Since Sunday, when the president finally addressed the country in response to the ongoing #EndBadGovernance protests, analysts and critics have not stopped rewriting his speech. They think he should have proposed more than the usual platitudes he blandly delivered, and I agree. He offered neither reprieve nor concessions, just vaunted some chest-thumping achievements that have had little bearing on the reality of those for whom the initiatives were allegedly designed. For a man whose managerial prowess was sung to the high heavens, Bola Tinubu serially comes up short in anticipating and responding to national issues with the panache of someone…

115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing incompatible with the character of the Yoruba people, and (which) has no place in their constitution…. Hyper-sensitive officials may come tomorrow who will see sedition in every criticism and crime in every mass meeting.” Sapara Williams was Nigeria’s first articulate defender…