The Pacesetter Frontier Magazine

Tag: Abdul Mahmud

  • The Supreme Court Has Changed the Rules for 2027

    The Supreme Court Has Changed the Rules for 2027

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    The news about the Supreme Court’s decision restoring sections 77(5), 77(6), 77(7) and 84(2) of the Electoral Act 2026 which broke late last Thursday has done more than resolve the dispute between the Independent National Electoral Commission and the Zenith Labour Party, while altering the legal terrain upon which political parties prepare for the 2027 general election. The provisions mentioned above are now part of the law governing the nomination of candidates; and political parties cannot treat them as optional rules simply because some of their internal processes may already have proceeded on a different understanding. The immediate consequence is clear. Section 77(5) ties participation in party primaries, congresses and conventions to the membership register submitted to INEC within the prescribed period and Section 77(6) prevents a party from using a different register for those purposes, while section 77(7) attaches a particularly serious consequence to failure to submit the register as required. Section 84(2), meanwhile, prescribes direct primaries or consensus as the methods through which political parties nominate candidates.

    The Supreme Court has now held that these provisions are not inconsistent with the Constitution.

    The consequence for political parties is that internal party arrangements cannot be divorced from compliance with the law governing election. A party may have its constitution, convention, leadership organs, and rules, but those instruments operate within the legal framework established by the Constitution and the Electoral Act. The Supreme Court has now confirmed that the National Assembly may impose these requirements on the electoral activities of political parties.

    The difficulty, however, in understanding the consequences of all of this ies in the chronology. The Court of Appeal declared the provisions invalid on 16 July 2026. INEC subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, which has now set aside that decision and restored the provisions. During the intervening period, parties preparing for 2027 were confronted with an appellate judgment that removed the legal foundation for some of the disputed requirements. The present judgment has brought the provisions back into force, but political parties that acted during the period of uncertainty cannot simply assume that every step they took will automatically survive scrutiny, with specific regards to party primaries.

    A political party that conducted its nomination process contrary to section 84(2) now faces an obvious legal question. If the party conducted an indirect primary at a time when the Court of Appeal had declared the statutory restriction unconstitutional, can a candidate subsequently challenge that nomination on the ground that the Supreme Court has restored the provision? The answer cannot be had by saying that the Supreme Court validated section 84(2). Questions concerning the temporal effect of the judgment, the doctrine of precedent, accrued rights and the circumstances in which a completed nomination may be challenged will have to be resolved in individual cases. The same problem arises under sections 77(5) to (7). A party may have conducted a congress or primary using a register different from the one submitted to INEC, or may have failed to comply with the statutory requirement concerning submission of its register. Such conduct can no longer be saved by the Court of Appeal’s judgment. A dissatisfied aspirant may now argue that the nomination process was conducted in breach of the governing electoral law.

    This development consequently opens a new field of pre-election litigation, but it does not, by itself, reopen the statutory window within which such proceedings may be commenced. The Constitution has imposed a strict temporal discipline on pre-election disputes. By section 285(9) of the Constitution, every pre-election matter must be filed not later than 14 days from the date of the occurrence of the event, decision or action complained of. The Electoral Act operates within that constitutional framework and cannot be invoked to extend a limitation period which the Constitution itself has prescribed.

    The critical question, therefore, is not simply when the legal consequence of an irregular nomination or electoral decision becomes apparent, but when the particular event, decision or action forming the subject of the complaint occurred. Once that event has occurred, the statutory clock begins to run. A subsequent discovery of its implications, or the emergence of a further consequence flowing from the original act, will not ordinarily revive a cause of action that has already become statute-barred. The courts have approached the question by examining the reliefs sought and identifying the specific event or decision that constitutes the plaintiff’s complaint. This has an important constitutional consequence. The jurisdiction conferred over pre-election matters is inseparable from the temporal limitation imposed by section 285(9). The court cannot enlarge the period by recourse to equitable considerations, nor can a litigant circumvent the limitation by repackaging an expired pre-election grievance as a post-election complaint. The jurisprudential purpose is evident: disputes concerning the selection, nomination and sponsorship of candidates are intended to be brought and, as far as possible, resolved before the election, leaving election petitions to address matters properly arising from the conduct and outcome of the election itself.

    There is, however, a constitutionally recognised qualification. Section 285(13A) excludes from the computation of time periods during which a natural disaster, war, State or national emergency, or other force majeure prevents the filing or hearing of a pre-election matter. That exception is necessarily confined to circumstances falling within its terms; it does not constitute a general power to extend the 14-day limitation period.

     

    The consequence is that the emergence of this new question does not necessarily mean that an aggrieved aspirant still has a live pre-election cause of action. Where the complained-of event occurred more than 14 days before the action was commenced, the constitutional limitation may already have extinguished the remedy. The real litigation may consequently shift from the substantive validity of the underlying act to the anterior questions of when the cause of action accrued, what precisely constitutes the event, decision or action complained of, and whether the proceedings fall within the constitutional definition of a pre-election matter.

    Nigeria’s electoral jurisprudence has already demonstrated that the nomination of candidates is one of the most heavily litigated stages of an election. The Supreme Court’s decision provides another statutory basis upon which an aspirant may challenge a party’s nomination process. The practical significance may be greater than the immediate dispute involving ZLP. A candidate who loses a primary may no longer have to confine the challenge to allegations of manipulation, exclusion or breach of the party constitution. The question may become whether the entire process complied with the Electoral Act. Section 77(7) deserves particular attention because its consequence goes beyond the validity of an internal party exercise. The provision concerns the eligibility of a party to sponsor a candidate where the statutory requirement relating to its membership register has not been satisfied. That gives the membership-register question potential consequences for the party’s participation in the election itself. For political parties, the practical consequence is that compliance cannot be left to assumption or delegated entirely to party officials who handled the earlier processes. Each party now needs to establish, from its own records, whether it has complied with the requirements the Supreme Court has restored.

    The first step should be an immediate audit of the party’s 2027 preparations. The audit should establish the membership register submitted to INEC, the date of submission, the register actually used for any congress or primary, the persons entitled to participate under the applicable register, the procedure adopted for nomination, and the documentary evidence supporting every stage of the process. Parties that cannot reconcile their internal records with the statutory requirements have a problem that should not be postponed until after candidates have emerged. In addition, Section 84(2) is equally consequential. Direct primaries and consensus are now the statutory routes for nomination. Political parties that  historically relied upon delegate-based indirect primaries must reconsider their procedures. A party constitution cannot be invoked as a substitute for compliance with a statutory provision that the Supreme Court has expressly upheld.

    There is also a larger institutional consequence. The judgment has settled, at least for now, the constitutional argument that these provisions unlawfully interfere with the independence of political parties. The Court of Appeal accepted that argument, while relying on the constitutional framework governing political parties. The Supreme Court has now rejected that position by restoring the statutory requirements. Political parties should therefore stop treating the controversy as a temporary legal set-back.

    The law has now been clarified. What remains uncertain is the fate of processes undertaken during the period in which the law itself was the subject of conflicting judicial pronouncements. This question will probably not end with this judgment. It may move from the Supreme Court’s constitutional determination to a series of disputes over particular primaries, congresses, registers and nominations. The parties that will be most exposed are those that assumed that the Court of Appeal’s July judgment had permanently removed the disputed provisions from the electoral landscape. It did not. The Supreme Court has restored them, and 2027 will now be contested not only at the polling booth but also over whether the parties themselves complied with the law before their candidates ever reached the ballot. Only the Federal High Court by virtue of Sections 29(1), 32 and 88(2) and (3) of the Electoral Act, 2026 can nullify the candidacies of candidates not validly nominated. Not INEC.

  • When the Bar Lowers the Intellectual Bar

    When the Bar Lowers the Intellectual Bar

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Last week, I read a few Facebook posts about the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference which took place in Port Harcourt. The Uyo-based lawyer and scholar, Solomon Ekokoi’s post on the shoddy arrangements captured the mood better than most. There was, clearly, much to complain about in the organisation of this year’s conference. But the concern of this column lies elsewhere and is, for all practical purposes, a more fundamental one: between the 2025 Enugu AGC, where Julius Malema was the keynote speaker, and the 2026 Port Harcourt AGC, where George Weah delivered the keynote address, one cannot help but ask what these choices say about the direction of the Nigerian Bar Association. Perhaps someone needs to explain what happened to the intellectual imagination of the Nigerian Bar Association.

    The NBA is not another jack-in-the-box professional association gathering people together for an annual jamboree. The legal profession occupies a peculiar place in any serious country because lawyers are expected to engage with the questions that govern the exercise of power, the meaning of liberty, the character of the State and the obligations of citizens. A Bar conference should therefore be one of those rare occasions when the profession moves away from routine litigations and confronts the larger questions that confront a country and its citizens. Who is invited to address such a gathering is therefore not a trivial matter. A keynote speaker is not simply an entertainer who happens to possess a recognisable name. The choice is itself a statement about what the association considers intellectually important.

    And this is where I find the recent choices deeply troubling.

    Julius Malema is a formidable political personality. He is a controversial figure, an accomplished political mobiliser and an arresting public speaker, but he lacks the intellectual nous, analytical depth and conceptual rigour that would ordinarily qualify a political personality to deliver a keynote address to a profession whose central preoccupation is the disciplined interrogation of law, power and society. George Weah is a global sporting icon who became President of Liberia. His journey from football to the presidency is remarkable and worthy of discussion. But neither achievement, celebrity nor political visibility automatically translates into intellectual authority appropriate for a keynote address to a professional body whose membership includes some of Africa’s finest legal minds. The question is not whether Weah is an accomplished man. Of course, he is. The question, therefore, is not simply whether a keynote speaker is famous or accomplished in some other field, but whether the record he brings to the podium is compatible with the intellectual and ethical demands of the occasion. In the case of George Weah, his stature as an international football icon and former president of Liberia could not, by itself, erase the troubling human-rights record of his presidency, including the failure to advance accountability for grave violations committed during Liberia’s civil wars and his government’s retreat from the question of a war-crimes court.  To invite such a figure to deliver a keynote to a profession whose foundational claim is a commitment to the rule of law and human rights was, at the very least, a profoundly questionable exercise of judgment. Celebrity cannot be permitted to launder a record that ought itself to invite scrutiny.

    When the Nigerian Bar Association convenes its annual conference, the intellectual standard ought to be considerably higher. The question should not be how famous a prospective keynote speaker is, how many followers he commands or how much publicity his presence might generate, but what new question he will compel the profession to confront, what body of thought he will bring to the table and what difficult conversation his address will provoke. These are not unreasonable demands; they are the minimum questions any intellectually serious professional association ought to ask of the person entrusted with its keynote. The NBA seems increasingly comfortable with personalities when what it ought to be searching for are ideas. It celebrates visibility more readily than scholarship, confuses popularity with influence and public recognition with intellectual depth. Did the immediate past President not himself suggest that Martins Otse was invited to a roundtable at the conference partly because he had more followers on social media than the NBA? At some point, the NBA’s appetite for celebrity begins to look less like an attempt to engage the public and more like an abdication of intellectual judgment. The absurdity is that, in a profession whose very business is the disciplined engagement of ideas, the harder work of thought appears increasingly to be giving way to the easier currency of visibility.

    This should worry every lawyer, particularly when set against the depth of the African intellectual tradition available to us. Issa Shivji, a towering African legal thinker, has spent decades interrogating law, constitutionalism, class and political economy in Africa; Makau Mutua has profoundly shaped contemporary debates on human rights and international law; while Nigeria itself has produced contemporary legal scholars of the stature of Wahab Egbewole and Oyelowo Oyewo. Their scholarship does more than furnish answers to familiar legal questions; it unsettles assumptions that have too easily become settled and demands a more searching engagement with the problems confronting nation-states. Africa or the disaporan black race has never suffered from an absence of ideas. Our problem has often been the unwillingness of institutions to take ideas seriously.

    The irony is particularly painful in the legal profession. Lawyers make their living from words and ideas. They argue over constitutional meaning, interrogate precedent, distinguish one principle from another, challenge assumptions, and persuade judges to see familiar facts differently. The intellectual life of the lawyer should therefore be inseparable from the practice of law. A profession that ceases to think deeply eventually ceases to practise law deeply. This is not an argument for elitism, nor is it an argument that only university professors can deliver meaningful keynote addresses. A lawyer, politician, entrepreneur, artist or athlete may possess extraordinary insights. But relevance must be demonstrated, not assumed. A conference of lawyers should not lower its intellectual threshold simply because a prospective speaker possesses an identifiable celebrity status.

    Nigeria desperately needs institutions capable of producing serious public thoughts. Our political class has not provided enough of it. Our universities struggle under enormous constraints. The media is increasingly dominated by immediacy. The Bar, with its intellectual resources and constitutional role, ought to be filling some of this vacuum. When the Bar lowers its intellectual expectations, our country loses one more place where difficult questions might have been asked without fear. The organisers of NBA conferences should in future rethink what a keynote address is supposed to accomplish. The objective should not be to generate photographs, headlines or fleeting social-media excitement. A keynote should provoke thought worthy of the institution hosting it, challenge the profession to interrogate its assumptions, confront the defining questions of its time and leave its audience with ideas that endure beyond the conference hall. There is no suggestion here that every keynote speaker must be an Issa Shivji. That would be absurd.

    What is required is something much simpler: intellectual seriousness.

    The new President of the NBA should therefore look beyond the predictable culture of performative visibility, in which celebrity, social-media following and public recognition have become increasingly attractive substitutes for intellectual consequence. The Association should resist the temptation to measure relevance by the size of a person’s audience and instead recover a more demanding conception of intellectual authority that’s grounded in ideas, scholarship, originality and the capacity to unsettle received wisdom. The NBA needs fewer celebrities at its podiums and more minds capable of making the profession think. Why not invite Issa Shivji to speak to Nigerian lawyers about law, power, political economy and the enduring struggle over the meaning of justice? Why not bring Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, to Nigeria to speak about climate change, climate justice and the grotesque inequalities embedded in the global response to the climate emergency? Mottley is not another head of government who happens to speak eloquently about climate change; through the Bridgetown Initiative, she has placed the relationship between climate change, global finance, debt and development at the centre of the international conversation. And if the NBA chooses to extend that conversation to Africa and the oceans that connect us, it can invite Wavel Ramkalawan, the former President of Seychelles, whose country embodies the existential threats posed by rising seas to small island states. Seychelles has itself described climate change as an existential threat, while Ramkalawan has argued that the ocean must be treated as a central pillar of the climate agenda rather than an afterthought.

    These are the sorts of people a keynote committee should be thinking about. Not because they are celebrities whose presence would fill a conference hall, but precisely because they would force Nigerian lawyers to think beyond the narrow confines of legal practice. What does our law owe communities in Igbokoda and Okitipupa in Ondo State that are facing ecological collapse, with some disappearing into the sea? What does environmental justice mean in a country where oil extraction, pollution, land degradation and the destruction of livelihoods are everyday realities? What obligations do lawyers, courts, governments and corporations have to generations that have not yet been born? These are legal, political and moral questions, and a profession that prides itself on being the guardian of justice should be willing to engage them seriously. In the Age of Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, the NBA cannot afford to be playing pussy-fussy with its intellectual life. The annual conference should not become another stage for photographs with famous people whose principal qualification is that they are famous. The keynote should be an intellectual intervention, an invitation to think more deeply about the world in which the law operates and the kind of society the profession is helping to construct. If the new President wants to leave a mark, one place to begin is by restoring intellectual seriousness to the NBA conference keynote.

    Over to you, Mr President, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN!

  • The Ministry of Condolence Affairs

    The Ministry of Condolence Affairs

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Death has always had impeccable timing in Nigerian politics. Campaign managers, pollsters and party apparatchiks are never consulted, although the political class somehow receives the message; before the condolences’ registers announce themselves at the entrances of the houses of mourning, convoys begin to gather with punctuality, funeral ceases to be a private moment and becomes constituencies.

    The passing of the former Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, together with the death of the police aide attached to Senator Seriake Dickson, brought forth a familiar national ceremony in which the departed were mourned, of course, but quickly found themselves sharing attention with a far more energetic spectacle, as the road leading to the senator’s residence became a political expressway and every arriving vehicle carried not only condolences but also calculations.

    Television cameras understood the assignment, social media performed with customary enthusiasm, photographs multiplied by the hour, videos travelled across WhatsApp with astonishing speed, and a casual observer unfamiliar with the identities involved could easily have concluded that the visitors were the principal victims of the tragedy, while the deceased had quietly become supporting actors in the production mounted in their honour.

    The renowned Nigerian writer, the late Chinua Achebe, once echoed the proverb that mourners should not cry more than the bereaved. Modern politics has revised the proverb. Contemporary Nigerian mourners have however taken his caution on board: they do not always cry; they pose for the cameras as soon as they arrive carrying faces carefully prepared for public consumption. The ritual begins outside the gate, temporarily stops with the departure of the television crews, and resumes in the media office where photographs are inspected before the familiar caption, “Standing with my brother in this difficult time,” is finally approved.

    Grief has acquired a press secretary.

    Nobody asks whether the family has eaten, while almost nobody notices the exhausted relatives who have repeated the same account of the death fifty times before lunch, because every important arrival demands receptions, handshakes and photographs that capture every audience. Silence, which once belonged to mourning, then struggles to secure an invitation.

    Nigerian politics possesses the extraordinary elite gift for converting every human experience into attendances: weddings become declarations of loyalty, births attract congratulatory delegations, while funerals offer something even more valuable because nobody argues with mourners and nobody accuses a visitor of campaigning while standing beside a coffin. Death provides a temporary halt to the political, even if subtle. Every political camp understands the arithmetic. Expressions of sympathy seldom remain the expressions of sympathy for long. Public attention either drifts towards those who attended, who stayed away, or whose faces were captured by waiting cameras, until the funeral is discussed less as an occasion of grief than as evidence of political movement, with some political associates announcing that the gatherings demonstrate political strengths, although nobody stoops to ponder the uncomfortable reality that they demonstrate only the certainty that everyone eventually dies.

    The pilgrimage has now shifted towards Rotimi Amaechi following the death of his mother, the route has changed, yet the script remains untouched. Convoys once again gather with solemn efficiency, with familiar faces who emerge wearing expressions perfected through years of public service and private ambition. Every arrival carries sympathy wrapped carefully around political significance; but nobody says so aloud because nobody needs to. Cameras click and roll. Photos and videos are posted on social media. Political commentators immediately begin searching the background of each image with forensic determination, discovering that some leaders smiled too warmly, and accidental seating arrangements suddenly become evidence of national realignments.

    The deceased deserves remembrance.

    Only the presumed chief mourner receives the larger audiences of mourners who turn funerals into annual general meetings in which they appear more as political shareholders in bright and variegated colours, and less as companions in grief than as officials of the Ministry of Condolence Affairs.

    The Ministry could hardly function without a training school. There, public figures would receive instruction not in the difficult art of consoling the bereaved but in the more profitable discipline of public mourning, leaving with the practised understanding of where to stand, whom to embrace, how long to remain within the frame, and the precise moment at which sympathy should give way to publicity. The most accomplished officials would soon distinguish themselves in the field. A house of mourning would become their natural place of deployment, where success would depend neither upon familiarity with the deceased nor sympathy for the bereaved, but upon an instinctive knowledge of where the cameras had been placed and how best to remain within their gaze without appearing to seek it. Political parties would, in time, discover that funeral attendance provides a more reliable measure of commitment than the labour of reading a manifesto or defending a legislative record, with advancement increasingly reserved for those whose presence at high-profile bereavements has been faithfully documented, leaving the unfortunate politician who arrives after the television crews have departed to wonder whether the journey had served any political purpose at all.

    Nigerians have become unwilling spectators in this performance because scarcely a day passes without the social media delivering fresh photographs of political visitors and preserving every embrace for public inspection, until the country begins to treat proof of attendance as a greater civic obligation than the quiet expression of sympathy from which such visits once derived their meaning. The long nights that descend after the visitors have departed seldom attract similar attention because cameras lose interest once the speeches have ended and the convoys have disappeared, leaving behind a family learning to accommodate an absence that no photograph can soften and no public procession can relieve.

    The public life of every society demands gestures of compassion, and no reasonable person would question the duty of politicians to console associates in moments of bereavement, although a clear distinction remains between a visit undertaken to comfort the grieving and one calculated to communicate political relevance, because the former belongs to the ordinary decencies of human conduct while the latter gradually transforms private sorrow into another stage upon which ambition seeks public approval. The dead deserve better than becoming silent participants in political choreography, while the bereaved deserve the privacy that allows grief to unfold without constant interruption from visitors whose principal concern lies beyond the condolence they profess to offer.

    Nigeria may never establish the Ministry of Condolence Affairs, although experience suggests that such an institution already exists in unofficial form, operating with remarkable efficiency and requiring neither legislation nor a budget because its work is carried on by those who instinctively recognise every prominent funeral as another engagement in the long campaign for political relevance, with its permanent archive preserved not in official records but in photographs and videos that survive long after the mourning itself has passed.

    May the departed sleep well.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • What Nigeria Owes You – By Abdul Mahmud

    What Nigeria Owes You – By Abdul Mahmud

    There is a familiar refrain that surfaces whenever Nigerians in the diaspora are discussed, or when professionals at home are urged to “give back”. It is often delivered with a tone of moral certainty: Nigeria trained you. Nigeria made you. You owe Nigeria. It sounds persuasive. It even feels patriotic. But it is not entirely true. And, more importantly, it obscures a deeper truth we must confront if we are to have an honest conversation about citizenship, obligation, and justice. Let us begin with the claim itself. That Nigeria “gave” free education, that the government “subsidised” your university education, and therefore you owe the country a debt of gratitude. At first glance, this appears reasonable. But scratch the surface, and the logic begins to unravel.

    Education was never a gift. It was never charity. It was, and remains, a duty the state owes its citizens.

    Chapter II of the 1999 Constitution sets out the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy. These provisions are not mere aspirations, they articulate the moral and political contract between the Nigerian state and its citizens. They impose obligations on the government: to provide education, to ensure welfare, to secure the dignity of the human person, and to harness the nation’s resources for the common good. When the state builds schools, subsidises tuition fees, or trains doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and teachers, it is not performing an act of benevolence. It is fulfilling a constitutional obligation. That is what governments are for. To suggest otherwise is to invert the relationship between the citizens and the state. It is to recast rights as favours and duties as gifts. It is to ask citizens to be grateful for what is already theirs by law and by moral claim.

    Let us humanise this.

    Picture a young boy in my provenance of Sabo, South Ibie, Edo State, or a girl in a crowded compound in Ikot Obong Edong, Akwa-Ibom State. Their parents struggle, but they insist on education for their children. The child walks kilometres to school, studies under flickering lanterns doing awoko, or burning midnight candles, shares textbooks with classmates, and perseveres against all odds. When the government subsidises their tuition, it does not erase the sacrifices made by that family. It does not replace the hunger endured, or eating without  – that familiar way of having lunch of Eba and then okra soup without meat or fish, the nights without electricity, the overcrowded classrooms, or the strikes that stretched a four-year degree into six.

    That children did not receive gifts. They survived a country badly ruined by an irresponsible political class.

    And when they finally emerge as doctors, lawyers, engineers, or teachers, they carry not just  certificates, but the weight of years of endurance. They are not merely products of state generosity; they are products of personal resilience and collective sacrifice.

     

    So when we say, “Nigeria trained you”, we must ask: Which Nigeria?

    Is it the Nigeria of broken laboratories and outdated equipment? The Nigeria of underpaid lecturers and perpetual strikes? The Nigeria where students sit on floors and write exams in overcrowded halls? The Nigeria where young graduates wander for years in search of work? Or is it the Nigeria imagined in the Constitution: a state that guarantees equal and adequate educational opportunities, promotes science and technology, and ensures that every citizen can develop to their full potential? There is a gap between these two Nigerians. And it is within that gap that the truth resides.

    Yes, the state contributed to your education. But you also paid for it in ways that are rarely acknowledged. You paid in time lost to strikes. You paid in the cost of private tutorials when public teaching failed. You paid in the emotional toll of uncertainty. You paid in the opportunity cost of a country that often delays, diminishes, and sometimes derails potential. Your parents paid, too, through taxes, levies, and the quiet endurance of a country that asks much and gives little.

    So who owes whom?

    This is not an argument against giving back. Far from it. There is a moral beauty in contributing to one’s community, lifting others as you rise, and using your skills to improve the society that shaped you. Many Nigerians, at home and abroad, already do this in remarkable ways. They build schools, fund scholarships, support families, and invest in communities. But, giving back should be an act of choice, not coercion. It should flow from a sense of solidarity, not from a narrative of indebtedness that misrepresents reality.

    Some may argue that Indian diaspora communities are giving back to the homeland, so why can’t Nigerians do same?  The comparison is seductive; but it is built on a false equivalence. The idea that Nigerians aren’t giving back, having been given the ladder by their country to climb to the top of their careers ignores the reality that citizens and their families financed their own survival within a system that often failed them through exorbitant tuition fees, refundable caution fees that were never refunded, taxes, private spendings on handouts, and personal sacrifices in the face of strikes, poor infrastructure, and limited opportunities. What is described as a “ladder” was, for many,  fragile katako scaffolds they climbed at great personal cost. To recast that struggle as a debt owed to the state is to confuse duty with benevolence and to overlook the constitutional obligation of government to provide education and welfare as a matter of right, not charity.

    As for India, its diaspora’s contributions are not driven by guilt but by confidence in institutions, in economic opportunity, and in a country that increasingly creates pathways for meaningful engagement. People give back where systems work, where efforts are not swallowed by inefficiency or corruption, and where impact is visible. If Nigeria seeks a similar commitment, it must first build a country that earns it. Obligation cannot be demanded where trust has not been established; it must be cultivated through governance that respects, supports, and empowers its citizens. By the way, what is the Nigerian Diaspora’s emittance, if not giving back to families?

     

    The danger of this narrative is that it lets the state off the hook.

    If citizens are constantly reminded of what they owe Nigeria, we risk forgetting what Nigeria owes its citizens. We risk normalising a situation where the government’s failure is obscured by appeals to patriotism. We risk creating a culture where the bar is set so low that minimal compliance with constitutional duties is celebrated as generosity. The Constitution is clear about the obligations of the state. It speaks of security and welfare as the primary purpose of government. It envisions a society where citizens have access to education, healthcare, and opportunities for meaningful work. It calls for the eradication of corruption and the abuse of power.

    These are not optional ideals. They are basic commitments.

    When the state fails to meet them, the burden shifts to citizens, who are then told to “give back” to compensate for systemic deficiencies. Doctors are asked to remain in underfunded hospitals out of patriotism. Teachers are urged to accept poor conditions in the name of nation-building. Professionals abroad are told they owe a debt that must be repaid by returning home, regardless of the conditions they left behind. This is not a sustainable model of development. It is an attempt at robbing Peter to pay Paul.

    No country thrives by guilt-tripping its citizens. It thrives by creating conditions in which citizens can flourish and, in turn, choose to contribute. The question, then, is not whether Nigerians should give back. The question is whether Nigeria has created an environment that makes giving back meaningful, effective, and sustainable. Does the system support innovation? Does it reward merit? Does it protect those who invest their skills and resources in the country? Does it ensure that contributions are not lost to corruption or inefficiency?

    Until these questions are answered honestly, the call to “give back” will ring hollow for many.

    We must also recognise that citizenship is not a one-way street. It is a relationship of mutual obligation. Citizens owe duties to the state: to obey the law, to pay taxes, to participate in civic life. But the state owes duties to citizens that are far more profound: to protect, to provide, and to create an enabling environment for human dignity and development. When that balance is disrupted, the language of obligation must be carefully examined. To the Nigerian doctor who trained in a public university and now practices abroad, your success is not a debt to be repaid. It is a testament to your perseverance within a flawed system. If you choose to give back, it is an act of generosity, not repayment. To the young graduate struggling to find footing in an unforgiving economy, you are not ungrateful for expecting more from your country. You are asserting your rights. And to the Nigerian state, the message is simple: fulfill your promises. Honour the Constitution. Build the country that works.

    The most powerful way to inspire citizens to give back is not to remind them of what they owe, but to demonstrate, consistently and convincingly, what their country owes them; and is willing to deliver. The claim that Nigeria gave you everything, and therefore you owe it everything, will remain not just incorrect, but unjust.

  • The Illusion of Control

    The Illusion of Control

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    There is a way Nigerians talk about insecurity. They lower their voices, to the point of whispering. They change the subject, no sooner fear kicks in. They say it will pass. They insist that Abuja is safe because it must be safe. A capital city cannot fall. The federal government cannot lose control of its own seat of power. These are comforting assumptions. They are also dangerous. In recent weeks, I have teased friends about the steady tightening of the noose around the Federal Capital Territory. Not because it is amusing. It is not. But because sometimes humour is the only way to force attention to what we would rather not confront. Terrorist groups now operate across swathes of territory in Niger, Kogi, and Kwara States. These are not distant borderlands. They sit in the country’s north-central corridor. They form the outer ring around Abuja. This is not speculation, but it appears so. Communities have been overrun. Villages have emptied. Highways have become corridors of fear. Kidnapping has turned into an industry. In some places, armed groups collect levies. They decide who farms and who does not. They dictate movement. They impose their will. That is not mere criminality. It is territorial control. When non-state actors exercise sustained authority over territory, it must be called what it is. It is a direct challenge to the state. It is an assertion that the monopoly of violence has shifted. It is an invitation to chaos.

    Abuja is not just another city. It is not an illusion, it is a lived city with life and blood. It is the symbolic and administrative heart of the federation. It houses the presidency, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps, and the command structure of the armed forces. If Abuja is threatened by terrorist groups, the message travels far beyond its borders. It signals weakness at the core. Some of these groups openly speak of the caliphate. They speak of power and destiny. They see the capital as a prize. Whether they have the capacity to seize it is another matter. The danger lies in their intent and in the steady erosion of the state’s aura of control, which is increasingly turning into an illusion. A state survives not only on weapons and manpower but on perception. Once citizens begin to believe that the government cannot protect its capital, fear multiplies. Investors withdraw. Diplomats reassess. Citizens retreat into self-help and private security.

    The problem is not only the gun. It is the slow corrosion of confidence.

    It is troubling that those entrusted with securing the capital appear to treat these developments as routine. There is a tendency to downplay. To reassure without action. To blame political opponents for raising alarm. That instinct is fatal. History teaches that capitals fall not only because of superior firepower but because leaders misread warning signs. Look at other countries that once believed their capitals were insulated. In Afghanistan, Kabul fell with shocking speed in 2021 when the Taliban advanced across provinces and the state’s will collapsed. In Iraq, Mosul fell in 2014 when security forces melted away in the face of insurgents’ march. Even the Sahel states of Mali and Burkina Faso have retreated into the shells of their national capitals while terrorists tighten the noose around them. In all of the cases above, the crisis did not begin in the capital. It began in neglected peripheries. It grew in ignored villages. By the time it reached the centre, the damage had already been done.

    Nigeria is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali or Burkina Faso. Nigeria’s circumstances differ. The military is larger. The country is more diverse. But the lesson is simple. A state that allows large territories to slip from effective control invites a dicey test at its core.

    There is another layer to this crisis. While insecurity spreads, the ruling party appears consumed with narrowing the political space. There is a belief that if the opposition is weakened, if dissent is muffled, if electoral competition is reduced, stability will follow. That belief is mistaken. A healthy democracy is not a luxury in times of insecurity. It is a necessity. Open political competition allows grievances to be expressed through ballots rather than bullets. It allows criticism to expose weaknesses before enemies exploit them. It creates channels for accountability and correction. When a ruling party behaves as if total dominance is the same as total security, it confuses control with legitimacy. Legitimacy is earned through popular participation in democratic governance. It is sustained by fairness and inclusion. It is not manufactured by closing space. In fact, narrowing the democratic space can deepen insecurity, make marginalised groups feel unheard and citizens to lose faith in institutions while turning inward. When politics becomes winner takes all, governance becomes reactive rather than strategic. Energy that should be directed at reforming the security architecture is spent on silencing opponents. This convergence of insecurity and political indiscipline is dangerous. It suggests a state distracted from its primary duty. The first duty of any state is protection. Protection of lives. Protection of territory. Protection of institutions. Everything else is secondary. If terrorist groups continue to entrench themselves in communities surrounding the capital, several outcomes are possible.

    The first is the normalisation of fear. Abuja could become a city under siege in all but name, ringed by instability. Movement would be restricted. Military checkpoints would multiply. Civil liberties would shrink in the name of safety.

    The second is economic decline. Investors do not commit long term capital to countries whose capitals appear vulnerable. Insurance costs rise. Infrastructure projects stall. Jobs disappear. A struggling economy then feeds further unrest.

    The third is regional contagion. Nigeria is the largest economy and most populous country in Africa. Instability at its core would reverberate across West Africa. Extremist networks thrive on porous borders and weak states. A destabilised Nigeria would embolden similar actors elsewhere.

    The fourth is the erosion of national unity. As fear grows, citizens retreat into ethnic and religious identities. Trust in the federal project weakens. Calls for self defence groups intensify. Fragmentation becomes thinkable.

    These are not predictions. They are warnings. They are trajectories that can be altered if there is urgency and honesty. What then is required? First, a candid acknowledgement of the scale of the threat. No more comforting half truths. Second, a comprehensive security overhaul that integrates intelligence, community engagement and sustained presence in vulnerable areas. Deploying soldiers to communities that have been attacked is not enough. Developing a lasting and strategic national security is essential. Third, political maturity. The ruling party must understand that a strong opposition does not weaken the state. It strengthens it because it compels the government to justify its choices, defend its policies, and constantly measure its actions against credible alternatives. Where opposition parties are viable, organised, and free to operate, they function as early warning systems. They amplify local grievances before they metastasise into rebellion. They interrogate security lapses before they become national disasters. They provide citizens with lawful channels through which anger, frustration and disappointment can be expressed. In this sense, opposition is not sabotage. It is ventilation. When political space is open, discontent circulates within institutions. When it is closed, pressure builds outside them. A state that suffocates dissent often discovers too late that it has also suffocated its own capacity for self-correction.

    Democracy, therefore, is not an inconvenience to be managed through procedural compliance while power is consolidated elsewhere. It is the live wire of restraint and accountability. Extremism thrives where citizens conclude that ballots change nothing and that public institutions merely ratify predetermined outcomes. In such environments, radical actors present themselves as the only authentic challengers of a closed system. By contrast, a competitive democratic order deprives extremists of oxygen. It demonstrates that change is possible without violence and that authority can be contested without bloodshed. If the ruling party narrows the opposition space in pursuit of dominance, it may win temporary tactical advantage, but it risks strategic decay. The weakening of pluralism erodes legitimacy, and legitimacy is the moral force that sustains the state when coercion alone cannot.

    A nation state that appears incapable of securing itself sends signals to its enemies and to its citizens. To its enemies, it signals opportunity. To its citizens, it signals abandonment. Both signals are dangerous. Nigeria stands at a crossroads. The path of denial leads to deeper crisis. The path of reform demands courage. It demands that those in power look beyond electoral calculations and focus on survival of the republic. Abuja must not become the symbol of state fragility. It must remain what it was meant to be. A centre that reflects unity, stability and hope. That outcome is still possible. But only if we act before the circle tightens further.

  • In Praise of the Ratels

    In Praise of the Ratels

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    The Nigerian virtual space was recently been filled with striking images. Young persons and the old, teenagers in-between. Men and women who turned up with brooms, buckets, hoes, machetes, brushes, paint, and resolve in pursuit of social good. Streets were swept. Drainages cleared. Dilapidated school walls were repainted. Public spaces long abandoned to neglect were touched again by human care. The question many asked was simple. Who are these people?

    They are the Ratels.

    They are followers of the social media activist and celebrity, Martins Vincent Otse, widely known as Very Dark Man. But to describe them merely as followers would be to miss the point. What we are witnessing is not fandom. It is civic action. It is collective labour. It is shared responsibility returning to the public square. The Ratels have offered Nigerians something rare in these times. An example. Not a sermon. Not a press statement. Not a state policy paper. An example in motion. Their work speaks in the language of action. Clean streets. Schools reclaimed from neglect. Reclaimed public spaces. This is the grammar of democratic citizenship made visible.

    Otse and the Ratels deserve to be praised for this intervention. Not because they discovered something new, but because they reminded us of something old and hallowed that we allowed to fade into oblivion. The ethics of communal labour of love. The spirit of mutual aid. The understanding that a country is sustained not only by those who govern it but by the citizens. Long before the modern Nigerian-state came into existence, empires, kingdoms and chiefdoms organised life around collective responsibility. Communities built together. They farmed together. They repaired roads together. They cleaned the shared villages’ squares together. This was not charity. It was belonging. To live in a community was to owe it labour, time, tenderness, love and care.

    These practices were known by many names across the continent. They varied by language and culture, but they shared a single moral core. In the Etsako provenance of this writer, it was called and it is still called Mha’kugbe. Let’s join up together, literally. No one was left alone with a burden that belonged to all. When a roof collapsed, neighbours gathered. When a path was overgrown, the village cleared it. When shrines decayed, hands appeared without invitation. This was democracy before the ballot box arrived. Not democracy as an abstract ideal, but democracy as participation. Citizenship was not a document. It was conduct. It was performance.

    The Ratels have unconsciously returned us to this past. Not as nostalgia, but as practice. They have shown that modern citizenship does not require waiting for government permission. It requires initiatives. It requires a sense of ownership over shared spaces. It requires the courage to act without applause.

    Their actions also echo another powerful historical tradition. Mutual aid societies.

    Across Africa, the Caribbean, and working class communities worldwide, mutual aid societies sustained life long before welfare states emerged. They organised burial funds. They supported widows. They helped the sick. They pooled resources to solve common problems. They did this quietly, efficiently, and with dignity. These societies were not built on ideology. They were built on need and solidarity. They understood something essential. Survival is collective. Dignity is shared. The Ratels stand firmly in this historical lineage. Their work is unpaid. Their labour is voluntary. Their reward is not money, but meaning. In a society where public discourse often celebrates what many now rightly describes as “wealth without work” and influence without service, this matters deeply. What they have done is to reframe activism. Too often activism is reduced to outrage alone. Outrage has its place. Anger can expose injustice. But outrage without repair leaves spaces broken. The Ratels have chosen repair. They have chosen to clean, paint, and rebuild.

    This choice carries democratic significance. Democracy is not sustained by elections alone. It is sustained by habits. Habits of care. Habits of responsibility. Habits of showing up. When citizens clean streets together, they learn cooperation. When they repair schools together, they affirm the value of education. When they reclaim public spaces, they reject abandonment as a destiny. These are civic lessons no classroom can teach as effectively. There is a moral clarity in sweeping the streets. Humility in painting a classroom wall. These acts restore dignity not only to spaces but to those who perform them. The public space matters because people matter. The Ratels have also challenged the culture of spectatorship. Social media often turns citizens into observers of decay. We film potholes. We record collapsing buildings. We circulate evidence of failure. The Ratels have moved from documentation to intervention. They have crossed the Rubicon between seeing and doing, into quarters mobilised by verbs and new shifts. These shifts matter.  No country can be rebuilt by commentary alone. It requires hands. It requires sweat. It requires citizens willing to act without waiting for the perfect conditions. There is also something quietly radical about their inclusiveness. The images show no hierarchy. Old and young work side by side. Men and women share tasks. There is no division of labour based on status. Everyone contributes what they can. This is equality practiced, not proclaimed.

    The Ratels offer hope without slogans in the time of cynicism. In the time of fragmentation, they remind us that democracy is a lived experience. It lives in how we treat shared spaces. It lives in whether we see public schools as ours or as nobody’s. It lives in whether we act when we see decay or merely complain. In the time of noise, they stand at the intersection of communal tradition and modern civic activism. They show that the past is not dead. It waits to be reactivated. They show that citizenship can be joyful. That service can be communal. That democracy can be practiced with brooms and paint, not only with speeches. They have work quietly. They practice unity of purpose publicly. This is why they deserve praise. Not excessive praise. Not romanticisation. But recognition.

    In praising Otse and the Ratels, one must be clear. This is not about personality worship. It is about civic inspiration. Leadership in this sense is not command. It is example. Otse has provided the spark. The Ratels have become the fire. Their work should challenge governments, but it should also challenge other citizens. The state must provide infrastructure and services. That obligation does not disappear. But citizenship does not end where government responsibility begins. Both can coexist. Both must. Salute to the Ratels. Salute to shared action in pursuit of the common social good. Salute to the Very Dark Man whose surname, Otse, carries the meaning of beauty. May that meaning find full expression in his life and labour; and may the grace of his works endure in its purest form, untouched by distortion, undimmed by time, and revealed in its natural brilliance.

    In the hands of the Ratels, the past has returned, not as memory, but as a living practice.

  • Silence Finally Learns to Speak

    Silence Finally Learns to Speak

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    There is a special kind of silence that follows power everywhere it goes. It is not the gentle quiet of the monastery or the eerie quiet of mourning. It is the awkward, accusatory silence of a phone that once overheated from devotion and now lies cool, innocent, and suddenly uninterested. Such is the fate of the phone of Yusuf Buhari, son of the one-time military ruler and former President, who recently lamented that ever since they vacated the Presidential Villa, his phone has fallen into an eloquent silence. “After Goodluck Jonathan made that call to my dad to congratulate him on his victory as Nigeria’s next president, I used to receive up to 2,000 calls a day from different people. The calls would start coming in as early as 4 a.m. – from old classmates, acquaintances, extended family members, former maids, and servants who had once worked for the Buhari family at some point. There were also callers with bogus, untraceable explanations, but my assistant would simply come up with polite excuses to end those conversations quickly! But the moment my dad left power and handed the baton to His Excellency Bola Tinubu, the calls dropped dramatically to about 100 a day. After my dad was buried, they reduced even further to around 20 daily – usually just from siblings and business associates. The phones no longer ring. Nobody truly cares”.

    Yusuf Buhari’s lament is therefore not merely a personal reflection, it is indeed a public service announcement about the aura of power in Nigeria.

    Once upon a presidency, the phone rang like a Pentecostal bell on Sunday morning. Calls came in torrents. Old classmates rediscovered brotherhood. Distant cousins suddenly remembered shared ancestors. Former house helps developed emotional attachments that demanded urgent reconnection. Even strangers arrived armed with stories so creative they deserved the Nigerian Prize for Literature. Everyone wanted to talk. Everyone needed a moment. Everyone was important. The phone became the national shrine. Then came the unthinkable tragedy. Power packed its bags. The baton of power was handed over. Democracy did its modest little dance like Jimmy Bo Horne’s dance across the floor. And something even more devastating occurred. The phone began to rest. From two thousand calls to one hundred. From one hundred to twenty. From the roar of affection to the whisper of obligation. From the expressive euphoria of power to the familiarity of family group chats. This is not just decline. This is the austerity of pretend affection in the absence of power.

    Let us pause and admire the honesty of Yusuf Buhari. The phones no longer ring. Nobody truly cares. It is a brave thing to say out loud what the entire country already knows but pretends not to know. In Nigeria, love is renewable only when it is connected to power. Affection is strongest where one is close to the power. Once power goes, the allure of friendship wanes.

    This discovery is not unique to Nigeria. In the United States of America, it was made with cheese. Lyndon B. Johnson, once the most powerful man on earth, reportedly complained that after leaving the White House, senators who once hovered like loyal furniture suddenly developed hearing problems. The phone that rang relentlessly during legislative battles and war briefings became suspiciously quiet. Johnson, a man who could bend Congress with a stare and a threat, learned the old lesson in a new accent. Arms twist only when there is something left to extract. Power had been the caller, not friendship. Jimmy Carter also encountered the same silence, though he dressed it in Southern politeness. After leaving the White House, he once noted how Washington’s warmth cooled, how invitations thinned, and how the phone lost its urgency. Carter, a man who traded power for principle and later built houses with his own hands, learned that integrity is admirable but not bankable. Washington respects power more than character. When the office disappeared, so did the interest. The calls, it turned out, had been for the presidency, not the person. The meaning that Yusuf Buhari’s lament provides is that relevance only obeys the law of power. If you have power, or close to power, the laws of things will bend over to your wishes. Relevance in public life has very little to do with ideas, values, or service. It has everything to do with power. You call he who has power that can move the mountain for you. Who can whisper your name into the right ears at the right time. When that ability expires, so does the crowd.

    Power in Nigeria is a balm. It heals old grudges. It restores forgotten relationships. It multiplies cousins like loaves of bread. It turns silence into urgency. When you have it, people call at four in the morning to check on your spiritual wellbeing. When you lose it, they discover the importance of respecting your privacy. The pattern is so consistent. The same society that will not answer calls from the powerless will accuse them of being inaccessible. The same people who once dialed endlessly will later say they did not want to disturb you in your grief. Courtesy suddenly appears when usefulness disappears.

    But let us be fair. This is not cruelty. It is efficiency. Why waste airtime on someone who cannot move a file, sign a paper, influence a contract, or secure a favour. Friendship must also eat. Concern must have logistics. Sympathy needs a budget. The phone, after all, is not just a device. It is a moral instrument. It measures value in real time. It rings for the important and sleeps for the irrelevant. It is democratic only in theory. In practice, it obeys hierarchy. What makes this moment cheesy is the shock that accompanies the discovery. As if the silence is a betrayal rather than a curriculum. As if the phones were ringing out of love rather than calculation. As if two thousand daily calls were ever sustainable without the fuel of power. This is the Nigerian lesson that no civics class teaches. Power is the loudest ringtone. Without it, even your obituary struggles for attention. And yet, there is something profoundly instructive in this quiet. For the first time, the silence is honest. The remaining calls are few, but they are real. Siblings call because blood still remembers. Business associates call because interests endure. Everyone else has returned to their natural habitat, which is waiting for the next powerful number to save.

    In this silence, truth clears its throat. It tells us that many of our public relationships are seasonal. They follow office terms, not human bonds. They are loyal to chairs, not people. They are attached to corridors, not conscience. The lie which underlines Yusuf’s lament is that care is proven by ringing phones. But care has always been something else. Care is presence when there is nothing to gain. Care is the call that does not need to be returned. Care is the visit that cannot be monetised. By that standard, the phones were probably not ringing with care even at their loudest. So, maybe this is not a fall from grace. Maybe it is a graduation. The fact which stays stark is that silence strips away the noise and leaves behind a smaller, sturdier circle. It replaces the choruses of opportunists with a handful of humans. It enthrones reality.

    If those who inhabit the high chambers of power would cure themselves of this peculiar affliction, they must first reconcile with the enduring truth: it is when power recedes that solitude reveals its sharpest edge. They must learn to dwell within the natural order of things, where silence, long suppressed, at last finds its voice. They must accept that the kingdom of power admits no rival sovereign; there are never two kings upon its throne. Until that wisdom is embraced, every departure from office will be accompanied by the same bewildered lament, uttered only in differing accents.

    The phones no longer ring.

    They will never ring for the reason that Yusuf knows: “Soja go” with old friends; and Soja arrives with new friends who in turn arrive with new ring tones.

  • Shettima’s Passive Presence in Discussions About His Own Political Future

    Shettima’s Passive Presence in Discussions About His Own Political Future

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Fresh political whispers drifting through news salons and media columns suggest that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is quietly weighing alternative running mates ahead of the 2027 presidential election. The names most frequently mentioned are not obscure. They are prominent northern Christian figures with national visibility and symbolic weight.

    Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara; Defence Minister, General Christopher Musa. Plateau State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang. And the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah. The whispers share a common thread. They frame the alleged weighing of alternatives as part of a larger political calculation around religious and regional balance after the controversial Muslim-Muslim ticket of 2023. They also point to an inner circle that appears to be thinking ahead, testing options, and perhaps sending signals without formally committing to any course of action.

    The first sign came when campaign posters bearing President Tinubu’s image began appearing across the streets of Abuja, conspicuously without any trace of Shettima. Amid the whispers stands Vice President Kashim Shettima, elected on the same ticket as Tinubu, serving a mandate that runs concurrently with the President’s, and who, by constitutional logic and political convention, ought to be presumed the natural running mate in 2027 unless compelling reasons suggest otherwise.

    VP Kashim Shettima

    What makes the current moment intriguing is not simply that names are being mentioned. Politics thrives on rumours after all. What shocks observers of the polity is the manner in which the Vice President appears reduced to a passive presence in discussions about his own political future. At one moment, he is treated as an afterthought; and at another moment, as a loyal functionary dispatched on errands while others debate whether he remains relevant to the project he helped midwife. The image calls to mind Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov’s novel, Oblomov. A character defined by inertia and resignation. A man whose life unfolds around him while he lies still, allowing others to decide what becomes of his estate, his relationships, and his destiny. When Shettima is not rendered invisible in elite conversations, he is portrayed as a man running presidential errands but without real agency. Flying out to represent the President. Receiving delegations. Offering dutiful loyalty, while the central question of his political fate hangs unresolved, sometimes discussed in rooms he has just exited and sometimes in rooms he may never enter.

    The irony is sharp. Shettima is not a novice. He is a former governor, and a seasoned party man. He was not selected in 2023 as a brooch fastened to presidential clothing or an ornamental addition. He was chosen despite strong objections from many quarters, including religious leaders and civil society voices who warned against the dangers of the same-faith ticket in a deeply plural country. Those warnings did not dissipate after the election. They lingered. They hardened into criticisms that have followed the administration. International partners, including voices from the United States, have made careful but pointed remarks about inclusion and representation. At home, the perception that Christian constituencies, especially in the North, felt alienated continued to shadow the government. The renewed circulation of alternative running mates must be read against this background. It signals an attempt to correct a political imbalance that many believe cost the ruling party moral capital. By floating respected northern Christian figures, Tinubu’s presidency appears eager to reassure sceptical audiences that lessons have been learned and that the future will look different. Still, the so-called attempt at weighing alternatives raises serious questions about political ethics and loyalty. What does it say about the stability of presidential and vice presidential partnerships when a sitting vice president is treated as expendable barely midway into the first term in office? What message does it send to party loyalists who defended the 2023 ticket at great personal cost? And what precedent does it set for the future?

    The Constitution grants the President wide latitude in selecting a running mate. That power is not in dispute. Political wisdom, however, demands more than constitutional permissibility. It requires sensitivity to process, respect for incumbents, and an understanding of how power is perceived as much as how it is exercised. There is also a deeper institutional issue at play. The office of the Vice President in Nigeria has long suffered from ambiguity. Its occupant is either overly powerful, a spare tyre that is painfully useless, or surplus to requirements. Rarely is there a stable middle ground defined by clear responsibilities and mutual respect.

    From Obasanjo’s frosty relationship with Atiku Abubakar to Buhari’s cautious sidelining of Professor Osinbajo, history offers little comfort. Shettima’s predicament fits neatly into this pattern. He is visible but constrained. Present but peripheral. Trusted enough to represent the President abroad, but seemingly not trusted enough to be shielded from speculation about his replacement. The mention of figures like Dogara, Mutfwang, Musa, and Kukah adds further layers to the conversation. Dogara brings legislative gravitas and a record of defying party lines on principle. Mutfwang represents a Christian minority state scarred by violence and neglect. Musa embodies military professionalism at a time of persistent insecurity. Kukah symbolises a strain of moral authority whose polish has worn thin, weakened by his muddled interventions on claims of Christian genocide in Nigeria. Each name appeals to a different constituency. Each underscores what the current ticket lacks in the eyes of critics.

    What remains missing is an honest conversation about governance performance. Electoral arithmetic alone cannot substitute for accountability. If the administration believes that changing the face of the ticket will cure deeper discontent, it risks mistaking symptoms for causes. Nigerians are burdened by inflation, insecurity, and a sense of economic drift. No vice presidential reshuffle can obscure these realities. For Shettima himself, the moment demands clarity and resolve. Silence can be dignified, but prolonged silence in the face of open speculation risks being read as acquiescence. Political survival in Nigeria rarely rewards quiet endurance and favours strategic assertion. More’s the pity for a Vice President who finds his future debated as an abstraction rather than being confronted as a political fact. More’s the pity for a power order that normalises such uncertainty at the heart of presidential power. And more’s the pity for a country whose politics revolves around personalities and permutations rather than the hard work of governance.

    Whether these discussions are trial balloons or serious plans, they reveal an administration already looking beyond its present mandate. That alone should give pause. Power is most effective when it is anchored in purpose, not perpetually distracted by succession. But do Tinubu and his goons care?

  • Northern Comfort, Southern Complacency: A Tale of Two Elites’ Failures

    Northern Comfort, Southern Complacency: A Tale of Two Elites’ Failures

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Dr. Bashir Kurfi, a former scholar in Public Administration at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and a man who refuses to bow to orthodoxy, recently observed that the southern elites should protest against the northern elites for bearing the cost of their irresponsibility.

    It is a bold assertion, persuasive precisely because it draws strength from curated memory. For decades, sections of the northern elite have honed the politics of displacement, converting structural failure into a narrative of victimhood and external sabotage. Responsibility is endlessly declaimed or sometimes recast as the fault of history, colonial inheritance, regional imbalance, or the imagined hostility of others. This cultivated habit of excuse-making has become a political craft in itself, a means of masking failure while living in denial. Here, accountability is not merely avoided; it is rendered illegitimate, portrayed as an unfair demand imposed by adversaries rather than a civic obligation owed to the governed. Yet, any temptation to contrast this with the so-called “morally superior southern elites” collapses under closer scrutiny. Self-congratulation has long displaced self-scrutiny, as loud claims of progress, modernity, and enlightenment obscure deeply rooted habits of exclusion, corruption, and moral indifference.

    The language of merit and advancement advanced by both geographical sections of the national elite and their supporters often serves as a convenient alibi, allowing elite capture to proceed under the banner of regional exceptionalism. If the northern elite evade responsibility through grievance, the southern elite evade it through triumphalism. Between the two, the citizen is left with no moral refuge, only competing myths that justify failure while insulating power from consequences.

    Northern elites are celebrated for grandiloquent pronouncements on unity, development, and morality. They promise transformation but deliver stagnation. They speak of education while the region remains a desert of literacy, where enrollment figures mask a mass of uneducated youth and schools crumble under neglect. They preach an agricultural renaissance while malnutrition festers, rural communities are abandoned, and irrigation projects lie in rusting silence. They talk of industrialisation while local economies remain dependent on government largesse from Abuja. Corruption becomes not a scandal but a tradition, a rite of passage into power. Public infrastructure in the north tells the story of neglect more eloquently than speeches. Roads disintegrate, electricity remains a luxury, hospitals are monuments to absence, and clean water flows only in theory. Governors appear with fanfare to inaugurate projects that vanish as soon as cameras leave. Security is presented as a moral and cultural issue, yet decades of failed policing and recurring insurgency are shrugged off as misfortunes. Education, health, infrastructure, and security are left to chance while elites accumulate wealth, power, and prestige. Their failures are exported in blame, and in appeals to history, ethnicity, or religion. Yet, let us not pretend that the southern elite is a repository of competence or integrity. Southern elites enjoy their imaginary moral superiority while indulging in the same incompetence. The South accumulates debts with exuberance, borrows with abandon, and applauds itself for infrastructural projects that collapse within a few years. Governors and legislators steal openly, businesses thrive on political patronage, and the social contract is routinely violated. Health care is underfunded, education is increasingly privatised for those who can pay, and urban centers remain unplanned jungles where life is bestial, brutish and short.

    The southern elites’ failures are conspicuous in their feeble responses to crises. Floods destroy communities where emergency plans are paper buffers. Transport collapses under the weight of bad planning. Electricity is scarce, water is scarce, governance is scarce. They lecture, they condemn, they protest, but poor governance continues. Their moral outrage is selective, their complaints episodic. Corruption in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and other southern capitals mirrors the northern patronage networks in structure if not in style. The southern elite believes it is immune, superior, and innovative, but the truth reveals only adaptation of the same vices to local circumstances. One might ask whether Kurfi’s call has merit if the southern elite cannot even claim competence. Protesting northern failures without confronting southern failures is hypocrisy masquerading as moral indignation. Nigeria is littered with examples of southern elites failing spectacularly. Lagos State owes billions in debts. Rivers State is writhing from elites’ fights over its resources. Delta and Edo States oscillate between grandiose declarations of development and the steady reality of urban chaos. The elites’ ability to amass wealth contrasts sharply with their failure to build enduring legacies.

    Northern elites fail by neglect, southern elites fail by indulgence. The north deflects blame to the past and to others, the south revels in self-flagellation while repeating the same patterns. Both elites perpetuate poverty, insecurity, and underdevelopment. Both exploit ethnicity, religion, and regional sentiment to distract citizens from their failures. Citizens are left to navigate collapsed schools, inadequate hospitals, and non-functional roads while elites debate loudly in private clubs, social media platforms, and political conventions. Education provides a stark illustration. Northern elites pride themselves on historical institutions such as Ahmadu Bello University, Bayero University, and others, yet their policies yield mass illiteracy in primary and secondary schools. Southern elites boast universities and polytechnics, yet governance in the region often favours wealth, influence, and connections over merit. Both regions produce graduates who can recite theory but struggle with application, innovation, or problem-solving. Health care, too, reflects the dual failure. Northern hospitals lack staff, equipment, and medication, producing unnecessary deaths. Aishatu Umar died after a pair of scissors was allegedly left inside her abdomen during a surgical procedure at the Urology Centre in Kano state. Southern hospitals are overcrowded, underfunded, and often prohibitively expensive. Immunisation campaigns succeed sporadically, emergency response is haphazard, often resulting in deaths. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently accused a hospital of negligence over the death of her 21-month-old son.

    Kurfi’s call for southern protest is tempting, dramatic, and rhetorically satisfying, but it falters under scrutiny. It assumes a competence and moral authority that southern elites cannot claim. The northern elites’ failures are egregious, systemic, and destructive, yet the southern elites mirrors the same structural indifference in different guise.

    To protest without introspection is to miss the point. To lament northern irresponsibility while ignoring southern complicity is moral posturing. If Kurfi insists, let the protest begin with both northern and southern elites simultaneously. Let both target neglect, incompetence, corruption, and the chronic failure to build their regions rather than personalities. Let both demand accountability, competence, and foresight. Let them challenge excuses, deflection, and the endless parade of promises that never materialise. Only then does Kurfi’s assertion escape the narrow confines of regional moralism and enter the territory of genuine public scholarship.

    Nigeria suffers not because one region fails, but because all elites fail differently, predictably, and consistently. Northern elites fail with grand narratives of history and victimhood, southern elites fail with self-flagellating and congratulatory spectacles of competence and progress. Citizens pay the costs. Kurfi’s assertion excites, provokes, and invites reflection, yet it should also invite humility. Protest, if it is to mean anything, must begin at home, in every elite enclave, and in every hollow institution across this divided country.

    Nigeria deserves elites who deliver rather than lecture, build rather than blame, and govern rather than perform theatrics. Until that happens, the theatre of irresponsibility continues, with citizens as perpetual spectators.

  • 2026 and the Architecture of Power: Understanding The Tinubu Presidency

    2026 and the Architecture of Power: Understanding The Tinubu Presidency

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    This new year scarcely requires a seer to reveal its gravity. It stands as a decisive threshold for both Nigeria’s political class and the country itself. As the final full year before the 2027 general election, it unfolds within an atmosphere markedly defined not by open contestation but by cooptation, not by ideological opposition but by realignment, not by persuasion but by careful calibration of power. The familiar nuances of electoral politics have been subdued, replaced by a quieter, sinister and more strategic choreography in which alliances are absorbed, dissent is neutralised, and political outcomes are increasingly prefigured long before the ballot is cast. Tinubu’s Presidency has thus inaugurated a governing order that resists casual description and demands sustained, rigorous analysis. Authority has grown more personalised, institutions have been subtly but decisively reoriented, and the space of democratic life has narrowed. Power is no longer primarily fought over; it is managed, conserved, and deployed through configurations that feel increasingly distant from Nigeria’s recent political experience. What is taking shape is not simply a new leadership style, but a political condition in which the contest for power has yielded to the meticulous administration of power already secured.

    So, what’s really taking shape?

    Tinubu’s presidency marks a formative phase of governance characterised by the consolidation of authority through elite bargaining, the steady attenuation of democratic institutions, and the managed retreat of competitive politics. It does not announce itself as ideological. No manifesto declares its worldview, and no doctrine articulates its philosophical commitments. Instead, it operates as a governing illogic grounded in transactional politics, and the strategic deployment of state power in the service of endurance. Its coherence lies not in ideas but in method. At the centre of this method is elite cooptation and coordination. Power circulates within a narrow political circle where loyalty is sustained by access, protection, and reciprocal advantage. Alliances cohere less around programmes than around proximity to authority. The ruling party functions primarily as an instrument of aggregation, not as a forum for deliberation or contest. Opposition persists within formal constitutional boundaries, but its capacity to shape outcomes continues to contract. Politics increasingly resembles a closed conversation conducted beyond the reach of popular intervention. Elections still punctuate the political calendar. Ballots are cast, results announced, courts convened, and ceremonies observed. Democratic form remains intact. Democratic substance, however, undergoes a quiet but persistent erosion. Participation thins as belief in the consequences of electoral choice diminishes. Voters engage with the process less in hope than in resignation. Political competition loses its transformative promise, reduced to a symbolic presence within an already determined architecture of power. The vote comes to affirm authority more than to interrogate it.

    This configuration invites comparison with certain early authoritarian systems, not in ideology or historical circumstance, but in structural logic. In those settings, power was consolidated through the fusion of party, state, and patronage, yielding stability through alignment rather than consent. Tinubu’s presidency reflects a comparable pattern. Control advances less through open persuasion than through administrative coordination. Loyalty steadily displaces representation as the central political currency, while stability is secured through managed inclusion and calibrated exclusion. What emerges is not the silencing of politics but its careful containment, a narrowing of the space in which dissent may operate without ever quite disappearing. It is within this logic that the recently constituted high-level party committee must be understood. Comprising governors of the ruling party, members of the Federal Executive Council, and other strategically placed stakeholders, the committee is chaired by the Governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni, with Muiz Banire, former Legal Adviser of the APC, serving as Member-Secretary. Its membership spans the commanding heights of political power: Senator Adamu Aliero; AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara State, who chairs the Nigeria Governors’ Forum; Hope Uzodimma of Imo State, Chairman of the Progressive Governors’ Forum; and governors from Benue, Jigawa, Cross River, Ekiti, and Delta. It also includes Governors Uba Sani of Kaduna and Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers, senior ministers of the Tinubu administration, former governors, and key presidential aides. The committee’s composition is revealing. It gathers together not merely party functionaries, but custodians of state power, administrative reach, and regional influence, signalling an effort to synchronise authority across multiple layers of governance.

    This architecture points to a broader project: the consolidation of a pan-Tinubu suzerainty that extends beyond party boundaries while steadily hollowing out the opposition. President Tinubu’s rhetoric of accommodation and tolerance, framed as a defence of democratic resilience, sits uneasily alongside the political realities taking shape. As Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde has suggested, the role attributed to Nyesom Wike within this order is not incidental but instrumental, working across party lines in ways that weaken and fragment the opposition, particularly the PDP. The aim is not the outright abolition of rival parties, but their domestication. Opposition is permitted to exist, but only in diminished, divided, and ultimately manageable forms. In this sense, inclusion becomes conditional, tolerance selective, and pluralism subordinated to the overriding imperative of control. What is being constructed is a political order in which unity is achieved not through persuasion or shared purpose, but through dominance carefully disguised as consensus.

    Governance within this order privileges coherence and control over pluralism and dissent. Institutions remain visible, but their autonomy steadily contracts. Courts continue to function, though within a narrowing interpretive space. Legislatures exercise oversight through accommodation and bargaining rather than confrontation. Regulatory bodies increasingly align their conduct with executive priorities. Media organisations operate under diffuse but effective pressures that shape tone, emphasis, and silence. The outward continuity of institutional life thus conceals a deeper transformation in which independence yields to accommodation and restraint is replaced by compliance. Law sits at the centre of this transformation. Legal process retains its formal authority, but its connection to justice and accountability grows attenuated. Rules are deployed less as limits on power than as instruments for preserving stability. Procedure displaces principle. Political conflict is absorbed into litigation, translated from public disagreement into technical argument. Judicial outcomes, in turn, tend to affirm the prevailing distribution of power, conferring legal legitimacy on arrangements fashioned elsewhere. In this way, law operates not as an impartial arbiter but as a governing mechanism, ordering conflict rather than resolving it. Economic governance extends this same logic into the material lives of citizens. Policies presented as reform advance largely through executive fiat, with minimal public deliberation. Hardship is framed as necessity rather than consequence, sacrifice as virtue rather than failure. Social pain is moralised as discipline, while the language of inevitability accompanies decisions that reorder livelihoods, deepen inequality, and strain communal bonds. As legal process neutralises political contestation and institutions absorb dissent, economic policy completes the circuit of control. Public consent recedes in importance, displaced by appeals to expertise, urgency, and endurance. What emerges is a political economy in which adjustment replaces accountability, and endurance stands in for consent.

    In this political atmosphere, citizenship is quietly reconfigured. Active participation gives way to managed inclusion, while political agency is reduced from the capacity to shape outcomes to the freedom to comment upon them. Protest increasingly attracts securitised responses, and dissent is recoded as disruption rather than recognised as democratic expression. The public sphere does not collapse through decree; it contracts through mood and expectation. Fear need not be declared to be effective. Caution becomes internalised. Silence acquires the character of prudence rather than resignation. This transformation proceeds without the spectacle of overt repression. No dramatic bans signal a rupture with constitutional order. No formal emergency suspends democratic norms. Instead, change unfolds cumulatively. Each adjustment appears technical, even reasonable, when taken alone. Together, they produce a political climate marked by compliance, calculation, and quiet withdrawal. Democratic life thins through attrition rather than shock. What remains is not an absence of politics, but a diminished version of it, one in which engagement is carefully weighed against consequence, and participation is increasingly symbolic.

    Opposition is also redefined under these conditions. Critics are rarely confronted head-on; they are more often absorbed into negotiation, fragmented through inducement, or marginalised by selective exclusion. Disagreement persists, but it is stripped of leverage. Public intellectuals, activists, and commentators operate within a narrowing field where critique circulates without effect. Alternative visions struggle to gain traction because power presents itself not as a contingent arrangement open to challenge, but as a settled fact to be navigated. Politics shifts from contest over direction to adjustment within constraint. Patronage functions as the stabilising mechanism of this order. Access to state resources becomes the primary currency of loyalty. Appointments reward alignment, contracts reinforce networks, and economic opportunity increasingly follows political obedience. Dependency and compliance intersect, recasting the state from guarantor of collective welfare into distributor of selective benefit. As perceptions of fairness decline, public trust erodes. The language of corruption loses its moral urgency, reframed as an unavoidable feature of governance rather than an ethical failure demanding redress. Against this backdrop, the idea of reform assumes strategic importance. Reform rhetoric provides the moral cover through which consolidation is presented as progress. Structural adjustment is dressed in the language of modernisation; disruption is recast as courage. Resistance to reform is portrayed as nostalgia, sentimentality, or irresponsibility. In this way, critique is neutralised not by rebuttal but by delegitimation. Power is framed as necessity rather than choice, endurance as virtue rather than submission. The effect is not merely to govern policy outcomes, but to shape the terms on which political judgment itself is made.

    This condition shapes the national mood as Nigeria approaches 2026. Political expectation declines, cynicism spreads, and withdrawal often replaces engagement. Survival displaces aspiration. Younger generations encounter politics as a closed system rather than an open field, and hope shifts from public institutions to private strategies. Migration, informal economies, and personal networks emerge as alternative pathways to security. The danger lies not only in democratic erosion, but in habituation: as citizens adjust to limited agency, the possibility of recovery diminishes. Democratic capacity weakens through disuse, and memory of contest fades. Power consolidates not merely through control, but through the quiet acceptance of constraint. Naming this phase of governance as a distinct moment in Nigeria’s democratic trajectory performs both analytic and political work. It resists the personalisation of critique, framing Tinubu’s presidency as a system of governance rather than a reflection of temperament. It signals temporality, marking a phase rather than an immutable fate. Such naming preserves space for reflection, intervention, and alternative futures.

    The New Year is here. The architecture of power established during this formative period will shape what is possible. Whether this governing illogic hardens into permanence or encounters disruption will depend upon forces both within and beyond the state. That inquiry belongs to the next part of this essay, which turns to the prospects for politics and democracy under conditions shaped by consolidation, fatigue, and quiet resistance. For now, Tinubu’s presidency stands as a defining moment in Nigeria’s democratic journey: a moment of form without substance, of power without persuasion, and of consequences whose reverberations will extend far into 2027.

    Happy New Year.