionalizing partnerships with local leadership will significantly optimize the agency’s operational efficacy.

    ​Ultimately, the war against drugs cannot be won by the NDLEA in isolation. It demands the active participation of families, academic institutions, religious bodies, community leaders, and the media. With institutionalized grassroots engagement and sustained state funding, the agency can transition into a more visible, accessible, and formidable force capable of protecting Nigerian communities from the devastating impact of illicit drugs.

  • The Presidential Spokesman Who is Out of Touch

    The Presidential Spokesman Who is Out of Touch

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Public officials often forget that their words travel further than their offices. A minister, adviser or presidential spokesman may regard an interview as another routine media appearance, but citizens hear something else: an account of how those who govern understand their condition. That is why Bayo Onanuga’s recent remarks during his interview with Charles Aniagolu on Arise Television have provoked such public discomfort. In dismissing claims of widespread hunger and hardship, or suggesting that the suffering Nigerians describe does not correspond with his own observation, the presidential spokesman revealed a troubling distance between official perception and social reality.

    A spokesman is not merely a defender of government policy. He is expected to interpret government to citizens and communicate public sentiment back to government. That role requires attentiveness and restraint. Loyalty to an administration cannot replace acquaintance with everyday life. Once public communication becomes detached from lived experience, official statements begin to sound less like explanations and more like declarations from another country. The difficulty with Onanuga’s comments lies not simply in disagreement over economic policy. Citizens may differ on whether reforms are necessary or whether temporary pain is justified by promised future gains. The difficulty lies in denying the existence or scale of hardship at a time when ordinary Nigerians have reorganised their lives around scarcity.

    One does not require a statistical report to notice what has happened to the country. Markets have become sites of daily adjustments. Families that once bought food in quantity now purchase in fragments. Transport costs determine whether workers go to work every day. School fees compete with food bills. Medical appointments are postponed. Social ceremonies increasingly function as informal fundraising opportunities. Across urban centres and smaller communities alike, survival has become an exercise in difficult calculation.

    Global institutions have not ignored these developments. Reports over the past two years from international development and humanitarian agencies have repeatedly identified Nigeria as facing rising food insecurity, deteriorating household purchasing power and growing poverty levels. Food inflation has remained persistently high while incomes have failed to keep pace with rising costs. Such findings may be debated in terms of causes and remedies, but dismissing the underlying distress places official claims in direct conflict with evidence and with lived experience. Supporters of President Bola Tinubu would argue, with some justification, that inherited economic distortions required difficult choices. They point to fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate liberalisation and broader economic reforms as unavoidable measures postponed by previous administrations. Economic reforms are rarely painless, and no serious observer expects structural adjustments to produce immediate comfort.

    Citizens, however, are entitled to examine outcomes.

    Fuel subsidy removal increased transportation costs almost immediately and produced consequences across every layer of economic life. Exchange rate reforms increased the cost of imports and raised production expenses for local businesses. Prices adjusted upward. Household budgets contracted. Small businesses struggled to absorb higher operating costs. Wages remained largely static while inflation reduced their value in practical terms.

    Economic arguments lose persuasive force when daily experience moves in the opposite direction.

    A worker whose salary has technically increased but whose purchasing power has collapsed does not experience improvement. Families that once maintained modest stability now depend on relatives abroad, informal loans or support networks. Professionals quietly adjust expectations downward. Retirement savings lose value. Young people postpone milestones once considered ordinary. Many Nigerians who previously occupied stable middle class positions now speak openly about survival.

    This explains why remarks denying widespread hardship have generated such resentment. Citizens can endure sacrifice more easily than dismissal. Governments gain public trust when they acknowledge burdens honestly and explain their choices with candour. Public anger grows when officials appear insulated from consequences borne by everyone else. Political office creates its own form of distance. Daily exposure to official briefings, controlled environments and protected routines can produce an incomplete picture of national life. Those who occupy such spaces risk believing that public complaints are exaggerated because deprivation is no longer visible within their immediate surroundings.

    That danger is not unique to Nigeria.

    Political history contains many examples of governing classes that gradually lost contact with social conditions until public frustration became impossible to ignore. The comparison many Nigerians drew after Onanuga’s interview was the famous phrase associated with pre-revolutionary France: “Let them eat cake.” Historians have long disputed whether Marie Antoinette ever uttered those words. Their symbolic significance remains powerful because they represent indifference born of distance. When ordinary people complained of hunger, the phrase imagined rulers so removed from public suffering that they responded with disbelief and absurdity.

    No one suggests that Nigeria is at the same stage as pre-revolutionary France, nor should historical comparisons be stretched beyond their limits. The lesson remains useful. Public officials must resist the temptation to substitute personal observation for collective reality. Bayo Onanuga’s responsibility is not to agree with every criticism of the Tinubu administration. His responsibility is to speak with enough humility to recognise that millions of Nigerians understand their own circumstances better than any official briefing can describe.

    A spokesman who cannot hear public hardship risks speaking only to power while losing the confidence of the public he is meant to address.

  • The One-Man Village – By Abdul Mahmud

    The One-Man Village – By Abdul Mahmud

    Last week, I came across an account on X, formerly known as Twitter, the haunting account by one Elder Oyin Zubair about Owa-Onire, a community once known for its celebrated waterfall but now reduced to silence and abandonment. His telling was not merely reportage; it read like an elegy for a place emptied of itself. What lingered was not only the fact of depopulation, but the image at its centre: a town that had become, in effect, a one-man village.

    That account stayed with me because it illuminated, with unusual clarity, a reality that official language often fails to capture. There are moments in the life of a country when a single image says more than official briefings and ministerial speeches combined. Owa-Onire offers one such image. A whole town emptied of life. A man living by himself among abandoned homes. Churches without worshippers. Mosques with silent muezzins. Streets walked by one man because everyone else has fled. Security operatives arrive and discover that the place they came to protect has already ceased to exist in any meaningful civic sense. And it is not an isolated tragedy.

    As The Guardian reported two years ago, “Most traditional rulers in Ifelodun Local Government of Kwara State have fled their communities for fear of being kidnapped by gunmen. The Guardian newspaper gathered that some communities in the local government have turned into ghost towns as residents have fled to safer areas outside the council and the state. Kidnappers in the area now address letters to the monarchs, informing them of when they would strike in their domain”.

    That image ought to unsettle every Nigerian.

    When officers drawn from the drone unit, the Mobile Police Force, and the Anti-Kidnapping Squad entered Owa-Onire as part of ongoing operations across the forest corridors of Kwara South, they encountered silence. There were no signs of ordinary life. No market activity. No communal movement. No evidence that people still regarded the place as home. Only Lekan remained.

    His description of himself as “the landlord” carries a tragic irony. It is not the boast of a wealthy proprietor but the lonely designation of a man who has outlasted the social life of his community. His neighbours are gone. His king was abducted and held for months. The economy of the place he once called home has collapsed. His nearest market is elsewhere. His hometown exists only as geography.

    What happened in Owa-Onire is neither accidental nor sudden. Communities do not disappear overnight. People endure hardship for long periods before abandoning their provenances. Rural Nigerians understand insecurity more intimately than security policies acknowledge. They know the sound of fear. They adjust their lives. They avoid certain roads. They avoid their farm lands. They stop travelling at dusk. They negotiate with danger until living itself becomes impossible. The story from Owa-Onire suggests precisely such a regression into the self when bandit incursions become recurrent. Kidnappings turn ordinary movements into calculated risks. The abduction of the monarch marks the decisive point of departure for the self. If the king could be taken and held in the forest for months, what protection remained for everyone else?

    The ordinary people depart.

    This is perhaps the most serious indictment of insecurity in Nigeria today. Death is devastating, but displacement creates another kind of wound. It empties communities gradually and normalises retreat. Citizens surrender territory without formal declaration. Villages become mere nodal points on security maps rather than places where people build lives. The reports that dozens of communities across Ifelodun and neighbouring areas have suffered similar abandonment should force national reflection. These are not isolated incidents. They represent a creeping alteration of Nigeria’s internal landscape.

    Nigeria should treat this moment with greater urgency than it currently does. Security cannot remain an episodic response that appears after communities have already collapsed. The presence of armed personnel matters, but sustained territorial confidence matters more. Intelligence gathering must become local and continuous. Rural policing requires deeper integration with communities. Forest governance can no longer remain vague. State and federal authorities must clarify responsibility rather than trade blame.

    The ruling class should recognise that insecurity is no longer confined to distant places that can be discussed with casual indifference. It should also recognise that empty villages alter migration patterns, strain urban centres, deepen poverty, create recruitment grounds for criminal networks, and weaken social cohesion. When these conditions persist, decline rarely announces itself with spectacle. Countries seldom collapse in dramatic scenes; they weaken through quiet accumulations that become normal enough to ignore.

    A town without people should never become ordinary.

    The details that linger most from Owa-Onire are not the deployment of one hundred security personnel, nor the donation of ten thousand naira to a solitary resident, it is Lekan’s account as told by Elder Oyin Zubair that unknown people entered the community during the night, and by morning nothing appeared different because there was almost nothing left to take. That sentence captures something larger than one deserted settlement. It describes a country confronting danger while behaving as though time remains abundant. Nigeria is playing with fire while sitting on its palms. It cannot continue losing communities, and normalising abandonment without eventually confronting consequences that exceed security language. Territorial presence means little when people no longer believe they can inhabit their provenances safely.

    Owa-Onire should not become another passing headline.

    It should become a dire warning.

  • Father’s Day: “Men and Things are Doing”

    Father’s Day: “Men and Things are Doing”

    By Uche Anichukwu

    July 17, 2021 is forever etched in my heart. It was the day my first son, who is also my second child, graduated from primary school. I was reeling in pains from the burns I suffered during a domestic fire incident. My legs, wrapped in bandage, were hurting badly.

    The Igbo often seem to have a fitting folklore for every situation. There is one about the woodpecker, who boasted that he would cut down Iroko trees to supply firewood for his mother’s funeral ceremony. But when the sad incident happened, the woodpecker was impaired by a large abscess on his beak. That was going to be my case.

    I was particularly emotional about it because my son was the valedictorian. We were both sad that I could not be there for him. I hugged him tightly, encouraged and prayed for him.

    With everyone gone, it was just me and an empty house. The void was filled by a rush of memory: his first cry as I paced anxiously outside the labour room, his first day in school, and the long journey to his graduation. I felt a sudden surge of strength and made up my mind to risk it. I called the driver to come back home and take me to the event.

    The gratitude and joy in my son’s eyes was evident as he waved at me. I smiled and waved back. Despite the excruciating pain I felt, I put up a happy face throughout the ceremony and posed for a few photographs with my family. Several guests congratulated us and many admired my three-piece ceremonial suit. Little did they know that beneath the joyful face and beautiful clothes were bleeding wounds and excruciating pains. I also knew that my doctor would be mad at me for venturing out and for putting on those pairs of trousers and shoes. But all those did not matter to me – what mattered was my son’s happiness.

    But guess what? Physical wounds are probably the least of the brunt that men bear. Fatherhood is a great honour. It is a joyful experience and something everyone wishes to experience even in their next life. Yet, it comes with its own realities also worth reflecting on during the Father’s Day celebration.

    Even the Bible in Job 14:1 declares that “Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.” Therefore, the title, “Men and things are Doing,” is a loose translation (a transliterations actually) of a popular Igbo expression, “Nwoke na ihe na-eme.” It captures the silent struggles of men who bear the weight of their families, friends and relatives.

    In our African setting, in the absence of any social welfare scheme, a man begins to bear burdens once he earns his first pay. It is not bad in itself. We have all benefitted from such it.

    Furthermore, once a man seeks a bride, he becomes automatically ripe as a provider for his wife and children: food, shelter, clothing, school fees, medical bills, just to name a few. He also becomes ripe for in-laws and the responsibilities that come with it. If grace smiles on you as a man, you will have enough resources to shoulder the responsibilities effortlessly. Otherwise, it becomes an endless cycle of hustle and pondering from one meal to the other and from one school fees to the other. Like Sisyphus, you are likely going to continue with the cycle until old age gradually creeps in – if you are lucky to live to old age.

    My child, the valedictorian, voiced a rather unsettling question when he was in primary four or so. “Daddy, why do men die earlier?” he had asked, sitting beside me. I was lost, not sure what may have prompted the question. He narrated his observations in school and church.
    I could also relate. My father, the late Rabbi Gabriel Anichukwu, teacher and headmaster par excellence, died shortly after my first year in the university. As I stood with my wife facing the congregation on my wedding day, I saw my former boss and number three man in the country at the time, His Excellency, Senator Ken Nnamani, GCON, and a good number of senators. I saw the famed Chief C.C Onoh, former governor of old Anambra State, who honoured us with his presence, having been informed of my wedding that Saturday morning by Barr. Nana Ogbodo. I saw other dignitaries and captains of industry. But my father was conspicuously missing in the congregation. Same applied to my father-in-law. A tear or two dropped on my shoe.

    I explained to my son the much his young mind could comprehend, but assured him that his daddy would be there for him till old age, by God’s grace.

    Meanwhile, as you age, you discover, as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses does, that you are no longer that strength “That ever with a frolic welcome took/ The thunder and the sunshine.” If you are lucky, you will have a family that still treasures your sacrifices and relatives that still remember your contributions to their lives. Otherwise, you are left to rot away as though you were just one foolish, useless, and irresponsible man throughout your life.

    Several months ago, I visited a much senior friend. I found just him alone with his driver, who now works as driver, cook, and house manager. A home that had once bustled with life and laughter had become empty and cold. I asked about madam. He retorted, “Uche, when last did I see her? If she is not in Europe today, she is in America tomorrow seeing her children and grandchildren.” Instructively, both have always got along well and their bond was never in doubt. So, the absence could not be intentional.

    The tale referenced is not an exception. It is now very common to visit a former rich or influential man living all by himself in a desolate mansion. Children are all abroad or elsewhere. The wife moves from one location to the other. In most cases, “Omugwo” (the Igbo customary practice where a mother travels to nurse her daughter and new grandchild), which typically should not last more than three months, turns into years of “wifelessness” and solitude for the man. You have just a house help or steward, who manages to cook your meals and administer your drugs for age-related illnesses like hypertension, arthritis, dementia, etc.

    Instructively again, men’s health easily fails them as they grow older because of both mental and physical exertion. Years spent sacrificing for others and taking little care of their health, often come home to roost. Before they know what is happening to their bodies, it is already too late. Their days are already numbered.

    And God help you if you are married to someone who would rather inundate your children with all your real and imagined wrongdoings, than highlight your sacrifices. In your sunset, when your strength has failed you, you would begin to wonder if you had not spent your prime raising household enemies. You are abandoned to face death in installments. Just carefully observe your neighbourhood.

    It is probably for these reasons that King Solomon wonders in Ecclesiastes 1:3, “What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”

    But should men, therefore, shy away from their responsibilities? Never! What then should a man do? The answer lies in Ecclesiastes 2:24 where King Solomon admonishes men: “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.”

    As a man, learn to take care of your physical and mental health. Make yourself happy, responsibly. Cut your coat according to your cloth. Importantly, invest in your retirement. And frankly, children should never be the sole retirement hope, for they also have their own (rat) race to run.

    Some discussions quickly remind you that your family cannot abandon you if you treated them well in your prime. That is not an absolute truth; for many fathers have been abandoned in spite of all their sacrifices. Again, scan your neighbourhood. Besides, why rely on what is controlled by another person for something as critical as your wellbeing in old age? An Igbo adage reminds us that money in another’s pocket is always very far.

    As I conclude, I salute my late father, a gentleman and cerebral headmaster. One of his teachers told me that they usually called him “Mr. Duty is Duty” behind him because of his diligence and work ethic. He and mom taught us hard work and diligence by example. May their souls continue to rest in peace. Amen!

    Happy Father’s Day to my fellow fathers.

    Mazi Anichukwu is a media consultant and public affairs analyst.