The SEDC will need protection from political extortion, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
When he presented his budget proposals for 2024 to Nigeria’s National Assembly, the first full year of appropriations under his presidency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu identified as his priorities human asset development, poverty reduction and fighting insecurity. Last week, his official spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, appeared to forget or renounce that policy direction, when he acknowledged […]
“One-party participatory democracy” by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
On 13 December 1972, Zambia’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, signed into law the Constitution (Amendment) Acts, numbers 3,4 and 5 ending the country’s First Republic and ushering in a new constitution for the country, which promised a “One-Party Participatory Democracy” under “one and only one party…., namely, the United National Independence Party (UNIP).”
The wages of presidential subterfuge
On the evening of 5 April 2012, the prime-time bulletin on the television news of the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), announced to the country that the president, Ngwazi Professor Bingu wa Mutharika, “had been taken ill and had been flown to South Africa for specialist treatment.”
An Anatomy of Parliamentary Sexploits, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
2025 has not been easy on Nigerians. The economy has looked far from bright; the weather has been suffocating; and cost of living has been stubbornly oppressive. With rising massacres in the Middle Belt, and Borno State in the north-east apparently losing ground to the nihilism of Boko Haram terror, violence remains unremitting. In the […]
Nigeria and the Fading Lights of Justice, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
As he settled in to deliver the judgment of the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on 2 April 2025, presiding judge, Wilfred Kpochi, felt obliged to get one ritual out of the way. Glancing left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues on the three-person tribunal to confirm that the judgment he […]
Sunday Jackson is a Victim of A Miscarriage of Justice, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Numan, the town that lends its name to one of the 21 Local Government Areas in Adamawa State in north-east Nigeria, is home to the Bwatiye (Bachama), a transnational identity group stretching into parts of Cameroon. Located in the basin of Benue River and one of its tributaries, River Taraba, Numan’s fecundlands play host to […]
Nasir el-Rufai: The bloodlust of a presidential wannabe, by Chidi Odinkalu
In the week in which former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai abandoned the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, to chart a different political trajectory with the Social Democratic Party, SDP, his son, Bashir, characteristically made it known that “Southern Kaduna residents will keep seeing sheghe if they continue to attack indigenous Fulani herdsmen.” Three things about […]
In Rivers State, A Supreme Iniquity? By Chidi Odinkalu
At the end of February 2025, Nigeria’s Supreme Court continued a tradition of afflicting the people of the territory of Rivers State with curious jurisprudence.
