Showing posts with label Robert A. Caro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert A. Caro. Show all posts

Friday, August 15, 2025

Lessons From Obi’s One-Tenure Proposition

 By Dan Onwukwe

The emergence of Mr. Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential race and the profound impact he made in that election has been driving Nigerian politics in astonishing manner. He’s defining public agenda, and speaking up – articulately and emphatically – on the urgent need to fix a broken Nigeria, clean up the mess, cut the cost and size of governance.

*Peter Obi
Like no other politician in the present dispensation, Obi is also marshaling out the challenges of immediate sort confronting the country and the citizens and proffering solutions to them. These are leadership lessons. 
          

Mr. Obi never fails to remind anyone who cares to listen that part of his vision for a better Nigeria is not for personal gains but to dismantle the present structure of criminality in the country, not by violent means, but through active participation of the citizenry in the democratic process.

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Tinubu And Alienation Of S’East Region

 By Dan Onwukwe

Political power is like a bikini. It reveals. It exposes a leader’s real character, no matter how he tries to hide it. That’s why what some politicians do when they are trying to get your vote is not necessarily what they do after they have it. This is what happens: when a President feels he has got enough power, when he thinks he can do without you anymore, that’s when you begin to see how he always wanted to treat people. 

*Tinubu

Moreover, you can begin to see by watching what he does with the power he has desperately acquired and what he wanted to accomplish all along. That’s also why history sometimes provides a striking opportunity for understanding the interplay between leaders, circumstances, and the behaviour of some leaders who society once accorded recognition and respect.

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Why Do The Worst People Rise To Power?

 By Dan Onwukwe

First, a confession: The above headline is not original to me. It’s that of a young American political scientist, Brian Paul Klass. Brian is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, America’s flagship monthly magazine. He is the author of Corruptible: Who Gets Power and how it Changes Us. He’s the co-author of How to Rig an Election.  His research interests include: Authoritarianism , Democracy, US politics, Political violence, and more.

Lessons in power will continue to elicit intellectual conversation. It’s not for nothing. It’s so because what leaders do while they are trying to get power is not necessarily, to borrow the words of historian Robert A. Caro, “what they do after they have it”. It’s, therefore, not unkind to say that it has been the misfortune of Nigeria to watch worse people rise to power and use that power to bend people to their will and impoverish the citizens.