Azu Ishiekwene

When he made the last Independence Day speech of his first term, President Muhammadu Buhari might have been speaking only to his prep team and the recording crew. Not that Nigerians were not happy to mark another national holiday.

If the Peoples Democratic Party had its way, its candidate in Saturday’s governorship election in Osun State, Ademola Adeleke, would have been declared governor that day.

It seems MTN is never too far from the speed dial to trouble. Three years ago, the telco, which has the dominant share of the mobile telecoms market in Nigeria, was slammed with a $5.2 billion fine for failing to disconnect 5.1 million…

Governments, especially the executive arm, tend to forget that it is the rule of law that makes it possible, in the first place, to define what national security is. They think national security is what the man or woman in power says it is…

Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State is increasingly becoming the Rochas Okorocha of the South West. With very little effort, he might surpass the latter, the self-acclaimed exponent of iberiberism (an Igbo slang which roughly translates as…

What is it about us, Nigerians, that make others think they can take us for granted and get away with it? Two different recent news items got me thinking about how long we would be prepared to put up with the shenanigans of folks who think…

The Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, thinks he has found the medicine for public opinion: listen with blocked ears.

The pastor of the Household of God International Ministries, Reverend Chris Okotie, has asked the 68 political parties, especially the two major ones, to roll over and adopt him as their consensus candidate in next year’s presidential…

In Abuja, it came to light, again, that lawmakers who have been a thorn in the side of the public had, after seven months, passed a budget that would feed their greed by N31 million each, and increase the number of the suicidal and walking…

I still remember Lai Mohammed shelling PDP. The party was a band of thieves, a criminal enterprise with an incompetent captain at the helm, determined to drag the country down. Impunity and violence were the PDP’s official languages, while…

What our old and aged go through near the end, especially at the hands of families, only they can tell. Once when Goodall had a fall at home, he screamed and screamed for help and no one came for two days

The leadership of the Senate under Saraki has grown so paranoid about its tenure and security that it tends to see every disagreement as proof of rebellion

How a government whose single greatest promise was to fight corruption has been enmeshed in a fruitless argument over whether or not it is more corrupt than its predecessor is one of the most embarrassing legacies of the Buhari…

Buhari came close to this experience in a public way, lately. In December, his son, Yusuf – his only son – was involved in a bike accident that nearly claimed his life....Buhari and his wife, Aisha, visited the hospital a couple of times.…

The world is moving, unstoppably, towards a more open system, one that is not a respecter of tin gods – or goddesses. Politicians who would last are not those who fiddle with their tenure or those who game the system: it’ll be those with a…

I’m now in my Coomson season, wondering exactly what I’m doing here and whether I should not be going to Accra

Put it this way. It took Kachikwu three weeks after he made his first statement on December 14, promising to end the scarcity within 48 hours, and all the high-level promises that followed, to find out that the system was broken and there…

In a week when her husband was under the most severe attack in recent times for fiddling as widespread killings brought the country to its knees, praying for his intervention that would not come, Aisha’s retweet piled on Abuja’s…

President Buhari has promised justice, but it’s hard to believe him after watching that Saudi Arabia video. It’s hard to believe he’ll deliver justice after he told a delegation of Benue elders to his office to restrain “your people” and in…

He thinks that we should understand by now that he means well, that we should see the sorrow in his face and sense the pain in his heart.