Nigeria Needs Safe Schools

 By Gordon Brown

Edinburgh—In the last few weeks, more than 300 children have been abducted from Nigerian schools in a new wave of kidnappings by terrorist groups hellbent on extorting money and spreading fear.

By now, the pattern is depressingly familiar. On the morning of November 17, gunmen broke into the dormitories of a girls’ secondary school in Maga, a town in the northwestern state of Kebbi, killing the vice-principal and abducting 25 students. Only days later, on November 21, assailants staged an early-morning attack on St. Mary’s, a co-ed Catholic school in Papiri, a town in the neighboring state of Niger.

It was first reported that 227 people were abducted, but that number has since risen to 303 students – between the ages of eight and 18 – and 12 teachers, surpassing the notorious mass abduction of 276 female students in Chibok in 2014.

Violence And The ‘Emilokan’ Presidency

 By Obi Nwakanma

It is no longer news that the current APC administration – the ‘Emilokan’ presidency of Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu – has no answers to the problems facing Nigeria. Bola Tinubu is in fact, out of his depths. He has not the actual training, the intellectual capacity, the visionary or rhetorical ability to move Nigeria forward. He is negotiating with terrorists.

*Tinubu

He is not only clueless – yes that word again that has come to haunt the APC and its supporters who first used it against Dr. Goodluck Jonathan – Tinubu is confused. He has no ideas, beyond his “Agbado solutions.” He is surrounded by the most incompetent people ever to be assembled on Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council. A cabinet of lightweights, who like the man Tinubu himself, are also mostly out of their depths.

Bola Tinubu And State Capture

 By Obi Nwakanma

I have made this point at various points in this column, that for a nation to claim “independence,” or legitimacy, it must have sovereign control of its state institutions.

*Tinubu

It should never be a transactional or “contract state.” Is Nigeria a sovereign state? I do not think so, because, currently, Nigeria does not seem in control of its sovereign institutions. As a nation, Nigeria is not governed by her leaders. It is under state capture. Those who parade themselves now as the leaders of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, are in fact, not answerable to the citizens of this republic.

Nigeria: Building A Nation Without Nationalists?

By Kayode Komolafe

While Nigeria marked the 57th Anniversary of her independence on Sunday one streak of the national mood was not explicit in the messages sent on the occasion. Here is the point: it is hardly fashionable anymore to wave the flag of Nigerian nationalism or defend the unity of the country as a matter of historical responsibility. The latest fad is that of championing ethnic, regional or religious interests at the huge expense of national integration and cohesion.

*President Buhari

The tragedy of the moment is simply that it used not be like this; a generation of Nigerian youths once made Nigerian nationalism their career. For example, the young men in the Zikist Movement proudly and selflessly fought in the spirit of Nigerian nationalism; they did not champion northern or southern interests. No, a century of British colonialism did not come an end on October 1, 1960 without a fight.

To be sure, there were no guerrilla fighters who went to the bush; but there were radical youths agitating in the cities. As the late Marxist historian, Bala Usman, used to put in his inimitable polemical fashion, the struggle for independence was for the nationhood of Nigeria and not for ethnic or regional divisions. In fact, 70 years ago, some of the young men were so immersed in the liberation of Africa such that Nigerian independence was expected to be the launching pad for the total liberation of the black people. It was not for nothing that the appellation of the chief inspirer of the young nationalists, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, was not “Zik of Onitsha” or even “Zik of Nigeria.”