politics

an image of oshiomhole hitting a home-run, with Monday Okpebholo carrying the flag, while Asue Ighodalo and Olumide Akpata lose

Home Run for Oshiomhole

In case you missed it, Senator Babafemi Ojudu shared a viral message last week: Asue Ighodalo was a member of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu transition committee after he was elected Lagos State governor in 1999. In another life, Ighodalo, a dyed-in-the-wool Lagos Boy, might have been on Tinubu’s side, as Obaseki once was. What politics can not divide does not exist

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Edo Polls

Edo Polls and the Famous Product Vendor

I guess that Obaseki’s style – not to mention his take-no-prisoner politics, a bad habit he may have inherited from his estranged promoter, Oshiomhole – may have further alienated him and reduced the chances of his candidate, Ighodalo, making significant inroads in the North. Prominent people in PDP who sheltered Obaseki from vagrancy in 2020 against whom he turned his back are waiting to take revenge. Will it be the triumph or perhaps the redemption of the product vendor? Will President Bola Ahmed Tinubu get his vindication four years after Obaseki’s campaign mocked him with, “Edo no bi Lagos?” Or will this be Obaseki’s chance to affirm himself as the new political force in Edo and shut down the production factory of the decorated lousy product vendor once and for all?

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photo mix of the governors of Kano, Plateau, Zamfara, Lagos, Bauchi, Abia, Ebonyi and Cross River with a backdrop of the supreme court

The Road to Thanksgiving

Jurisprudential jiggery pokery has a very long history in Nigeria, even though it wasn’t always rampant or brazen. It was with a heavy, tormented heart, for example, that Justice Fatai Atanda-Williams said the judgment of the Supreme Court in the famous case of Awolowo v Shagari in 1979 was never to be cited as precedent. Today, the Supreme Court has made so many conflicting and confusing judgments that even if it were to make exemptions it would find itself too entangled in the knot of its own self-inflicted misery to know where or how to start

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a photo of nyesom wike with arrows projecting towards him

The Trials of Nyesom Wike

Happening on Wike’s 56th birthday, it was the most unlikely birthday present from the government of Siminalayi Fubara…If Wike was good enough to carry the governor through the dark, difficult days of their trials together when some of the governor’s ardent supporters today didn’t know him from Adam, the governor should be the last person to hang his benefactor out to dry so quickly

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An image of outgoing Liberian President George Weah pointing stands out from a backdrop of african leaders

Weah’s New Jersey for A Troubled Continent

Weah was determined to launch an earlier presidential bid that may have disrupted Johnson’s presidency. Regional leaders fearing Liberia’s fragile state prevailed on him to wait. After watching bands of mostly jobless and potentially vulnerable rural youths fall under the spell of Weah’s star power, Nigeria’s president at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo, advised the former World Footballer of the Year to suspend his ambition and return to school

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a picture of atiku, tinubu and obi seated in front of a backdrop of the supreme court and Themis, the Greek goddess, who represents law, order, and justice

Atiku, Obi and the Road to Kilimanjaro

On a good day, it’s improbable that any of Abubakar’s or Obi’s lawyers would say, with a straight face, that they believe that the constitution created Abuja as an enclave of super voters. Even for a constitution widely criticised for its clutter, it would be taking a malicious lack of clarity too far to suggest that the writers meant that Abuja voters were greater than the rest of us. Not even in the US, famous for its ‘federational’ oddities, does the capital, Washington DC, hold an electoral veto vote over the other states. In fact, the whole point of the Electoral College is to equalise the states. Nigerian courts have also made this point repeatedly. But obviously, the election petition industry will stop at nothing to reinvent its growth, expansion, and prosperity

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