Obasanjo And The Haunting Ghost Of His Third Term Agenda

 By Olu Fasan

Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former military ruler and former civilian president, is a bundle of contradictions. One could write a book on Obasanjo’s strengths, and another on his flaws. Of course, Obasanjo is his own hagiographer. He has written many books on himself, with such self-referential titles as My Command, Not My Will and My Watch. But as the biographer Lytton Strachey said, discretion is not the better part of biography. And so, most of Obasanjo’s books are an exercise in self-glorification, with highly disputed narratives. 

For instance, Obasanjo’s My Command, an account of his role during the civil war, was so controversial that it provoked General Godwin Alabi-Isama to write his own book, The Tragedy of Victory, to correct what he described as “Obasanjo’s Tissues of Lies”.

Nigeria At 65: It’s Time To Break The Vicious Circle

 By Olu Fasan

President Bola Tinubu cancelled yesterday’s Independence Anniversary parade at the last minute. No reason was given for the cancellation beyond the government’s “deep regret” for the “inconvenience caused”. Given that it was about Nigeria’s 65th anniversary as an independent state, a milestone, the cancellation was significant. Yet, in truth, it was just as well the parade was axed.

For it would be an extraordinary act of self-deception to roll out the drums for Nigeria’s 65th independence anniversary. The sad truth is that, beyond the fact of its existence as a political entity, there’s little worthy of jubilation about Nigeria at 65. If that statement sounds outlandish, then consider the following three critical measures of a nation’s success: unity, security and prosperity. Add a fourth: state capacity. How well has Nigeria fared, at 65, on these indices of development? Abysmally, one must say! 

The Return Of Fubara, Nigeria’s Most Diminished ‘Governor’

By Olu Fasan

Siminalayi Fubara returned as “governor” of Rivers State last week, six months after he was magisterially removed from office by President Bola Tinubu, following his declaration of an emergency rule in the state. Fubara returned with his tail between his legs, utterly humiliated.

*Fubara, Wike and Tinubu

Henceforth, anyone who refers to Fubara as governor must put the word in inverted commas. Why? Well, truth be told, he’s not a governor in the true sense of the word. He owes his existence in office not to the people of Rivers State, but to President Tinubu, the National Assembly and Nyesom Wike, the former Rivers State governor, now Tinubu’s self-aggrandising and untouchable minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

Tinubu De-Markets Nigeria With His Penchant For Overseas Travels

 By Olu Fasan

Earlier this week, President Bola Tinubu’s spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, announced that the president had cut short his two-week vacation in France and returned to Nigeria “to resume official duties”. Given that Onanuga previously described the president’s trip to France as a “working” holiday, one must wonder why Tinubu stopped working remotely from France.

*Tinubu

Truth be told, President Tinubu was wrong to embark on that trip in the first place. Whatever forced him to truncate his stay in France already existed before he left this country: Nigeria was in a dire strait; insecurity was overly uncontrollable, acute poverty and hunger were dehumanising ordinary Nigerians, and the government was rudderless and bumbling. By choosing to travel abroad under those dreadful circumstances, Tinubu behaved like Nero who fiddled while Rome burned!

Restructuring: Is Nigeria’s Problem The Constitution Or Its Operators?

By Olu Fasan

The commonest riposte by opponents of the call for political restructuring in Nigeria is that Nigeria’s problem is not its political system or its Constitution but the operators. I refer to this as the “culture versus structure” argument in my forthcoming book In The National Interest.

Put simply, those blaming the operators of the Constitution, and not the Constitution itself, subscribe to the “culture hypothesis”, which attributes a country’s poverty or prosperity to the culture and behaviour of its leaders and citizens, and not the kind of institutions it has. By contrast, adherents of the “structure hypothesis” posit that the nature of institutions, governance structures and political systems determines the success or failure of a nation. The nature/structure dichotomy is central to the restructuring debate in Nigeria.

A tale Of Two Nations And Their Victorious Women’s Sports Teams

 By Olu Fasan

The past two weeks have been remarkable for sports women internationally. Women’s national sports teams were victorious in major international tournaments and attracted differing responses from their governments. In Britain, England’s women’s national football team, the Lionesses, beat their Spanish counterpart to win the 2025 UEFA Women’s Championships.

In Nigeria, the Super Falcons, this country’s women’s national football team, triumphed over their Moroccan rivals to bring home the 2025 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, WAFCON. Barely a week later, the D’Tigress, Nigeria’s female basketball team, secured a hard-fought victory over Mali to clinch the 2025 FIBA Women’s AfroBasket cup. Kudos to the ladies! Who says women cannot do what men can do? Of course, they can, and even better! 

Serial Defections: How Would Atiku Be Remembered In Nigerian Politics?

 By Olu Fasan

Recently, on July 14, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice-president, announced his latest defection from a political party. It was his fifth since 1999 when Nigeria returned to civil rule. In 2006, while still vice-president under the administration of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku defected to Action Congress, AC. In 2007, he returned to PDP, only to decamp to the All Progressives Congress, APC, in 2014.

*Atiku

Three years later, in 2017, Atiku defected from APC and returned to PDP. Now, in 2025, he has defected from PDP to the African Democratic Congress, ADC, under which he is assembling a coalition to face the APC and its flagbearer, President Bola Tinubu, in the 2027 presidential election, which, seemingly, he’s keen to contest. That would be Atiku’s seventh attempt at the presidency, aged 80! Outside politics, Atiku is known for many things. He is a proud family man, a successful businessman, and a holder of a major traditional title, the Waziri of Adamawa.

2027: The Theoretical Case For Jonathan’s Return To Power

 By Olu Fasan

The title of this intervention is hedged with the word “theoretical”. That’s because the proposition that former President Goodluck Jonathan could return to power in 2027 is patently far-fetched and improbable: therefore, although there’s logic to the proposition, it’s purely theoretical.

*Jonathan

Indeed, Jonathan’s wife, Patience, put it unequivocally when she said recently that her husband would never go back to Aso Rock, and that she would campaign vigorously for the re-election of President Bola Tinubu. The bond between the Tinubus and the Jonathans is so strong, Mrs Jonathan implied, that it would be a betrayal if her husband ran against President Tinubu in 2027. 

June 12: If Abiola Won, Is He Now A Posthumous President?

 By Olu Fasan

Exactly 32 years ago, the presidential election of June 12, 1993 was annulled by the military regime of General Ibrahim Babangida that conducted the poll. Over three decades after that seismic decision, the truth, the whole truth, about why the election was annulled and who actually annulled it remains unknown.

*Abiola 

General Babangida’s long-awaited memoir, A Journey in Service, failed woefully to settle the whodunnit question because he passed the buck and named a long-dead colleague, General Sani Abacha, who can’t defend himself, as the chief culprit, and resorted to doubtful conjectures about the motives of those he described as “the nefarious ‘inside’ forces opposed to the elections”, but mentioned none of them except Abacha. Thus, 32 years after the epoch-making decision, Babangida still could not bring himself to name any living culprit, as if none exists! 

‘Shadow Government’: The Irrational Hounding Of Pat Utomi

 By Olu Fasan

There are two views about Professor Pat Utomi’s decision to float what he called “Big Tent Coalition Shadow Government, BTCSG”. One is that he should not have stirred up a hornet’s nest with something as “provocative” as a “shadow government”.

*Utomi
Another is that any democracy that cannot tolerate a non-violent pressure group, by whatever name it is called, is not a true democracy. I subscribe to the second view. For me, the first view, by being censorious about the BTCSG, misunderstands the true nature of democratic pluralism.

However, there’s a third position, far more pernicious, which seeks to demonise Professor Utomi and treat him as an enemy of the state. From the hysterical, even apoplectic, reactions of the state, you would think Professor Utomi created a “shadow government” to overthrow the Tinubu government and not merely to hold it accountable.

One-Party State: Nigerian Political Parties Are Mere Special Purpose Vehicles

 By Olu Fasan

Ostensibly, Nigeria is a multi-party democracy. But in reality, it is a one-party state. Those ululating over the recent gale of defections wrongly assume that there are material differences between Nigerian political parties. Yet, in truth, the prevalence of defections, decamping, cross-carpeting, or name it, only proves that nothing distinguishes political parties in Nigeria.

*Tinubu

Lord Palmerstone, a former British prime minister, famously coined the phrase “there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies but permanent interests” to describe relations between nations. However, Nigerian politicians have appropriated that saying and turned it into the leitmotif of their political culture. Indeed, Bola Tinubu used the phrase in 2014 when he and others were cobbling together the All Progressives Congress, APC, a potpourri of strange political bedfellows who were united merely by a self-serving agenda to seize and share power. “There are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, but permanent friends, ” Tinubu said, without any sense of irony. Politics in Nigeria is all about selfish interests.

Dele Farotimi: Is Afe Babalola After The Truth Or A Pound Of Flesh?

 By Olu Fasan

Most of those who have commented or are commenting on the Dele Farotimi-Afe Babalola saga have not read the book at the heart of the story: Farotimi’s Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System. I have. I bought a digital copy from Amazon last week, and spent four hours slowly reading – more appropriately, perusing – the 115-page book on Kindle.

*Farotimi 

Why did I buy the book? Two reasons. First, column-writing is about topicality and informed commentary. A good columnist should comment on any topical issue of significant public interest and do so from an informed perspective. The Farotimi-Babalola story has gripped Nigeria and has wider implications for the principle of legality. I decided to read the book so I could offer an informed opinion. Second, I wanted to know what irked Aare Afe Babalola so much that he went for the nuclear option, seeking to crush Farotimi personally and professionally. Well, answer: the book is a dynamite! 

Okonjo-Iweala, Kemi Badenoch: The Shaming Of Nigerian Statehood

 By Olu Fasan

The strength of any country consists of its natural resources, human resources and capital assets, namely, the economic wealth that delivers higher living standards. The first two determine the third. If a country can successfully harness its natural resources, using its human talent, it will prosper; if it can’t, it will fail.

*Kemi Badenoch and Okonjo-Iweala

Now, Nigeria is known worldwide for its abundant human and natural resources, so why is it one of the world’s poorest countries? Why is Nigeria run so badly that it’s utterly dysfunctional, verging on state failure? The commonest answer people give is “leadership”. But Nigerians run world bodies and lead major Western political parties, so why can’t Nigerians run their own country well? How can Nigerians provide leadership abroad, but not at home?

Hunger: Nigeria Is Starving Its Own People; That’s Iniquitous!

 By Olu Fasan

Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, published the results of the General Household Survey Panel, which showed that 63.8 per cent of households face severe food insecurity and are skipping meals, some for a whole day.

Nigeria is not in war or ravaged by famine, so why should two-thirds of the population be in the throes of hunger and starvation? How can one explain the savagery of hunger that has reduced many Nigerians to scavenging for food? Well, here’s the harsh truth: the Nigerian state is starving the Nigerian people through deliberate policy choices.

Tax Reform Bills: Tinubu Lacks The Will For National Consensus Building

 By Olu Fasan

Hardly anyone will disagree that Nigeria needs a fundamental tax reform. This, after all, is a country with one of the most cumbersome tax regimes in the world, where tax laws and regulations are overlapping and burdensome, where the administration and collection of taxes, and their spending, are ridden with inefficiency and corruption, and where tax avoidance and evasion are prevalent. Nigeria’s tax system is in deep crisis.

*Tinubu

However, while crises are a trigger for fundamental reforms, making the status quo unsustainable, they are not sufficient for reform success. In a democracy, there’s a critical need for an explicit electoral mandate for reform and for a carefully crafted policy design, shaped by a broad consensus for change.

Yorubanisation Of Tinubu’s Government: Nigeria’s Fate Is Now In Yoruba Hands!

 By Olu Fasan

Shortly before the 2023 presidential election, I wrote a piece titled “Yoruba ronu: A Tinubu presidency would tarnish your race” (Vanguard, February 16, 2023). The premise of that thoughtful and, in my view, patriotic intervention was threefold. 

*Tinubu

First, Bola Tinubu’s miasmic past was the antithesis of the honour-signalling ‘omoluabi’ ethos that Yorubas claim define them. His self-serving and feudalistic politics was entirely at odds with the ‘omoluabi’ core values. Second, Tinubu staked his presidential bid on “Emi lokan” (It’s my turn), but also on “Yoruba lokan” (It’s Yoruba’s turn).

Donald Trump’s Return: Americans Put Economic Self-Interest Above Moral Values

 By Olu Fasan

There are two views of human behaviour. One is that people are primarily motivated by self-interest – what’s in it for me? The other is that people are primarily influenced by deeply ingrained moral values – what’s right and wrong? The first view comes from the rational choice or game-theoretic school, the second belongs to what scholars call constructivism.

*Trump

Now, Europeans are generally believed to privilege high principles over narrow self-interest. By contrast, Americans have long been seen as mostly self-interested, individualistic people, to whom moral values are secondary considerations. That caricature of the Americans played out powerfully last week when they overwhelmingly returned to power Donald Trump, president from January 20, 2017 – January 20, 2021, notwithstanding his deeply flawed character and untoward past behaviour!

Stop Blaming IMF, World Bank; Nigeria’s Economic Woes Are Self-Inflicted!

 By Olu Fasan

The International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank have long struck a raw nationalistic nerve in Nigerians. Romantic patriotism drives the nationalistic urge to reject any perceived IMF/World Bank ‘interference’.

*Tinubu

Several years ago, as a magazine publisher, I interviewed Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, then finance minister under General Ibrahim Babangida’s regime, when he stopped over in London on his way to the IMF/World Bank meeting in Washington. I asked him why Nigerians detested the multilaterals. “I think in Nigeria we’ve tended to be isolationist,” he said. Nigerians, he implied, loathed foreign institutions telling them what to do, even in the face of a self-inflicted crisis.

Beyond The Economy, Why Is Tinubu So Unpopular? It’s Arrogance Of Power!

 By Olu Fasan

Recently, Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist and senior vice-president for development economics, wrote an article in the Financial Times urging Nigerians to embrace the economic reforms of their president, Bola Tinubu. “The country’s elites must forge a political consensus in support of these reforms,” he said.

*Tinubu

Like every seasoned policy expert, Gill knows that without a political consensus, no reform, especially a radical one, can succeed. However, what he failed to say is why there is no political consensus in favour of Tinubu’s economic reforms. Yet, addressing that point is, in part, key to understanding why Tinubu is so unpopular, and why few embrace his “reforms”.

Regional ‘Development’ Commissions: A Perversion Of Regionalism In Nigeria

 By Olu Fasan

Every senator and every member of the House of Representatives who voted to create a regional ‘development’ commission in Nigeria claim it is a game-changer that will radically transform the geopolitical zone concerned. But that’s not true; rather, it is another unaccountable federal agency that will induce the squandering of public funds and do little to support regional development.

Tinubu

Similarly, every president who signs into law a bill to establish a regional ‘development’ commission has fostered another opportunity for patronage politics and all types of corruption and abuse of entrusted power.