When The State Turns The Law Against Dissent Under Tinubu’s Watch

By Kolawole Olaniyan  

It is happening again. Under President Bola Tinubu, Nigerians are facing an increasingly repressive political and legal environment. Like the Muhammadu Buhari government before it, the Tinubu administration is making an utter mockery of Nigeria’s constitutional and international obligations to respect human rights and uphold the rule of law. 

*Tinubu

There is something deeply troubling about a country in which the security agency created to protect the state and its people increasingly finds itself in court seeking to restrain citizens from speaking, organising, and criticising those in power. Nigeria has been here before. 

But under Tinubu, threats, harassment, and intimidation of human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and civil society organisations are being compounded by the growing weaponisation of the criminal justice system, particularly by the Department of State Services (DSS), to silence peaceful dissent and intimidate critics.

Reflections On ASUU And The Constrictors

 By Tony Afejuku

Once again, necessity is compelling me to dwell on the FGN-ASUU imbroglio – which is becoming or has become bigger than an imbroglio. Perhaps we should call what the FGN is doing to and against ASUU a game of imbroglio? All positive hopes that our public universities on lock-down will re-open sooner than later are shrinking un-steadily second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day and month by month.

*ASUU, Federal Govt negotiating team 

Several persons have spoken and written and several more are still speaking and writing about this important issue that is now in the critical hurly-burly of our tertiary education. And after my last appearance here, I promised myself to keep quiet for sometime in the cherished hope that the constrictors who are gripping tightly the neck-muscle of our universities would withdraw their sphincters because they were more or less in touch with reality at last – especially after the Professor Nimi Briggs Committee honourably did their duty with unblemished integrity that the de-humanized constrictors in power never bargained for.