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Opinion

Monday, 28 January 2019 04:32

Our increasingly fascist public discourse - Jason Stanley

“Populism” is an innocuous-sounding description for the xenophobic nationalism that is now sweeping much of the world. But is there something even more sinister at work? In The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish scholar who miraculously survived World War II in Germany, describes how Nazism “permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.” As a result of this inculcation, Klemperer observed, “language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly…

Sunday, 27 January 2019 05:11

Onnoghen’s sack as Buhari’s embrace of Laurent Gbagbo - Festus Adedayo

Every government always has what I call the Jega moment. Even in advanced democracies, in spite of the sophistication of their governance, politics and powerful institutions, the Jega moment always comes. Broken to its brass-tacks, the Jega moment is that feisty moment that tests an administration’s capacity to jump into an oceanic tidal wave without a life-jacket. The Jega moment tests the rawness of a government’s brunt as to whether it can bite the bullet. It is akin to that biblical Esther’s valiant “If I perish, I perish” statement. The Jega moment is reference to the dilemma faced by Goodluck…

Sunday, 27 January 2019 05:09

Russia must stop persecuting Jehovah’s Witnesses - Washington Post Editorial

More than 600 days have passed since Russian police in Orel, south of Moscow, arrested Dennis Christensen, a Danish national and self-employed carpenter and builder who was active in the local Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. He has been held in a detention center since the nighttime raid on his home on May 25, 2017. The charge against him is “organizing the activity of an extremist organization” — meaning, yes, Jehovah’s Witnesses. In a final plea at his trial last week, prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Mr. Christensen to 6½ years in prison. They have turned the worship of God into…

Friday, 25 January 2019 04:59

Threat of UK- US visa ban: Opposition got Buhari where it matters - Farooq Kperogi

I am closer to the power brokers in this Buhari regime than I can persuade many people to believe. But I'm not in the business of persuasion. I just want to arm people with the right information. They can choose whatever they want to do with it. In the wake of the gale of defections that hit APC around August last year, President Muhammadu Buhari was overwrought with intense grief. Days later, as the relentless certainty of his electoral defeat stared him in the face, he called members of his inner circle and swore, in a fit of anger and…

Friday, 25 January 2019 04:44

Obasanjo’s sense of judgement- Alani Akinrinade

Obasanjo asking Nigerians to vote for Atiku is an insult to our collective intelligence. With the benefit of hindsight, can anyone truly say Obasanjo’s sense of judgment in choosing leaders can be trusted? Some of us who knew him in the military and were privileged to see him operate during the civil war know if there is one thing Obasanjo is not blessed with, it is a good sense of judgment. Nigeria unnecessarily lost thousands of soldiers because of his poor judgment at the war front. But for the paucity of arms, ammunition and food, the Biafrans would have turned…

Friday, 25 January 2019 04:42

Why Obasanjo’s voice still matters - Jideofor Adibe

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s recent 16-page letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, which sounds more like a state-of-the nation address, has, as expected, dominated the deadlines since it was delivered on Sunday, January 20, 2019. Titled, ‘Points for Concern’, the 4,018-word commentary was a bare-knuckled critique of the Buhari government on sundry grounds, including accusations that his government planned to use state institutions to rig forthcoming elections. Mr Obasanjo also accused Mr Buhari of undermining the country’s democratic process and returning the country to the Abacha era. Though Buhari once claimed that Abacha was a hero, most Nigerians regard him as…

Wednesday, 23 January 2019 04:39

A vote for APC isn’t a vote for Buhari - Farooq Kperogi

A vote for APC in the coming presidential election won't be a vote for Buhari; it would be a vote for an evil, greedy, corrupt, provincial, and reactionary cabal made up of Mamman Daura, Abba Kyari, Isa Funtua and their minions who are currently perpetrating a stratospheric theft of the nation's resources in ways that would make an angel of Abacha. President Buhari is an insentient human vegetable who is barely aware of his own existence. As much I disdain Vice President Osinbajo's predilection for barefaced lying and annoying rhetorical legerdemain, if he would truly stand in for Buhari while…

Sunday, 20 January 2019 04:04

MC Oluomo, Bayo Success and the curse of Lagos motor park kingpins - Festus Adedayo

The fracas in Lagos on January 8, 2019 during the rally of the All Progressives Congress (APC) held at the Skypower Grounds, Ikeja Government Reservation Area has, once again, brought into grim reality how Nigerian politicians have overtime played upon the tripodal factors of illiteracy of members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, (NURTW) their naivety and the huge uncensored daily cash inflow in their hands to cause unmitigated political crises in many parts of the country. At that rally, the Lagos State Treasurer of the union, MC Oluomo, was stabbed while some other persons, including journalists, escaped…

Friday, 18 January 2019 04:59

Jungle justice for Chief Justice? - Olusegun Adeniyi

With the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) latching on to the trial of Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Walter Onnoghen to make all manner of accusations and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) responding in kind, what is going on today is akin to what followed the suspension in 2011 by President Goodluck Jonathan of the then President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Salami. Interestingly, the antagonists of yesterday are now the protagonists of today. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ayo Obe has clearly spelt out the moral, political and legal principles regarding this matter in her Monday intervention on…

Friday, 18 January 2019 04:57

Managing perceptions of 2019 elections - Jideofor Adibe

Perception – also known as optics- is a belief or opinion held by people on the basis of how things seem. Our perception of any event is our reality and our truth, which is why people say that perception is everything. The American essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau put it even more graphically: “It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Others’ perceptions of our intentions and actions frame the way they engage with us. Of course those perceptions may be completely at variance with our intentions. But our good intentions, however noble…

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Thursday, 17 January 2019 05:12

Nigeria as ‘Election 2019’ draws near - Edwin Madunagu

It should be agreed that there are different ways of apprehending and describing the situation in Nigeria as the country draws near “Election 2019”, the general elections beginning on February 16, 2019. But I have chosen, naturally and unsurprisingly, an angle and a perspective informed by the burning interests of the working, toiling and poor masses of the country. This angle and this perspective, I believe, coincide with and describe the general position of the Nigerian Left. By “general position”, I mean an ideological – political position to which every tendency of the movement which considers itself both Left and…

Monday, 14 January 2019 04:15

Risks to the global economy in 2019 - Joseph S. Nye

As Mark Twain never said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you think you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Over the course of this year and next, the biggest economic risks will emerge in those areas where investors think recent patterns are unlikely to change. They will include a growth recession in China, a rise in global long-term real interest rates, and a crescendo of populist economic policies that undermine the credibility of central bank independence, resulting in higher interest rates on “safe” advanced-country government bonds. A significant Chinese slowdown may…

Saturday, 12 January 2019 03:25

Buhari no longer the only problem - Abimbola Adelakun

At some point, future historians of the present will give Donald Trump some credit for aptly summarising the dynamics of political following of our time. During his presidential campaigns, he bragged that he was so loved by his followers that he could shoot someone in public and not lose any voter. He has been right so far. There is virtually nothing he does wrong that has cost him in the way other politicians have paid for lesser sins. His supporters bend over to ameliorate the impact of his misdemeanours. The things they criticised President Barack Obama for are now justifiable;…

Monday, 07 January 2019 05:07

Amina Zakari and allegory of the squirrel with a lone palm nut - Festus Adedayo

The squirrel in traditional African worldview is the animal which got summarily killed by the searing pellets from the bullets of the hunter due to its inability to discern. Its roasted head, made into a gourmet and displayed on a platter, preparatory to being devoured for dinner, is held in African homes of yore as a lesson to men and women who disdain wise counsel.The squirrel's corpse, stretched thin, pierced with a skewer and eventually laid out for roast on the iron gauze in the evening by the hunter's wife, a gently billowing fire underneath the gauze drying the notorious…

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