The deliberate destruction of the Nigerian university environment began in earnest with the appointment of Prof Humphrey Nwosu as the Chairman of Nigeria’s electoral umpire, known then as the National Electoral Commission. Nwosu was a lecturer at the Political Science department of the University of Nigeria when General Ibrahim Babangida called him up in 1989 for the position following the resignation of his predecessor, Prof Eme Awa from the same position. Prior to the years spent by both Profs Awa and Nwosu as heads of the electoral umpire, the government did not favour members of the academic community for such positions. I recall that the Nigerian Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) which supervised the election of Alhaji Shehu Shagari as Nigeria’s President in...

It has been flying all around social media, and at a point, I got confused about what people were celebrating bandying the drop in the volume of fuel Nigerians consumed each day. While many of the people sharing this were “using style” to praise the Tinubu administration for using subsidy removal to reveal the fraud in the system, there were those who were gloating over the savings wrought on Nigeria by the government by putting the brakes on excessive consumption of fuel. Still sharing these posts were innocent people making jokes about the entire situation with little or no understanding of how dire things truly are. Those who shared the information cited data from the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory...

That Enugu Ogene singer, Okezie Chikezie Nwamba, popularly known as Igbo Jah, was killed by hail of police bullets in Enugu is no longer news. What is news is that he was killed on the premises of a police formation where, according to the latest information, he was invited to entertain the leadership. When news of the ugly incident broke, the initial police bulletin from the Police Public Relations Officer of the Enugu State Police Command, Daniel Ndukwe, read that Igbo Jah was at the Enugu State Anti-Cult police formation “for a friendly chat,” a phrase which effectively hid the mission of the slain folk singer to the notorious place where policemen arrest and detain people, mostly on trumped-up charges. The world...

The Nigeran Naira is on an uncontrollable plummet, competing with Ghana’s Cedi, Sierre Leone’s Leone, the Guinean Franc, and a few other backbenchers in the race for the fastest to hit rock bottom. Our currency, in the last fourteen months, has, without dignity, gone unclad before the global community, dropping an estimated 150 percent of its value, and doesn’t look like its family of minders has the creativity to stem the slide. When the free-fall began immediately following the handing over of government to President Bola Tinubu, the feeling of economic uncertainty pervaded the country. People wondered how it was possible to navigate the harsh situation, and even mustered some of the millions of disgruntled citizens into street protestations that were...