Sambisa Forest is one of the several forests that constitute the ungoverned space in Nigerian geography. Yet it remained a subject of no interest to both the leadership and the citizenry until the media beamed searchlight thereupon at the twilight of the Boko Haram insurgency in the country. The space so characterised in the Nigerian context is a preponderance of forest reserves that have remained quite inaccessible to the Nigerian security operatives whose reluctance to storm the space has been identified as a product of their inefficiency, sub-standard weaponry, and conspiracy. This state of the security mind lends credence to…

Someone suggested a few weeks ago that Buhari’s irrationally wild popularity in the Muslim north deserves a doctoral dissertation to explain. I disagree. It’s simply a mix of amnesia, emotions, and Muslim clerical tyranny in the north. Nigerians generally have a predilection for sentimentalizing the supposed glories of bygone days. The past is always greener than the present, and the further a memory recedes into the past the more its putative glories are celebrated and romanticized. Add that to the fact that Buhari’s first coming was short-lived. But you can actually map the genealogy of the myth of Buhari’s “Mai…

To say the war against corruption is far from over is stating the obvious. Efforts by well meaning Nigerian citizens to own their own government, fight corruption and direct energy towards real developments may have been foiled by our own constitution and politicization of war against corruption. Our own political class may have swindled the process to suit their mercantile idea of politics, political rivalry and political relevance. It is no longer tenable to measure the war against corruption based on the unquestionable good intentions of President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) to internalize and institutionalize positive change. Instructive to intimate that…

Donald Trump’s “America first” approach to US foreign policy would seem to create an opening for China to assert itself more forcefully on the world stage. But that assumes what remains to be seen: whether China’s leaders can reinvigorate their country’s decaying socioeconomic model. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping’s summit at Mar-a-Lago, the US president’s gilded Florida home, is the latest chapter in a long, often turbulent, but increasingly vital history of Sino-American engagement. In the World War II era, veterans of the Chinese Nationalist government, such as the financier T.V. Soong and the wife of the Nationalist leader, Madame…