The cities of Daura, President Muhammadu Buhari’s home town, Kano, his political base, and Kaduna, where he has a home, and where the aircraft that brought him from London landed early Friday, March 10, as well as other parts of the North saw the people trooping out to jubilate and thank God for his safe return. I noticed that there was no such jubilation in the entire South West, the East, the Middle Belt and the South South. This is understandable. Too many cynics and mischief-makers in these other parts of the country had expected the worst and they had…

People who believe that Nigerians asking questions about when Buhari should come back to the country are ‘busy bodies’ who should leave the President alone to recuperate and return to the country at his convenience, do not get it. There is something called ‘suspense’ – one of the hallmarks of a good story. An ‘exciting’ story is driven by suspense: it leads us down a path of expectations and builds tensions as the plot unwinds. Suspense helps to capture and sustain interest in a story. Buhari’s medical vacation in the UK has been turned into a suspense-packed story. The competing…

With the emergence of Prof. Yemi Osinbajo as the Acting President, we seem to have suspended our disbelief. Against all logic, our hopes have soared to stratospheric heights. We wager that Osinbajo holds the magic wand to turn around the beleaguered fortunes of the nation and its citizens. But we need not sally forth at this moment of the nation’s life in exultation at the prospect of better times ahead. What we direly need is introspection. We need that to steel ourselves for the grim reality that would befall us at the end of the four years of the presidency…

The president’s wiretap tweetstorm on Saturday produced the expected reactions, some of them inaccurate. Here are three points about the legal questions in play and three broader questions about what is really going on. First, the U.S. government needs probable cause, signatures from government officials and advance approval from a federal court before engaging in wiretapping in the United States. There are some narrow exceptions, for things such as short-term emergencies, which are then reviewed by a judge promptly after the fact. This is not something that the president simply orders. Under the law governing foreign intelligence wiretaps, the government…