Last Friday, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a literary event in New York. The attack culminated the many years of harassment by religious fundamentalists over his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. When the book was published, Muslims took umbrage over its contents and demonstrated their feelings through public protests and book burnings. Several countries banned the book, Iran synthesised the rage into a Fatwa. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, head of the theocratic regime of Iran, sought a soft target after an attritional war with Iraq (and the resultant economic fallout had brewed domestic disaffection against him) and capitalised on the…

In the same “Change Must Begin with the Leader” written on 06/07/2020, we observed: “In Nigeria, they promised us ‘change’ and we fought to bring in its champions. Some lost their capital, others their health, while some paid the supreme price, but we all heaved a sigh of relief and proclaimed, “It has come!” We wanted change, and we thought fairness and justice would take the place of selfishness and impunity; that transparency and accountability would replace corruption but, above all, that our lives and property would be secure. “We have seen how our leaders of old discarded our homemade…