The Pacesetter Frontier Magazine

Tag: Abdul Mahmud

  • Reuniting with the Past

    Reuniting with the Past

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Last week, my phone rang. The voice on the other end was familiar. It was Mike Igini, the former Resident Electoral Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission and my old comrade from the student movement. “Comrade Mahmud, how you dey na?” he asked with a chuckle. His call was brief, yet loaded with memory. After a few pleasantries, he said, “I’ve passed your number to Kennedy. He will call you”. I didn’t ask who this Kennedy was. The name was enough to stir my mind. I instantly thought of my former classmate at Essi College, Warri. Kennedy, the boy with quick wit and a restless mind. I had not seen him since late 1994. That year, I had returned to the High Court of Justice in Warri to challenge the expulsions of student leaders from Delta State University, Abraka. We met by chance, exchanged words, then life again took us in different directions.

    The following day, the phone rang again. This time, it was Kennedy. His voice carried across the Atlantic. Ecstasy reborn. We spoke as though the years had collapsed into seconds. We caught up on our boyhood years, old teachers, and forgotten mischiefs. The laughter was genuine, the kind that makes the chest lighter. That call sparked many more. Kennedy reconnected me to other former classmates, some in Nigeria, others scattered abroad. The joy was overwhelming. But grief came too. Some of our friends had gone ahead. Daniel Ifemeni. Emuesiri Osagada. Names once called in classrooms and dormitories, now only spoken in remembrance. May their souls rest in power.

    Memory is cruel and kind at the same time. It gives us joy, then leaves us with loss.

    While I was still swimming in nostalgia, another surprise came. My former classmate, Akan Akpan, added me to the WhatsApp group of my year group at Lutheran High School, Ikot Ekpene. Another reunion, though virtual. Another rush of excitement. Names I hadn’t heard in decades suddenly lit up my phone screen. Those who departed our earthly shores. “War Party”, who wore his nickname like a warrior on the football pitch. “Tolade”, who was fascinated by the nickname he adopted from the Yoruba nation he had not visited. And the recently diseased Vincent whose remains have not been interred. We greeted each other with emojis, memes and laughter. Stories began to pour in. I realised something simple. Reuniting with the past is both an act of joy and an act of healing. I lived an itinerant life as a boy. My late father’s job as a senior federal government employee meant constant movement. Town to town. School to school. Friendships began and ended in cycles. Every new place was a chance to start again. At the time, I resented the uprooting. But looking back, it gave me a country of memories. Our country became my oyster.

    These recent reunions have forced me to reflect. What is it about reconnecting with old friends that touches us so deeply?

    First, it is the reminder of who we once were. Life has a way of pushing us into roles that are professional, political, and parental. We wear these masks daily until we forget the raw, unpolished versions of ourselves. Talking to Kennedy and chatting with my former classmates pulled me back to Warri, Ikot Ekpene and to the restless teenager I once was. That boy had dreams, fears, and an unshakable belief in our country and its people. He still lives in me, though buried under adult responsibilities.

    Second, reunions remind us of the passage of time. Hearing the names of those who have died struck me deeply. Daniel. Emuesiri. “War Party”. “Tolade”. Vincent. They were once full of energy, running across fields, arguing in classrooms, laughing at jokes. Now they are gone. Death turns classmates into memories. And yet, in remembering them together, we honour them. We keep them alive in the small spaces of our conversations.

    Third, reconnecting with old friends is a mirror. We see ourselves reflected in their stories. Some have succeeded. Some have struggled. Some carry scars we never imagined. But, through them, we recognise how far we have come. The boyhood fears and the mischiefs of teen years that have shaped the men and women we are today.

    The virtual WhatsApp groups of my Lutheran High School and Essi College classmates have been a revelation. Technology has collapsed distance. Former classmates in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Warri, Benin City, Ikot Ekpene, London, and cities in the United States now speak as though they sit in the same room. The groups are alive with memories. “Do you remember this teacher?” one asks. “Who recalls the mischief of the palm plot?” another teases. “Do you remember the cries of the bush baby?”  another asks. Each story builds a bridge to the past. But these reunions are not just about nostalgia. They are about grounding. They remind us that we belong to a web of shared experiences. In a society where politics divides and hardship isolates, reconnecting with old friends brings warmth. It restores a sense of the family, one community of shared love and lived experience.

    Old friendships are unique. They are not based on power, money, or status. They are rooted in innocence. They were formed before titles mattered, when all we had were chalkboards, football fields, and teenage dreams. That is why they feel pure when we return to them. Yet, there is also a lesson in humility. Reuniting shows us that life is unpredictable. Some of my classmates have achieved success beyond imagination. Others have endured pain, loss, or poverty. In these conversations, there is no competition. We share as equals. We encourage one another. We laugh at our past. We grieve our dead. And in doing so, we recognise the simple gift of life.

    I have also realised that reunions are acts of gratitude. Gratitude for friendships that once carried us. Gratitude for memories that still make us smile. Gratitude for survival, for being alive to answer the call of an old friend. As I reflect, I think about the young people of today. Will they, in thirty years, find the same joy in reconnecting? Or has technology changed friendship too much? Our bonds were forged in classrooms, assembly grounds, and on football pitches. Today’s bonds are formed on screens. Time will tell if they endure the same way.

    For now, I hold on to these reconnections. They remind me that the past is never truly gone. It waits quietly, until one phone call, one message, one WhatsApp group brings it rushing back. Reuniting with former classmates is more than nostalgia. It is a reminder of who we are, of what we have lost, and of what we still share. It is an act of memory, an act of love, and above all, an act of hope. So, when the phone rings and a familiar voice says, “Comrade, how you dey na?” – answer it. It may carry you back to the boy or girl you once were. And it may remind you that life, despite its trials, still holds spaces of joy reborn. While I wait for that call from a classmate of my primary school years in Benin City, Kwale, Sapele, or Warri, I am reminded that friendship is a river. It may dry in places, it may bend and twist, yet it always seeks a way to flow again. May the bonds of old companions be replenished, not merely by memory, but by love, and love again. For in the quiet return of friendship lies the miracle of time redeemed, and in its renewal, the heart learns once more that nothing of true value is ever truly lost.

  • The Hollow Nigerian Way of Fighting Terror

    The Hollow Nigerian Way of Fighting Terror

    -By Abdul Mahmud 

    Simon Ekpa has been sentenced to six years in Finland for terrorism-related crimes. His arrest by Finnish police in 2024, which was public was followed by criminal charges, trial, and conviction handled by the courts of that country – in quick time.  No politics. No ethnic undertones. No religious sentiment. No ifs. No buts. Just the law. That is how serious nations combat terrorism. They use laws. They use institutions. They make the courts, not politicians, the final arbiters. Finland has shown that when citizens wage wars against the state, there is only one path; the path of justice. Our country and its puissant rulers should take notice. But, will they?

    For years, our country has lived under the weight of terrorism and banditry. From Boko Haram in the Northeast, to bandits in the Northwest, to armed herdsmen across the Middle Belt, to secessionist violence in the Southeast, our country has been battered. Yet, ask yourself: who are the high-profile terrorists that our country has ever successfully tried and jailed? Tukur Mamu, the man the SSS named as a terrorist who was arrested in September, 2022? Three years later the hearing of the criminal charges filed against him at the Federal High Court, Abuja, has not gone bail hearing. Who else? None. Rather than pursue justice, our country has embraced appeasement. Rather than resort to trials, it has embraced settlements. Rather than apply the law, it has enthroned the politics of kid gloves. Terrorists, rather than being dragged before our courts, they are courted with amnesty. That kind of détente plays out in grotesque rituals. Men who once stormed villages, who left behind charred homes and unmarked graves, now appear draped in camouflage. Bandoliers of ammunition hang across their chests. Kalashnikovs, the same weapons that mowed down innocents, slung confidently across their shoulders. They grin for the cameras. In those staged moments of “surrender”, the mass killings and abductions they committed, including the humiliation inflicted on our sovereign state, are made to vanish into thin air. Governors pose beside them as though they were statesmen, not outlaws. Soldiers and police officers stand by in silence, complicit in the theatre. What should be a reckoning becomes a performance. What should be justice becomes indulgence. And what should reaffirm the authority of the state instead diminishes it, making the law itself look like a prop in a grotesque show.

    They also have a way of christening the rituals to make them appear legit. They call it “deradicalisation”. They call it “reintegration”. They call it “rehabilitation”. In truth, it is a capitulation. It is the surrender of the state to its enemies. The hypocrisy is glaring. When petty thieves are caught, they rot in jail. When kidnappers without political links are arrested, they face endless trials. When poor youths are caught for petty crimes, they are paraded before cameras. When the hideouts of Yahoo-Yahoo boys, the so-called Aza men, as the streets now describe them, are raided, it dominates the headlines and fills the evening news. But when men with blood on their hands, when men who sack villages and massacre innocents are caught, they are offered seats at the table. They are told to lay down their arms. They are “reintegrated” into the very society they destroyed.

    This policy of appeasement did not begin today. It has a history. Nasir El-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State, openly admitted that he paid bandits to stop attacks. He was not ashamed. He said he travelled out of the country to meet them. He said he settled them. His justification was crude: to stop them from killing his people, he had to give them what they wanted. Other governors followed the same path. Bello Matawalle of Zamfara embraced negotiations with bandits, granting them amnesty. Aminu Masari of Katsina tried the same. In Niger State, Abubakar Bello also pursued dialogue and settlement. The logic was always the same: better to settle killers than confront them. Better to appease terror than uphold the law. But what has this brought our country? Nothing but emboldened terrorists. Bandits who now fly helicopters into forests. Bandits who tax farmers before they can plant or harvest. Bandits who shoot down military aircraft. Terrorists who walk free while victims bury their dead.

    Ekpa’s sentencing in Finland throws all this into sharp relief. Here was a man who incited violence from abroad. Here was a man who issued threats, who enforced stay-at-home orders in the Southeast, whose words and actions paralysed local economies and endangered lives. Our puissant rulers cried out, again and again, until their voices broke and turned hoarse. Our country itself wailed in anguish. But nothing tangible happened here. It took a foreign country, thousands of miles away, to act. Why? The answer isn’t farfetched. In Finland, the law is supreme. In our country politics is supreme and it trumps law. Yet, hypocrisy rises to the surface, traded as the common currency of power and persuasion. Our leaders say they are fighting terrorism; but, they refuse to use the one tool that makes nations strong: the impartial force of justice. They are quick to parade the poor. They are quick to jail the powerless. But they refuse to jail terrorists. They refuse to even try them. So we must ask again: who are the high-profile terrorists that Nigeria has jailed? Is it Shekau? No. He died by his own hand. Is it any of his commanders? No. Is it the masterminds of the Chibok abductions? No. Is it the killers of students in Katsina, Kankara, Kagara, or Yobe? No. Is it the men who sacked hundreds of villages in Zamfara, Benue, Plateau? No. The answer is clear. No one.

    But, every other market day, the military announces the surrender of hundreds of “repentant” Boko Haram fighters. They are fed. They are clothed. They are trained. They are sent back into society. Their victims, the widows, the orphans, the displaced, are left with nothing. This is not justice. This is betrayal.

    Our country has turned upside down the meaning of justice. Instead of trials that affirm the rule of law, it creates photo opportunities for terrorists and bandits who shake hands with governors. Instead of courtrooms, it arranges negotiation tables. Instead of jail cells, it sets up reintegration camps. Ekpa’s case is instructive. He was not tried here. He was not punished here. He was punished in Finland. And he was punished because a nation that values law and order cannot allow terrorism to fester unchecked. Our country, by contrast, has allowed terrorism to become an industry. An industry of settlements. An industry of amnesty. An industry of deals. The consequences are dire. Terrorism has metastasised. Banditry has grown. Kidnapping for ransom has become the national enterprise. Farmers are abandoning their land. Children are being denied education because schools are unsafe. Citizens are paying for the failure of the state to act. It is time to say the truth: our country is not fighting terrorism. Our country is accommodating it. Our rulers are bargaining with it. Our rulers are feeding it.

    Those who defend the appeasement policy argue that our country lacks the capacity to fight. They argue that the military is overstretched. They argue that negotiation saves lives. But they miss the point. No country has ever secured itself by appeasing terror. No state ever won peace by rewarding killers. Peace without justice is an illusion. Finland has shown what is possible. Finland has shown that when institutions work, the law can confront terror. Our country must learn. Our country must rise. Our rulers must stop hiding behind appeasement and confront the reality that they have abandoned justice.

    The question remains: who will bell the cat? Who will summon the courage to prosecute terrorists? Who will put Shekau’s successors on trial? Who will bring the leaders of bandit cartels to court? Who will give our citizens the assurance that the state is not in league with killers? Our hypocrisy will remain exposed. We jail the petty thief. We reintegrate the mass murderer. We punish the weak. We reward the strong. We claim to fight terror while pampering terrorists. This is why trust in the state is collapsing. Citizens see a government that cannot protect them, yet embraces those who butchered their families. They see widows mourning while killers are feted. They see children out of school while warlords are called “repentant”. In such a climate, the idea of justice becomes hollow, the meaning of citizenship erodes, and the authority of the state shrinks into ridicule.

    A nation that cannot punish its worst offenders cannot command the loyalty of its people.

    And so the cycle continues. Bandits strike, the state negotiates. Terrorists kill, the state forgives. Villages are burnt, the state calls for dialogue. The message is clear: in our country, crime pays when it is scaled high enough. Small men are crushed by the system; big men are courted by it. This inversion of justice is not only obscene; it is suicidal for a fragile state. For no republic can endure when the sword is turned against the weak while the strong are shielded from the law. The lesson from Finland is plain. Nations that survive are those that make no distinction between the weak and the powerful in the eyes of the law. They understand that justice is not an option, but the very lifeblood of order. Our country with its rulers must decide whether its wants to remain a theatre of indulgence or a country governed by law. Until it chooses justice, our citizens will keep burying the dead, keep mourning the abducted, keep watching governors shake hands with killers. And our hypocrisy, already naked before the world, will become the grave digger of our republic.

    Ekpa’s sentencing is a mirror. A mirror that shows us the face of our country’s failure. The question is: will our country’s rulers look into it? Or will they, as always, look away?

    Time will tell.

  • For Deki Agbahovbe at Seventy-Nine

    For Deki Agbahovbe at Seventy-Nine

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    A few days ago, specifically on Thursday, 21st August, 2025, Mrs. Deki Agbahovbe turned seventy-nine. She was my teacher. She taught me Literature-in-English at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Ondo, Ondo State, in the mid-1980s. But she was far more than a teacher to me. She became a mother, a guardian, a compass. I still see her in the classroom. Firm. Disciplined. Sharp-witted. Her voice steady, her eyes alert. She had no patience for sluggish thinking. You had to be quick on your feet. You had to listen, to think, to respond. Literature, for her, was not just about books. It was about life, about human choices, about clarity. She made us wrestle with texts until the words yielded their truths. She would scold us with precision. Everyone had a nickname, which elicited from those hiding their faces from her darting eyes between the pages of their notebooks. The nicknames weren’t meant to wound, but to awaken to one’s failing. She wanted us to think. She wanted us to know that words carried weight, that language was power. That was her gift to us. She made us better readers, and by extension, better human beings.

    But my story with her began outside the classroom.

    When I arrived in Ondo to begin my Advanced Level, the admission process had long closed. I came late. The admission window was already shut. It was her husband, Pa Agbahovbe, now late, who helped secure my place, on seeing my WAEC result. “I won’t let this slip. Not with your top grades”, he said. Bless his soul. My mother, relieved that I had not lost the opportunity, later entrusted me to Mrs. Agbahovbe, leaving what was a paltry sum at the time with her and for my care.. She became my loco parentis. It was not a title she carried lightly. She stepped into the role of mother with the same seriousness she brought into teaching. In her, I saw the vigilance each time I wanted to buy something. She would scrutinise my request. Was it necessary? Was it useful? Would my mother have approved? There was no room for waste. No space for frivolity. She wanted me to grow with discipline and purpose. She guarded me like one of her own. From there on, I didn’t miss my biological mum who had assumed both the fathering and mothering roles over me and my other six siblings after our dad suddenly passed on a year and half earlier. She guarded the money my mother left in her care as though it were her own. She watched over me as if I had been born from her womb. I called her mummy. She was mum really. Not in the ordinary sense of affection. But, in the true, living sense of mothering. The name was natural. She earned it, not by indulgence, but by discipline, by care, by the quiet insistence that life must not be wasted. Looking back now, I realise how formative those years were. To be young, away from home, with the temptations and freedoms of student life, and yet to have someone watching, guiding, restraining – it was a blessing, indeed. She did not smother me. But, she would scold. Typical of Bendel mothers. She did not overprotect me. But, she would set boundaries with her eyes, the way mothers do. I feared walking into her path or going to the staff room. But she gave me a structure, a fence within which I could grow. That, perhaps, is the highest form of mothering.

    Seventy-nine is not just a number. It is a testament. It is the story of a life given to shaping others. A life that chose the classroom as its altar, and young minds as its offering. For how do we measure the worth of a teacher? By the books covered in a syllabus? By the marks on an exam sheet? Or by the human beings who rise, decades later, to say: “She taught me. She shaped me. She mothered me”. Teachers like Mrs. Agbahovbe live in the lives of their students. We carry them forward.

    We hear their voices in our own speeches. We remember their warnings when we are tempted to stray. We recall their encouragement when we are tempted to give up. Her sharp wit still echoes in me. Her firm discipline still steadies me. And her care, her quiet, and watchful care still warm me. At seventy-nine, I honour her. But more than honour, I thank her. I thank her for the discipline that never allowed waste. I thank her for the firmness that sharpened my mind. I thank her for carving in me the love for literature and letters. I thank her as a mum who kept watch, who cared enough to say no, who shaped me in ways only time can fully reveal. I thank her and Pa Agbahovbe for the humanity that saw a young boy, late for admission, and chose not to let him fall by the wayside.

    We live in a world that often forgets teachers. We celebrate politicians, businessmen, celebrities. But teachers? They fade into the background. Yet they are the ones who make all the others possible. Without a teacher, no leader rises. Without a teacher, no thinker emerges. Without a teacher, the world has no compass. Mrs. Agbahovbe belongs to that quiet army of nation-builders. They work in classrooms with little recognition. They labour over students, planting seeds they may never live to see bloom. They shape destinies quietly, one mind at a time. But beyond being a retired teacher, she remains a mother. And this is where I must insist: the mothering of others is one of the noblest acts of humanity. She did not choose me. I was handed to her. Yet she embraced me, guarded me, disciplined me, and guided me. That act alone speaks volumes of her heart.

    Seventy-nine years is a long journey. It carries laughter, tears, struggles, triumphs. It carries the memory of her late husband, who once opened the door of opportunity for me. It carries the many students who passed through her hands, each with a story to tell. It carries the weight of decades of giving, of caring, of standing firm in the classroom and at home. But seventy-nine also carries light. It carries the glow of legacy. For a teacher’s true legacy is not in her own years, but in the years of her students. Every life she touched carries her forward. Every success her students achieve echoes back to her. Every grateful memory, like this one, keeps her alive in ways age cannot diminish. Whenever I read her posts on Facebook and look at her photos, I see a woman of balance. This is in spite of the vagaries of life, of changing seasons and changing circumstances. She hasn’t changed. She is still stern, stubborn to upholding truths in her posts. She is still demanding accountability, this time from the band’s of looters that continue to ruin our country. She still shows care, with light the dominant motif of her posts. Above all, she is still the mother I knew almost forty years who celebrates every landmark in the life of her biological children and her many online children. That balance is rare. It is what makes her unforgettable. As she walks slowly into her eightieth year, I pray strength for her. I pray joy for her. I pray that she knows, deep within her, how much she is loved and remembered. For memory is a form of honour, and gratitude is a form of prayer.

    Mummy at seventy-nine. That is what she remains to me. A mother in the classroom. The forever teacher. A guardian of discipline. A keeper of care. We, her students, are her testimony. We carry her name not in titles or accolades, but in the quiet ways we live our lives. Every time I resist waste, I hear her. Every time I choose discipline over indulgence, I see her. Every time I read a text with care, I remember her. That is how teachers live forever. Not in boastful gestures or grand claims, but in the subtle ways they leave their marks on the world. They live in the lessons that echo in our minds long after the bell has rung, in the wisdom we carry when we face moments of doubts, and in the values that guide our decisions. Every act of kindness, every choice rooted in integrity, every word spoken with care are the true living testaments to their influence. Like the living oracles.

    Teachers endure because they become part of the lives they touch. They are woven into our successes and failures, our laughter and our grief, our quiet moments of reflection and our boldest leaps forward. When we act with courage, patience, or generosity, we do so in the shadow of those who taught us how. In this way, they never truly leave us; they continue to shape the world through the people they have nurtured, loved, and believed in.

    Last week on Facebook, as you turned seventy-nine, I bowed and paused to say thank you, Mummy. For the firmness that shaped us, for the discipline that steadied us, for the care that healed our wounds, and for the humanity that shone through every gesture of your life. Yours was never the loud voice of power, but the quiet insistence of love and principle, teaching us that strength does not need to raise itself above others to be felt. The world may not carry your name on its billboards, or in its histories, or on streets’ signposts; but I do. And I will never forget.

    Happy birthday, Mummy Deki Agbahovbe. May the days ahead be kind to you, and may the memories of the countless students whose lives you touched wrap around you like a shawl. At seventy-nine, you remind us that teachers are custodians of memory and guardians of futures yet unseen. For you are, and will always remain, our Mummy.

  • Voyage Around Memory

    Voyage Around Memory

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Memory is a mischievous marvel, fleet-footed, capricious, and ever faithful only to its own whimsy. It ducks and weaves between time and consciousness, slipping out of reach just when you think you’ve grasped it. One moment, I am scanning the horizon of remembrance, combing the scattered debris of vanished moments while looking for things that have taken flight into the silence of disappearance or loss. And then, without warning or logic, a story appears. Insistent. Clear. Seemingly unconnected to the search I’m making.

    This time, it is the tale Italo Calvino recounts in the closing section of Quickness, one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. He tells of the Chinese painter, Zhuang Zhou, who was summoned by the Emperor to paint a crab. But rather than reaching for his paint and brush, Zhou made an unusual request: a villa to live in, twelve servants to attend to him, and five years to contemplate the task. At the end of the five years, Zhou asks for five more. The Emperor, bemused but patient, grants the request. Then, in the tenth year, Zhou walks into the room, picks up his brush, and with the swiftness of lightning, paints the crab. One stroke. A perfect crab. Alive on the canvas.

    This tale lives in me not because of its absurdity or its humour. It lives in me because it reveals something elemental about how memory works. About how nothing is ever truly lost. Not to time. Not to space. What appears to vanish merely sleeps. It waits in the folds of consciousness for the right light, the right silence, the right inward gesture to stir it awake. In that sense, memory is not a storage shelf or an archive. It is a living presence. An oracle that chooses what to reveal and when. For many of us, memory feels like a thing stored. A fixed cabinet inside the brain, with drawers and files, some in order, others scattered. This is how we’ve been taught to understand it. But, the neuroscientists of the early 20th century, as my Comrade, Daniel Ishaya, reminded me only recently, began to see memory differently. Not as a fixed structure, but as a process. A movement. An act of reconstruction.

    In the 1920s, researchers, like Karl Lashley, who experimented on rats, tried to locate where in the brain memories were stored. Lashley in particular failed. No matter how much they removed from the rat’s brain, they still managed to remember how to solve the maze they had once learned. This led Lashley to a radical and, at the time, heretical conclusion: memory, he said, doesn’t live in one place. It resides everywhere. And nowhere. This insight set the tone for what memory studies would become: a field that increasingly acknowledged the fluid, unpredictable nature of how we recall, store, and retrieve experience. It isn’t a family photo album where you point to the deceased parents or long lost loved ones. It isn’t a hard drive. It’s something more subtle. More alive.

    Professor Steven Rose, the British neuroscientist and neurobiologist who passed away last week, spent a lifetime thinking about this. For him, memory wasn’t simply about biology; it was about meaning. About culture. About history. He once said that memory is both a personal and a political act. That what we remember, how we remember, and what we choose to forget all say something about who we are. Rose, writing with his partner, Hilary, argued that memory exists at the intersection of brain, body, and society. That even though memory has a biological basis, which requires neurons and synapses, it is shaped by our relationships, our language, and our political environments. But, it was Antonio Damasio, the Portuguese-American neuroscientist and philosopher, who offered one of the most humanising views of memory in our time. In books like ‘The Feeling of What Happens’ and ‘Self Comes to Mind’, Damasio reminded us that memory is not a sterile archive. It is soaked in emotion and imprinted in the body.

    According to him, our memories are encoded not just as images or facts, but as “somatic markers”; bodily feelings attached to lived experiences. When we remember something painful or joyful, we don’t just recall a picture, we have a feeling of the moment over again. The rush of blood, the tightening of the chest, the warmth or sting. For Damasio, this emotional echo is what makes memory so powerful and so central to identity. Memory, he says, is the basis of the self. Not just what we have, but what we are.

    I know this to be true in my own life. I still remember my late dad’s voice. The rhythm of his humming Kenny Roger’s Lucille while polishing his black leather boots on the veranda of our house in Kwale. I cannot tell where in my brain this memory resides. But I know it lives. I know that when I smell the scent of the black Kiwi polish or hear Roger’s Lucille, the memory rises. Whole. Intact. Not because I summoned it, but because something did. That’s the mystery of memory. We don’t control it. We live with it, occasionally embarking on a voyage around it. Like an adventurer on a familiar path. It plays with time. It interrupts. It waits. And sometimes, it surprises. So, think of all the things we carry without knowing: the smells of childhood, the sting of a slap, and the trees that once seemed to journey alongside us in childhood, keeping pace as we gazed out of the windows of moving cars. These things sleep in us. Then, years later, they rise. In moments of joy. Grief. In dreams. In sudden laughter. In the way your child tilts their head, just like your father once did. Memory doesn’t die. It lingers.

    It was that great French writer, Marcel Proust, who, in his In Search of Lost Time, described the moment he dipped a madeleine into a cup of tea; and suddenly, involuntarily, the entire world of his childhood in Combray flooded back. Not because he tried to recall it. But because memory chose that moment to return. As a voyage of return. As a gesture to the determinism of time. Every returns in time.

    We live our lives imagining that the past is behind us. That it is over. Closed. Filed away. But memory reminds us otherwise. The past lives in the present. It shapes how we see, feel, act. In truth, there is no clean break between now and then. There is only continuity.

    Though, it is not always a gift. Memory, that is.

    For survivors of war, for those who have suffered abuse, trauma, loss, memory can be a wound that never heals. Neuroscientists now speak of “traumatic memory” as a different kind of memory etched deep in the amygdala, often immune to time and rationality. You don’t remember the trauma. It remembers you. But memory can also be redemptive. It can rescue us from oblivion. Bring back the voices of those long gone. Give us a sense of who we are and where we’ve been. I often think about this in relation to our country. A place with a fractured relationship to memory where citizens forget too easily. Rulers bury histories. Power silences witnesses. Our textbooks skip over  massacres. Our Streets squares do not bear the names of our heroes and heroines. As citizens, we are asked to move on too quickly. To forget too much. And we wonder why our wounds fester. What a country remembers says everything about its soul. That’s why memory is not just personal. It is political.

    Zhuang Zhou didn’t need ten years to study a crab. He needed ten years to enter the space where memory, imagination, and vision become one. And when the time came, he painted from that still place. One stroke. One breath. A perfect crab. In our frantic world of instant recall, Google searches, Artificial Intelligence, it is tempting to treat memory as information. As data. But true memory is something else. It is not just what we remember. It is also what remembers us. My late dad’s voice. The scent of the Kiwi polish. These are not echoes. They are presences. To voyage around memory is to sail across a sea without a map. The waters change. The shorelines shift. But if you listen carefully, something inside you still knows the way.

    There are moments in my long voyage when I pause, seized by a quiet tremor, and ask myself: What is it you’re truly seeking, Mahmud? The question arrives like a knock on the door. And just as I begin to sink into the quietude of unknowing, memory drifts in like an old friend who needs no introduction. Recall the story of the emperor, the painter and the crab. Perhaps, like the painter, Zhuang Zhou, memory has been ensconced all these years in its silent villa, waiting. It lays a gentle hand on my shoulder and whispers, “Here I am. I’m what you were searching for all along”. It doesn’t so much answer the question as gently reminding me that the question itself was always part of the remembering. Here, it wasn’t speed that mattered, but the slow steeping of insight. It wasn’t the painter’s brushstroke that was miraculous, but the decade of unseen preparation.

    And so I wonder: is that what memory does with us? Withdraws into its chambers, waiting until the question is properly formed, before returning with a simple and clean truth drawn in one swift line.

  • When the State Lies

    When the State Lies

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Something distinctly unsettling stirred when my young friend and colleague at the Bar, Festus Ogun, quietly reversed course from his initial social media post in which he rightly drew public attention to the plight of the “Yola Six”, the law students abducted en route to resume studies at the Nigerian Law School in Yola after their externship in the south east. His later post, this time applauding the Nigeria Police for the successful rescue of the “Yola Six” struck a discordant note. The facts, as later confirmed by two of the victims, told a different story. Not just different but diametrically opposed to the claim of the police.

    Festus, one must concede, was most likely swept up in the moment, buoyed by what he believed to be credible information from the police. Who could blame him? At the centre of it all were the lives and liberties of six promising students whose futures hung precariously in the balance, held captive by criminals who recognise neither law nor the sanctity of human life. Still, the relief that greeted the eventual release of the students does not wash away the bitter aftertaste of official dishonesty and falsehood that reveals a deeper crisis of integrity within the Nigerian state. When the custodians of public trust lie, when the state manufactures its own myths of heroism in the face of tragedy, one must ask: what else is it willing to fabricate? And why?

    In the realm of public life, a state that lies does more than twist facts. It corrodes trust, fractures the moral contract between citizens and the state, and raises unsettling questions about whose truth matters. Today, in our country, official lies are no longer an aberration. They are the Directive Principles of State Policy. They are the practices of power performed without shame. Two weeks ago, six law students were kidnapped on their journey from the Southeast to Yola, in the Northeast, where they were to resume their Nigerian Law School studies. Young men, driven by the dream of law and justice, were intercepted by gunmen, abducted, tortured, and used as pawns in a ransom trade. The students’ accounts, as narrated by Reverend Ernest Okafor and David Obiora, both victims, revealed a chilling, yet tragically familiar story: departure from Onitsha on the morning of July 26; ambush between Zakibiam and Mukari, Benue State, by nightfall; relocation into the womb of a forest; physical abuse, trauma, and ransom negotiations that dropped from N50m each to N10m each before their eventual release on August 1. The state watched. Then came the lie. The Nigerian Police, in a bid to grab headlines and polish tarnished image, released a statement claiming credit for rescuing all six students. A triumphalist announcement, devoid of detail, dripping with spin. But Rev. Okafor countered it with chilling clarity: “The police played no role in our release”. None. The families paid. The six kidnapped law students were released. But, it raises the question: Why does the state lie?

    It lies because it can. It lies because truth has no constituency in a country where power is unaccountable. It lies because the state has, over time, developed an addiction to orchestrated spectacle. A need to be seen to act, even when it has not lifted a finger, or raised a stone. The lie becomes a sedative for public outrage. A script to manage perception. In this case, the image of a competent police force triumphing over terror is too useful to pass up, especially when the reality is one of chronic failure.

    But this isn’t new.

    Our country’s history is littered with official falsehoods. The Civil War, with all its horrors, was packaged in July, 1967 by the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon as a “police action” aimed at “restoring order”. The pogroms, starvation, and genocide were hidden behind the wall of massive state propaganda. The truth bled quietly, off camera. In 1999, the return to civil rule was hailed as the dawn of a “New Nigeria”. But the killings in Odi, Bayelsa State, later that year revealed otherwise. The military razed the town, leaving hundreds dead. The government claimed it was responding to the killing of twelve soldiers. No commission of inquiry was held. No one was punished. When asked years later about the incident, President Obasanjo said, “The people of Odi invited the military”. He lied. The state lied. In 1991, between the end of the civil war and our country’s return to civilian rule, I was abducted by operatives of the State Security Service and held incommunicado at their Ikoyi detention facility. For weeks, the state flatly denied any knowledge of my whereabouts. The then Minister of Information, the late Chief Alex Akinyele, and his cabinet colleague, the late Professor Babs Fafunwa, repeatedly took to press briefings to insist, sometimes with theatrical conviction, that the government had no hand in my “disappearance” as President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).

    Here’s another lie. But who remembers?

    In October 2020, the youth-led #EndSARS protests were crushed at the Lekki Tollgate in Lagos. Live bullets were fired into a peaceful crowd. Blood stained the road. The Nigerian Army initially denied even being present at the scene. Then, caught by evidence, admitted presence; but claimed they only fired blanks. Government officials spoke in circles, contradicting one another. The state swore no lives were lost. Meanwhile, families mourned in silence. CNN and Amnesty International exposed the state’s lies. The government responded by launching attacks, not on the killers, but on the truth-tellers. Witnesses like Obianuju Catherine Udeh, better known as DJ Switch, and Rinu Oduala, were forced into exile. In this long tradition of denial, what happened to the law students is not an exception. It is a continuation of the familiar pattern of lie-telling. The state’s cover-up. Or what my abductors during my long incarceration in 1991 glibly referred to as “the state’s cover story” – a phrase that still rings with a certain chill. It was as though the state had transformed itself into the editorial boardroom of a propaganda tabloid, where facts were doctored, and headlines manufactured to deflect public inquiry and defang public outrage. A newsroom, yes; but one staffed not by reporters of truth, but by functionaries skilled in the dark art of distortion. In that room, reality was edited, inconvenient truths redacted, and official narratives spun with the finesse of professional deceivers.

    The question must be posed again: Why does the state lie?

    It lies because it fears accountability. And because lies are cheaper than reforms. Easier than truth. The truth demands justice. It demands restitution. Lies cost nothing, except the people’s trust. The state lies because of its own decadence. There are no real consequences for lying. A police officer can announce a fake rescue. A governor can fabricate achievements. A minister can misrepresent statistics. No heads roll. No shame is felt. No apology is issued. In such a system, lying becomes a normalised administrative instinct. It lies because lies are often more palatable than the truth. The truth is messy. It complicates power. It reveals incompetence. It opens the door to scrutiny. The lie is clean like a whistle. Tidy. It reinforces the illusion of control. But the cost is enormous.

    Each lie told by the state chips away at its moral legitimacy. Trust, once broken, is hard to rebuild. Citizens retreat into apathy or rage. Conspiracy thrives. Paranoia deepens. The distance between the ruler and the ruled becomes godo godo. Deep gullies. And when citizens no longer believe their government, even in times of truth, the consequences can be lethal. Imagine being the parent of one of the kidnapped students. You scrape together millions in ransom. You pray through sleepless nights. Then you see on the evening news that the police claim they rescued your child. No mention of your suffering. No mention of your sacrifice. Just a polished press release. A lie told over your lived experience. The spectre of falsehoods, which places the state at the centre of every story, even when it played no part, comes with the erasure of the sufferings of victims. The agency of families. The courage of survival. It is this spectre of falsehoods that turns citizens’ pains into weapons of state propaganda.

    So what must be done?

    First, citizens must learn to expose the lies that the state tells. “Unmask lies wherever they are told” was Amílcar Cabral’s enduring exhortation. A call to truth as resistance and to clarity as a revolutionary act. Refuse to be gaslighted. Insist on fact. Every time a false narrative is offered, it must be met with citizens’ testimonies and documentation. Second, citizens must build a culture of public memory. Our country forgets too quickly. Lies thrive in forgetfulness. The state counts on our fatigue. But we must remember. And remind. And record. Third, institutions must be reformed to uphold transparency. Press releases should not replace accountability. Oversight mechanisms must be strengthened. Internal checks enforced. Citizens must continue to hold power to account. A lying state can only persist when citizens become indifferent. To resist the lie is to defend our republic.

    Some will argue that all states lie. That this is the nature of power. Perhaps. In functional democracies, lies are often exposed. Careers end. Elections are lost. Apologies are issued. In our country, lies are rewarded with promotions. Our citizens must change that. When the state lies, it desecrates its duty to the citizens. It abandons the ideals of public service. And it betrays the very law those kidnapped students set out to study and one day uphold. The future of a country cannot rest solely on the scaffolding of its constitution. It must be anchored in truth. Truth as a moral habit. Truth as a civic duty. Truth as a sacred covenant between the governors and the governed. For without truth, the constitution becomes a hollow text, and governance becomes the theatre of illusion. When the state lies, and lies without shame or consequence, it tells its citizens: your pain is irrelevant, your reality is disposable, and your trust is mine to abuse.

    But truth, however buried, has a stubborn way of returning. Like the voices of David Obiora and Rev. Okafor. Clear. Undeniable. Refusing erasure.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Erosion is Killing Auchi, One Rain at a Time

    Erosion is Killing Auchi, One Rain at a Time

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Just recently, photos of deep erosion gullies cutting through Auchi began circulating on social media. They are terrifying images. Stark. Stark enough to jar the conscience of any public official in Edo State with an ounce of duty. But, unsurprisingly, they haven’t. Auchi, the northern Edo town, one of the most important towns of the Afemai people, which now wears the look of a town falling into itself, is being eaten alive. Its red earth is pockmarked by holes and yawning gullies that stretch for metres. Gullies that now resemble open graves. Open graves. That is what Auchi’s erosion sites have become; gaping, growing pits that threaten lives, homes, memories. They spread like a slow poison. They don’t stop. They have no boundaries. They creep into compounds, under buildings, across streets. They swallow the land. They take trees, people, homes, hope.

    For decades, Auchi has battled the effects of erosion. But what began as seasonal floodwater carving paths across the town has today become a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe. Nature is no longer whispering. It is roaring. Though, Auchi is not an exception. In every part of the world, climate change announces itself in its own voice. Sometimes it is wildfires. Other times, floods. In Auchi, it has taken the form of massive gullies that now disfigure the landscape. While nature raises its voice in fury, tearing through land and life with devastating force, the State and Federal Governments respond with silence, as if deaf to the groaning earth. The Governor of Edo State, rather than confronting the crisis head-on, is busying himself with frivolous ceremonies and jejune receptions for dignitaries inside the Government House; or issuing petty threats to political opponents who decline the summons of protocol. At the federal level, the President and his men are adrift in the sea of re-election calculations, too absorbed in the arithmetic of power to reckon with the crumbling soil beneath their citizens’ feet. The tragedy unfolds, and those entrusted with responsibility look away, either blinded by ambition or numbed by indifference. No State and National Disaster Agencies have made perfunctory visits, at least to take photos and issue hollow promises as they always do.

    Meanwhile, the earth keeps shifting beneath Auchi. The people are afraid. And they have every reason to be. Houses now perch on the edge of gullies. Families wake up to discover the land beneath them has vanished. Roads once busy with motorcycles and schoolchildren have disappeared. There is no exaggeration here. What is happening in Auchi is a disaster. One that is both natural and political. Natural because the red Mars-like earth of Auchi is loose, vulnerable, and unable to withstand repeated assault by floodwaters. Political because those charged with protecting communities like Auchi have done nothing. A few interventions have been attempted over the years. But, they are far too little to address the problem. Auchi appears to have been abandoned to its fate. Auchi is what abandonment looks like in a country where the elites fly over disaster zones and do not walk through them. Auchi is a town on nobody’s priority list, rendered voiceless by the geography of power.

    But, Auchi matters to me. It always has.

    My provenance lies just across the expressway in Sabo, South Ibie clan. A community, once distinct, now inseparable from Auchi by the tides of time and traffic. The expressway from Benin to Abuja slices through both, but geography no longer draws the lines clearly. First-time visitors often ask: where does Auchi end, and where does Sabo begin? No one knows for sure anymore. The land has fused, as memory and place sometimes do. Auchi is woven into the fabric of my life. It is where my story turned the corner. I returned there at sixteen. An abrupt return occasioned by the death of my father. Auchi received my mum, my siblings and I like a relative waiting at the door. It became the ground of my becoming. The streets were my first library. Modest bookshops filled with promise stood proudly from Up-Garage down to the junction of Inu-Umoru Street. They drew me in. That was how I met books. That was how books met me. News vendors became my morning tutors. They stood in front of the old New Nigeria bank building, shouting headlines, turning the heart of the town into a public classroom. I began to see that education did not end in the four walls of a school. The world itself could be a blackboard. It was here, too, in the stirrings of student politics, that the future beckoned. November 1990. Delegates gathered for the NANS Convention at Auchi Polytechnic. The convention was botched by the military dictator, IBB, but something was born. The talk of my candidacy began there, whispered in the corners. Days later, I became President of NANS at the University of Benin. But the idea was seeded there. Auchi also carries grief. Beneath its red earth rests a friend, a brother, a comrade. Professor Abubakar Momoh – one of the finest political economists of his generation. He lived with courage and brilliance. He died with his integrity intact. His memory breathes in the soil of Auchi. Bless his soul. Auchi is not just a town. For me, it is a map of memory. A place of pain and purpose. It is where the past and the future shake hands.

    Yet, today, Auchi is being cut in half by gullies.

    Whole sections of the town are being disconnected. Roads linking the town’s quarters have become impassable. In some cases, the gullies have reached several metres deep. Some as deep as 25 to 30 feet, making them death traps for children and even adults. It is hard to imagine how a town this important could fall into this level of neglect. But it has. The images don’t lie. Photos show the town being gnawed from the inside. Videos show frightened residents looking at a growing abyss outside their homes. Some tell stories of neighbours who had to flee in the middle of the night when the ground cracked open beneath them. These are not scenes from a disaster movie. They are real. And they are a warning. A warning about what happens when climate change meets government indifference. For years, experts have said that Nigeria is vulnerable to climate disasters. From desertification in the North to rising sea levels in the South. From deadly floods to droughts. Yet, there is still no coordinated climate resilience plan. Auchi is paying the price. The gullies that once began as harmless rills have now turned into fullblown canyons. In some places, these canyons have reached homes, schools, and clinics. The town’s economy will suffer in the future if nothing is done today. No investor will build on land that might vanish. No school can function where access roads have become rivers of mud. No resident can sleep in peace when they fear the next rainfall might bring their house down.

    What Auchi needs is not a photo-op by a government delegation. It needs action. Urgent, technical, focused action. There is a National Erosion and Watershed Management Project (NEWMAP). There is a Federal Ministry of Environment. There is a Niger Delta Development Commission. And there are ecological funds. Where are they? What is the use of these institutions if they cannot stop a town from falling into the ground? But, Auchi is not alone. Even my provenance, South Ibie clan, is battling to save itself from the frightening gullies showing up. Other towns in southeastern Nigeria, like Agulu, Nanka, and Oko in Anambra State are facing similar gully erosion disasters. They are crying for attention.

    And that raises painful, even haunting, questions: Why are these people being condemned to suffer through neglect? Why does the Edo State government avert its gaze, in particular, as though willful blindness might erase the deepening wounds of the land? Is it that someone in power has shrugged off responsibility, consoling himself with the fatalistic notion that these terrifying gullies are mere acts of God?

    There is no sense in which this erosion can be called an act of God. It is the act of a system that looks the other way when danger builds up. It is the act of leadership that plans for ribbon-cutting ceremonies, not for long-term environmental protection. We cannot keep blaming the rain. We must blame our refusal to build drainages. Our failure to regulate construction. Our inability to act before disaster strikes. Every year, government agencies speak about climate change. They sign agreements. They attend international conferences. They talk about emissions and net zero. But in Auchi, and elsewhere, climate change is not a theory. It is a lived reality. It is the sound of the earth caving into itself. The scream of a child falling into a pit. The helplessness of parents watching their compounds dissolve into nothing. We must not allow Auchi to become a town of mourning. We must not let it become a cautionary tale. The time to act is now. Erosion doesn’t wait. Gullies do not pause. They grow. With every rain. Every storm. Every season. The gullies stretch across the land like wandering prophets gone rogue and cast themselves in the image of Diogenes with his flickering lamp, not in search of honest men, but probing endlessly for the next soft earth to devour.

    They move with a quiet, deliberate menace, carving their paths deeper into the yielding earth, as though animated by some unspoken philosophy of ruin. They do not rush, but open up slowly, as if conscious of their role in a slow and inevitable undoing. In their wake, they leave haunting images of absence and sad reminders of what once stood with pride and permanence. This is not progress; it is the architecture of decay masquerading as motion. Here, Auchi becomes a palimpsest of vanishing memory, a terrain where grandeur is not merely lost, but dismantled by the hands of water and time. Auchi is the theatre of sheer destruction which echoes the melancholic vision that the 18th century French philosopher, Denis Diderot, once conjured: a world that exists only as the broken remnants of what has been. In this philosophy of ruin, nothing is built; everything is unmade, and the silence that follows speaks louder than any storm.

    Erosion is Killing Auchi, one rain at a time.

    The people are pleading. They are not asking for miracles. They are asking for attention, for responsibility, for help. We cannot claim to be building a country while allowing its towns to collapse. We cannot talk about development while our earth gives way beneath our feet. Auchi is weeping. It is breaking apart. Will our leaders come to its rescue before it is too late?

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Ashleigh, Identity, and the Diaspora’s Return

    Ashleigh, Identity, and the Diaspora’s Return

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    When Ashleigh Plumptre pulled on the green jersey of the Super Falcons, she was not just representing our country. She was performing a deeper act: an act of cultural reimagination. She was constructing a new identity. One that defies borders, blurs categories, and reclaims ancestral memory. Her decision to play for our country was not simply professional. It was symbolic. And a welcome. The same holds true for Michelle Alozie, though in a different sense. Her identity and cultural belonging are affirmed more directly. Her parents are Nigerians by birth. Their citizenship anchors her connection. Ashleigh’s case is further removed. Her story begins with her grandfather. She is third generation by blood, not by birthplace. Yet, both women, by different paths, have found their way to the homeland.

    In Morocco, during the just concluded Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, WAFCON, Ashleigh wasn’t the only one who showed up. Her white friends turned up too in the final game. In green and white. In song. In spirit. The country folks in the stands showed up for her, screaming: “Oyibo, Oyibo, Oyibo”. It wasn’t performative support. It was a collective ritual. Hers was a public reaffirmation of belonging to a homeland that once felt remote, but now stood close: immediate, intimate, and deliberately embraced. This is the emerging narrative of diasporic identity. It is no longer about return in the old nationalist sense, but about reimagining connection that is chosen and not inherited. It’s about the formation of the new self. A new selfhood. Rooted not in the soil, but in memory. Not imposed by geography, but spawned by cultural will. For many years, the children of African immigrants in the West lived in the liminal. They straddled two worlds. Often, they were forced to choose between assimilation and alienation. Many chose silence. Some chose denial. A few wrestled with duality in the few emerging multicultural European states, where the opposition of far right groups to multiculturalism is growing, for instance. Over the weekend, far-right agitators marched on the major streets of London, Norfolk and Essex, fanning the flames of hate and fears.

    But today, something new is happening.

    This generation is not simply identifying with the homeland. They are reconstructing the homeland within themselves. They are returning, not to a physical homeland; but to an imaginative one. They are engaged in the work of cultural reimagination, taking fragments of ancestral memory, mixing it with lived diaspora experiences, and shaping a composite identity that is both authentic and innovative. Ashleigh Plumptre’s case is instructive. Born in Leicester. Raised in English schools. Trained in English football academies. She could have followed the familiar path: play for the senior women’s team in England, lean into Euro-visibility, ride the institutional comfort. But she didn’t. Instead, she turned towards our country. Not because of nostalgia. Not out of charity. But because she saw herself differently. She reimagined the story of her lineage in a manner that her reimagination and story invariably don’t end up serving as a footnote to her Britishness, but as a foundational part of her identity. Her grandfather’s Nigerian heritage became a map. She traced it backwards, then forward again, into her own body, her own future.

    This re-rooting of identity is an active process. It requires intention. It requires curiosity. It requires the courage to be different. To live differently. And to live across cultural lines. Ashleigh’s identity is not a throwback. It is not mimicry. She does not need to “be more Nigerian than the rest of us” to prove belonging. Her very decision to claim the country of her grandfather’s birth on her terms, through football, is already a profound act of self-definition. Hear her: “I’ve just opened myself up to everything in the culture. I want to be able to encourage young people to do the same thing and identify with being mixed race”. And this is the core of the matter: diasporic identity today is performative, political, and deeply personal. Ashleigh’s decision is performance in the sense that it is enacted before a global audience. She performs belonging on the pitch. Her body moves in ways that express her allegiance, her pride, her conviction. But it is also political because she chooses to represent a country that has long been marginalised on the global stage. A country whose name doesn’t carry the same prestige as England’s, but whose history, culture, and resilience mean something far greater to her personal narrative.

    Her act is not one of rejection, but of reconstitution.

    She hasn’t abandoned England. She is reassembling our country inside herself. She is expanding what it means to be a fellow compatriot within the frontiers of cultural reimagination. Diaspora children are not just “returning” to the homeland. They are remaking the homeland in new forms: through fashion, through music, through sports, through social media discourses, through literature and academic theory. You see it in the rise of Afrobeats in London, Atlanta, and elsewhere. In the Nigerian-infused slang of Toronto teenagers. In the names proudly worn by second-generation Americans. You see it in the TED talks, the Instagram bios, our country’s flags in bios, the poetry slams, the Nollywood TikToks. You see it in how Ashleigh plays. Calm. Composed. Tactical. In the “Never-Say-Die” attitudes, “Dia-Body-Go-Hearam” and “E choke” dispositions of our younger countryfolks. The attitude of the British in training, Nigerian in expression. She doesn’t fit into the old categories. That’s the point. She is rewriting them with clarity.

    For decades, the homeland treated its diasporas as lost. As footnotes to colonial displacement. The story was one of escape, of absence, of loss. But that’s not the story anymore. This generation is reimagining the diaspora not as a departure but as an extension. Not as lost children, but as bridge-builders. They are redefining what it means to belong. Not to one place. But to many. Simultaneously. What Ashleigh represents is this: post-postcolonial identity that is fluid, global, but emotionally anchored in the ancestral. She is not burdened by the nationalism of the first generation. Nor by the silence of the second. She is free to choose and she chooses this: that freedom is power. It allows her to say, “I am British, and I am a Nigerian. Not one before the other. Not one more than the other. Both. Together”.

    And this is perhaps the most radical thing. In a world still obsessed with purity of culture, of blood, of loyalty, Ashleigh and others like her in our national basket teams are dismantling those myths. They are proving that identity is layered, negotiated, and dynamic. They are not confused. They are composed. They are not torn. They are woven. And our country folks must learn to embrace this. Too often, the homeland struggles with diaspora returnees. Questions of authenticity arise. “Do you speak the language?” “Do you eat the food?” “Do you know the history?” But, these are the wrong questions. Ashleigh may not speak the Yoruba tongue of her grandfather. But she understands solidarity. She understands the burden of representing a black country in a white-dominated world. She carries the flag, wears and kisses the badge on her jersey with pride. That should be enough.

    Identity is not measured in jollof rice. It is measured in meaning. Then, what does it mean to claim the homeland? It means carrying its name with dignity. It means choosing it, even when it’s not the easier option. It means amplifying it on the world stage, when others are silent. Ashleigh is doing all of this. So are thousands of young people around the world. They are not waiting to be invited to adopt the identity of the homeland. They are claiming it. Reimagining it. Living it. And they are demanding that we expand the borders of belonging. That we make room for the hybrid selves. That we honour choice as much as bloodlines. That we embrace the return not just of bodies, but of imagination.

    Ashleigh’s return is not simply to the homeland. It is to a narrative that was once broken by colonialism, exile, and dislocation, that is now being fixed by a new generation. A generation that refuses to forget. That refuses to be strangers. That insists on its place in our collective story. Our grand narratives. Her story is just one example. But it speaks volumes. It tells us that return is no longer a physical journey. It is a spiritual reckoning. A political choice. A cultural rebirth. An invitation that we must accept as public intellectuals to rethink the way we frame identity. To shift our gaze from the narrow lens of ethnicity, which has long anchored our scholarship, toward new formations. Toward acts of reimagination that speak to a more fluid and inclusive understanding of who we are. It invites us to craft fresh discourses. To see our country not as a fixed terrain of bloodlines and boundaries; but as an imagined space that is open, evolving, and welcoming to all who choose to belong.

    Finally, and in summary, the homeland stands for more than geography. It is a place of love, of memory, of origin. It belongs to those born within its borders and to those born far away, who carry it faithfully in their hearts. Ashleigh carries it. So does Alozie. And in carrying it, they remind us of something profound: the homeland is not only a place. It is a people. It is a history remembered. It is a choice made. It is the quiet insistence that belonging can stretch across oceans and generations. In this era of evolving identities and cultural reimaginings, the homeland is also a future. One that the children of the diaspora are helping to shape through their voices, their music, their sports, and their return. One match at a time. One song at a time. One return at a time. All in pursuit of life’s many missions. Ashleigh and the girls fulfilled one of such missions. Mission X, accomplished.

    Congratulations are in order, country people!

  • Trump, House Negroes, and the Tragedy of African Leadership

    Trump, House Negroes, and the Tragedy of African Leadership

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    Two weeks ago, Joseph Boakai, the Octogenarian President of Liberia, stepped into the White House, the symbolic heart of American power, to meet Donald Trump who had literally summoned five African presidents from Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania and Senegal to a landmark summit on trade, investment and security. It was supposed to be moments of diplomacy in which sovereigns usually stand together as equals, even if power asymmetry hung visibly in the air; and in which the business of bilateral relations is conducted with utmost civility and mutual respect. President Donald Trump forgot all of this, carrying himself with a certain abrasiveness that offends sensibilities and imperils the dignity of the state he represents, and turning the summit into a Q & A session. A job interview, to put it mildly. By displaying such abrasiveness, President Trump simply lent credence to George Mason’s enduring observation: “A state is nothing more than a reflection of its citizens; the more decent the citizens, the more decent the state”. When the conduct of its leader falls beneath the threshold of civility, a nation begins to mirror that coarseness, blurring the lines between the individual and the institutional. The office loses its aura, and the republic begins to speak in the crude accent of its commander-in-chief. But, what unfolded before television cameras was a scene more telling than any press release could muster. A scene that peeled back the layers of old colonial wounds, racism, ignorance, and above all, the enduring failure of African leadership.

    So, what really happened?

    This is what happened. During the USA-Liberia bilateral meeting, President Donald Trump caught sight of the cameras and turned toward the Liberian President and offered what he perhaps thought was a compliment. “Such good English. Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” he quipped, half in jest, fully in condescension. And how did the Liberian President respond? He nodded with the eagerness of a schoolboy desperate for approval. With the meekness of one unsure of his worth. With the servility of the “House Negro” Malcolm X once warned us about. “Yes Sir, from Liberia,” he said, bowing as though he stood in front of a master, not a counterpart or an equal. Even before the stage was set and the cameras began to roll, the youthful President of Senegal was also heard, almost breathlessly, begging President Trump to consider building one of his famed golf courses on Senegalese soil. It was a scene both painful and revealing: a sovereign leader reducing his office to the role of a supplicant in pursuit of the ephemeral. One could almost hear the echo of the colonial plea of yore. Moments like this confirm an unsettling truth that some countries do, indeed, have his kind: leaders who confuse servility for diplomacy, who mistake flattery for statecraft, and who forget that leadership is not about seeking favour, but about earning respect.

    There is, without doubt, more to be said about President Diomaye Faye. As a youthful politician who rode the cresting waves of youth agitation and popular discontent to ascend the Senegalese presidency, one would have hoped that his vision for investment would be shaped by both discernment and duty. His very mandate came from the restless streets and from young men and women demanding jobs, dignity, and a future. That he would, in a rare bilateral moment, use the occasion to plead for a golf course is not only disappointing but telling. Of all the investments he could have championed, including those that build factories, power tech hubs, fund vocational training, or stimulate agro-industrial growth, he chose leisure over labour, turf over tools. Golf is not the future the Senegalese youth marched for. It is difficult not to read his request as symbolic: an appeal not for sustainable development, but for prestige cloaked in links and fairways, sand traps and putting greens. A vision of Senegal where the young and unemployed citizens who imagined a different dawn would become caddies and buggy drivers under the blazing Sahelian sun, ferrying the clubs of foreign tourists is certainly not the vision the youths surrendered their lives for. But, a country that fought for change cannot be sustained by spectacle. Leadership, especially one born of youthful struggle, must rise above the temptation of ornamental investments. The real green Senegal needs isn’t manicured fairways, it’s fertile economic opportunity.

    Regardless, the Trump-Boakai moment captured everything that is wrong with African leadership in the 21st century. Everything that remains broken about post-colonial consciousness. And everything that still stinks in the corridors of foreign diplomacy.

    Here, I return to the question itself.

    “Such good English…”

    Trump’s statement, in its full ignorance, reveals something deeply rooted in the Western psyche. The inability, or refusal, to accept African sophistication unless it is filtered through European-American norms. English fluency becomes an achievement for an African, not a basic civic attribute. Like a dog that has learned to walk on two legs, the African is congratulated not for being intelligent or articulate; but for being surprisingly so. Here is the subtle bigotry that colonialism taught the West to internalise: that Africans are children of Babel, speaking in tongues and unfit for civil discourse, unless trained. The notion that any elegance, eloquence, or sophistication must be the result of exposure to Western values. Never innate. Never cultural. Never home-grown.

    Yet, even more galling than Trump’s remark was the Liberian President’s response. He should have been offended, or at least, diplomatically assertive. He should have reminded Trump that Liberia is an English-speaking country founded by freed African-American slaves. That its Constitution and institutions bear American fingerprints. That the flag of Liberia waves with a single white star against stripes drawn from the U.S. flag. That speaking English in Liberia is as natural as breathing.

    But, no. Boakai bowed. In that bow, he betrayed Africans. In that nod, he shrunk his office. He forgot the weight of the presidency. He forgot the millions of Liberians whose dignity he represents. And he forgot, most importantly, that African leaders must now speak not only as citizens of their nations, but as the voice of a continent long misrepresented and misunderstood. President Boakai became the embodiment of the “House Negro” Malcolm X described in his fiery speeches. Malcolm’s House Negro metaphor is what it is: the “House Negro” who lives in the master’s house. He eats the master’s leftovers. He wears the master’s clothes. And when the master falls sick, he asks, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” He loves the master more than he loves himself. That was the image that the Liberian President evoked with his reply. Not a partner. Not equal. Not a leader. But a grateful servant in the White Man’s house.

    This isn’t merely about one President and one moment. It is about a pattern. A chronic crisis of leadership in Africa. A ridiculous helplessness passed down through generations of post-independence elites who still bow to foreign powers. Our leaders seek validation, not partnership. They smile too quickly, nod too eagerly, and apologise when they should assert. They crave photo-ops with Western presidents more than they pursue meaningful outcomes for their people. The handshake becomes more valuable than trade deals. The state dinner more important than school funding. It is the politics of inferiority. Wrapped in Western suits, our leaders walk into foreign capitals unsure whether they belong. And because they do not believe in their own equality, neither do their hosts. The tragedy is that Liberia, of all countries, should have known better. Liberia’s founding is an anomaly in African history. Established by the American Colonisation Society in the 19th century for freed Black slaves, Liberia has always been tethered to the United States. Its capital, Monrovia, is named after a U.S. president. Its political and legal systems mirror those of the U.S. If any country should not be asked, “Where did you learn to speak English?”, it is Liberia.

    So, the ignorance of Trump was not only an insult, it was a statement of just how forgotten Africa remains in the imagination of the Western world. Even those countries with deep historical ties are reduced to caricature of the linguistically exotic. And unfortunately, too often, their leaders reinforce that caricature.

    How different things could be. What if the President had smiled and responded, “Mr. President, Liberia was founded by African-Americans. English is the language of our Constitution. Your nation helped shape our republic. So, I should be asking you, where did you learn to speak so beautifully?” That would have turned the moment into dignity. Into assertion. Into a quiet reminder that African nations are not guests in world affairs. They are equals.

    Instead, something else came to the limelight: the hollowness of diplomacy when it is not backed by self-respect. The collapse of historical memory. A leader who, in trying to please, diminished the office he holds. And Africans were thus reminded again that the worst of colonialism isn’t in the past. It lives on, in minds, in gestures, in words unspoken, and bows uncalled for. Africa doesn’t need leaders who seek to be liked. It needs leaders who know history. Leaders who speak with pride. Leaders who challenge ignorance with quiet firmness. Leaders who carry the continent on their shoulders when they step into global arenas.

    The time for doffing hats and nodding like the agama lizard is over. It is time for standing tall. For reclaiming the narratives. For teaching even the most powerful that African states are not curiosities. They are nations. With languages, with histories, with pride.

    If African Presidents forget that, then the shame isn’t Trump’s alone.

    It is ours, as Africans.

    Leaders like Boakai and Diomaye Faye represent Africa. And Africans must demand better from them.

  • Africa Is a Cemetery for Africans

    Africa Is a Cemetery for Africans

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    The phrase, “Africa is a cemetery for Africans,” falsely credited to Vladimir Putin, has long taken a meaning that goes beyond the dubiety of its source. But, whoever couched it and pushed it into the virtual space, acquiring its virality in the process, must have seen further than most of us. It isn’t just a phrase about the continent’s history of slavery, war, famine and the brutality of tyrannical rulers. It isn’t even just about the millions who die needlessly from hunger or curable diseases. It is, more sharply, a commentary on the kind of men who govern the continent. Men who live off their people and die in lands far away from them. Men who snatch the people’s hope, supplanting it with indignity, and burying their future.

    To call Africa a cemetery is to point fingers at the power-holders who turn statehouses into slaughterhouses. At men who transform democracy into dictatorship, and public trust into private holdings. It is to hold the mirror up to the likes of Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who ruled the Central African Republic like a butcher, crowned himself emperor in a lavish ceremony modelled after Napoleon, then died quietly in exile. Or Paul Biya of Cameroon, who has ruled from Geneva’s five-star hotels longer than from his country’s capital in Yaoundé. Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Edgar Lungu of Zambia, and our own Umaru Yar’Adua and Muhammadu Buhari. These men, whose names merely make up one half of the cycle of rulers, ran their countries into the ground and found their final comforts abroad. And the other half of the cycle is squared by current rulers who not only have ruined what is left and are making weekly and monthly detours to foreign lands as medical tourists. President Tinubu are you there?

    It is a tragedy. A continent that raised these men must now bury them in soils they once betrayed. They left in luxury. They returned in caskets. In many ways, these rulers are a symbol of something far more enduring and sinister. They represent a political culture that rewards oppression and celebrates impunity. In their hands, power isn’t a tool for service, it is an instrument of self-preservation. Here, governance becomes nothing more than the extraction of value from the state to feed a narrow circle of cronies. The people? Forgotten. Their suffering? Just background noise to the wailing of sirens and the clinking of champagne glasses at state dinners.

    The facts have been consistently laid bare in the public space. Let’s recall a few here. African presidents are some of the most travelled in the world. Not for diplomatic shuttles; but for healthcare. They build no functioning hospitals at home, but they travel to London, Paris, Berlin and Dubai for treatment. They abandon their people in crowded and understaffed clinics, but they fly first-class overseas to seek the best medical attention money can buy. And when their bodies fail them, as all bodies must, they breathe their last far from the people they ruled. Far from the streets they never fixed. Far from the schools they underfunded. Far from the hospitals they refused to equip.

    What else can one call it but medical tourism, the grim betrayal dressed as privilege? The brutal irony lies in this: men who, in life, denied their citizens the dignity of basic healthcare, now claim in death the full embrace of global medical excellence. It is a perverse reward system, where rulers who left their nations gasping for breath are themselves intubated in sterile wards abroad. Since the days of Bokassa, Banda, and Nyerere, whose memories now live mostly in footnotes and faded eulogies, a new figure has emerged to personify this legacy of abandonment. Buhari. His memory stands today as the emblem of that cold, clinical disregard. He will forever remain the poster child of the paradox: a ruler absent from his people in sickness, yet ever-present in their sufferings. In his eight years in power, he spent over 200 days in London receiving medical treatment. No one knew the nature of his ailment. No one knew the cost. He never spoke of it. But the planes flew, and the presidential entourage never grew smaller. At home, doctors were going,  coming, and going on strikes – in that endless cycle of going. Patients were dying. Hospitals were gasping for life support. But the president was always in the UK, wrapped in the quiet of Harley Street clinics. When he eventually left office, he slipped out of the country again, reportedly for medical treatment. He died there. In a land not his.

    What kind of man does that? What kind of ruler spends more time receiving treatment abroad than fixing what’s broken at home?

    This is the paradox: they die abroad. But they are always buried here. They want our earth, but not our air. Our soil, but not our service. They want the glory of being mourned by the people they abandoned. State burials, public holidays, military salutes and obsequious rituals designed to lend dignity to the undignified. Even in death, they take from the people. But, come to think about it, which country buries its own betrayal with such fanfare? Nigeria. There’s a point to note just as well about a good number of these rulers who die nameless deaths in luxurious suites abroad. Their final breaths are heard not by the nurses in their own public hospitals, but by foreigners whose names their citizens will never know. Then, after death, the surreal drama begins: the flag-draped coffins, the sorrowful national broadcasts, the endless condolence registers. The body returns. But the damage remains.

    The story always morphs into a drama that repeats itself. Over and over. New rulers emerge, promising change. Promising health reforms. Promising to stay at home. But in time, the lure of the nanny-state; the state that pampers and provides for their every private need draws them in. They forget the people. They remember only their pleasures. Governance in Africa, to these men, is not duty. It is privilege. The State becomes the nursemaid. It feeds them, bathes them, tucks them into presidential suites, and sends their children abroad to elite schools. It handles their birthdays and bankrolls their funerals. Even in retirement, the State remains their slave.

    This is what all Africans must call out. This nannyhood. This warped conception of public office as a private inheritance. This sucking of the breast of the nation until it runs dry. There is no nobility in dying abroad, far from the people you led. No honour in returning as a cargo on a presidential jet. No dignity in a life that denied others theirs. Yet, how many more must we watch go this route? How many more African leaders will fail to understand that leadership is not about luxury? That power is not about self-protection?

    Africans know what good governance looks like. They see it in countries that invest in their people, in their institutions, in their futures. They see it in leaders who die among their people, not above them. But Africa has been denied this reality for too long. Too many of its rulers rule like monarchs and flee like fugitives. Their names decorate airport lounges and stadiums. But their legacies rot in the ruins they left behind.

    Africa needs a new kind of leadership. One that sees the presidency not as an escape, but as a service. One that understands that a hospital bed in Lagos is worth more than a thousand hospital visits to London. That education for all is better than scholarships for the few. That the real measure of leadership is not in miles travelled, but lives touched. Until then, the cemetery metaphor remains. And the burials will continue. Not just of bodies. But of dreams. Africa deserves more than being the final resting place for men who ruined it. Africa deserves leaders who will live for her, suffer for her, and if they must, die with it. Not in exile. Not in a foreign suite. But on the soil they swore to serve.

    That, perhaps, is how Africa must escape the cemetery.

  • Nigeria’s Ruling Class and the Collapse of Decency

    Nigeria’s Ruling Class and the Collapse of Decency

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    In a country starved of dignity, the conduct of members of the political class becomes akin to the conduct of wayward sailors staggering on the deck of a sinking ship. Call it the Titanic. They stagger through public spaces, like the character, Juda Pesa, the self-proclaimed market philosopher in the Kenyan writer, Meja Mwangi’s novel, ‘Striving for the Wind’, who, while heavily inebriated, staggers and lectures his fellow villagers in the market square of Kambi, their tongues loosed by hubris, their minds empty of ideas, and their mouths brimming with insults.

    What ordinarily should be spaces for sober public discourses have become arenas of farce, disrespect, and sheer moral bankruptcy.

    Take, for instance, the appalling behaviour of Clement Jimbo, a member of the House of Representatives from Akwa Ibom State. Last week, he took to the social media and desecrated it. In a misguided attempt to attack the newly proposed coalition party, the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Jimbo likened its fate to that of the ADC airline that crashed into the Lagos lagoon many years ago. In doing so, he not only revealed a stunning lack of emotional intelligence, but also insulted the memory of those who perished in that national tragedy. Such a comparison is not just insensitive; it is utterly inhumane. It reflects the deepening rot within a political class that sees human suffering as a metaphor to win cheap political points. It was neither a slip of tongue nor the exaggeration of a man caught in his own rhetorical flourish. It was deliberate. And it was cruel. Disgraceful. Jimbo’s words betray a disturbing disregard for the solemnity of human life and the rights of association and assembly guaranteed by the Constitution. For what is the ADC coalition but a constitutional expression of political will? In mocking it with the imagery of death, Jimbo abandoned reason, embraced the vulgar and displayed bitter animus. No man, and no less an elected representative, with a sober mind, would write such a nonsense.

    But Jimbo is not alone in this descent.

    Please, welcome the former Governor of Rivers State and current FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, who, on his own part, has since embarked on a media roadshow of abuse and puffery. Like a man possessed by the ghost of Dionysus, he spares no one. His language, coarse. Elder statesmen who should be honoured are dragged into the portorportor of his invectives. Colleagues are treated as some objects of oddity. Wike’s verbal outbursts are not only unbecoming, they are offensive. They reflect a broader cultural decline where the values of restraint, humility, and honour have been replaced by noise and braggadocio. His public tantrums are not those of a statesman. They are the antics of a man too drunk on power to distinguish office from the theatrical circus. On this point alone, the late French thinker, Guy Debord was right when he described those, intoxicated by their authority, who turn power to a spectacle, mediated by performances that reduce governance to a public circus. Unfortunately, brilliant as Debord was, his life, shaped by heavy drinking, reflected what he critiqued, suggesting a definitive parallel to the self-destructive intoxication of power that was the oeuvre of his scholarship.

    Ours has become the republic of the vulgar. Our rulers have normalised vulgarity and the kind of rulership that promotes staged circuses over substance. Rulers now speak before thinking. Their followers cheer, not for the wisdom in their words, but for the damage done to perceived enemies. There is no decorum. No civility. No depth. Only spectacle. What is worse is that this malaise is not confined to individual outbursts. It has become commonplace. From legislative chambers, social media, to press conferences, from campaign rallies to the marketplace, public communication has been stripped of thoughtfulness and replaced with buffoonery. Public discourses have collapsed under the weights of ego and idiocy. This is no accident. It is the consequence of a country that no longer rewards intellect or insists on virtue in governance. Today, political office is often the reward of wealth without work, noise without nuance, ambition without direction. Men and women who should never be entrusted with the responsibility of representing constituencies find themselves in charge of states. Those who should be in motor parks soliciting passengers for taxi drivers are making laws. Those who should be practitioners of virtue have instead become performers on the stage of vice.

    The result is a tragic comedy. Ours, a country of famed thinkers and scholars, now finds itself led by jesters. A country that once inspired the continent with the intellect of its statesmen is now mocked by the vacuity of its present custodians. Our rulers do not read. They do not listen. They do not reflect. They hurl words the way savages hurl stones. Blindly and destructively. Aristotle, in his reflections on ethics and politics, reminds us of Eudaimonia and the idea of human flourishing through virtue. Leadership, he argued, should strive towards the good life, a life rooted in moral excellence. But our rulers appear to inhabit a different moral universe; one in which the basest instincts are rewarded, and vulgarity is taken as strength.

    But, this is not just a problem with bad manners. Or of rulers or the rest of us behaving badly. It is a problem of ethics. When rulers lose the capacity for shame, the republic suffers. When elected public officials dance naked in the marketplace of ideas, citizens lose faith. When the elites speak like urchins, then what hope remains for street hawkers? Or for children coming after them? Yet, our citizens must ask: How did their country get here? How did men of such hollowness rise to such prominence? The answers lie partly in the decay of our civic institutions, in the ghettoisation of democracy, in the commodification of politics, and in the retreats of citizens from moral engagement. When elections are bought or stolen, not won; when godfathers select, not the voters electing their representatives; when loyalty to power replaces loyalty to principle, this type of rulership emerges.

    All is not lost. No country weeps forever over its losses. It can recover. And it does recover what it loses. But recovery demands courage. It demands that citizens cease to excuse bad behaviour from leaders. It demands that voters look beyond ethnic and party lines. It demands that young people, women, professionals, and thinkers enter the arena, not with the weapons of insult, but with virtue, intellect, service, and vision.

    Today’s rulers may act like drunken sailors, but they do not represent the totality of who the citizens truly are. They are a symptom of our collective complacency. If our country is to correct this course, it must recenter its values and reimagine its politics. It is not enough to pity these men of Brobdingnag. It is not enough to laugh at their tantrums. Citizens must demand better. Citizens must rebuild the moral spine of their national life. They must raise the ethical bar. Leadership is not the theatre of the absurd. It is a responsibility. It requires the mastery of the finesse of governance, empathy, and restraint. A country doesn’t achieve greatness or rise above the pedestrian through the actions of straw men and women; but by the character of those it entrusts with power.

    The time to restore dignity is now.

    As virtuous citizens sound the resonant bugle of conscience, summoning the wayward sailors of state back to the shore of reason and rectitude, our country must steady its helm and chart a new course of moral clarity and purpose across the calm waters of virtue and public decency, while it unyields to the tempests that may come.

    A word is enough for the wise.

  • Africa’s Ethnic Diversity and the Search for a Home-Grown Democracy

    Africa’s Ethnic Diversity and the Search for a Home-Grown Democracy

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    I must begin with a confession. I write two columns weekly. One for this magazine and the other for the People’s Gazette. After finishing my piece for the People’s Gazette, I found myself staring into that graveyard of silence familiar to writers: the sudden and barren wasteland of the mind, the dreaded place called writer’s block. My Muse had packed her bags. Without a whisper. Without a rustle of inspiration. Perhaps, as the GenZs say with half a chuckle and half a fear, my village people had finally located me. So, I resolved not to place my fingers on the keyboard this week; and to retreat in quiet surrender to emptiness. But fate, or perhaps the gods of public engagement, had other plans for me.

    I posted a short prelude to my other column on Facebook; just a few lines excerpted from my other column. It elicited reactions. But one reaction in particular arrested me. It came from my dear friend and Nigeria’s former Ambassador to Guinea-Bissau, John Usanga. His words were warm, but they carried a troubling question, foregrounded by that kind of humility that makes one pause and think: “I love your write-up, great comrade! But my problem is this: Given that Africa – and I mean no disrespect to us as a people – is tribal in composition, what would be the proper home-grown democratic structure that will accommodate the diversity of ethnic groups in Africa to the satisfaction of all Africans?” His question haunted me. It tugged at my conscience. It lingered, even as I told myself I had nothing more to say this week. So here I am, struggling still with the Muse who has refused to return, but compelled to respond to a question too important to ignore. For at the heart of it lies Africa’s oldest dilemma: how to reconcile her many tongues, her many nations, her many peoples, into a shared political life that is just, inclusive, and truly democratic.

    Before I venture into the heart of the matter, a brief detour is necessary as an interrogation of Ambassador Usanga’s use of the phrase, “tribal in composition.” Though likely used in good faith, the phrase carries a heavy historical burden. It echoes the vocabulary of early sociologists and anthropologists like Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Malinowski whose positions were tainted by racist prejudices. In their writings, Africa’s ethnic nations were flattened into “tribes”; a term that became the shorthand for the primitive, the pre-political, the undeveloped. These so-called “tribes” were not seen as evolving cultures with histories, institutions, and systems of governance. They were imagined as static relics of humanity’s past that were exotic, chaotic, and in need of external order. The description may have served colonialism, but it does violence to the richness of African identities. To call African nations “tribal” is not simply to misname them; it is to diminish them. It is to cast them outside the realm of the modern. And that, let it be said plainly, is racist.

    Africa’s nations are complex. They are multi-layered. They are diverse. They are dynamic. They are not “tribes” in the sense of the colonial. To continue to describe them as such is to remain trapped in that colonial imagination.

    Now, I return to the main themes of this piece.

    In 1957, as Britain’s colonial project began to collapse, the Colonial Office in London released a troubling Report. Democracy, it stated, would not travel well in the colonies, especially in Nigeria. Its reason? Widespread poverty. Ignorance. And, in more guarded colonial-speak, the “tribal” character of the Nigerian.

    It was a cold dismissal. A quiet warning that democracy, imported wholesale, would break under the weight of ethnic diversity. The Report wasn’t entirely wrong. It was, however, short-sighted. The late Claude Ake, the renowned Nigerian political economist, would later put it more clearly. In his book, The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa, Ake wrote that democratisation must precede democracy. In effect, he meant that democracy cannot exist without it being practised. It cannot take root in an environment where it is not nurtured. It cannot be wished into being. Today, nearly 70 years since that colonial report, Africa still struggles with democracy. The question remains: what form of democracy can truly work for Africa? One that respects the continent’s ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. One that Africans can call their own.

    This isn’t a question plucked from the sheaf of the abstract. It goes to the heart of Africa’s failures and its hopes. Across the continent, post-independence governments inherited the Western liberal model. Parliaments. Presidents. Political parties. Constitutions. They adopted Westphalian and European legal systems and bureaucracies. But they did not dismantle the colonial state, as Professor Chidi Odinkalu argued recently at a webinar. Nor did they adapt these systems to the realities of the continent. In many cases, they simply exchanged white rulers for black elites. Or they simply masked their black skin with white masks- with apologies to Frantz Fanon.

    The result? Electoral violence. Ethnic competitions. Winner-takes-all politics. Fragile institutions. Military coups. The problem isn’t that democracy is foreign. The problem is that African societies are structured differently. Identity is local before it is national. People trust their kin before they trust the state. Allegiance to clan, ethnicity, and religion runs deep. This is not inherently bad. Diversity is not Africa’s curse. It is the character of those who run the state that implicates the operationalisation of democracy in terrible ways. But when the operators ignore the essential character of representation of democracy, it leads to conflict. When states impose uniformity, people resist the imposition in many conflictual ways. When political systems fail to give space to different groups, people feel excluded.

    So, what is to be done?

    First, we must accept that Africa cannot copy and paste democracy. We cannot take the American presidential model or the British Westminster system and expect it to thrive in our societies. We need to build democracy from the ground up. Based on our own histories. Based on our own realities.

    Perhaps, a hark to the past will help provide some clarity.

    Before the advent of European colonialism, African societies governed themselves. Many had systems of consensus. Kings and chiefs ruled, but often in consultation with the people. These governance systems were participatory. They were inclusive. They recognised diversity. Modern democracy must learn from these traditions. It must be rooted in African social structures.

    Second, we need to embrace federalism. True federalism. Not in name, but in substance. Many African countries are artificial states, with colonial borders. The colonialists bundled together dozens, even hundreds, of ethnic groups; and expected them to coexist under a centralised government that has turned out unrealistic. The unitary model has failed in places like Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A genuine federal system allows communities to govern themselves while remaining part of the national framework. It provides autonomy. It reduces ethnic tension. It encourages participation. Take Nigeria, for instance. With close to 600 ethnic groups, its problems are partly structural. The current quasi-federal system concentrates too much power at the centre. It breeds resentment and unhealthy competition. A restructured federation that returns power to the regions may offer better stability.

    Third, Africa needs inclusive institutions that must reflect the plural character of society. Power must be shared. Representation must be guaranteed. This goes beyond ethnic balancing. It means building systems that represent every voice. Minority protections must be enshrined in the basic law.

    My position doesn’t mean that the past must be romanticised. Some traditional systems are patriarchal or discriminatory. But a hybrid of modern state institutions working alongside reformed traditional authorities can enhance legitimacy. Rwanda’s Gacaca courts offer one such example. Though controversial, they blended customary law and community justice to address post-genocide reconciliation and enthroned restorative justice. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is another example. Though not perfect, it reflected Ubuntu.

    Fourth, democracy must be localised. Too often, elections are national rituals, far removed from ordinary people. Controlled by money. Captured by elites. But real democracy starts at the local level. In the ward. The village. The township. When people feel they have a say in their everyday governance, democracy begins to make sense. Democracy is a verb; people learn democracy by doing democracy.

    But we must also go deeper. Political education is key. People must understand that democracy is not just about voting. It is about dialogue. Debate. Compromise. More importantly, democracy cannot thrive on empty stomachs. The Colonial Office was partly right: poverty undermines democracy. So does unemployment. Illiteracy. Disease. People who are desperate do not care for ballots. They care for bread. Building home-grown democracy requires investing in people. Education. Health. Jobs. Infrastructure. These are not luxuries. They are necessities. When people are empowered, they can participate fully in governance. When citizens are informed, they can hold their leaders accountable.

    Across Africa, the civic space and freedoms are under attack. Governments shut down the internet. Arrest critics. Clamp down on protests. But history shows that democracy often comes from below.

    In 2020, Nigerian youths mobilised for #EndSARS. In 2023, Senegalese students led demonstrations for justice. Last week, Kenyans protested new taxes and forced their government to retreat. The Togolese weren’t left out. These are signs of democratic awakening. Young Africans are no longer waiting for perfect systems. They are demanding accountability. They are building platforms. They are using technology to organise and mobilise. They are showing that democracy is not a concession. It is a fight borne out of courage of conviction. But, in the end, the question isn’t whether Africa is fit for democracy. The question is whether democracy can be made fit for Africa.

    And the answer is yes.

    But it will not come through mimicry. It will come through imagination and struggle. Through bold reforms. Through the reforms of the African mindsets. Through the reinvention of local traditions. Through federal structures. Through inclusive governance. A home-grown African democracy must rise from the soil of the continent. It must speak its languages. Honour its cultures. Embrace its complexities. Only then can democracy take root. Only then can it flourish. No more.

  • Tinubu and The Bad Roads Not Taken

    Tinubu and The Bad Roads Not Taken

    -By Abdul Mahmud

    “I couldn’t reach Yelawata in Benue State due to bad roads”, said President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. This sentence captures the spirit of Tinubu’s presidency. Aloof. Detached. Cold. Inconsiderate. Leadership without compassion. Governance without sacrifice. Authority without empathy. How did Mandela once describe compassion? He said, “Our human compassion binds us the one to the other, not in pity or patronisingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.” In those words lie the moral clarity of leadership: to feel with others, and to act in ways that dignify their pain. But in the hour when the people of Benue cried out beneath the weight of their grief, when blood soaked their soil and hope withered on parched lips, President Tinubu neither spoke with the tenderness the moment demanded nor did he offer comfort. Instead, he stood, quartered only to the state-organised gyre, where falcons heeded the call of the lying falconer while unburdened by the anguish of the listeners, unmoved by the cries circling beneath his silence.

    I return to the scene of the crime. Yelawata, in Benue State, is soaked in blood. Again. Victims of another attack. Not the first in the state. Sadly, not likely the last. Men butchered. Women slaughtered. Children silenced by bullets and machetes. Bodies burnt. Farmers buried in shallow graves. A people under siege, paying with their lives for living on ancestral land. And the President? He dilly-dallied like Nero until he was forced out of Aso Rock. When he eventually turned up in Benue State, he didn’t go to Yelawata.

    Why? The roads were bad.

    That excuse tells us everything. It tells us Tinubu doesn’t see governance as a sacrifice. It tells us he sees power as comfort, not service. That he is more concerned with personal convenience than national grief. That to him, bad roads are a reason not to visit, not a call to action. The road to Yelwata was too rough for his usual long motorcade. But is the road to governance not paved with sacrifice? A president should go where pain is deepest. He should stand with the broken. Weep with the grieving. Reassure the fearful. But Tinubu stayed away.  He dispatched men like Sunday Dare and Bayo Onanuga; envoys who, upon arrival, shielded their nostrils with cupped palms, as though the stench of death and despair in Yelawata were too profane for their privileged lungs. They came not to mourn, but to manage optics; not to grieve with the grieving, but to distance themselves from the human wreckage their master could not bear to face. He sent words instead of presence. He chose distance over duty.

    What is the worth of a ruler who cannot be troubled by the suffering of his people? Presidents do not have the luxury of comfort. They are servants, not absolute monarchs. They must lead from the front, even through valleys of blood. When George W. Bush visited Ground Zero after 9/11, he climbed the rubble. When Barack Obama went to Newtown after the school shooting, he wept with the parents. When Nelson Mandela walked into the ruins of apartheid violence, he held grieving mothers and swore it would never happen again.

    Tinubu avoided Yelawata. Then insulted the people. He claimed the killings were reprisal attacks. Without evidence. Without tact. Without truth. He invariably blamed the victims. He called them the culprits. He rewrote a genocide into justification. And when he finally arrived Makurdi, it was under pressure. Nigerians had cried. Protested. Shamed him into action. So, he adjusted his diary.

    That adjustment came too late. In Makurdi, school children were drenched by rain, lined up to wave flags at a president who couldn’t be bothered to dry their tears. In front of the Tor Tiv, the King of the Tiv, Tinubu’s lies crumbled. The monarch told him to his face: “These are not reprisals. They are genocidal. They aim to wipe out our people.” It was a moment of truth. The kind only kings and corpses can speak. Tinubu had no answer. After the Royal smack-down, he chose not to make it to Yelawata. He contrived an excuse: the roads were not motorable. A helicopter couldn’t be arranged. A convoy couldn’t roll. A man who uses presidential jets to vacation in France; and who is billed for luxurious holidays in the sunshine of Saint Lucia couldn’t find a way to reach grieving Nigerians at home.

    Now, the question many are eager to ask: What does it cost to show empathy? What does it take to be present in pain? In Tinubu’s case, apparently too much. This presidency has reduced governance to showmanship. It is all optics, no substance. Press releases instead of policies. Travel photographs instead of action. Ceremonies instead of compassion. Tinubu has become a distant figure. A president of Abuja, not of Nigeria. He rules from marble offices, not the muddy fields of the countryside. From Lagos business tables, not farming communities in Benue. He governs through statements, not presence. Through silence, not sympathy. The tragedy of this moment isn’t just the deaths in Yelawata. It is the erosion of leadership. It is about a man who sees the office of president as the crowning of a personal ambition, not a platform for national healing. A man who imagines governance is a reward, not a responsibility. This needs to be put out more plainly: this is not leadership. This is negligence. Tinubu’s refusal to visit the scene of the carnage, his false statements about the cause and his delay in responding to the tragedy that befell our country all points to a leader who doesn’t feel the country’s pain. One who doesn’t carry the emotional weight of his office.

    What happened in Benue is part of a pattern.

    Tinubu’s second year in office has been marked by detachment. Nigerians groan under inflation. Food is unaffordable. Electricity is a myth. Fuel prices break the backs of ordinary citizens. Unlike the back David Diop so powerfully evoked in his acclaimed poem, Africa, unbent, “that never breaks under the weight of humiliation”. The backs of ordinary citizens stoop beneath the burden of betrayal. Yet the president travels. Dines. Celebrates. Appoints cronies. Signs inflated budgets. Adds more burden to weary citizens. There is no compassion in his policies. No empathy in his speeches. No connection in his actions. A caring ruler would reduce his convoys. Tinubu expanded them. A president with empathy would cut down waste. Tinubu has increased waste. A ruler in tune with citizens would share in their sufferings. Tinubu asks them to “tighten belts” while he loosens his.

    To govern a country requires moral courage. Tinubu’s response to national pain is indifference. His answer to cries is silence. His reaction to mass murder is a shrug. Then, where lies the heart of his rulership? Not in Benue. Not in Zamfara. Not in Plateau. Not in the IDP camps. Not in the shanties. Not in the markets. The heart of this government beats only for the rich, the powerful, and his coterie of handlers. For friends in Lagos. For loyalists in government houses. For image-makers. Not for the rest of us.

    The presidency should be the conscience of the nation. Under Tinubu, it has become a billboard. A brand. A throne without soul. It is not just his failure to visit Yelawata that is tragic. It is the symbolism of it. It tells the story of a man who doesn’t understand the weight of grief. Who doesn’t see the power of presence. Who thinks governance is about roads, not relationships. Even if the roads were bad, there were other options. Helicopters. Courage. Love. Anything but absence. But he chose to stay away, which speaks volumes. It says, “You are on your own”, O-YO! “You are not worth the trouble.” It says, “Your pain is inconvenient.” It says, “I’ll mourn you from a distance.” A president who cannot brave bad roads for his people cannot lead them through harder paths. But, here is the deeper tragedy: the road to Yelawata isn’t the only one Tinubu refused to travel. He has refused the road of humility. Of compassion. Of moral leadership. He has chosen another path; the road of entitlement, indulgence, and imperial comfort.

    Our country is ruled by a man who cannot be disturbed. But, our country is disturbing. It cries out from every state. It begs for presence. For proximity. For a ruler who shows up. In person. Not by proxy. Until that happens, we will continue to drift.

    Governance is not about the ease of travel. It is about the urgency of compassion. It is not about what is motorable. It is about what is moral. Tinubu failed this test. In the hour of grief, he was absent. In the moment of truth, he deflected. In the face of pain, he excused. He cannot build our country from behind the presidential walls. He must descend his Olympian height. Step into our blood-soaked earth. Walk with the wounded. Cry with the survivors. Stand with the forgotten.

    Or step aside. Our country deserves more. Being the president shouldn’t be taken as a title, with all the pomp to boot. It is a task. It is not the celebration of personal ambition. It is the surrender of comfort for the sake of others. It is not about dodging bad roads. It is about building better ones and still traveling the worst ones when duty calls. Until Tinubu understands this, he will remain a stranger to his office. A visitor in his own country. A ruler, not a leader.

    While he pretends that the tragedy in Benue is “an internecine clash of neighbours”, to quote my friend, Josephine Akioyamen, the people of Benue must dig in to defend themselves against the rampaging Fulani conquistadors, Yelawata will remember his indifference. Just as our country remembers. The world will not forget.