Playing The 1998 Abacha Power Game In 2026

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

It was Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, the French critic, journalist, and novelist, who, in 1849, coined what has become an enduring proverb: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same. In matters of governance and power in Nigeria – military or civilian – nothing can be truer.

*Tinubu, Abacha

As editor of the Sunday Diet newspaper, I was in Maiduguri in April 1998, yes the selfsame Borno State capital that has become a killing field, to cover the national convention of the Grassroots Democratic Movement, GDM. Borno was the home state of Alhaji Gambo Lawan, the national chairman of the GDM, one of the five political associations that included the United Nigeria Congress Party, UNCP; Congress for National Consensus, CNC; Democratic Party of Nigeria, DPN; and the National Centre Party of Nigeria, NCPN, formally approved by the electoral umpire – National Election Commission of Nigeria, NECON – in September 1996 for the politics of that era.

If Sudan And Hong Kong Should Visit Nigeria Today

By Banji Ojewale

If Sudan and Hong Kong should visit Nigeria today, the world might not be in much shock at the outcome of the trip. I’m sure of two consequences.

First, we would be unprepared for them, despite the handwriting on the wall alerting us that we’ve been found wanting in the balances. In much of our post-independence history, we were never seen to be ready for events that came calling like a ‘‘thief in the night.’’ How do we handle nocturnal robbers? We don’t cuddle them. We cull them.

*Korean soldiers 

Secondly, flowing from the first, our leaders would misread the signs of the times and accord the strangers a most satanic, sanguinary and smoky reception. Ditto for the local ‘malcontents’ hosting them. Our leaders would chase them to the outermost and innermost parts of the land and mete out penalty outstripping their impudence that brought in Hong Kong and Sudan.