By Adekunle Adekoya
On Wednesday, the national power grid managed by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, collapsed for the 11th time in 2024, leaving the country in complete blackout. Some people said that it wasn’t the 11th but the 12th time, on the average, a collapse of once a month.
Data from the National System Operator, NSO, showed that as of 2pm that day, none of Nigeria’s 26 power plants was on the grid.
By Ugoji Egbujo
Soon after independence, election rigging set the western region on fire and brought down the first republic. ‘Operation Wetie’ wasn’t just frustration and impatience; it was a rejection of the courts. In the second republic, malpractices returned to ruin elections’ credibility, and Baba Ajasin saw it better than others. Omoboriowo, who snatched victory from Baba, had to flee.
When that republic fell, the soldiers blamed their coming on economic hardship and rigged elections. The third republic didn’t last. Principal politicians, excluded, others were railroaded into an artificial dichotomy of two sterilised parties. Shorn of natural birth and passion and with a more transparent electoral procedure, the June 12 presidential election lacked edginess, fire and controversy. It didn’t precipitate confusion.
By Owei Lakemfa
My experience in highbrow Asokoro on Friday, January 19, 2024 was like a nightmare. I had an important appointment and I felt comfortable I was going to be some 40 minutes early. Then it happened: blocked roads in the narrow streets. That was when it dawned on me this was the day the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on gubernatorial elections in some eight states. Now, Asokoro is where the Governors have their lodges in the nation’s capital, and some with their supporters had blocked the roads.
I was, like many motorists, trapped, but just when I thought I had extricated myself, the worse happened: Nasarawa State Governor Abdullahi Sule and his supporters were celebrating further down, and the road was completely blocked. There was no escape. While they celebrated in Abuja, there were protests and bonfires in the state. At the end of the wild celebrations, Governor Sule told the press at the Presidential Villa that those protesting in his state were just “1,000 people (who) are protesting somewhere”.
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Since the Supreme Court reversed the Appeal Court judgements that sacked Kano State Governor, Kabiru Yusuf; Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State; and Zamfara’s Lawal Dauda, many Nigerians, characteristically, have been ululating about how the judiciary has redeemed itself. Those wishing to cut the apex court a bigger slack talk about how the Supreme Court has redeemed the image of the judiciary.
Some have even stretched the inane adulation by claiming, rather ludicrously, that the verdicts are a veritable proof of President Bola Tinubu’s democratic credentials because it must take the non-interference of the president for the judiciary, a supposedly independent arm of government, to do the needful.
By Olu Fasan
Professor Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first literature Nobel laureate, published his critically-acclaimed novel, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People On Earth, in September 2021. So, he probably didn’t have the 2023 presidential election and Bola Tinubu, who emerged president, in mind when he wrote the book. However, reading the novel, one gets the impression that Professor Soyinka foreshadowed the election and its aftermath.
In a post-publication interview with the Financial Times, Professor Soyinka said he wrote the book “to confront Nigeria with its true image”. Indeed, Sir Ben Okri, the recently knighted Nigerian-British writer, described the book as Soyinka’s “magnus opus on the state of his homeland”. Of course, when someone writes a novel, he or she has no control over how the reader interprets it, more so when the novel is verisimilitude, having an appearance of reality. Therefore, for me, Professor Soyinka’s novel provides a powerful framework for analysing the 2023 presidential election, the Supreme Court verdict and Tinubu.
By Chidi Odinkalu
In 1968, Stanislav Andrzejewski, the former Polish soldier and prisoner-of-war, who later founded the Sociology Department at the University of Reading in England, coined the word ‘kleptocracy”, which he defined as “a system of government [that] consists precisely of the practice of selling what the law forbids to sell.” He saw in the system of Nigeria’s First Republic, “the most perfect example of a kleptocracy” in which “power rested on the ability to bribe.”
By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa
Increasingly but alarmingly, it is gaining ground that Nigerians now believe that justice is for sale. This position seems to be gaining ground increasingly. Is it possible to buy justice? Is it true that some politicians have all manners of mobile injunctions already typed and prepared, stocked in their portfolios and they just bring them out to suit any occasion?
Can it be true that there are some judges who have been earmarked for such jobs as issuing out any order, injunction or judgment? Can it ever be said that parties before a court of law can know their fate even before the case starts?
By Olu Fasan
Last week, I put everything aside to watch the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, from start to finish! With rapt attention, I picked up the minutiae of the extremely detailed verdict. But after the 13-hour-long ruling, I was utterly despondent about the future of presidential elections in Nigeria.
Let me start with two general observations. First, the judges worked to a predetermined answer. Because they couldn’t bring themselves to invalidate the election of a sitting president, unprecedented in Nigeria, they found every reason to affirm Bola Tinubu’s election. Courts of first instance are fact-finding courts that seek to get to the bottom of a matter and do justice. But the PEPC used every conceivable procedural technicality to reject virtually all the facts and witnesses presented by Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar.
By Andy Ezeani
Let no one deceive anyone; the
processes and structure of democracy in Nigeria are presently in grave danger.
There is no exaggeration in talking of a democracy in intensive care unit (ICU)
at the moment. The danger is clear, present and escalating by the day.
Unless there is a quick, drastic
containment of the excesses that have seized the democratic process in the
country, no special gift of clairvoyance is needed to predict an imminent
debacle. Smothering the pervasive voices of discontent and disapproval at the
widening corrosive abuse of the system, as seem to be the strategy of the
powers that be, can last but for a short while.
By Olu Fasan
It is a truism that a country’s foreign policy is the reflection of its domestic circumstances. A country that faces huge economic, political and security crises at home would be foolhardy to prosecute a war abroad. Furthermore, a robust foreign policy depends on domestic support. Thus, it’s utterly reckless and dangerous for a president to take his country into a foreign war without the endorsement of the legislature and understanding of critical domestic constituencies! Yet, that’s what Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s new and sophomoric president, seems intent on doing in response to the military coup in Niger Republic.
Since the coup in July, which removed President Mohammed Bazoum from power and installed General Abdourahamane Tchiani as head of state, Tinubu has talked tough, vowing that “all means will be used to restore constitutional order in Niger”. Under his leadership as chairman of the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, the organisation gave the junta a week’s ultimatum to reverse the coup. When that failed, ECOWAS ordered the “deployment” of a “standby force” to invade Niger. Now, it’s said to have agreed a “D-Day” for military action!
By Osilama Emmanuel Osilama
I will like to call on the President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, his executive arm, and the new National Assembly legislators to seriously consider the urgent review and possible amendment of the Land Use Act that is over 40 years old and no longer useful to our present day economy. This will open up the real estate market to an endless possibilities of the huge capital of internally generated revenue that have been locked up in the space for so many years because of the provisions as decreed and enacted in the Land Use Act.
The truth is that our country is not getting the right value from her real estate sector and until our government takes deliberate steps in the right direction nothing will change. It is estimated that Nigeria holds between $ 300 billion to $ 900 billion of dormant capital in residential and agricultural land, while the high-value real estate market segment holds as much as $ 750 billion of value that can be unlocked.
By Olu Fasan
Mallam Nasir el-Rufai is an unrepentant religious bigot; a militant Islamic supremacist, who believes Islam is superior to Christianity and should be privileged in national leadership. He doesn’t just hold these views, he actively pursues them. As governor of Kaduna State for eight years, until May this year, El-Rufai ran an Islamic government, with a Muslim-controlled administration, despite the state’s large Christian population.
Now, out of office, he prides himself on installing a successor on a Muslim-Muslim ticket, and entrenching Muslim dominance of Kaduna State governance. More significantly, El-Rufai boasts of foisting his Kaduna State Muslim-Muslim leadership model on Nigeria, and warns Nigerians to brace themselves for a prolonged Muslim leadership of this country
By Tonnie Iredia
Former Senate President Lawan’s senatorial nomination bid and the earlier Imo State Governorship election are two recent cases whose controversial outcomes have continued to annoy many people including retired and serving judges. A third case that may have such lasting impact is the controversy concerning what a candidate must score in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory as a condition for becoming president.
According to Section 134 of the Nigerian Constitution 1999, a candidate can only win a presidential election in Nigeria if he scores majority of votes at the election which must in addition not be “less than one quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all the states of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory Abuja.”
By Olu Fasan
General Ibrahim Babangida erred tragically and did a great disservice to Nigeria by annulling the presidential election of June 12, 1993. But nothing has deepened the wounds more than the deception and betrayal of the so-called “June 12 activists”, who turned the annulment into a self-serving political lodestar and built their political careers around it, yet bastardised the spirit of the June 12 election by acquiring power through a deeply flawed presidential poll that violated universal rules of credible elections.
*MKO Abiola
Earlier this week, General Babangida said the “gains” of the June 12, 1993 presidential election were squandered in succeeding elections. He told journalists: “It was adjudged the freest and fairest election in Nigeria, yet politicians have blatantly ignored that beauty: the beauty of credible elections.” How ironic that the man who flagrantly annulled an election now talks, 30 years later, about the “gains” and “beauty” of the same election!
By Olu Fasan
Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the newly installed president of Nigeria, is a product of two great institutional anomalies. One is a deeply flawed Constitution designed to delegitimise the presidency of Nigeria. The other is a Might-Is-Right state that manipulates state agencies to impose its will on the people. These anomalies deny Tinubu’s presidency the strong mandate and legitimacy it badly needs to govern.
Let’s start with the constitutional anomalies. Under section 134 (2) of the 1999 Constitution, a candidate is deemed elected as president, where there are more than two candidates, if: (a) he has the highest number of votes cast at the election, and (b) he has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two thirds of all the states in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
By Olu Fasan
In just over three weeks, on May 29, Bola Tinubu will be inaugurated as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Yet, in parallel, election petitions seeking to nullify his declaration as winner of this year’s presidential poll are earnestly afoot. Given that the petitions won’t be determined before May 29, a sword of Damocles, in the form of his removal from power, potentially hangs over Tinubu’s head. Theoretically, that’s a possibility; otherwise, what’s the point of the presidential election petitions?
The 1999 Constitution, under section 239(1), allows the Court of Appeal and, ultimately, the Supreme Court to determine whether someone has been validly elected as president; the Electoral Act 2022, under section 136(1), requires the court to nullify the election of someone not duly elected as president. Thus, constitutionally, Tinubu’s election as president could eventually be nullified, however long it takes to determine the petitions. But that’s theoretical.
By Owei Lakemfa
Nigerians have the next 70 days to survive a regime that has chastised them with whips and is promising to further chastise them with scorpions. Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, last week not only renewed the Buhari regime’s threat to increase Nigerians heavy burden by piling far higher fuel prices, but also told the incoming administration to immediately raise the Value Added Tax from 7.5 per cent to 10 per cent.
While depleting all available resources and adding heavy local and foreign debts to the bargain, the regime seems determined to drain whatever finances are available. So, rather than wind down and start producing handover notes, it wants to conduct a census that promises to be controversial. But more importantly, the census will be used to legally take out N869 billion or $1.88 billion from our national coffers. It is like a retirement package.
By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa
Year in and year out, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, conducts elections into various offices in Nigeria, either through the main general elections, the bye-elections or other elections. INEC has been involved in the conduct of elections for an unbroken period of twenty-four years on, from 1999 to 2023. It would seem however that there is still a lot to do to get the electoral umpire moving. For sure, INEC is the only statutory body authorised to organise or conduct elections in Nigeria, in respect of certain offices created by the Constitution.
INEC is one of the federal executive agencies of the State established under section 153 (1) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, with its functions stated in paragraph 15 of the Third Schedule of the said Constitution. Under and by virtue of paragraph 14 of the said Third Schedule, the Chairman of INEC should be at least forty years old, he must be non-partisan, he must not be a member of a political party and he must be a person of unquestionable integrity.
By Sunny Ikhioya
From the outcome of the February 25 elections, it is clear that our politics will never be the same again. Our youths have answered the clarion call by taking up the challenge to take back their country and, this is clear for all to see. Even with this, some people are refusing to accept the reality of our situation. You know, those who do not want to play by the rules always find reasons for their failure. The election was substantially flawed and has drawn negative criticism from far and near.
Ultimately, it is the court that will decide. But whatever the outcome, the real change in our democracy has come to stay. This is an election that our sitting President, after casting his vote on election day, displayed his ballot to the whole world, an action that is against the Constitution and the Electoral Act. By so doing, he has demonstrated that our leaders have no respect for the rule of law, and a few misguided leaders followed in his footstep.
By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa
On Friday March 3, 2023, the nation waited with bated breath for the Supreme Court, the crowning glory and head of Nigeria’s judicial system.
The apex court is populated with leaders of the judiciary, starting from the Honourable the Chief Justice of the Federation, who also heads the National Judicial Council. It had been a long wait indeed, essentially because on February 8, 2023, the Supreme Court gave a lifeline to the suffering masses of our people when it issued an order for the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes to continue to circulate alongside the new notes. But the federal government and the Central Bank of Nigeria would have none of it, insisting that the old N500 and N1000 notes were gone forever as they had ceased to be legal tender.
