It’s incredible how eight years have ended as a two-word parable: constituted authority. That’s what Governor Abiola Isiaka Ajimobi would be mostly remembered for – the epigram from his encounter with students of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. That episode was perhaps one of the most catastrophic PR disasters of Ajimobi’s eight-year tenure.
Browsing: Azu Ishiekwene
I woke up several times peeping for the first sign of dawn before my phone finally rang at 6:10am. A family friend who suspected we would be voting at the same place wanted to know if I was already at the booth because she couldn’t find it.
As the final results of last week’s presidential poll were released, three broad groups emerged: Those genuinely surprised that the Peoples Democratic Party candidate, Atiku Abubakar, lost; those in pretentious denial of his defeat; and those in a quandary because they hoped to profit from a stalemate.
Last week, when I described the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mahmood Yakubu, as one of the most frequently executed men on social media, I had no idea what was coming.
If you walk by sight you cannot help approaching Saturday’s presidential election with a heavy heart. The candidates of the two major parties, Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, have been presented in the worst light possible
These days Nigeria is treated as either the continent’s worst joke or the world’s laggard for democracy. From Nairobi to Brussels and from London to Washington, we’re getting lengthy lectures on how not to run a country. And we’re laughing them off and forwarding the messages.
At this rate, President Muhammadu Buhari may beat former military President General Ibrahim Babangida to the record of collecting the most abusive letters from a former president.
The first sign of chaos is the number of senior advocates of Nigeria who offered to take up the matter free of charge. Often, when you find that many senior lawyers falling over themselves to represent a client – usually a high-profile client – you can be sure that more than anything else, they’re in it for spite, drama and self-interest. Any claim of public interest must be taken with a healthy pinch of salt.
Get this straight: Atiku Abubakar will lose the presidential election on February 16. I’m not Rev. Father Ejike Mbaka or one of the tongue-in-cheek seers whose predictions you’ll be struggling to figure out after dropping your offering in the bag at midnight of December 31. I’ll say it the way it is, walking where angels fear to tread.
The general election in 51 days will be different from previous ones in nearly two decades in many ways. Money is one way. At this time in a “normal” election cycle, politicians would be in a rat race to outspend one another.
At the belated signing of the Peace Accord, for example, PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, was quite vocal on his fear that the election would be rigged.
Exaggeration is the most common strain of fever at election period. Politicians make voters – and the general public – believe that the world might end on ballot day, when in fact what they are playing for is their own survival.
Oyedepo does not have to like Buhari – and it’s obvious that he doesn’t. Which is fine. But a man of his stature and learning ought to know better than to inflict on church members and propagate publicly a piece of monstrous fiction which, frankly, discredits him
I didn’t want to write this week. It wasn’t writer’s block or the occasional frustration from sounding like a broken record. It was not the feeling of speaking to the Nigeria wall, either.
The APC senator representing Rivers South East Senatorial District, Magnus Abe, said the dictatorship of the Minister of Transport and Director General of the Buhari Campaign Organisation, Rotimi Amaechi, may hurt the party badly in the forthcoming elections.
But even from the more respectable versions, it is difficult not to come away with the impression that the photograph is symbolic of the growing feeling in the South East that after a long, harrowing spell in the wilderness, Ndigbo might well be on the verge of finding rest in the bosom of the PDP.
In recent times, forecasts about the outcome of the 2019 elections by the Economic Intelligence Unit of The Economist of London, and the United States Institute of Peace, have been hotly debated.
His appointment had been barely announced when some folks with very long memory of their unpleasant encounter with him in their earlier life stuck the knife in his back; they’ve been twisting it since.
When El-Rufai fights, he doesn’t use his size or pick an enemy in his weight class.
It was a memo from a certain school in Rajasthan, India, called Amity University. In the three-paragraph memo, the Registrar, Vishwadeepak Singh, a retired military officer, had given students a deadline of August 13 to get boyfriends or girlfriends.