Notes From Atlanta

Electricity Should Decide Nigeria’s 2027 Elections

2026-10-24T00:05:09.781-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Wherever Nigerians congregate in the diaspora, conversations about our country almost invariably gravitate toward electricity. That was what happened after I delivered a keynote address at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley on October 1. The Nigerians I met there agreed with me that perhaps the greatest incubator of poverty and underdevelopment in our country is the absence of stable, reliable electricity.

Two Nigerian professionals at the university, an engineering professor and a pharmacist, urged me to devote a column to the subject and help make it a defining issue in the 2027 elections. I told them I had written several columns about Nigeria’s electricity woes. They knew. They wanted me to write another one. One of them later sent me a scholarly study of how India, which is several times Nigeria’s size, and which often competes with Nigeria for the dubious distinction of being the poverty capital of the world, has brought electricity to nearly all its households.

I have often wondered why Nigeria’s political class treats electricity as an irritating inconvenience that can be managed with occasional sterile speeches, ministerial reshuffles and grandiose promises. The power crisis has arrested our development, strangled innumerable talents and made the ordinary business of living needlessly expensive. It ought to be the defining issue of every election.

During the 2023 presidential campaign, Bola Ahmed Tinubu told a Nigerian Economic Summit Group audience that “a common screwdriver can create a path to fortune if electricity is taken care of.” One of my compatriots in Texas told me the remark impressed him enough to support Tinubu.

I can understand why. The screwdriver was an unusually evocative trope. Think of the mechanic, the machinist, the carpenter, the barber and the hairdresser who have skills, energy and enterprise but whose work is perpetually interrupted by darkness. Give such people dependable electricity and their modest tools can become instruments of prosperity. Take it away and you force them to spend much of their earnings buying fuel to power their own little electricity companies.

At the groundbreaking of the Gwagwalada power plant in August 2023, Tinubu described electricity as “the greatest human invention of the last 1,000 years” and said Nigeria could never become an industrial powerhouse without it. He understood the problem well enough to speak movingly about it. So, what happened to the electricity he promised?

His choice of Adebayo Adelabu as minister of power offered an early clue. Adelabu had been a deputy governor of the Central Bank, but his consuming political ambition was to govern Oyo State. He saw his ministerial appointment no more than a pathway to the realization of his ambition.

In April this year, he resigned to pursue that ambition. The power sector he left behind remained as benighted as he met it. His successor, Joseph Tegbe, inherited the same chronic crisis. Nigerians are entitled to judge the president by the electricity delivered to their homes and businesses, whatever names appear on the ministerial door.

A 2024 National Bureau of Statistics survey of nine states found that grid-connected households received an average of just 6.61 hours of electricity a day. Households outside the grid had no such six hours to count. As recently as August 2026, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission recorded average grid generation of only about 4,102 megawatts. For a country of Nigeria’s size and possibilities, this is a monumental embarrassment.

In a May 18, 2024, column titled “Nigeria’s Economic Apartheid in Electricity Consumption,” I called the government's stratification of electricity consumers into bands a form of economic apartheid. The official categories promise Band A consumers at least 20 hours of electricity a day and Band E consumers just four. Our government has bureaucratized chronic darkness and given its degrees impressive alphabetic names. Its ambition should be Band A electricity for everybody.

Compare our circumstances with India’s. A 2022 scholarly study by Debajit Palit and Atul Kumar reported that about 400 million Indians lacked electricity in 2011. By 2019, India had achieved near-universal household electrification. The country then worked to make those connections useful. Its government reports that average rural electricity supply rose from 12.5 hours a day in 2014 to 22.6 hours in 2025. Urban residents now receive an average of more than 23 hours.

India accomplished this through determined government investment in the prosaic infrastructure politicians rarely find glamorous: substations, transformers, feeders and distribution lines. Its Saubhagya program connected roughly 28.6 million households. It strengthened distribution companies, attacked losses and used public financing to get electricity to people whom the market alone had little incentive to serve. The scholarly study identified enabling government policies and financial support among the most important drivers of electrification.

South Africa, which I visited in May 2024, supplies another instructive example. Only a few years ago, its rolling blackouts had become a national torment. The government made room for independent electricity producers, removed licensing obstacles and encouraged private investment in generation. Meanwhile, Eskom repaired and improved its existing plants. On October 2 this year, Eskom reported more than 500 consecutive days without nationwide load shedding. Nigeria should find that achievement particularly humiliating.

Our electricity crisis has consequences that go well beyond the inconvenience of sitting in darkness. It shrinks our imagination of what is possible. Hospitals spend fortunes generating their own power. Businesses that should be expanding spend their capital on diesel. Digital work, automation, refrigeration, precision manufacturing and countless conveniences of modern existence are made prohibitively costly or impossible. Nigerians are compelled to pay a private tax to subsidize government incompetence every time they start a generator.

The engineering professor I met in Texas gave me an illustration that has stayed with me. A computer-controlled Haas vertical milling machine, the sort used to produce sophisticated automobile components, can cost around $100,000. He estimated that running such a machine in Nigeria for 12 hours daily on diesel-generated electricity could consume about ₦155,400 in fuel each working day. Over 25 days, that is nearly ₦3.9 million in diesel alone. That is money a manufacturer elsewhere might spend hiring employees, buying materials or expanding production.

Imagine how many Nigerian inventions die before they are born because the inventors cannot afford the electricity required to make them real. Imagine the jobs that never materialize, the workshops that never open and the economic possibilities that evaporate with every blackout. We have normalized a gigantic national tragedy.

The 2023 Electricity Act has already given states wider powers to establish and regulate electricity markets. Governors, now flush with more money stolen from the poor in the name of subsidy removal, can no longer hide behind Abuja as if electricity were exclusively a federal affliction. They should be required to show what they intend to do with their new financial and jurisdictional powers.

I would like every governor and every aspirant to publish a credible plan to add, as an ambitious starting benchmark, 200 megawatts of generation capacity within four years, subject to each state’s resources and a serious feasibility study.

Tell us whether it will come from gas, solar, hydro or some combination. Tell us where the plants, substations and distribution networks will be built, who will finance them and how electricity will reach the people who need it. A promise to “attract investors” is political noise until someone shows us the financing, the agreements and the timetable.

Tinubu also told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign not to vote for him for a second term if he failed to keep his electricity promise. His spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, has since reminded us of a caveat in the original statement: “unless I give you adequate reasons why I couldn’t deliver.” Well, Nigerians deserve those reasons now. They also deserve explanations from every politician who wants their votes in 2027.

Whoever finally liberates Nigeria from the tyranny of darkness will have struck perhaps the greatest blow against poverty in our modern history. Tinubu’s common screwdriver is still waiting for the electricity that will turn it into a path to fortune.

Related Articles:

Nigeria’s Economic Apartheid in Electricity Consumption

Nigeria Has to Have World’s Worst Electricity Crisis

Why Shettima Insults Atiku

2026-10-17T00:01:03.717-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

In Vice President Kashim Shettima’s caustic barbs at former Vice President Atiku Abubakar during the inauguration of the APC Presidential Campaign Council in Abuja on October 14, many Nigerians see an aggressively disagreeable putdown of a political opponent. I see an opportunity to introduce Nigerians to a time-honored, culturally sanctioned, ritualized joking relationship in Islamicate cultures in West Africa.

I have tried several times in the past to have conversations with fellow Nigerians, particularly from the South, about the cultural institution of joking relationships between cross cousins, between grandparents and grandchildren, between granduncles and grandaunts and their grandnephews and grandnieces and between certain ethnic groups. I have had little success being understood. The idea that people can gleefully call one another fools, slaves or thieves and still feel a profound sense of kinship seems too counterintuitive to many people.

Hausa people call it wasan barkwanci. In my Baatonum language, it’s called gonaru. The Kanuri call it nə́ngi, while the Fulani know it in some varieties of Fulfulde as denɗiraagal or denɗiraaku. They all refer to culturally sanctioned joking relationships that permit people to exchange insults and mockery without taking offense.

The Kanuri and the Fulani have an age-old joking relationship that gives wide cultural latitude for members of both groups to insult, tease, mock and belittle each other, irrespective of age and social status differentials, without taking offense. My ethnic group, the Baatonu (also called Bariba or Baruba) of Borgu, has a similar relationship most notably with the Zarma of Niger Republic and the Sabe of Benin Republic, among several examples.

This is the context of Shettima’s seemingly hostile public squelchers against Atiku. He was enacting the enduring joking relationship between the Kanuri and the Fulani in partisan political contest. Shettima himself has acknowledged this many times in the past.

The verbal hostilities began well before Shettima became vice president. On September 11, 2022, he dismissed Atiku as a “political tourist” whom the APC would retire to Dubai. On November 1, he mocked Atiku’s training at Kano School of Hygiene and said selling bottled water did not qualify him as an economic expert. He compared Atiku’s repeated presidential bids to Raila Odinga’s electoral travails in Kenya.

These were political putdowns delivered with the relish of a man who knows he can get away with a great deal.

Shettima offered his most explicit cultural explanation for these putdowns of Atiku on September 6, 2023, after the presidential election tribunal upheld Tinubu’s victory. He promised to retire Atiku to Fombina and buy him goats and chickens to rear. Then, invoking the traditional Kanuri-Fulani relationship, he explained that he had “the liberty to hurl all insults at him and he’d stoically bear.”

At a February 6, 2025, gathering to celebrate former Ekiti Governor Kayode Fayemi’s 60th birthday, Shettima, with Atiku present, described himself as an “agent provocateur” who had fired political shots at him and would do so again in 2027. He said he addressed Atiku as “Baba” in private. Reporters said Atiku smiled.

At the October 14, 2026, APC event, Shettima returned to the Odinga comparison, the Kano School of Hygiene dig and derided Atiku’s proposal for a targeted petrol-production subsidy as an “ideological wardrobe” change. He also took exception to Atiku’s habit of calling President Tinubu by his first name. The old repertoire of ritualized, culturally sanctioned mockery acquired fresh campaign material.

Obviously, Atiku has hardly reciprocated in kind. In his clearest direct personal response, during an April 12, 2026, interview, he described Shettima as “disrespectful,” invoked his own seniority in age and public service and refused to engage him.

The 20-year age gap matters to Atiku. He sees a younger political figure violating northern Nigerian conventions of elder reverence, but Shettima sees a Fulani joking cousin who should take his squelchers with good humor.

There are two problems here. Elder reverence is clashing with culturally sanctioned joking relationship. What gives? In cultures where joking relationships are institutionalized, such as most of Muslim West Africa, age is bracketed. Social status is bracketed. Restraint is thrown out the window. You are supposed to grin and bear it if you can’t retort in like manner.

Anthropologist Florian Köhler’s documentation of Kanuri-Fulani teasing in Niger, which is true of joking relationships everywhere in West Africa, shows that the recipient can respond with a counter-insult or stoically endure the teasing. The custom makes room for both responses.

But beneath the mutual or one-sided derisions of joking relationships lies a genuine search for peace and camaraderie. That was why social anthropologist Mark Davidheiser helpfully called the institution “joking for peace” in a 2006 journal article.

For example, my younger brother who lives in Lagos discovered that a Bureau de Change man he’d thought was Hausa was, in fact, Zarma from Niger. After the discovery, their relationship went from mutual cordiality to aggressive, ritualized insults and mockery, but beneath all the make-believe hostility was a genuine affiliational solidarity.

The man often extends favors to my brother, including better exchange rates than he gives others, and he shares other kinds of privileged information with him. My brother reciprocates. Baatonu and Zarma people call each other bààsè, which is Zarma for cousin, specifically the kind of cousin with whom one has the cultural license to joke.

In 2014, UNESCO placed the practices and expressions of joking relationships on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It described the institution as “a tool for reconciliation and peace-building.”

The institution can require people bound by an ancestral pact to assist one another and settle disputes peacefully. That is the moral economy behind the extravagant insults. For many communities, joking relationships also preserve memories of old wars, migrations and reconciliations.

This leads me to the second problem. Enacting ritualized teasing in the realm of partisan politics is largely uncharted territory in Nigeria. When this cultural institution took shape, our current style of adversarial party politics was beyond anyone’s imagination.

Plus, Nigeria is pluri-cultural, and the institution is almost unknown in southern Nigeria. Most southerners, and even many young northerners who are not deeply inserted into their culture, gasp when they hear Kashim taking the cultural license of joking relationships to take pot shots at Atiku.

Elsewhere in West Africa, however, politicians have carried this custom into public political life.

In Mali in February 2004, President Amadou Toumani Touré, National Assembly President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta and Culture Minister Cheick Oumar Sissoko, who were linked by joking relationships, exchanged calabashes of beans on national television. The symbolic insults elicited laughter and demonstrated that people in different political camps could remain brothers.

In Senegal in April 2005, Prime Minister Macky Sall joined regional political figures representing Serer and Joola communities in an exchange involving a sheep and a sack of beans, to the amusement of the crowd.

Anthropologists Cécile Canut and Étienne Smith documented these political enactments of joking kinship. The participants visibly shared the playfulness. Everybody knew the script and played along.

That is the missing ingredient in the Shettima-Atiku encounter. Atiku once smiled through the banter, but his April response suggests that repeated electoral putdowns have worn thin. Shettima is also the serving vice president and Atiku his political opponent. Whatever the traditional license, official stature gives Shettima’s words wider reach and makes his ridicule sting differently.

In all of this, I am reminded of Waziri Ibrahim, the Second Republic Borno politician and presidential candidate of the Great Nigeria Peoples Party, whose watchword was “Politics without bitterness.”

There is something peculiarly apt about a political philosophy associated with a man from Borno finding a possible cultural vehicle in an old Borno-linked joking relationship. Waziri imagined political differences existing within a larger national family.

I think the culturally sanctioned license to insult can help drain bitterness from political rivalry, such as we have seen in other West African countries with a similar tradition.

For example, Shettima has repeatedly joked that he will retire Atiku to a farm and buy him goats. Perhaps Atiku could one day retort that Shettima is his slave and should tend the animals himself. That would be perfectly intelligible within the cultural conventions Shettima invokes.

Tinubu’s Subsidy-Free Subsidy and Neoliberalism’s Collapse

2026-10-10T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Apparently, the omniscient, omnicompetent “invisible hand” of the market has suddenly developed an infirmity that requires the helping hand of the Nigerian state. After more than three years of publicly treating petrol-price intervention as economic blasphemy, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has authorized the Nigerian National Petroleum Company to surrender its retail profit margin for a month so Nigerians can buy petrol more cheaply.

What happened? I thought petrol subsidy was an abomination. I thought the market, left to its own devices, would work its magic and lead us into an economic El Dorado. I thought the government had no business interfering with the full, fierce, forceful fury of international oil-price fluctuations, even when the fluctuations immiserate the people whose wellbeing is the primary reason governments exist.

In an October 8 statement, the presidency announced that NNPC Retail would sell petrol at cost for a limited period. If the landing cost is ₦1,300 per liter, NNPC says that will be the selling price. The government is also negotiating a ₦1,350 ceiling on the ex-gantry or landing cost of petrol, with refiners and importers expected to recover any temporary shortfall when prices fall. It promises forward crude sales to domestic refineries, a strategic fuel reserve, expanded cash transfers and other interventions.

Neither figure guarantees a nationwide pump price. NNPC clarified on October 9 that its discount will run until October 31 at its retail outlets. For me, that is a damp squib, as the British call a hype that doesn’t live up to its promise, because a 30-day reprieve, however welcome, is not the same as durable affordability.

Unlike neoliberal evangelists and their unthinking converts who regard suffering as an indispensable sacrament of “reform,” I welcome the intervention, however disappointingly transitory it is. I have never believed that a government should stand akimbo and watch citizens smolder in the ferocious fury of brutal market forces.

Petrol in Nigeria is not an optional luxury. As I have repeatedly argued, its price affects transport fares, food, electricity generation, school attendance, medical care and the survival of small businesses.

What interests me more than the concession itself is the ideological edifice it has begun to bring down.

On September 30, 2023, I wrote a sarcastic column titled “Thought Subsidy Was Bad. Why is Tinubu Bringing it Back?” A Daily Trust investigation had reported that the government spent ₦169.4 billion in August to keep petrol around ₦620 per liter despite Tinubu’s “subsidy is gone” proclamation. I asked why Tinubu was committing “economic blasphemy” by doubting the efficacy of the Invisible Hand.

My sarcasm was directed not at the assistance but at the hypocrisy of those who had declared assistance an economic sin. I wrote then that the problem with petrol subsidy was the monstrous corruption associated with its administration, not the principle of assisting people. A government that cannot punish subsidy thieves whose identities it knows should not convert its failure into a punishment for everyday folks.

Three years later, we are back to the same theater of absurdity. The presidency is bending over backwards to assure Nigerians that this intervention is neither a subsidy nor a price control. NNPC has issued its own statement insisting that its discount “does not represent the reintroduction of petroleum subsidy.”

Why this hysterical semantic defensiveness? The answer is obvious. It’s because Tinubu’s government has become a victim of the success of its own propaganda.

For years, the Nigerian political and economic elite worked overtime to turn “subsidy” into what rhetorical scholar Richard Weaver called a “devil term,” that is, a word programmed to provoke instinctive disapproval. Linguists call a related process “semantic derogation,” through which a neutral or positive word acquires negative associations.

Subsidy, which basically means assistance extended to reduce a burden, was transformed into a synonym for theft, waste and economic backwardness.

What is inherently bad about government assistance? Why is it noble to subsidize politicians’ sybaritic lavishness but ruinous to help ordinary Nigerians get to work, transport their produce or keep their businesses alive? Why are bailouts for the rich enlightened economics while assistance to the poor is an unforgivable crime against the invisible hand?

The demonization of subsidies was never an innocent exercise in economic education. It was an engineered mass hypnosis that persuaded even its victims to celebrate their own dispossession and piecemeal annihilation. It successfully turned the mass economic strangulation of the people into a hegemonic moral consensus. People who would be the first to perish in the economic fire of this stupid, wicked policy applauded the people lighting it.

I warned in several past columns that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, that the manufactured consensus that demonized subsidies would eventually collide with the material realities of people’s lives and then unravel. That is precisely what is happening.

Some people who insulted me for opposing petrol subsidy removal now concede that they were foolish to believe that the subsidies did not benefit poor Nigerians. Reality has become a more effective teacher than the righteous outrage of implacable opponents of the withdrawal of subsidies like me or the dishonest, self-interested sermons of the high priests of neoliberalism.

Notice that this is no longer merely a quarrel between Tinubu and his critics. In 2023, Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi all supported petrol subsidy removal. They were essentially united on the supposedly sacred principle that government assistance for petrol consumption must end.

Now Atiku promises to restore a targeted subsidy, including cheaper crude for domestic refineries. Obi, who as recently as August defended subsidy removal, said in an October 6 BBC interview that he would remove the corruption and retain the subsidy. Tinubu, meanwhile, has embraced temporary discounts and negotiated pricing arrangements while frantically insisting that he has done nothing of the sort.

I do not mistake politicians’ conversions for sudden moral enlightenment. Elections concentrate the mind when voters have been roasted alive by purportedly “courageous” reforms. But their retreat is important because it shatters the fiction that there was no alternative to abandoning Nigerians to the cold, cruel, calculating hands of the market.

I recognize that there are real distinctions between a direct treasury-funded subsidy, a public company forgoing profits and a temporary ceiling that allows suppliers to recover losses later. Calling everything a subsidy obscures these differences. But calling a government-negotiated ceiling “not a price control” cannot conceal the obvious fact that the government is intervening to prevent market prices from being passed straight through to consumers.

If intervention is now permissible, why must it last only one month? What happens to a worker after October 31? At ₦1,400 per liter, Nigeria’s ₦70,000 minimum wage buys only 50 liters. Even the presidency’s illustrative ₦1,300 price would buy fewer than 54 liters. Four extra liters do not reverse three years of accelerated impoverishment.

In my last Saturday’s column titled “World Fights Costly Petrol. Tinubu Defends It,” I showed how governments across the world were cutting fuel taxes, capping prices, releasing reserves and otherwise protecting citizens. Five days later, the Tinubu presidency announced versions of several of those measures.

I am not claiming my column caused the retreat. The point is that Nigeria has finally acknowledged what other societies have long understood, which is that the market is an instrument of economic organization, not a bloodthirsty deity to which human lives must be sacrificed in the name of “reforms.”

And we must still ask the fundamental question about why an oil-producing country must price the petrol its citizens consume as if its domestic crude has to be exported and repurchased at international prices? Where are the transparent calculations of production, refining, distribution and reasonable profit? A month of margin surrender does not settle that question.

The old neoliberal consensus is cracking because people cannot eat promises. It is collapsing like a house of cards because people cannot fuel generators with “reform” slogans or pay transport fares with mendacious sermons about deferred prosperity. A government worth the name exists to protect living human beings, not to keep an economic dogma alive after its consequences have become nakedly transparent and intolerable.

Let Tinubu call his concession a discount, a margin adjustment or whatever euphemism makes it easier for his ideological cheerleaders to sleep at night. Nigerians are not obliged to participate in the semantic gymnastics. What matters is relief from extortionate petrol prices and the exposure of the fraudulent premise on which Nigerians were told to endure avoidable existential torment.

World Fights Costly Petrol. Tinubu Defends It

2026-10-03T01:47:39.755-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Something extraordinary is happening across the world. Governments are losing sleep over the intolerably rising prices of petrol and diesel. They are cutting taxes, subsidizing fuel, capping prices, releasing strategic reserves, relaxing regulations and strong-arming oil companies. Where relief has not yet come, governments are promising it.

Tinubu’s Nigeria is the exception. It is marching callously and ignominiously in the opposite direction. It derives perverse joy and pride in its soulless, cold-hearted strangulation of the people.

A few examples of countries that are doing the exact opposite of Tinubu’s insensate destruction will suffice.

On Friday, October 2, the G7 agreed to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil from emergency reserves to bring prices down. The decision followed pressure from the Trump administration, which had threatened restrictions on American diesel exports if European governments did not release their reserves. Oil prices fell almost immediately after the announcement.

Germany has cut taxes on petrol and diesel by 17 euro cents per liter through December and is discussing a fuel-price cap. Australia halved its petrol and diesel excise, shaving 26.3 Australian cents off every liter. Canada suspended its federal excise tax on gasoline and diesel.

Ireland cut petrol taxes by 27 cents per liter and diesel taxes by 32 cents. Spain proposed relief of up to 30 euro cents per liter. South Korea imposed a fuel-price ceiling. Brazil has subsidized gasoline and cut taxes. Italy leaned on major oil companies to cap petrol and diesel prices. Kenya cut VAT on petroleum products.

President William Ruto personally announced a reduction in diesel price after public protests over rapidly rising energy costs. His government had already spent substantial public funds cushioning fuel prices.

Ghana’s President John Mahama said his government was considering cutting fuel margins and reviewing a new petroleum levy to relieve the pain at the pump after petrol rose about 15% and diesel about 19% in one pricing window. He also raised the possibility of a supply agreement with the Dangote refinery.

My research for this column has documented at least 50 cross-continent national cases of state interventions designed to reduce the cost of petrol or diesel, and that’s not even an exhaustive global count.

In the United States, the Associated Press found this week that about one-third of U.S. states have implemented some form of fuel-tax relief alone. That does not count every regulatory waiver, supply measure or proposed tax holiday.

The mechanisms differ, but objective is unmistakably the same: to shield citizens and businesses from bearing the full brunt of an international fuel-price shock.

I am writing this column from Texas where I was invited to give a keynote address on Nigerian Independence at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. I, of course, live in Georgia. The comparison of Texas and Georgia with Nigeria is both revealing and enraging.

On September 28, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a statewide disaster proclamation because of record diesel prices. He authorized expanded use of cheaper tax-exempt dyed diesel on Texas roads, relaxed weight restrictions and sought federal waivers intended to expand supply and reduce costs. Abbott said record prices threatened agriculture and freight and raised costs for every Texas family.

That same day, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency and suspended the state’s motor-fuel excise tax for 30 days. Georgia ordinarily taxes gasoline at 33.3 cents per gallon and diesel at 37.3 cents. Kemp suspended the taxes because, as his office put it, Georgians needed relief from global market volatility.

Now look at the prices. AAA put regular petrol at $3.94 per gallon in Texas and $3.96 in Georgia on October 1. A U.S. gallon is 3.785 liters. That works out to about $1.042 per liter in Texas and $1.046 in Georgia. At roughly ₦1,329 to the dollar, that is about ₦1,385 per liter in Texas and ₦1,391 in Georgia.

Petrol in Nigeria has recently hovered around ₦1,400 to ₦1,430 per liter, although NNPCL stations cut prices this week to about ₦1,360 in Lagos and ₦1,370 in Abuja.

That means petrol costs roughly the same in Nigeria as it does in Texas and Georgia. Yet Texas regards its diesel prices as disastrous enough for a statewide disaster proclamation. Georgia regards its fuel prices as sufficiently intolerable to declare a state of emergency and surrender tax revenue.

Nigeria regards almost the same nominal fuel price as “economic reform” that will yield an illusory El Dorado in an undefined future.

The obscenity of the contrast becomes starker when income enters the picture. The statutory minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. The same federal rate applies to most workers in Georgia. At 40 hours a week, that is about $1,257 a month. At current petrol prices, a minimum-wage worker earns enough in a month to buy roughly 1,200 liters of petrol.

Nigeria’s national minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month. At ₦1,400 per liter, it buys exactly 50 liters.

A minimum-wage worker in Texas or Georgia can therefore buy roughly 24 times as much petrol as a Nigerian minimum-wage worker, even though the pump prices are almost identical.

And Nigerians endure vastly inferior public transportation, unreliable electricity that forces households and businesses to buy fuel for generators and a road-dependent economy in which virtually every increase in petrol price cascades into food, transportation, rent and other costs.

Yet we have been conditioned to regard a demand for affordable petrol as some primitive Nigerian appetite for undeserved indulgence. I have consistently called this attitude an example of self-annihilating stupidity.

The intellectual conditioning began in earnest under Muhammadu Buhari. Government increasingly spoke of affordable petrol as an economic pathology. By 2020, his administration was arguing that market-determined petrol prices were unavoidable, that cheaper Nigerian petrol encouraged smuggling and that subsidy was unsustainable. The language gradually migrated from government officials into elite public discourse.

Tinubu has elevated this attitude into a governing creed. He announced on May 29, 2023, that “subsidy is gone.” Two years later, he said his economic reforms were “working” and described subsidy removal as necessary to rescue Nigeria from fiscal collapse. His government continues to present the pain generated by the World Bank-dictated “reforms” as a difficult passage toward eventual prosperity that we all know will never come.

Meanwhile, the very premise on which Nigerians have been asked to suffer is coming under increasingly serious scrutiny.

On our September Diaspora Dialogues podcast, oil producer and oil-and-gas businessman Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim broke down the pricing chain and arrived at an unsubsidized pump price of roughly ₦605 per liter. His central argument is devastatingly simple. Nigeria should dedicate crude for domestic refining and price that crude for the Nigerian economy rather than pretend that every barrel consumed in Nigeria has first been exported to Rotterdam and bought back at international opportunity cost.

He included production, refining, distribution and reasonable profit margins in his calculation. The conversation consequently moved from the tired incantation of “subsidy or no subsidy” toward the more useful question of what petrol should actually cost in an oil-producing country.

Professor Izielen Agbon, a U.S.-based petroleum engineer, approached the problem separately at a seminar organized by Femi Falana and reached a remarkably similar range. Using production-cost pricing and accounting for crude production, refining, transportation, margins and Nigeria’s tax regime, he calculated a pump price of roughly ₦435 to ₦687 per liter.

Agbon argues that Nigeria’s central pricing problem is import-parity pricing, which treats domestically produced crude as though its economic value to Nigerians must always equal what it could fetch abroad. He argues that this abandons Nigeria’s comparative advantage as an oil producer and transmits international prices directly into an impoverished domestic economy.

In light of Olawepo-Hashim’s ₦605 calculation or Agbon’s ₦435-₦687 range, government and defenders of the present system now owe Nigerians something better than slogans. Show us the numbers. Demonstrate why petrol produced from Nigerian crude for Nigerians must cost ₦1,400 per liter.

The old argument that affordability necessarily means an unsustainable subsidy is no longer sufficient.

There is an additional irony. NNPCL’s own 2024 audited accounts contain trillions of naira in “under-recovery” and energy-security obligations even after the government announced that subsidy had vanished. Agbon cites ₦8.67 trillion in under-recovery. The accounting terminology has changed, bu the underlying questions have not.

And where is organized labor in all this? To be fair, the NLC and TUC have condemned the latest increases. On September 30, the NLC demanded an immediate petrol-price reduction and described Nigeria as facing a “full-scale survival crisis.”

But statements are not commensurate with the scale of the emergency. If a ₦70,000 minimum wage buys barely 50 liters of petrol and every fuel increase ricochets through food, transportation and household survival, at what point does organized labor organize?

Governments from Washington to Berlin, Ottawa to Canberra and Seoul to Brasília understand that citizens cannot simply be abandoned to whatever price the global oil market produces. Nigeria should not require a special theory of economics to arrive at the same humane conclusion.

Sanusi and the Betrayal of El-Rufai

2026-09-26T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

A few days before Nasir El-Rufai’s trending, impassioned September 23 letter talking about the “apparent silence” of friends and family members he had “publicly stood by,” I read social media posts lamenting Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II’s supposed betrayal of El-Rufai in his hour of need, especially in light of the role El-Rufai played in rescuing Sanusi from banishment.

I thought the assumption that Sanusi had abandoned his friend was unfair and that even El-Rufai would be reluctant to reach that conclusion because of the delicate position Sanusi occupies and the practical impossibility of reciprocating what El-Rufai did for him when Abdullahi Ganduje dethroned and banished him.

Then El-Rufai’s letter appeared. El-Rufai did not identify anyone by name, so any identification has to remain inferential. But Sanusi seems to me one of the likeliest people he had in mind.

Some of the other obvious possibilities can be eliminated fairly easily. El-Rufai has already publicly declared Nuhu Ribadu and Uba Sani as “former friends” and accused them of working against him. They therefore hardly qualify as the friends whose true relationship with him revealed itself in his moment of personal adversity.

Tinubu is also an awkward fit because El-Rufai has publicly insisted that he and Tinubu were “never friends” in the personal sense. In any case, he is being detained by Tinubu’s government with what seems like Tinubu’s express imprimatur.

And people such as Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi have publicly spoken about El-Rufai’s predicament. Atiku and Amaechi have even put his name as a member of their presidential campaign council. That makes silence a poor description of their conduct.

Sanusi fits El-Rufai’s language more snugly. El-Rufai writes that some people may “deny our relationship or try rewriting history” and says his experience may cause him to “reconsider the nature of certain relationships.”

He begins by referring to friends whom he had “publicly stood by.” He recalls having “stood by people” in difficult circumstances. He says he expected no “gratitude or reciprocity.” He then speaks of people he had supported making their own choices “now that circumstances are reversed,” and says he bears no resentment toward anyone who chooses “not to do the same for me.”

Toward the end, he even invokes “ingratitude.” Read as a whole, the letter keeps circling back to a very specific moral ledger, which is (1), standing by people when they were in trouble, (2), circumstances are now reversed and some of those people have chosen silence or indifference. That is precisely why Sanusi comes so readily to mind.

The language in the letter suggests a personal, not a political, relationship whose depth was publicly known, particularly one in which El-Rufai had conspicuously stood beside the other person during adversity. Again, Sanusi fits that description almost to a T.

On March 9, 2020, Ganduje’s government dethroned Sanusi as Emir of Kano and exiled him to Awe in Nasarawa State. A federal court later ruled that the banishment and restrictions on his movement were unlawful and unconstitutional.

El-Rufai responded almost immediately. On March 10, barely 24 hours after the dethronement, he appointed Sanusi vice chairman of the Kaduna Investment Promotion Agency. On March 11, he appointed him chancellor of Kaduna State University. On March 13, after a Federal High Court in Abuja ordered Sanusi released from confinement, El-Rufai traveled to Awe, met him and drove away with him.

El-Rufai’s words that day make the present moment especially poignant. He said Sanusi had been with him since their teenage years and had never left him. He added that he, too, could not leave Sanusi at such a moment.

With that history, it is easy to see why people would now look toward Sanusi and ask: Where is he?

I don’t know what El-Rufai, his family or his supporters may know that the rest of us don’t. Perhaps Sanusi has privately done nothing. Perhaps there are conversations and interventions the public knows nothing about. From the outside, though, the charge of betrayal strikes me as extremely unfair.

Sanusi does not possess anything remotely resembling the power El-Rufai had in 2020. He is merely emir, an influential cultural and religious figure, but a powerless symbol of a bygone past, nonetheless. He exercises no executive power. His throne itself exists within a political structure controlled by the Kano State government.

That vulnerability should be obvious from the precarity of his position. He was removed once by a governor and restored by another. Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf restored Sanusi in May 2024 and subsequently left the NNPP for the APC on January 26, 2026. When he did so, he unequivocally described the move as an alignment of Kano with the ruling party at the federal level.

That places Sanusi in a politically, even existentially, awkward position. A highly public intervention on behalf of a cantankerous former governor who is being prosecuted by federal authorities could easily acquire meanings beyond anything Sanusi intends.

El-Rufai is currently in ICPC custody under court-authorized remand while facing charges connected principally to investigations arising from the Kaduna State House of Assembly probe of his administration.

Sanusi therefore cannot reproduce El-Rufai’s 2020 gesture in any meaningful sense. He cannot drive to a detention facility, collect El-Rufai and take him away. He cannot appoint him to a state board. He cannot use executive power to create an institutional refuge for him. All he has is his voice, his private access to people in power and whatever moral or symbolic authority the throne he sits on still possesses.

And even his voice is politically expensive. When El-Rufai stood by Sanusi in 2020, he did so from the security of an executive office. He was the sitting governor of Kaduna State, enjoyed constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution while in office and had substantial access to the Buhari presidency.

His intervention for Sanusi certainly carried political meaning, but there is no evidence that it threatened El-Rufai’s governorship or personal liberty.

Sanusi occupies a vastly more precarious position today. His throne has already been taken from him once by political authority. His restoration itself came through another change in political power. It is unreasonable to pretend that an emir in such dicey circumstances has the same freedom of maneuver as a sitting governor.

If Sanusi were to be deposed this time because of an impolitic political gamble, there would be, ironically, no El-Rufai to save him from the certain fate of exile to a godforsaken wilderness in the middle of nowhere.

The absolute bravest thing Sanusi could probably do for El-Rufai is use whatever private access he has to President Tinubu to plead for fair treatment, bail or some accommodation within the law. Even that would involve potentially self-immolating political risk because such an intervention could be interpreted as sympathy for a man who has become an outspoken adversary of the federal political establishment.

Public denunciation of his continued detention would carry even greater risks. This is why the arithmetic of reciprocity becomes difficult. El-Rufai could stand up for Sanusi without putting his governorship in obvious jeopardy. Sanusi cannot stand up for El-Rufai in precisely the same fashion because he possesses neither El-Rufai’s former power nor his former security.

You cannot sensibly demand symmetrical repayment from people situated in radically asymmetrical circumstances.

I understand why El-Rufai may feel wounded. Months in detention are hardly conducive to detached philosophical calculations about the limitations confronting friends outside. Adversity naturally rearranges one’s mental ledger of friendship. People remember whom they helped, who showed up for them and who vanished when the weather changed.

But Sanusi presents a harder case. If he speaks loudly, he risks turning himself into a political combatant when his throne is already inseparable from Kano’s combustible politics. If he remains quiet, people who remember Awe in March 2020 can easily see a treacherous, self-centered ingrate hiding behind royal robes.

Perhaps Sanusi deserves that judgment. Perhaps there are facts outside public knowledge that would justify it.

From what is publicly known, though, I am not there yet. El-Rufai rescued a friend while standing on the firm ground of gubernatorial power. Sanusi is being asked to rescue that friend while standing on a shaky throne that Nigerian politics has already pulled from beneath him once. I would be slow to call self-preservation betrayal.

Nigeria: 2nd-Cheapest Petrol, 3rd-Worst Wage

2026-09-20T00:48:28.813-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Some APC-aligned accounts have been circulating a graphic suggesting that Nigerians should be grateful because petrol here is among the cheapest in West Africa.

That comparison tells only half the story. A rich man boasting that his children are doing better than the children of his poorer neighbors would hardly be making an impressive boast. Nigeria is, after all, one of Africa’s biggest oil producers.

The fuller picture is more sobering. My comparison, compiled with the help of AI from official wage notices, fuel regulators and current pump-price reporting, shows that Nigeria has the second-cheapest petrol in West Africa, after Niger Republic.

But among countries with comparable statutory minimum wages, only Ghana and Sierra Leone have lower minimum wages than Nigeria.

And when the real question becomes how much petrol a month’s minimum wage can actually buy, only Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Sierra Leone fare worse. Nigeria’s ₦70,000 minimum wage buys only about 48 to 50 liters at current pump prices.

The comparison with Niger Republic is especially revealing. Our much poorer northern neighbor sells petrol at 499 CFA per liter, the cheapest in West Africa, and raised its minimum wage to 42,000 CFA a month from January 2026.

That minimum wage buys about 84 liters of petrol, nearly twice what Nigeria’s buys. So, saying petrol is relatively cheap in Nigeria is no great flex. What matters to ordinary people is not merely the nominal price at the pump, but how much of it their wages can actually buy.

Sowore as Best President Nigeria Refuses to Have

2026-09-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Nigeria has tried almost everybody except the people who actually frighten the system, who can shake, even extirpate, the status quo and who can cause the sort of creative destruction the country needs to refashion itself.

For sixteen years, the PDP ruled Nigeria and accumulated enough sins, real and imagined, to make its initials almost synonymous with everything that was wrong with the country. Its opponents excoriated its corruption, pooh-poohed its incompetence, scorned and protested its petrol-price increases, savaged its incapacity to keep the country secure, and railed against its profligacy and remoteness from the pains of everyday Nigerians.

The loudest of these opponents called themselves “progressives.” They cultivated an image of ideological and moral difference from the PDP and became virtuosos of oppositional indignation. Then they got power.

Since 2015, the people who had perfected the vocabulary of outrage against the PDP have had ample opportunity to show Nigerians what they would do differently. Nigerians can judge the results from their own lives. They do not need the World Bank, the IMF, APC propagandists or opposition politicians to tell them whether food is affordable, whether transportation costs have risen, whether their salaries still have value or whether life has become easier.

The point here is larger than Bola Tinubu, Muhammadu Buhari, the APC or the PDP. Nigeria has now subjected itself to a long experiment with the two dominant tendencies of the Fourth Republic. The PDP establishment governed for sixteen years. The coalition that defined itself largely through opposition to that establishment has governed since 2015. The personnel change, parties change, slogans change and campaign colors change. The fundamental grammar of elite politics has proved remarkably resilient.

So what exactly do Nigerians mean when they say they want change? That question brings me to Omoyele Sowore.

Sowore has sought the presidency since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2018. INEC records show that he received 33,953 votes in the 2019 presidential election. He ran again in 2023 and is again seeking the presidency on the platform of the African Action Congress. His electoral numbers have so far been minuscule, but the interesting question for me is why a country that endlessly complains about its political establishment shows so little curiosity about one of the few presidential candidates who stands conspicuously outside it.

Sowore is contrarian, irreverent, iconoclastic and almost constitutionally incapable of genuflecting before constituted authority. His political temperament was formed long before presidential ambition entered the picture.

He emerged from the radical student activism of the late military era, later founded Sahara Reporters and has spent decades irritating successive governments, sometimes at considerable personal cost.

Many Nigerians find his ideas outlandish. Some find him abrasive. Some regard his promises as economically fantastical. His current proposal for a N500,000 minimum wage, for example, naturally raises questions about inflation, productivity, public revenue and the capacity of private employers to pay it. Sowore says between N3 trillion and N4 trillion can be recovered by eliminating government waste and that additional revenue can come from unpaid oil royalties and the plugging of financial leakages. Those claims deserve interrogation on their merits.

What interests me more is the political sociology of his persistent marginality.

The question came up recently when I addressed lecturers and students in the Political Science Department of Lagos State University. A lecturer told me that he had always voted for Sowore and wondered aloud why young Nigerians who say they are sick and tired of the status quo have never gravitated toward him in anything approaching the enthusiasm they showed Peter Obi in 2023.

I offered two explanations.

The first is symbolic capital. Sowore has never been a governor, minister or senator. He has no sprawling business empire whose size Nigerians can use as shorthand for importance. In a political culture in which wealth, office, convoys, sirens and proximity to power are routinely mistaken for substance, that is a serious handicap.

We have also managed to corrupt the meaning of political “experience.” In Nigerian political discourse, experience often means prolonged membership of the very political class that people complain has ruined the country. Someone becomes “experienced” by being a governor, minister or senator, irrespective of what he actually accomplished there. Familiarity with the machinery of elite power becomes its own qualification.

Sowore has a different kind of political experience. His experience is in agitation, organization, confrontation with authority, media insurgency and advocacy. Whether that translates into competent executive government is a legitimate question. It is at least worth recognizing that these are different conceptions of what political experience means.

The second explanation is what I call the absence of a primordial constituency.

This, I think, is even more consequential. Successful Nigerian politicians almost always possess an ethnic, regional or religious home base from which political affection radiates outward. Sowore fits awkwardly into this architecture.

Although he is culturally, linguistically and geographically associated with the Yoruba world, he identifies his ancestry with the Ijaw people of Ondo State. More important, he does not organize his politics around ethnic ownership. He refuses the familiar invitation to become somebody’s ethnic candidate.

Religion offers him no comparable political anchorage either. INEC listed him in 2023 as Omoyele Stephen Sowore, reflecting his Christian naming background. Yet religion has never been the organizing idiom of his politics.

That leaves him without the two most potent instruments of primordial political mobilization in Nigeria: ethnicity and religion.

His natural political constituency, to the extent that he has one, consists of people who understand themselves principally through their experience of exclusion, economic deprivation or abuse of state power. The difficulty is that class and subaltern identities often lose political contests to primordial ones.

A poor Nigerian may know intimately that he is poor. He also knows that he is Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, Baatonu, Tiv, Christian, Muslim or something else. Poverty describes his condition. Ethnicity and religion frequently inhabit his conception of himself.

That distinction helps explain the peculiar predicament of political figures who cannot easily be converted into ethnic property. A politician with an identifiable primordial constituency begins a national contest with emotional capital already deposited in the bank. Someone like Sowore must manufacture political solidarity from interests that cut across inherited identities. That is a much more difficult undertaking in Nigeria.

There is another aspect of Sowore that deserves scrutiny, and that is his reputation for personal incorruptibility.

A senior figure in government once told me about his dealings with Sahara Reporters. He said when they were in opposition, people inside government sometimes supplied them with documentary evidence of wrongdoing, which they handed to Sowore to publish. According to him, Sowore would independently verify the material, publish what he judged to be credible and refuse to publish what he could not authenticate.

What impressed him even more, he said, was Sowore’s refusal to accept gifts. “He rejected even transport fare,” he told me.

That is an anecdote from someone who said he dealt with him, so I cannot independently authenticate every detail of it. I recount it because it illuminates the reputation Sowore has cultivated among people who have encountered him.

None of this resolves the substantive questions surrounding his candidacy. His economic program can be interrogated. His lack of executive governing experience can be interrogated. His temperament can be interrogated. His promises can be costed. His assumptions can be challenged.

But Nigerians should perhaps also interrogate something closer to home: their conception of political change itself.

If every presidential candidate must first have been manufactured by the system, enriched by the system, validated by the system and endowed with a primordial constituency before Nigerians regard him as “serious,” the demand for radical change begins to contain a contradiction.

We keep asking the political establishment to give us somebody who will overthrow the habits of the political establishment. And every four years we are astonished when it gives us itself again.

We Need More Oloyedes in Govt Agencies

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

I didn’t get a chance to write a retrospective evaluation of Professor Is-haq Oloyede’s tenure as JAMB registrar when most people did after his departure in July because the time of his exit competed with more pressing national discourses that invited my intervention. But I have always been haunted by a gnawing guilt that I haven’t shared my own assessment of a man who, though fallible like the rest of us, transformed a consequential educational institution in remarkable ways.

I have met Professor Oloyede only once in my life, and it was at the Ilorin airport in December 2023 when I visited Nigeria for the first time in seven years for the formal presentation of a book that I co-wrote with colleagues Prof. Moses Ochonu and Dr. Osmund Agbo.

While waiting for my delayed Lagos flight, I saw someone who looked distinctly like him. Because I had heard several great things about him from mutual friends, I summoned the courage to go and say hello to him. I was shocked that he knew me. I found him to be a warm, lively, friendly, intellectually alert yet generous and humble person.

People who knew him closely had told me he embodied several curious contraries. He is a profoundly intelligent and innovative person who is nonetheless self-effacing to the point of giving you permission to underestimate him.

And although he had a First Class degree in Arabic and is deeply religious, I was told, he is wary of people who flaunt public displays of religiosity, who pepper their conversations with performative Arabic phrases that they barely understand. He himself keeps it plain and simple when he relates with Muslims outside religious contexts.

In my short interaction with him at the Ilorin airport, I instinctively activated my Arabic vocabularies to punctuate my conversations, knowing that I was speaking with a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. He didn’t requite my performative zealousness with superior Arabic phraseology, like many people with his Arabic erudition and deep Muslim faith would do. He spoke plain English. Then I recalled what I had heard about his indifference to or even suspicion of such behavior. I quickly adjusted.

That’s why I think the most unfair charge often hurled at him by his detractors is the charge that because of the depth of his Islamic faith and his scholarly investments in Arabic and Islamic studies, he is a Muslim bigot. It isn’t only that he self-consciously chooses not to mix the profane and the divine in everyday contexts even when he relates with fellow Muslims, he takes it as an article of faith to be scrupulously fair to Christians and other people who don’t share his faith.

There are probably people who will attribute disadvantages they suffered from him to their faith. I don’t know. Being humans, all kinds of things are possible, but people who know him intimately and whose judgment I trust, both in and out of JAMB, tell of a man who is animated by and concerned with justice and fair treatment for all irrespective of faith or other primordial variables, whose passion for making a difference is consuming.

This is the background behind his success at JAMB. When Oloyede assumed leadership of JAMB in 2016, he inherited an organization in which astonishing large amounts of money routinely disappeared into bureaucratic sinkholes. In his first full year, JAMB remitted N7.8 billion to the federal government. The government had expected a remittance of about N500 million. The ICPC later publicly commended the anti-corruption reforms that produced this result.

I initially had a slightly different reaction to JAMB’s newfound capacity to generate billions of naira. I thought there was something morally perverse about an examination body boasting of revenue generated largely from poor young people seeking admission into universities.

In a July 13, 2021, article titled “Why Must Students Take UTME Every Year?” I argued that compelling students to retake UTME every year was “needlessly exploitative.” A student who scores well and fails to secure admission for reasons unrelated to academic competence should, I argued, be able to use the score for at least two years and ideally for up to five years, as is possible with the SAT in the United States. I still stand by that argument.

In fact, the enormous surpluses JAMB began to remit under Oloyede helped make the case that the examination fee itself was too high. The federal government eventually reduced the basic application fee from N5,000 to N3,500 in 2019. Then Education Minister Adamu Adamu explicitly cited the extraordinary rise in JAMB’s remittances as evidence that the agency could charge candidates less and still cover its expenses. Oloyede himself later said a suggestion from the Nigerian Guild of Editors prompted him to formally recommend the reduction.

With time, however, I came to see another dimension to the revenue story. The billions JAMB suddenly started remitting were also an index of the stupendous scale of the leakages that had existed before Oloyede arrived.

The infamous story of the JAMB official in Benue who claimed that a snake had swallowed N36 million illustrates this perfectly. Many Nigerians remember the story as evidence of JAMB’s corruption. The actual story points in the opposite direction. The money disappeared years before Oloyede became registrar. It came to light because he ordered an unusually thorough audit of JAMB’s finances after assuming office. The audit exposed old thefts, led to recoveries and triggered prosecutions. I made this point in my 2023 column on the controversy over Mmesoma Ejikeme’s forged JAMB result.

By the time Oloyede left office, JAMB said it had remitted more than N50 billion in operating surpluses over his decade in office. Before his appointment, the comparable remittances were almost risibly insignificant. Whatever disagreements one may have with specific JAMB policies, the financial transformation is difficult to explain away.

And financial probity was only one part of the story. Oloyede abolished the scratch-card system that had nourished fraud and profiteering and replaced it with electronic PIN vending. His JAMB introduced the Central Admissions Processing System, or CAPS, which made admissions more transparent and gave candidates the ability to track, accept or reject admission offers electronically. CAPS also made it harder for tertiary institutions to conduct admissions completely outside JAMB’s view.

His administration strengthened biometric verification, tightened the accreditation and monitoring of CBT centers and created the JAMB Equal Opportunity Group to make the UTME more accessible to blind candidates and other people with disabilities. These were tangible institutional innovations with consequences for ordinary people.

This is where Oloyede’s record reinforces a point I have repeatedly made about Nigerian institutions. In a March 30, 2019, column titled “INEC as Greatest Danger to Nigeria’s Democracy,” I observed that the weakness of our institutional structures causes government agencies to take on the character and temperaments of the people who head them. Dora Akunyili stamped her energetic vigilance on NAFDAC. Yemi Kale’s analytical rigor gave the National Bureau of Statistics unusual credibility. Attahiru Jega’s personal reputation for integrity rubbed off on INEC.

Oloyede’s JAMB belongs in that tradition. His personal frugality, intolerance of financial opacity, obsessive attention to processes and concern with institutional reputation became attributes people increasingly associated with JAMB itself.

That is simultaneously reassuring and troubling. It is reassuring because it shows what a conscientious leader can do even within the severe constraints of the Nigerian public service. It is troubling because institutions should eventually acquire virtues that survive the people who temporarily lead them. A system whose integrity depends entirely on the moral fiber of one individual remains dangerously vulnerable to regression.

Oloyede’s tenure certainly had its failures. The gravest was the catastrophic 2025 UTME error that compromised the results of 379,997 candidates in 157 centers in Lagos and the Southeast. The scale of the error was horrendous.

I wrote at the time that the disaster deserved outrage while also pointing out that comparable technology failures had disrupted standardized examinations in the United States, Britain and India. JAMB investigated the complaints, acknowledged its error, apologized and organized a resit for the affected candidates. Oloyede accepted responsibility publicly.

We later learned that his first instinct when the scale of the failure became clear was to resign. People around him persuaded him that leaving in the middle of the crisis would amount to abandoning the students whose results had been compromised. He stayed to supervise the remedial process.

For me, that episode revealed as much about him as his successes did. Anyone can bask in the reflected glory of institutional success. Character becomes more legible in moments of humiliating failure. Oloyede did what Nigerian public officials almost never do: he admitted that his institution had grievously failed, apologized without hiding behind a committee and took personal responsibility for an error he did not personally cause.

Professor Segun Aina, a professor of computer engineering and systems expert, succeeded Oloyede on July 31. Aina has said that protecting JAMB’s integrity will be a central priority of his tenure. That is a promising starting point.

My hope is that he will build on Oloyede’s achievements, correct the flaws that became apparent during his tenure and institutionalize the habits of transparency and accountability so deeply that they cease to depend on who occupies the registrar’s office.

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How Exile Prepared Ribadu for Trump Confrontation

2026-09-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

A Christian friend called me a few days ago after news spread that scores of my Borgu cousins who had gathered for Juma’at prayers at Kpenya Mosque in Dekara District of Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State were abducted by terrorists. He said the international publicity that attends attacks such as this must have contributed to the waning of the “Christian genocide” narrative that had reduced Nigeria’s complex security crisis to a simplistic, one-dimensional story of Muslims killing Christians.

I told him it was more complicated than that. It’s true that the abduction of Muslim worshippers from a mosque punctures the fiction that Nigeria’s terrorists check the religion of their victims before they kill, kidnap or dispossess them.

Nonetheless, what seems to be the retreat of the Christian-genocide rhetoric in Washington cannot be explained by these sorts of inconvenient facts alone. Facts rarely defeat politically useful narratives by themselves. Someone has to organize the facts, carry them into the right rooms and translate them into the political idiom of people who have the power to act. That person, more than anyone else in the Tinubu government, appears to have been National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu.

Fifteen years ago, Ribadu was effectively a political exile in the United States. He was removed as the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission after he fell out with the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua government. He fled the country after surviving at least two failed assassination attempts and several death threats.

He spent about 18 months as a visiting fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development and also had an affiliation with Oxford. Washington became a classroom as well as a refuge.

In May 2009, Ribadu testified before the US House Financial Services Committee on corruption and illicit financial flows. In February 2010, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs to discuss Nigeria’s political crisis.

At the Senate hearing, Ribadu thanked Senators Russ Feingold and Johnny Isakson for intervening when the Yar’Adua government was after him. “You stood up, you spoke, and it has made a difference,” he told them.

He had personally experienced how congressional pressure, think-tank advocacy, media visibility and executive-branch attention can converge to influence a foreign government.

That knowledge became useful late last year when Donald Trump elevated allegations of a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria into a major foreign-policy confrontation. Trump returned Nigeria to the list of Countries of Particular Concern, threatened to cut US assistance and instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action if Nigeria failed to stop the killing of Christians. He even used the phrase “guns-a-blazing.”

Whatever one thought of the factual basis of the genocide claim, the diplomatic danger to Nigeria was potentially politically, even existentially, fatal. Nigerian officials protested that insecurity afflicts people of all religions. True as that was, the argument did little to address the American political machinery powering the accusation.

Within weeks, Ribadu led a heavyweight Nigerian delegation to Washington that included the attorney general, the inspector general of police and the chief of defense staff. He met Congressman Riley Moore, one of the loudest congressional voices on Christian persecution in Nigeria, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. In the aftermath of the meeting, the language of confrontation soon began to give way to the language of cooperation.

Then came the lobbying operation. In December 2025, Aster Legal, acting on Ribadu’s behalf, hired DCI Group, a Washington public affairs and lobbying firm, under an agreement worth as much as $9 million over a year. The contract said DCI would help Nigeria communicate its efforts to protect Christian communities and sustain American support for the fight against West African jihadist groups.

This was expensive. But the mechanics of the campaign are instructive. DCI went directly into the American conservative Christian ecosystem from which much of the genocide narrative drew its political and rhetorical energy. Its FARA filings show outreach to evangelical and religious-freedom figures, invitations to a dinner with Nigeria’s First Lady and efforts to arrange interviews for her. The filings record invitations to figures such as Sam Brownback, Nina Shea, Ralph Reed and Penny Nance, along with subsequent congressional engagements.

Oluremi Tinubu was an unusually useful messenger. She is an ordained Christian pastor married to a Muslim president. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February, Trump publicly recognized her as a Christian pastor and called her “a very respected woman.” Her presence complicated the picture of a Muslim government presiding over the slaughter of Christians.

Ribadu kept returning to Washington. From May 4 to May 6, he met Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and senior State Department and Pentagon officials. In August, he led another Nigerian delegation for the second session of the US-Nigeria Joint Working Group created to deal with the Country of Particular Concern designation.

These high-profile meetings caused the tenor of the relationship between Nigeria and the United States to change dramatically. The United States still speaks about protecting Christian communities, and Nigeria remains on the religious-freedom list, but Washington now increasingly treats Nigeria as a security partner.

The clearest evidence of the change came from Marco Rubio. In congressional testimony in June, he said in many cases Nigeria’s problem was a lack of capability in confronting heavily armed terrorist groups and described US-Nigeria cooperation as a “success story.”

Then Trump himself wrote Tinubu in July praising his “decisive leadership” and his efforts to confront violence affecting Christian communities. Months after threatening military action, Trump was telling Tinubu that it was an honor to stand with him against terrorists.

Ribadu’s American exile helps explain his aptitude for managing this transition. I doubt that he simply dusted off his 2009 contact list and called old friends. In any case, Washington has changed profoundly since the Obama years, and many of the Trump people who mattered in 2025 and 2026 were outside Ribadu’s old think-tank circle. His advantage appears to have been what is called institutional literacy.

He had learned that Washington is a collection of overlapping constituencies. You need to know how the US Congress works, which congressional staff to contact, which think tanks matter, which lobbyists can get the job done, which religious organizations are central to narrative reframing, what alternative media narratives to construct, and which executive agencies can help the most. He had also learned that access becomes more useful when it is attached to something the United States wants.

Of course, the Tinubu government has bargaining chips that no opposition politician can match. Nigeria can offer intelligence cooperation, military access, counterterrorism operations, arrests and prosecutions. That helps explain why the government’s Washington campaign has so far produced more tangible results than Atiku Abubakar’s much smaller lobbying effort. Money matters, but state power gives lobbying something concrete to sell.

Just so I am not misunderstood, this is not a celebration of Ribadu’s diplomatic wizardry. It’s merely an analysis and an acknowledgement of my sense of what and who are responsible for the thawing of the tensile stress between the Trump and Tinubu administrations.

There is, however, a more immediate test of the government’s security competence than anything that happens in Washington. It is in Dekara, where scores of my Borgu cousins were abducted from a mosque while performing Juma’at prayers. The government must secure their release and ensure that such an outrage does not become another entry in Nigeria’s grim catalogue of mass abductions.

Borgu deserves particular attention because an axis of the country long known for relative peace has been bleeding with increasing regularity lately. Communities that used to regard terrorism and mass kidnapping as distant horrors are now learning the vocabulary of ransom, displacement, fear and mass graves. The federal and Niger State governments must move beyond episodic reactions and establish a security structure capable of preventing recurrence.

It was in Borgu that Bola Tinubu received the title “Jagaba,” or champion, long before it became inseparable from his political identity. The people of the land that gave him that name should not have to live at the mercy of terrorists. If Washington now regards his government as a serious partner in the fight against insecurity, that partnership must produce security where Nigerians actually live, worship and sleep.

For Borgu, the most meaningful dividend of all the lobbying, diplomacy and international security cooperation will be the safe return of the Kpenya Mosque abductees and the restoration of the peace for which Borgu was once known.

The same must be true for every part of Nigeria now bleeding from insecurity, from Benue and Plateau to Zamfara and Katsina, from Borno to the forests of Niger and Kwara states and other communities where Nigerians, Christian and Muslim alike, live with the daily fear of blood-thirsty terrorists, bandits and kidnappers.

Now That Tinubu and Atiku Agree on Cheap Petrol

2026-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Last week, I argued that Atiku Abubakar’s promise to restore petrol subsidy had rattled President Bola Ahmed Tinubu because it finally opened a policy flank on which the president is acutely vulnerable. Events since then have strengthened my conviction. Tinubu has gone from deriding Atiku’s proposal as evidence of “serious ignorance” of governance and economics to suddenly talking about the imperative to lower transportation costs and make Nigerians benefit from cheaper fuel.

After meeting governors this week, Tinubu announced an accelerated rollout of CNG infrastructure and said, “We have agreed that cheaper fuel should result in cheaper fares!” His government wants lower transport fares from October 1.

Atiku wants to achieve affordability through petrol subsidy. Tinubu wants to achieve it through CNG and state intervention in transport fares. Beneath the differences in method lies an unexpected convergence: both men now concede that Nigerians need affordable energy and transportation. That’s some progress!

Tinubu once knew this without the benefit of Atiku’s prompting. At his January 25, 2023, presidential campaign rally in Abeokuta, he said, “I will reduce the price of fuel. Be rest assured that I will solve the fuel crisis.” He later repeated the promise more tersely: “We shall bring the fuel price down.” Those are useful quotations to recall now that the government treats cheap petrol as an economic abomination.

The difference between candidate Tinubu and President Tinubu is that the latter became captive to the narrative hegemony of subsidy-removal fundamentalists. Because Atiku and Peter Obi had also promised to eliminate petrol subsidy in 2023, there was no formidable political voice challenging the ideological consensus. The victims of the policy complained, but the political elite and their neoliberal cheerleaders told them that their suffering was necessary, temporary and ultimately redemptive.

Tinubu came to understand “reform” almost exclusively as the infliction of pain on everyday people. So, upon being sworn in, he lit a fire under Nigerians, has been roasting them slowly in it while government officials who luxuriate in sybaritic lavishness tell Nigerians that being cooked alive is an investment in a glorious future. When Atiku promised to rescue Nigerians from the fire, Tinubu and his overfed supporters warn that extinguishing the fire would reverse the gains they have recorded from being roasted.

This mentality is peculiar because governments everywhere recognize that the cost of energy and mobility cannot simply be abandoned to the tender mercies of the market. In much of Europe, governments heavily subsidize mass public transportation, which reduces the necessity for private car ownership. Canada does much the same. Brazilian cities spend public money to keep bus fares below their full economic cost.

The United States has a more automobile-centered model, so the political system is extraordinarily sensitive to petrol prices.

Years ago, I cited an instructive example from Iowa. A citizen panel recommended that the state raise its petrol tax by eight to ten cents a gallon because it desperately needed money for roads and bridges. Governor Terry Branstad rejected the recommendation and instructed his Department of Transportation to search for savings.

His spokesman explained that the legislature did not want to impose an additional burden on taxpayers. Imagine that. Government needed money for infrastructure and decided that its citizens should not be squeezed harder to provide it.

Nigerian governments routinely invert that order. For Nigerian political elites and their enablers, citizens must first be impoverished so that government can become richer in order to build infrastructure for impoverished citizens. Yet only the living use infrastructure. You do not starve people to death today because you hope to give their ghosts world-class highways tomorrow.

There is also much semantic trickery in discussions of energy subsidies. Call them subsidies, oil tax breaks, petrol tax holidays, public transportation subsidies or something else. What matters to ordinary people is the outcome.

A widely cited estimate from the Center for Investigative Reporting once calculated the “true cost” of gasoline in the United States at around $15 a gallon when pollution, public expenditure and other socialized costs were included, although motorists paid a fraction of that at the pump. The point is that societies make political choices about who bears the full cost of energy and mobility.

Nigeria made an especially cruel choice. It is an oil-producing country with an appallingly inadequate mass public transportation system, unreliable electricity that forces households and businesses to generate their own power, and an economy in which almost everything moves by road. Removing the petrol subsidy in one fell swoop under such conditions was bound to transmit price shocks into food, transportation, manufacturing and nearly every recess of economic life.

The government nevertheless brags that governors are richer as a consequence. That is one of the most revealing advertisements for Tinubu’s reverse Robin Hoodism. Robin Hood, according to the legend, robbed the rich to help the poor. Tinubu’s economic philosophy drains resources from the poor to fatten governments and people who were already insulated from hardship. State governments now receive historically large allocations, and this is offered as proof that subsidy removal is working.

Well, according to a recent report, 33 states spent more than ₦500 billion in the first six months of this year on Government Houses, governors’ offices, related executive administration, travel and transportation. Of course, every naira in those categories is not spent on gubernatorial self-indulgence. Still, there is something perversely revealing about celebrating the swollen liquidity of state treasuries while the household economies that financed this liquidity through dramatically higher petrol prices are bleeding.

Tinubu recently reinforced this argument with a jibe about the days when some governors could not pay salaries. He recalled the “Half Salary” governor in Osun, an unmistakable reference to Rauf Aregbesola. Aregbesola’s modulated salary regime was indefensible and caused genuine hardship. But Tinubu was being clever by half because nominal salaries are meaningless unless we ask what they can buy.

Nigeria’s general price level has increased so steeply since the Aregbesola years that ₦50,000 in 2017 had approximately the purchasing power of about ₦237,000 today. So, if a senior civil servant whose full salary was ₦100,000 received ₦50,000 then, that miserable half salary could buy roughly what ₦237,000 buys today. Unless the worker’s current salary has risen above that threshold, his celebrated “full salary” leaves him poorer in real terms.

Petrol makes Tinubu’s boast even more ridiculous. The national average price of petrol was about ₦144 per liter in 2017. In May this year it averaged nearly ₦1,600. A ₦50,000 half salary in 2017 bought about 346 liters of petrol. A ₦100,000 full salary today buys only about 63 liters. The half salary bought more than five times as much petrol as the nominally full salary.

In other words, “we now pay full salaries” is empty propaganda without reference to purchasing power. A full calabash of worthless pebbles does not become more valuable than half a calabash of gold merely because it is full.

If time travel were possible, millions of Nigerians would speed back to the comparatively halcyon years when less money took them farther than more money takes them now. After all the economic gobbledygook has dissipated, people judge governments by the quality of their lives. Can they afford food? Can they get to work? Can their wages pay rent? Can businesses survive? Can parents meet the basic needs of their children?

For years, I have asked the wide-eyed neoliberal jesters in and out of government who demonize subsidies and worship cruelty as economic reform to show me one country that developed by ruthlessly depressing the living standards of ordinary people, destroying their purchasing power and making basic energy prohibitively expensive while government officials wallowed in comfort. I am still waiting because such a country does not exist.

The business of a government worth the name is to make life a little less difficult for the weakest members of society. Tinubu calls the deliberate transfer of pain from government to the poor “courage.” I have always called it reverse Robin Hoodism.

Atiku’s subsidy promise has at least forced Tinubu to rediscover a truth he knew when he wanted Nigerians’ votes in 2023: prohibitively expensive energy is bad for people and bad for an economy. They disagree about how to lower the cost, but the argument has already moved. Nigerians are no longer being told merely to rejoice that governors have more money and endure their own misery for an endlessly deferred tomorrow.

The debate is finally about how to make life affordable again. That is progress of a sort, although it has taken three years of disastrous “economic reform” and an opposition politician’s campaign promise to get Tinubu back to something he himself once promised: “We shall bring the fuel price down.”

Why Atiku’s Subsidy Gambit Rattles Tinubu

2026-08-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Atiku Abubakar may finally have discovered the issue that can draw political blood from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. And I am enjoying seeing the president and his inner circle squirm in discomfort like cats stranded on a hot zinc roof.

On Thursday, barely a day after official campaigns began for the 2027 presidential election, Atiku pledged to restore petrol subsidies if Nigerians elect him president. That pledge, more than anything he has done lately to dislodge Tinubu, is the clearest signal yet that he is prepared to wrest power from the president.

Before now, Atiku expended money, time and energy excavating Tinubu’s past, much of which Nigerians already know. Tinubu’s 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 to the US government in a case that grew out of a heroin-trafficking investigation has been public knowledge for years. It was Sahara Reporters that first reported it on September 15, 2008. Fresh FBI or DEA papers are unlikely to suddenly alter electoral attitudes.

The Chicago State University expedition was even less politically useful. Tinubu genuinely attended and graduated from CSU in 1979. Caleb Westberg, the university’s registrar, said so under oath. He agreed that the photocopy Tinubu submitted to INEC did not look like the 1979 samples shown to him, but CSU’s diploma templates changed over the years and the BBC found that Tinubu’s copy resembled replacement diplomas from the 1990s. Westberg also said the missing portion of the university logo could have been cut off during photocopying because American diplomas are unusually large and aren’t intended to be photocopied.

In America, diplomas are largely ceremonial documents that people frame and hang on walls. Transcripts are the official records routinely used to verify attendance and graduation. Atiku’s legal expedition ironically helped establish that Tinubu has a CSU transcript and graduated with honors.

The BBC Global Disinformation Team found no evidence for the claim that Tinubu forged the CSU diploma he submitted to INEC. The report, in fact, won “Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist” at the 2024 African Fact-Checking Awards in Accra. In other words, Atiku spent enormous political energy helping to settle a question whose answer was electorally barren.

Tinubu understood this and mostly ignored the attacks. More importantly, Atiku offered little policy distance from Tinubu on the economic question that has tormented Nigerians since May 2023. He had promised during the last election to remove petrol subsidies within his first 100 days in office. On the most consequential economic policy of the Tinubu presidency, Atiku was traveling on the same ideological road.

That changed this week. Atiku asked the question millions of Nigerians have been asking: where is the money supposedly saved from subsidy removal? He then promised a new subsidy structure that would privilege locally refined petrol, give qualifying Nigerian refineries crude at preferential prices, impose a fixed annual spending ceiling, trace subsidized crude to actual domestic production and punish diversion. His formulation is that “the subsidy will follow the barrel.”

That is a more serious proposal than the Presidency’s caricature of it. And Tinubu suddenly found his voice. He personally dismissed Atiku’s pledge as a demonstration of “serious ignorance” of governance and the economy. Atiku’s previous assaults on Tinubu’s character produced studied presidential indifference. But his challenge to the economic orthodoxy that has pauperized Nigerians produced presidential irritation. That means he struck a raw nerve.

If Atiku’s proposal demonstrates ignorance, what does Tinubu’s policy demonstrate? Any honest person knows the answer: cruelty. Between ignorance and cruelty, which is more benign? You be the judge.

The anti-subsidy theology that Tinubu and his neoliberal choristers recite has always rested on a false premise. Subsidy simply means government assistance. Every functional society subsidizes something its people need for survival and economic productivity. Governments subsidize food, agriculture, housing, healthcare, transportation or energy according to the peculiarities of their societies.

For Nigeria, petrol occupies a uniquely central place because it doubles as an infrastructural substitute. People buy petrol because public electricity is unreliable. Small businesses generate their own power. Goods move mostly by road. Workers commute in vehicles powered by fuel. Farmers, artisans, traders and manufacturers absorb fuel costs and pass them on through prices.

A petrol subsidy therefore travels through the economy. Its removal travels through the economy too, only in the opposite direction. It raises transportation costs, production costs, food prices and the cost of nearly everything that depends on movement or power.

I warned about this exactly one month before Tinubu was inaugurated. In my April 29, 2023, column titled “Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success,” I warned that any policy that caused an arbitrary and unbearable increase in petrol prices without a corresponding improvement in incomes and living conditions would sink Tinubu. That warning was elementary commonsense.

The subsidy removal has since wreaked havoc on the economy, deepened poverty, killed businesses, murdered hope, hollowed out the middle class and democratized misery. Reuters now describes the aftermath of Tinubu’s reforms as the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. Nearly 80 percent of Nigerians in a recent voter tracker said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

The government’s answer is always the same sterile, tired, intentionally dishonest incantation: temporary pains will yield permanent gains. But we have heard that sermon before.

Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program came with the same vocabulary of sacrifice, deregulation, currency devaluation, subsidy withdrawal and deferred prosperity. Nigerians were told to endure pain today for abundance tomorrow. By the time Babangida left in 1993, manufacturing had been battered, purchasing power had collapsed and social misery had spread. The promised gains vanished into the ether.

Only living people can enjoy future gains. A government that starves people in installments cannot redeem itself with a hypothetical prosperity scheduled for an undefined tomorrow.

Tinubu’s most frequently advertised dividend of subsidy removal is that states now receive more money and can pay salaries and pensions. That is useful to salary earners, pensioners and the relatives who depend on them. Every Nigerian with a functioning brain cell knows that formal salary and pension earners constitute only a small fraction of Nigeria’s population. The wellbeing of state treasuries is a poor substitute for the wellbeing of the vast majority of citizens.

What kind of economic triumph makes governors more solvent while making citizens poorer? Government has improved the liquidity of public treasuries by draining the liquidity of household economies.

Atiku has finally opened a policy flank that Tinubu cannot wave away with moral insults, ethnic mobilization or tales of macroeconomic “reform.”

Nonetheless, Atiku’s conversion deserves scrutiny. He promised in 2023 to remove the same subsidy he now wants to restore in a redesigned form. I disagreed with him then. A politician who changes his mind after observing the destructive consequences of a policy can reasonably plead that evidence changed his assumptions. Nigerians also have abundant reasons to distrust politicians who discover compassion during campaigns.

They campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Tinubu, after all, told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign that if he failed to give them electricity and returned for a second term, they should not vote for him, although he inserted an escape clause about giving “adequate reasons” for failure. Muhammadu Buhari promised a paradise of security, prosperity and integrity before power exposed the hollowness of his promises.

Atiku therefore has work to do. He must keep explaining the cost of his subsidy plan, its funding source, its legal path under the Petroleum Industry Act, its anti-corruption safeguards and the mechanisms that will ensure cheaper energy reaches households and industries. He should put these commitments in language that can be measured and used against him if he wins.

In spite of my well-justified distrust of the promises of politicians, including Atiku who supervised a ruinous privation program when he was vice president, I can’t help but concede that this is the first truly useful political argument of the 2027 campaign.

Policy contrast is finally replacing pointless and unproductive character assassination. Nigerians already know that Tinubu has a morally complicated past, but they live every day with something more immediate: the extortionate price of food, transport, electricity, medicine and survival.

Atiku has finally moved the contest from Tinubu’s old files in America to Nigerian kitchens, markets, factories and motor parks. That is where Tinubu is most vulnerable. Tinubu can survive old scandals, but the mass hunger his “reforms” have created is a more formidable opponent than impotent darts thrown at his character.

Related Articles:

Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success

Tinubu’s Accurate 12-Year-Old Prediction on Subsidy Removal Effects

President Tinubu and Dangers of Subsidy Removal

Tinubu, Nigeria is Sinking and Streets are Full of Tears

Conspiracy of Price Gouging between Dangote and NNPCL

Thought Subsidy Was Bad. Why is Tinubu Bringing it Back?

Rise of Right-wing Economic Populism in Nigeria

Same Old Cruel Lies to Justify Fuel Price Hike

Elumelu, Angelou and the Politics of First Names

2026-08-21T00:00:15.524-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

UBA Group Chairman Tony Elumelu rebuked a graduate trainee for calling him by his first name, saying he didn’t “subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life.”

Well, calling a social superior or an older person by their first name isn’t simply “Oyinbo life.” At least it isn’t uniformly American life. In the American South and much of the Midwest, addressing an older person or a social superior by their first name without invitation can still come across as startlingly irreverent, although corporate cultures vary and many workplaces now explicitly encourage first-name informality.

Here, titles such as “Mr.,” “Ms.,” “Mrs.,” “Dr.” and “Professor” are still customarily prefixed to last names when addressing older people, people one does not know well or people who are socially superior. This convention is particularly entrenched in many African American communities and remains customary in many American university settings unless the professor expressly invites first-name address.

Maya Angelou provided a memorable illustration of this Southern African American convention in San Francisco in June 1990 during a taping of KPIX-TV’s daytime talk show called "People Are Talking." Angelou, who was a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, famously corrected a 20-year-old undergraduate who addressed her as “Maya.”

“And first, I’m Miss Angelou,” she said. “Yes, ma’am. I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, has no license to come up to me and call me by my first name. That’s first. That’s first. Also, because at the same time, I am your mother, I’m your auntie, I’m your teacher, I’m your professor. You see?” Watch the video below:

That’s somewhat similar to Elumelu’s response to the young graduate trainee who called him Tony. Elumelu is just one year older than Angelou was when she publicly chastised the undergraduate who called her Maya.

So, even in American “Oyinbo life,” age, accomplishment and the quasi-familial authority of an elder can entitle such people to titular respect, to freedom from being addressed by their first name unless they expressly permit it.

I am aware that it’s slightly different in the UK. Well, the UK, too, once had an elaborate culture of titles and formal address, but that culture began to erode rapidly from the 1960s. There is now widespread egalitarian informality in address even though British society remains incredibly socially stratified in more ways than America is.

First-name address is now prevalent among British adults, including across differences of age and rank. British university students quite commonly call lecturers and professors by their first names.

I once wrote about British exchange students we had in my department who experienced culture shock upon realizing that, in many US university settings, it is considered astonishingly disrespectful and inappropriate to address lecturers and professors by their first names unless invited to do so.

Of course, even in Britain, primary and secondary school students don’t ordinarily call their teachers by their first names.

It’s also worth noting that in many parts of continental Europe, unlike in Britain, age, status and social distance are still explicitly marked in forms of address through honorifics, formal pronouns or other linguistic conventions. The norms vary considerably from country to country, but the point is that first-name familiarity across differences of age and status is by no means a universal European convention.

So, what the young lady did isn’t “Oyinbo life.” It is better understood as a spillover of the un-Nigerian corporate culture of diminished ritual marking of hierarchy that Nigerian banks and other elite workplaces embraced in the name of enhancing approachability. Elumelu, incidentally, is one of the architects of that culture.

Tinubu’s Double Standard on Jingir’s Jingoism and Catholic Clerics’ Counsel

2026-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

There is something profoundly unsettling about the selective elasticity of the Tinubu presidency’s capacity for outrage. Its vocal cords appear to be in fine fettle when Catholic clerics call attention to the misery that government policies have visited on Nigerians. Those same vocal cords mysteriously retreat into quiescence when a prominent Muslim cleric transforms the country into a theological battlefield and converts electoral politics into a sectarian headcount in ways that potentially benefit the president.

Sheikh Sani Yahaya Jingir, a leading Izala cleric, recently called for another Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket in 2027 and cast the 2023 election as a triumph of Muslims over Christians. At a Kano State Government mass wedding on August 8, he urged Muslims to repeat the Muslim-Muslim ticket so that they could prove to “unbelievers” who he said claim numerical superiority that Muslims are more numerous.

“When the votes were counted,” he said, “Allah helped us, and we defeated them.” He also declared, “My vote is for Islam,” and invited his audience to affirm that their votes should similarly go to Muslims. He said his advocacy would pain “unbelievers” and described himself as someone who “raises the flag of Islam.”

As a Muslim, I want to go on record that Jingir does not speak for me. My compatriots are not my enemies because of incidental differences in our religious faiths.

Elections are not a referendum on the numerical strength of religious membership. Elections are just elections, and their consequences are borne by everyone. Both Muslims and Christians are writhing in never-before-seen existential torment because of the Tinubu government’s soulless, spirit-crushing, boneheaded, wrongheaded, externally imposed economic policies.

After the predictable outrage that his remarks provoked, Jingir had an opportunity to retrieve himself from the condemnable cesspool of sectarian triumphalism into which he had gleefully descended, but he chose pigheaded defiance. In an interview with BBC Hausa, he said he had “absolutely no regrets,” would never apologize and would continue to advocate a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

His attempt at clarification both clarified everything and nothing. “I am not campaigning for Bola Tinubu,” he said. “I am campaigning for my religion.” And that is precisely the problem.

Nigeria is a delicately balanced multi-religious country where reckless clerical rhetoric can have consequences that extend far beyond the immediate thrill of applause from a religiously homogeneous audience. Northern Nigeria, in particular, is a religiously plural region with a long, complicated history of Muslim-Christian tensions, episodic violence and mutual suspicion.

Muslim clerical elites exercise enormous influence over public opinion in much of the Muslim North. Their pronouncements are invested with a moral authority that the words of politicians rarely command. A preacher who transforms elections into contests between Muslims and “unbelievers” therefore does more than share an eccentric private opinion. He sacralizes political difference. He invests ordinary democratic choices with the emotionally combustible force of religious obligation. That is unacceptably dangerous.

Jingir’s defenders have strained to explain away the language of kafir, “infidel” and arne as innocent descriptive terms for people who profess a different faith. That defense is willfully obtuse. Words acquire meaning from history, context, tone and usage. Kafir, “infidel” and arne are fighting words in Nigerian inter-religious discourse. They carry connotations of contempt, alterity, exclusion and civilizational hierarchy. They summon an “us” that is pure, righteous and entitled against a “them” that is alien, suspect and lesser.

A country riven by religious differences cannot afford that language from influential clerics. Nigeria has shed too much blood at the intersection of religion, politics and manipulation for sensible people to treat such rhetoric as harmless clerical exuberance.

The federal government’s response, or more accurately the Presidency’s studied silence over Jingir’s reckless religious provocation, becomes especially instructive when placed beside its recent reaction to Catholic leaders.

On July 28, leaders of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria met President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Villa. They spoke about insecurity, poverty, economic hardship, education and the general distress that millions of Nigerians endure. Cardinal John Onaiyekan later said the bishops told the president that Nigeria was “bleeding” and that ordinary people were hurting.

The Presidency sprang into combat mode. Daniel Bwala, one of Tinubu’s media advisers, accused Onaiyekan of sounding “more political than spiritual.” He questioned whether the cardinal spoke for all Christians and gratuitously dragged Peter Obi into the matter. Now, I invited the reader to judge who between Jingir and Onaiyekan sounds “more political than spiritual.”

Temitope Ajayi, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, issued a statement with the remarkable title “Cardinal Onaiyekan’s Abuse of Clerical Privilege” where he hurled a string of irreverent vituperations at one of Africa’s most respected Christian clerics.

The contrast is jarring. A Catholic cardinal whose clerical “offence” consisted in telling the president that Nigerians were suffering was accused of abusing clerical privilege. A Muslim cleric who turned the president’s Muslim-Muslim ticket into an instrument of religious supremacy and spoke of electoral victory over “unbelievers” has so far attracted no remotely comparable rebuke from the presidential megaphone.

The National Human Rights Commission has commendably called for Jingir’s arrest and prosecution over hate speech. Femi Fani-Kayode, a Tinubu ally, has excoriated him. Several Muslim and Christian voices have condemned his rhetoric. But the Presidency itself has maintained a remarkably eloquent silence.

Silence never has a single meaning. Tinubu’s silence cannot responsibly be presented as proof that he shares Jingir’s views. Yet presidential silence acquires political meaning when it occurs alongside furious presidential speech directed at people whose “offense” is infinitely more benign.

The Presidency demonstrated in the Onaiyekan episode that it knows how to respond to clerics. It knows how to issue statements. It knows how to deploy its spokespeople. It knows how to accuse religious leaders of political partisanship and clerical impropriety. That same machinery has developed an inexplicable infirmity in the face of Jingir’s sectarian jingoism.

For every northerner who professes or aspires to pan-northernism, this is the time to speak. Ahmadu Bello, the standard for northern inclusiveness, would condemn Jingir.

There is a poignant historical anecdote that illustrates how far we appear to have fallen from an older ideal of northern pluralism. A widely shared account says that in 1962, a young John Onaiyekan emerged the best secondary school student in the entire Northern Nigeria. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of the Northern Region, was so impressed that he personally visited the young Onaiyekan in his hometown and asked what he wanted to become.

Onaiyekan reportedly said he wanted to become a Catholic priest. The Sardauna, a descendant of Usman Dan Fodio and the most consequential Muslim political leader of his generation in Northern Nigeria, supported the young Christian’s aspiration.

The significance of the anecdote transcends its charming simplicity. Ahmadu Bello understood that the North could remain recognizably Muslim in large parts of its cultural geography while making space for Christians to flourish in their own faith. Religious difference did not have to become religious antagonism.

In several past columns, I have invoked Steve Goodier who captured this wisdom beautifully: “We don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Only notes that are different can harmonize. The same is true with people.”

Nigeria’s religious diversity is a fact that wise leaders manage, protect and celebrate. It is a reality that reckless leaders and clerics weaponize.

President Tinubu repeatedly presents himself as a protector of religious freedom and national unity. He now has an opportunity to give substance to those professions. He should distance himself clearly and unequivocally from Jingir’s jingoism. He should state that his choice of a Muslim running mate was never a vehicle for Muslim supremacy, a religious census or an invitation to humiliate Nigerian Christians.

In my May 30, 2026, column titled “The Shettima Danger for Tinubu,” I argued that the choice of Shettima as vice president reflects the singularities of the cultural sociology of Nigeria where ethnicity has more primacy in self- and group-identification than religion in the South and where religion is a more consequential agent of group identification and mobilization than ethnicity in the North. Tinubu is first a Yoruba man before he is a Muslim, but Shettima, in the context of national politics, is first a Muslim before he is Kanuri. This consideration led me to re-christen the ticket a “Yoruba-Muslim ticket.”

Finally, Tinubu’s spokespeople should also discover the same energetic vocabulary of indignation and vituperation they summoned against Catholic clerics who called attention to economic hardship and insecurity.

A government that berates a cardinal for saying Nigerians are hurting can surely find words for a cleric who divides Nigerians into Muslims and “unbelievers.” Nigeria’s peace requires that it does.

Lamido and New Twist in Nigerian Award Rackets

2026-08-12T12:50:50.357-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Nigerians have become so listlessly accustomed to the epidemic of dubious awards. Every week, some grandiloquently named organization nobody has heard of announces a “Man of the Year,” “Icon of Democracy,” “African Leadership Excellence Award,” “Global Peace Ambassador” or some similarly inflated honor for politicians, traditional rulers, businessmen and anyone else vain or credulous enough to accept it.

But the award racket now appears to be mutating into something potentially more consequential.

Someone recently called my attention to an organization called STAi Research University of Leadership, Management and Technology in Abuja, which on July 25 installed the Lamido of Adamawa, Muhammadu Barkindo Aliyu Mustapha, as its “Founding Chancellor.”

There was no mainstream media coverage of the event. But Idi Mukhtar Maiha,Tinubu's Minister for Livestock who is from Adamawa State, was there. The Lamido himself is said to be old and sick and was represented by his eldest son.

Although the Lamido was made the “founding chancellor” of the unlicensed university, there was no vice chancellor at the occasion.

The person who alerted me to this strange institution also pointed out that “Dr.” Ogah seems to have an unusual attraction for Northern traditional rulers and Islamic clerics.

Premium Times reported in 2022 that StandTall honored the Emir of Dutse and created a research center bearing his name. The same event involved Adamu Baba-Yunusa, the Ona of Abaji, with another center named after him. STAi's current board chairman is the Emir of Zazzau.

A 2021 StandTall conference was held in collaboration with the Kabiru Gombe Centre for Religious Diversity, Ethics and Peace Studies, named after the prominent Izala cleric Sheikh Kabiru Gombe. Ogah named a building on the 3D design of his campus after Izala leader Bala Lau.

“I looked at the photos of the event and asked myself how prominent Nigerians could be so much in love with titles that they would not even ask if an awarding institution is genuine,” the source said.

He has a point. STAi Research University is not on the National Universities Commission's list of licensed Nigerian private universities.

The organization behind it is StandTall Africa Initiative, founded by one self-described “Dr.” Ogah Emmanuel Edeoja whose PhD is “in view,” which is Nigerian English for “not yet earned,” but he addresses himself as a "Dr.," nonetheless.

Perhaps his “Dr.” derives from an honorary doctorate. But if it is honorary, there is another complication. In May 2026, the Federal Government approved rules specifically forbidding recipients of honorary doctorates from using “Dr.” in official, academic or professional contexts on the strength of those awards. The National Universities Commission had already become alarmed enough by Nigeria's epidemic of honorary doctorates and manufactured “Drs” to establish guidelines against their abuse.

Anyway, an organization that grew partly through the promiscuous distribution of awards is now promoting a “research university” whose founder publicly bears a doctoral title that his own published academic biography does not explain.

The supposed university itself appears to exist only in the imagination of its founder. I could find no independent university website, no publicly advertised accredited degree programs, no academic catalogue and no recognizable institutional infrastructure of the sort one associates with an operating university.

More revealingly, the organization's own account of the Lamido's installation describes faculties and research centers that “will” be established and announces fundraising for a proposed Senate House.

In other words, even its own publicity indicates that much of the institution whose “Founding Chancellor” has already been installed remains in the realm of futurity.

But the titles have arrived ahead of the university. There is already a “Founding Chancellor.” There are proposed faculties bearing the names of wealthy Nigerians. There are research centers named after prominent people. There are dignitaries, ceremonies, photographs and the grand institutional vocabulary of academia.

The buildings can come later. The titles must come first.

That is precisely how Nigeria's award culture works. Prestige is manufactured through association. Once an emir, minister, professor or billionaire appears on a stage with you, poses for photographs and accepts an imposing title, you appropriate a fraction of his social capital.

The process then becomes self-reinforcing. The fifth prominent person joins because the first four did. Nobody wants to be the tiresome fellow who asks the embarrassingly elementary question: Who exactly are these people? That is how reputational laundering works.

There is nothing inherently improper about trying to establish a private university. Nor have I found evidence that StandTall Africa Initiative itself is fictitious or that its promoters are engaged in criminal fraud. STAi Research University may simply be a proposed university whose promoters have galloped far ahead of regulatory approval in their choice of nomenclature and ceremonial theatrics.

But before anybody accepts an appointment as chancellor, pro-chancellor, vice-chancellor, professor or chairman of something that calls itself a university, it should first be established that it has been licensed by the NUC.

Nigeria's old award racket thrived on our almost pathological hunger for titles. Its emerging mutation may be discovering that there is an even more profitable frontier than giving people impressive titles. It is creating impressive institutions to house them.

Brazil as Euro-Africa on American Soil

2026-08-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Salvador embodied Africa in more ways than the preservation of Yoruba religion, as highlighted last week. Our Candomblé-believing tour guide, who used to be Catholic, also told us how the memory of the bravery of enslaved Yoruba Muslims in the 1800s is inspiring a small, as yet insignificant but nonetheless symbolic historical reconnection with Islam in the city.

In 1835, African Muslims, predominantly Yoruba, led an armed rebellion against slavery and the racial order in Salvador that left dozens of rebels and several of their opponents dead. Known in Brazilian historical records as the Malê Revolt, the uprising included both enslaved and free Africans.

As people familiar with the Yoruba language know, ìmàle means Muslim and Ẹ̀sìn Ìmàle means Islam, literally the religion of the Malians, a nod to the fact that Islam reached Yorubaland through Malians.

So, the Malê Revolt basically means Muslim revolt. Although Yoruba Muslims predominated, Hausa and other African Muslims also participated. Interestingly, while Bahia received particularly large numbers of enslaved people from West Africa, the rest of Brazil drew more heavily from West Central Africa, especially present-day Angola and Congo.

After the failed Malê Revolt, surviving Muslim Africans were imprisoned, flogged, closely monitored or deported to Africa. Several of the deported, particularly the Yoruba ones, chose to return to Lagos where they built mosques and shaped Islam to this day.

The 1835 Malê Revolt occupies an important place in Afro-Bahian historical consciousness even among strongly Christian Afro-Brazilians, our tour guide told us. The Salvador carnival organization Malê Debalê, for example, deliberately invokes Malê resistance through its name, music and public messages about racism and Black political struggle.

What I’d call symbolic Islam became institutionally visible again in Salvador around the early 1990s with the emergence of the Centro Cultural Islâmico da Bahia, which intentionally looked for a Yoruba Muslim from Nigeria’s Osun State by the name of Sheikh Abdul Hameed Abu Bakr Ahmad to head it since 1992.

Although Salvador, and Brazil in general, is defined by the crucible of racial tension, we found remarkable racial harmony in everyday relational encounters. We saw little overt racial anxiety in ordinary social interactions. In all the cities we visited, we saw families dining where one member looked white, another Black and yet another mixed-race. Everybody seemed to get along well in spite of racial differences.

Of course, this masks deep, race-induced structural inequalities in wealth distribution. My wife and I like to walk long distances both for health reasons and to feel the real, raw pulse of places. On the routes we walked in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the wealthiest neighborhoods, marked by stupendously spellbinding marble splendor, were overwhelmingly white while the grubbiest neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Black.

One Boni Sobrinho, a mixed-race sociology doctoral student and university lecturer we met at the Federal University of Bahia who identifies as Black because his father is Black, told us Brazilian racism, unlike American or European racism, wears a permanent, genial smile, which helps conceal its viciousness and lend it acceptability.

He has a point. When we dined in historic, high-end restaurants such as São Paulo’s Figueira Rubaiyat, which is constructed around an enormous, roughly 130-year-old fig tree, we were often the only Black diners. But no one fixed us with curious stares to suggest we didn’t belong there, the sort of stares Black people can encounter in parts of Europe and the United States.

Well, for all the loud echoes of Africa in Brazil, it is also very European. This wasn’t just the result of Brazil’s Portuguese colonialism but also of the deeply assimilationist nature of the colonization. From 1808 to 1821, for example, Rio de Janeiro became the seat of the Portuguese court and the effective center of the Portuguese Empire. Then, from 1815 to 1821, Brazil was elevated from colony to kingdom within the formally constituted United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.

It was an extraordinary inversion of colonial hierarchy. Brazil became the only colonial possession to serve as the seat of the colonial power that ruled it. It would be akin to the British monarch relocating to Lagos and governing the United Kingdom from there.

Echoes of that inversion have somehow survived to this day. Brazil’s economy is now many times larger than Portugal’s and Brazilian cultural production has long flowed back toward its former colonizer and shaped Portuguese cultural consumption. In global communication, we study this reversal of the conventional center-to-periphery flow of culture as a classic example of “contra-flow.”

Yet, Brazilians are so wedded to the Portuguese language that English has surprisingly little everyday reach. Were it not for Google Translate, we would have had a hard time communicating with many people. In all my international travels, I have never been to any country where I encountered as much resistance to English as I did in Brazil.

São Paulo is very European in its architecture and lush greenery. But its seemingly endless, grinding traffic seems to have no parallel anywhere in the world. An Uber driver told us that congestion gets so severe that some wealthy residents use helicopters to move around the city.

While the city of São Paulo looks European, its premier university, the University of São Paulo, like the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, reminded me of a Nigerian university campus. USP, incidentally, is not a federal university but a public university funded by the state of São Paulo and is widely regarded as Brazil’s leading university.

Although the physical structures of the public university campuses we visited were unremarkable, at least compared with American and European universities, Brazil’s leading public universities are generally more prestigious and more competitive to get into than private universities.

At the primary and secondary levels, however, the pattern often reverses, with private schools enjoying stronger reputations than public ones. Historically, this produced the striking paradox in which students educated in expensive private schools disproportionately won places at prestigious, tuition-free public universities while many public-school students ended up in tuition-charging private universities.

Affirmative-action policies have sought to disrupt that paradox. Federal universities now reserve at least half of their places for students who attended public secondary schools, with additional provisions based on income and racial identity.

I particularly looked forward to visiting Rio de Janeiro because its status reminds me of Lagos. Both are former national capitals that never surrendered their cultural and economic centrality. Instead of flying there from São Paulo, we deliberately took a long-distance bus so we could see more of Brazil’s countryside. Our bus, a better version of America’s Greyhound service, was basically an airplane on the ground.

I was struck by the fact that although the bus was not full, we left at the scheduled time. I joked to my wife that that was the greatest evidence that Brazil wasn’t a Third World country, along with electricity access of almost 100 percent and an adult literacy rate of about 95 percent.

In Nigeria, commercial road transport often doesn’t depart until all, or most, seats are occupied, which means advertised schedules can be aspirational. Even air travelers are accustomed to schedules that can dissolve into hours of delay.

The six-and-a-half-hour journey was a visual delight. Much of it followed the Via Dutra, one of Brazil’s most important highways, connecting its two largest cities through the Paraíba Valley, one of the country’s richest and most heavily industrialized regions.

The civil engineering along the route is a marvel. Highways have been blasted through, around and beneath mountains across terrain that would seem extraordinarily difficult to build on. As the road curls around steep mountains, the bus takes you high above valleys where lines of cars appear tiny below. The sight both excites and scares.

Retaining walls, anchor systems and elaborate drainage structures help stabilize slopes and reduce the danger of mudslides during heavy rains. Just as striking was the attention to environmental restoration. Areas disturbed by road construction were covered with greenery to encourage vegetation to return. In a country of dense forests and mountainous terrain, ecological preservation is plainly not an abstract concern.

By the time we arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the landscape had changed dramatically. We stayed about a mile from the central district and walked roughly 20 minutes to the archaeological remains of Valongo Wharf, surrounded by the modern city. An estimated 900,000 enslaved Africans passed through Valongo, which UNESCO describes as the most important physical trace of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the American continent. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.

One thing that repeatedly struck us in Brazil was the country’s forthrightness about the history of slavery. At the museums and historical sites we visited, the past was neither prettified nor glossed over.

We also visited the Museu do Amanhã, or Museum of Tomorrow, whose exhibits invite visitors to consider how human actions today will shape life over the next 50 years. Its striking futuristic architecture, set dramatically beside the water, is almost as memorable as the exhibitions.

Our visit to Cristo Redentor, or Christ the Redeemer, was another highlight. People from every part of the world and from many different faiths made the journey to this extraordinary monument. We took the train for about 20 minutes up Corcovado Mountain and emerged at the summit overlooking Rio. The panoramic view of the city, mountains and coastline was simply breathtaking.

That, finally, was the Brazil we encountered. It is neither entirely Europe transplanted nor Africa preserved, but a restless Euro Africa on American soil where conquest, slavery, survival and reinvention remain visible in the architecture, food, faiths, faces and rhythms of everyday life.

Five Days in Salvador, Brazil’s Yoruba City

2026-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

For the past couple of years, my wife and I have instituted a yearly self-care ritual of taking at least one vacation in a part of the world we have not visited before. This year, I suggested Brazil for two reasons.

One, my interest in recreational genetics has led me to join Facebook groups where people from all over the world share their DNA results and invite conversation. I was struck by the number of phenotypically white Brazilians who show significant Central and West African ancestry. Although the Brazilians who share their DNA results on social media groups are not representative of the entire population, their results nonetheless signaled to me that African filiation in the country is higher and deeper than most people assume.

Second, I have had a faint familiarity with the surviving vestiges of African, particularly Yoruba, cultural and linguistic influences in Brazilian culture and wanted to deepen my knowledge experientially.

So, we planned a 10-day, three-city vacation. We would visit Salvador, Brazil’s Blackest and fifth-largest city, which has the distinction of being the country’s first capital and is now the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia; São Paulo, Brazil’s commercial nerve center and the most populous city in the Americas; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city and its federal capital until 1960, which is also home to the Christ the Redeemer statue, one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

Because of Salvador’s historical and cultural significance to us, we chose to spend half of our stay there. In this remarkable city, we repeatedly encountered West Africa speaking Portuguese. The resemblance was not always visible in faces. Sometimes it announced itself in food, gesture, rhythm and words whose African ancestry had survived even when their speakers no longer remembered it.

In more ways than I can express, driving and walking through Salvador was redolent of the sights, sounds, occasional smells and rhythms of Lagos.

Except for its exquisitely hilly landscape and its mixed-race and white populations, almost everything else about it reminded me of Lagos. The sight of helmeted “Okada” riders competing with motorists for the road, vulcanizer shops, street vendors, occasional unsolicited car windshield cleaners during traffic jams, bus conductors shouting destinations to attract passengers, open-air markets and the architecture of the buildings could have made me momentarily lose awareness of where I was. Only the phenotypic diversity of the people around us kept reminding us that we were not in West Africa.

Although Salvador is Brazil’s Blackest city, and the northeastern region is the country’s Black Belt, Black people who look like me are no longer the numerical majority there. They now constitute about 34 percent of the city’s population. Mixed-race people, classified as pardos in Brazil, are the majority, with more than 49 percent of the population. White Brazilians constitute a little more than 16 percent of the city’s population.

Salvador’s demographic changes reflect a broader national trend in Brazil. Brazil’s population went from predominantly Black in 1872 to predominantly white in subsequent censuses and then, for the first time in its census history, to predominantly mixed-race in the 2022 census. According to that census, mixed-race Brazilians now constitute about 45 percent of the country’s population. Whites constitute a little over 43 percent and Blacks a little over 10 percent.

However, although Salvador is now only a little over 30 percent Black, the Yoruba influence in the city is unmistakable. The people depicted in murals are predominantly Black. Representations of traditional attire reflect unmistakably West African aesthetics.

The most recognizable monument to the city’s Yoruba heritage can be found near its center. There stands a historic urban lagoon called Dique do Tororó, distinguished by eight monumental sculptures of Yoruba and Fon-Gbe deities standing in the water.

Designed by the Bahian artist Tatti Moreno, the sculptures represent Oxalá, or Òrìṣà-ńlá; Iemanjá, or Yemọja; Oxum, or Ọ̀ṣun; Ogum, or Ògún; Oxóssi, or Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì; Xangô, or Ṣàngó; Nanã, or Nàná Bùrùkúù; and Iansã, or Ọya.

Four smaller sculptures on the surrounding land represent Oxumaré, or Òṣùmàrè; Ossain, or Ọ̀sanyìn; Logun-Edé, or Lógun Ẹ̀dẹ; and Ewá, or Yewa. The works were created during the 1990s and have become internationally recognizable symbols of Salvador’s African religious and cultural identity.

We visited the city’s historic Pelourinho neighborhood, where Michael Jackson performed with Olodum, the Afro-Brazilian percussion group whose name recalls Olódùmarè, the Yoruba name for the Supreme Being, and shot his iconic music video for “They Don’t Really Care About Us.”

Pelourinho was once a place where enslaved Africans and others were publicly punished during the colonial period. Today, it is known for its cobblestone streets, brightly painted colonial buildings, churches and strong Afro-Brazilian cultural presence.

There, we also visited the Afro-Brazilian Museum, where we found street vendors selling everything from food and clothing to artwork amid the familiar sounds and movements of African open-air markets.

We explored Salvador’s cuisine, which reminded us of West Africa in several ways. In Salvador, you cannot miss acarajé, which anyone with even a faint familiarity with Yoruba would recognize as deriving from “àkàrà jẹ,” that is, “eat akara.”

Like Nigerian akara, acarajé is made from beans, although the Bahian version is fried in palm oil. Salvador’s acarajé is then sliced open and filled with sautéed shrimp, diced onions and peppers, with chopped okra sometimes added. The acarajé we ate in São Paulo, however, looked and tasted almost exactly like Nigerian akara.

The women who traditionally fry and sell acarajé are called baianas. They dress in white or other brightly colored dresses with matching headwraps, resembling exaggerated forms of modern West African dress. They could easily pass for our mothers and sisters in almost any part of West Africa.

We also found that Brazilian cuisine is full of something that looked and tasted to us like garri. They call it farofa, a toasted cassava flour prepared in many varieties and often mixed with palm oil. It is served alongside stews, incorporated into other dishes or sprinkled dry as a garnish.

My wife initially thought it was something else. When she tasted it and discovered that it was essentially garri by another name, she remarked that she would not pay good money to fly from the United States to Brazil to eat garri in expensive restaurants.

It turned out that cassava, from which garri is made, came to us in Nigeria by way of Brazil. The Portuguese who introduced cassava to Africa first encountered it in Brazil.

But the similarities in our cuisines did not stop there. On Salvador’s beaches, which have an elaborate nightlife, we sampled several kinds of street food. One that stood out was queijo coalho, often translated simply as coalho cheese, which tasted exactly like wàrà to us. It is a firm, mildly salty Brazilian cheese made from cow’s milk. You buy it ungrilled and beach vendors roast it for you on skewers.

Perhaps the most surprising gastronomic discovery for us on the beaches was the sight of vendors selling what looked, and even tasted, like tsire, the Hausa-style skewered meat, usually beef, coated with a spicy groundnut-based seasoning and grilled over an open fire.

Brazilians call their version espetinho. Although it is not coated in the distinctive groundnut-and-spice mixture used for tsire, it looks every bit like tsire nonetheless. It is served with farofa, vinaigrette-style salad or hot sauce.

Seeing tsire-like meat being sold alongside people hawking sugarcane made me do a double take. Was I suddenly in Kano?

By far the most mind-blowing experience for us was attending two Candomblé ritual ceremonies. Candomblé is an Afro-Brazilian religion rooted in Yoruba and other African traditions. Much of its ritual liturgy is preserved in Yoruba.

I have a working knowledge of Yoruba, and my wife, who attended high school in Ogbomoso for three years, speaks Yoruba even better than I do.

It was a surreal experience seeing Portuguese-speaking Brazilians beating drums and dancing like Yoruba people while reciting incantations, prayers and songs in Yoruba, a language they did not speak conversationally and whose literal meanings many of them did not appear to understand.

Because the ceremonies were not open to everyone, we had to gain access through a tour guide who was an adherent of the faith.

He had given his business a Yoruba name, and because he was as dark-skinned as any regular Nigerian, I assumed he spoke some Yoruba. He did not. But, like the worshippers we encountered at Ilê Asé Opô Aganju, as the shrine is called, he had memorized inherited prayers, chants and songs in Yoruba, much as non-Arabic-speaking Muslims use Arabic in worship.

The ritual language, of course, often preserves older Yoruba forms and pronunciations shaped by centuries of transmission in Brazil.

We encountered an Egúngún, a Yoruba ancestral masquerade preserved in Bahia. Completely concealed beneath an elaborate cascade of brightly colored cloth, the masquerader is regarded as the temporary embodiment of a departed ancestor returning to counsel, bless or discipline the living.

As it danced and lunged through the gathering, a cane or ritual staff enforced a respectful distance, threatening men who obstructed its path and sending spectators scrambling aside.

After the Egúngún ceremony was over and the crowd was dispersing, we heard someone say in accentless Yoruba, “Kí ló dé?” That stopped us in our tracks.

We did not know the context in which he said it, but it fascinated us. Could this be a native Yoruba speaker visiting from Nigeria or Benin Republic? Could it be a Brazilian who had learned and understood the language?

So, I asked, in my limited Yoruba, who there spoke Yoruba. The person looked in our direction with great surprise and enthusiasm, but we had to leave because it was late and our guide had other commitments.

I will conclude this travelogue next week.

Tinubu’s Government of Ghosts, Doubles and Phantom Agencies

2026-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

A disturbing pattern of unending, self-destructive administrative chaos in appointments to consequential public office positions is defining the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu government, which signposts Tinubu’s lack of control of his government and the reality of a shadowy, disorganized, feuding and mercenary cabal of conscienceless influence peddlers in the Presidential Villa.

Muhammadu Buhari pioneered this sort of disabling administrative anarchy, but Tinubu has upped it a notch, to the point that no one can be certain of the validity or even legitimacy of appointments announced by the presidential spokesperson.

As I’ll elaborate shortly, there is now a recurring pattern of the Presidency repeatedly announcing appointments before verifying the legal office, the incumbent’s status, the supervising minister’s knowledge and the SGF’s capacity or willingness to implement the decision. The result is a government in which press releases conflict with appointment letters, agencies announce presidential decisions of doubtful origin and incumbents disregard publicly announced replacements.

In this atmosphere of administrative anomie, it’s no surprise that someone can forge, or be assisted to forge, presidential instruments to establish a fraudulent presidential council that can pass through multiple layers of the Nigerian federal bureaucracy.

Buhari’s administrative infirmity expressed itself chiefly through lethargy, vacancy and spectacular absent-mindedness. He took more than five months to constitute his first cabinet in 2015. After dissolving the boards of federal agencies in July 2015, he waited until December 2017 to announce 209 chairpersons and 1,258 board members. At least eight of the appointees had died. In 2020, Buhari appointed Tobias Chukwuemeka Okwuru to the Federal Character Commission two months after Okwuru’s death. By August 2020, reports counted about 80 federal agencies without substantive heads or governing boards or both.

Buhari’s major weakness was that he forgot to appoint people when he needed to, which I used to characterize as “ungovernance,” but Tinubu’s is a different hue. He appoints, unappoints and reappoints people with the nervous rapidity of a man changing television channels during a thunderstorm.

The examples have become too numerous to ignore. Maryam Shetty arrived at the National Assembly for ministerial screening in 2023 and discovered that her nomination had vanished. Tinubu replaced Niger Delta Development Commission nominees within 24 hours of naming them. Kashim Imam’s appointment as chairman of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency lasted less than a week.

In August 2025, the presidency reappointed Muheeba Dankaka as chair of the Federal Character Commission at 6:35 p.m. and announced Ayo Omidiran as chair at 10:44 p.m. One commission acquired two presidentially appointed chairs within four hours.

The Nigerian Television Authority provided an even more dramatic case. Tinubu, through his official spokesman, appointed Rotimi Pedro as director-general in August 2025 while Salihu Dembos still had an uncompleted tenure. Two weeks later, the presidency reversed itself and restored the incumbents. Premium Times reported that the supervising information minister learned of the original appointments through the media. Its investigation traced the upheaval to a presidential aide who had bypassed the minister and supplied allegations that an official review found spurious.

That episode illuminates the anatomy of the disorder. Access appears to have become authority. An aide can insinuate an allegation into the presidential bloodstream, procure a consequential announcement and leave ministers scrambling to discover what their own government has done.

Then came NIPOST. In October 2023, the presidency appointed Tola Odeyemi postmaster-general with immediate effect. But NIPOST’s own communications channels subsequently announced the reinstatement of Sunday Adepoju. Workers barricaded the headquarters against Odeyemi. She eventually assumed office.

The current imbroglio at the Border Communities Development Agency perfects the absurdity. On June 27, 2026, the presidency announced Abdulrazak Sa’ad Namdas as the agency’s new director-general, replacing Dakorinama Alabo George who it said had resigned to run for an election in Rivers State.

Namdas reportedly still awaits the formal appointment letter from the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. George says he never resigned, claims his announced replacement was an error and continues to act as head. On July 9, he met the finance minister to discuss agency funding. Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga answered with two words: “Namdas stays.”

Who, then, leads BCDA? The man announced by the presidency, the man recognized by the bureaucracy or the man exercising operational control? Trust TV’s analysis sharpened the question by pointing out that the BCDA Act creates the office of executive secretary, while the presidency calls the office director-general. The Act also makes clear that the executive secretary is the accounting officer who controls contracts, staff and public property. This semantic confusion therefore carries fiscal consequences. One agency now has two titles, two claimants and three divergent sources of authority: public announcement, formal instrument and administrative possession.

A president has the prerogative to hire and fire appointees. State authority, however, requires legible procedure. An appointment exists in law and administration through an authenticated instrument, a clear effective date, a lawful office and an orderly transfer of power. A press release floating free of these elements is risible political theatre. Repeated reversals convert presidential words into provisional rumors.

The suspicion of a cabal arises here. “Cabal” often functions in Nigerian discourse as an all-purpose name for invisible conclave of devils in the seat of power, an informal constellation of aides, patrons, bureaucratic gatekeepers and political financiers who can insert a name into a presidential announcement, withhold the letter that activates it, reverse the decision after resistance or sustain an incumbent against a published presidential directive.

The observable pattern establishes that Tinubu has lost the monopoly over the voice and force of his own presidency and that a cabal rules on his behalf. Competing nodes around him appear able to originate, obstruct and annul decisions. His government speaks in tongues, with each tongue claiming the presidential seal.

The scandal of the so-called Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, or PFIPC, becomes intelligible within this administrative Babel. The presidency says Adeniyi Adeyemi fabricated an appointment as director-general of a fictitious presidential agency. Yet this phantom acquired a ₦1.3 billion line in the 2026 budget, occupied federal office space, met foreign diplomats and secured an approved staff establishment after official verification failed. The Central Bank opened dollar and pound accounts for it on the Accountant-General’s mandate, although the accounts remained empty and inactive.

Calling Adeyemi a con man explains his intention, but his success diagnoses the sad, cabal-infested, fraud-prone, dysfunctional pathology of the Tinubu government. A solitary impostor cannot travel through the Office of the SGF, Head of Service, Budget Office, Accountant-General, Central Bank and diplomatic system unless verification gates have collapsed or helpful insiders have opened them. PFIPC became a government agency through serial bureaucratic authentication. Fiction accumulated official stamps until it acquired the material attributes of fact.

How do we reverse this? We can learn from our former colonizer. Britain subjects many public appointments to a published Governance Code and oversight by an independent Commissioner for Public Appointments. Nigeria needs a publicly searchable presidential appointments register showing the statutory office, appointee, tenure, effective date, instrument number and current status.

Every presidential council and every entity in the federal budget since 2023 deserves a forensic audit. The National Assembly should trace who inserted PFIPC into the budget and who validated each stage of its bureaucratic incarnation.

PFIPC surfaced because its counterfeit authority collided with the real Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission. How many silent phantoms flourish because they have avoided such a collision? How many presidential appointments originate from people Tinubu cannot identify? How many announced decisions die inside the SGF’s office while their ghosts roam the news?

A government that cannot authenticate its own voice invites impostors to speak for it. A president whose appointees cannot tell whether they have been hired, fired or duplicated presides over a dysfunctional, self-dealing banana republic. His authority has become divisible, tradable and deniable.

Case for Replicating the Oyo Kidnap-Rescue Template Nationwide

2026-07-18T00:05:43.560-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Because human beings are prone to perceive nonexistent patterns, connections and intentional design even in random or unrelated events, a cognitive tendency called apophenia, and because Nigerians have an enduring and justified mistrust of government, I have seen many people question whether the abduction and rescue of pupils and teachers from three schools in the Yawota and Ahoro-Esinele communities of Oriire Local Government Area in Oyo State really happened.

The mistrust is legitimate, but I find the apophenic leap from mistrust to the conclusion that the entire episode was staged a little unsettling.

I am convinced by the available evidence that pupils and teachers were indeed abducted by despicably homicidal terrorists. I have seen no credible evidence that any government paid criminals to stage the spectacle of an abduction and rescue.

Contemporary reporting documented the May 15 attacks, identified abducted children and teachers, interviewed their relatives and recorded the killing of two teachers before the surviving captives regained their freedom.

Terrorist groups have been abducting and killing innocent students for more than a decade and have never needed prompting from politicians to do so. Attributing their heinous crimes to sponsorship by rival factions within the Nigerian political class unintentionally exculpates these scoundrels and converts murderers into mere instruments of political intrigue.

That said, there is no complete clarity about how the pupils and teachers regained their freedom. Government critics have alleged, without evidence, that a huge ransom was paid as a precondition for their release. As I will show later, I doubt this.

But the government’s version of how the pupils and teachers were rescued is not entirely coherent, either.

The Presidency initially described the rescue as the outcome of a successful joint military, police and intelligence operation. It said eight suspected kidnappers were arrested, other members of the group were killed and neither ransom nor a prisoner exchange was involved. The abductors had allegedly demanded the release of a detained terrorist leader, but the government said he remained in custody and was being prosecuted.

The Army’s subsequent account was less dramatic than the Presidency’s early language suggested. It did not say troops stormed the camp and physically extracted the hostages during a firefight. Instead, it said a month-long intelligence operation identified the group’s leaders, informants, logistical networks and hideouts. According to the Army, arrests disrupted the group and exerted pressure that “ultimately led the terrorist group to unconditionally release the pupils and teachers.”

In a July 10 interview with Tinubu-owned TVC News, former DSS operative Seyi Adetayo offered a more specific but as yet uncorroborated explanation of the operational modalities of the rescue. He claimed that government security operatives identified and detained some kidnappers’ mothers, wives, children and other associates, sent recordings of those arrests to the abductors and combined coercive pressure with intelligence operations. He also claimed that the terrorists were warned that harm to their captives would bring harm to their relatives.

Based on the available evidence, the most defensible interpretation of what happened is that this was an unusually collaborative, intelligence-driven and coercively negotiated release. It was probably not a conventional battlefield rescue. Nor does it appear to have been a ransom-propelled release.

This actually fills me with hope. It means the government may have found a potentially effective template for disrupting terrorist networks and rescuing their victims without exposing abductees to the indiscriminate violence of a frontal military assault.

But the part of the template worth replicating is its lawful core: interagency cooperation, careful intelligence gathering, the identification of terrorist networks, the disruption of their supply routes and the arrest of culpable collaborators.

There would be no greater evidence for the truth of the government’s account of the Oriire rescue than the successful replication of its methods in unresolved mass-abduction cases nationwide.

The February 3-4 terrorist assault on Woro and neighboring Nuku communities in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State not only killed scores of people but also led to a mass abduction. UNICEF reported that around 176 women, including pregnant women, and children were kidnapped from Woro.

More than five months later, the victims have not been released, according to the latest public reports. The terrorists have released videos showing women and small children appealing desperately for intervention. They, too, need the collaborative intelligence-gathering energies that security agencies deployed in Oyo.

On May 15, suspected militants abducted 42 children from Mussa Primary and Junior Secondary School and surrounding homes in Askira-Uba Local Government Area of Borno State. Some of the abductees were extremely young. According to the latest available reporting, all 42 remain missing.

There was a separate school attack in Lassa town in the same local government area in Borno on June 29. Gunmen attacked Government Day Secondary School while students were taking examinations. Eight people were rescued, but 36 students and one staff member remain captive. The students comprised 25 girls and 11 boys.

On June 7, in Magamin Diddi village in Maradun Local Government Area of Zamfara State, bandits reportedly invited villagers to what was presented as a peace meeting and then abducted them. The police confirmed that 39 people were taken, although community estimates were as high as 50. The kidnappers reportedly demanded ₦125 million and released some captives to communicate the demand. There has been no authoritative public account of the remaining captives’ release.

Nor should the passage of time cause older victims to disappear from the national conscience. Eighty-nine of the Chibok schoolgirls abducted in 2014 remain officially unaccounted for. Their families have endured more than a decade of promises, occasional discoveries and prolonged uncertainty.

There are many more cases than I have the space to chronicle in this column. Security forces presumably have records of mass abductions, including many that never made the national news. Yet Nigeria has developed a disturbing ritual in which outrage follows an abduction, officials promise decisive action and public attention eventually moves elsewhere while families remain imprisoned in terrifyingly crippling uncertainty.

The true test of the Oyo operation is not the applause it generated after one dramatic success but the number of forgotten captives its methods can bring home. If its intelligence model worked as the government says it did, it should become a national operational doctrine rather than a self-contained public-relations trophy.

Replicating it in Woro, Mussa, Lassa, Magamin Diddi and other communities would simultaneously rescue imperiled citizens, restore public faith in the capacity of the government to perform its primary duty and begin to extirpate a kidnapping economy that has destroyed communal peace and individual peace of mind across Nigeria. Until that happens, Oyo remains an encouraging breakthrough, but not yet a proven national template.

Related Articles:

Terrorism in Oyo and Tinubu’s Yoruba Test

Don’t Add Lies to the Terrorist Horror in Oyo

In Trinidad and Tobago, Where Africa and India Meet

2026-07-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

When I received an email in April inviting me to be the keynote speaker at the June 24-26 International Media and Communication Conference at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago, I didn’t hesitate to accept. There were two reasons for this.

First, the invitation acknowledged and, in some ways, rewarded the visibility and significance of my contribution to media and communication scholarship. There are several competent professors of communication in the world who could have been invited to deliver the keynote, but they chose me. I felt both honored and flattered.

Second, I’ve had an inexplicably enduring curiosity about and emotional affiliation with the Caribbean islands, which I first encountered in my secondary school days as the “West Indies” when I read Samuel Selvon’s humorous yet gloomy and instructive 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners. The novel chronicles the struggles of Caribbean immigrants in postwar London and features a notoriously slippery Nigerian character called Captain.

My curiosity about and emotional investment in the region deepened in 2017 when my mother and I took AncestryDNA tests to determine whether the Manding patronyms in her family, such as Manneh and Toure, could connect her to Mali, where they originated. They did, and I captured this in a February 13, 2021, column titled “Surprising American Cousins Through My Mother’s Ancestry.”

But I also discovered that I have many Caribbean cousins and that one of my “ancestral journeys,” which is Ancestry’s term for places where people with whom one shares distant common ancestors live, is “Afro-Caribbean Peoples.”

That discovery both quenched my curiosity and deepened my emotional attachment to the Caribbean. I now know that I share common ancestry with several of the Africans there whose ancestors were stolen from West Africa hundreds of years ago.

I couldn’t help sharing this before the start of my keynote, particularly because the event’s MC, Abeo Jackson, an infectiously energetic doctoral student at the University of the West Indies, looked almost exactly like a maternal first cousin of mine. The resemblance was made even more pronounced by the fact that she was dressed like a Nigerian.

But Trinidad and Tobago, a tiny island nation of just 1.5 million people, isn’t populated only by African descendants. It also has a large Indian-descended population that slightly outnumbers the African population. That’s why I describe the country as a place where West Africa and India meet.

Indians became part of Trinidad primarily through the British colonial system of indentured servitude after the abolition of African slavery there in 1838. The end of slavery caused many formerly enslaved Africans to leave the sugar estates, reducing the supply of plantation labor and enabling workers to demand better, fairer wages.

The former British enslavers compensated for this by going to colonial India to recruit cheap, malleable workers under fixed-term labor contracts known as indentured servitude. The first Indian indentured workers arrived in Trinidad aboard the Fatel Razack on May 30, 1845.

Historically, Afro-Trinidadians enjoyed numerical dominance, but that began to slip in 1990. According to the country’s latest census, conducted in 2011, 35.4 percent of the population is Indian while 34.2 percent is African. About 8 percent identified as mixed African and East Indian. More than 15 percent identified as belonging to another mixed background and 6.2 percent did not state an ethnicity.

The driver who picked us up from the airport and took us to our hotel was an Indo-Trinidadian who spoke a charming, Hindi-inflected Trinidadian Creole English that both intrigued and escaped us. We resorted to hand gestures whenever verbal communication broke down.

Interestingly, Samuel Selvon, whose novel introduced me to Trinidad and Tobago in the 1980s, was Indo-Trinidadian. I didn’t know this until my visit to the country. Because the characters he describes are mostly Afro-Caribbean, I had assumed he was Black.

My wife accompanied me to Trinidad, and we had planned to explore the country beyond the university, but the intense three-day conference left us with no opportunity to do so. We plan to return on vacation in the coming years. Still, in our limited interactions with people within and outside the university, we encountered many fascinating things about the country.

While I was an undergraduate at Bayero University in Kano, I had the great fortune to read the works of Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis, a Trinidadian and Tobagonian linguist and scholar of African-Caribbean languages who wrote Trinidad Yoruba: From Mother-Tongue to Memory and Yoruba Songs of Trinidad. Her works examine the history, phonology, syntax and vocabulary of the Yoruba spoken in Trinidad, as well as the domains in which it survived the longest, particularly personal names, religious songs and rituals.

That led me to assume that most Trinidadians were descended from Yoruba people. But my wife, who is part Igbo, was the first to notice that many of the people we encountered at the university and the mall looked transparently Igbo, Cross Riverian or Akwa Ibomish.

So, I did a little research and found Trinidad’s 1813 slave census, which provides an unusually detailed snapshot of the African origins of its enslaved population. It recorded 25,696 enslaved people, including 13,984 who were African-born and 11,633 who were Creole-born, meaning they were born in Trinidad or elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Among the African-born population, the Igbo, rendered as “Ibo” at the time, had the largest representation, with about 2,863 people. They were followed by Congo people, with 2,450, Moco, with 2,240, Mandingo, with 1,421 and Kormantyn, with 1,068. Smaller recorded groups included Kwakwa, Temne, Susu, Kissi, Ibibio, Rada, Chamba, Fulani, Popo, Hausa and Yoruba.

I showed my wife the statistics and said they probably explained why so many people we saw in Port of Spain, the capital, and St. Augustine, the location of the University of the West Indies campus, looked so unmistakably Igbo.

Of course, all the ethnic groups have become so intermixed that it is impossible for anyone to be “pure” anything. But some genetic traits become physically dominant despite mixture with others.

Although the 1813 slave census counted only 10 Yoruba people in Trinidad, Yoruba cultural prominence in Trinidad owes much to the later nineteenth-century migration of formerly enslaved Yoruba people.

For a small country, Trinidad is surprisingly diverse. I didn’t expect to see any trace of Islam in this former British colony, where Indians bear names such as Samuel, Amanda, Rebecca, Joseph and John. But we saw bearded men who looked like Muslims and women who wore hijabs. Then we saw signs bearing the words “Ahlan wa Sahlan” and inviting the public to an Islamic event.

I asked one of the professors at the University of the West Indies to explain the Muslim presence in Trinidad and Tobago. Although Muslims constitute a mere 5 percent of the country’s population, they enjoy a visibility incommensurate with their numerical insignificance.

The best-documented early Trinidadian Muslim leader was Jonas Bath, who was also called John Mohammed Bath. He was an Arabic-literate West African Muslim brought to the island around 1804 or 1805. After obtaining his freedom, he became the religious and civic leader of the island’s Mandingo Muslims.

The community pooled money to purchase the freedom of other Muslims and reportedly numbered about 140 by the 1830s. Bath unsuccessfully petitioned the British authorities to repatriate the community to Africa.

The much larger and more enduring Muslim presence began in 1845 when the British brought Indian indentured workers to Trinidad after emancipation. But a few Afro-Trinidadians, inspired by American Black Muslims, also converted to Islam.

One such Afro-Trinidadian Muslim, my Trinidadian colleague told me, was Yasin Abu Bakr, born Lennox Philip, the leader of Jamaat al Muslimeen. On July 27, 1990, he and 113 others attempted to overthrow the government, partly in protest against economic difficulties caused by IMF-imposed subsidy withdrawals.

As you can probably guess by now, Trinidad and Tobago is an oil-producing country where subsidies still exist and where petrol, diesel and electricity are still cheap. It is the most prosperous Caribbean nation, and its universities are also among the best-rated in the region.

But the World Bank and the IMF haven’t given up trying to encourage the country’s government to remove all subsidies and leave the people to their own devices, as they have done in Nigeria.

I can’t end this reflection without noting the surprising similarity between the paralinguistic oral gestures West Africans and Trinidadians use to express annoyance, disgust, contempt, impatience or disapproval.

In Nigeria, we call it “hissing.” Jamaicans call it “kissing one’s teeth.” Trinidadians call it “steups,” sometimes spelled “stewps” or “cheups.” The verb is “to steups,” and the action can be called “steupsing.”

During lunch, an older man who works for a Caribbean news agency “hissed” in response to something. For a moment, it felt as though I was in Nigeria. My wife and I looked at each other in pleasant amazement.

Trinidad and Tobago taught me that history survives not only in archives, censuses and scholarly books but also in faces, faiths, names, rhythms of speech and even in a steups across a lunch table. On these small islands, Africa and India were uprooted, transplanted and compelled to remake themselves beside each other. What emerged is neither Africa nor India in miniature but a distinctly Trinidadian civilization in which distant inheritances remain visible, audible and emotionally recognizable.

The Phantom Presidential Council Scandal

2026-07-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

I first received a WhatsApp forward about the scandal from notable University of Texas history professor Toyin Falola. I didn’t read it. I thought it was just another corruption scandal, the sort I have become tragically inured to.

A few days later, my friend Professor Moses Ochonu forwarded another version of it to me. I told him Professor Falola, mentor to both of us, had already sent it to me but that I didn’t bother to read it because I had become jaded on issues like that. But social media soon became suffused with different tidbits of the scandal, and I could no longer ignore it.

I am now suspending the travelogue I had planned to write on my recent visit to Trinidad and Tobago where I was invited to deliver a keynote address at an international conference on media and communication. Nigeria, as it often does, has imposed its madness on my literary itinerary.

The story is almost too insane to be true. A certain Prince Adeniyi Adeyemi Mathew, also written in official statements as Adeyemi Adeniyi Matthew, presented himself as Director-General of the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council, sometimes twinned with the Presidential Economic Advisory Council.

The Presidency now says the body does not exist. In a June 11 disclaimer and a fuller July 1 statement, the State House said Adeyemi was an impostor, that his appointment letter was forged, that he falsely paraded himself as a presidential appointee and that the police had already filed criminal charges against him.

According to the Presidency, the drama began when the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission complained in October 2025 that another supposed government body was operating in its orbit. Foreign Affairs also reportedly grew uneasy after Adeyemi held meetings with ambassadors. The Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, then wrote the DSS and the Police to investigate what he described as forged appointment letters.

Adeyemi was later arrested at an office in the Federal Secretariat Complex in Abuja. Police reportedly searched his office and residence, found documents they characterized as forged and accused him of operating 34 bank accounts, including nine in the names of allegedly fictitious entities. The Presidency says he even used his papers to open a CBN account by misleading the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, although no government money was transferred into the account.

If that were all, this would be a straightforward story of a brazen con man who found a costume in the wardrobe of power and decided to wear it. But that is not all.

Before the Presidency disowned him, Adeyemi and his council were not anonymous. He led a management team to the EFCC headquarters. Premium Times reported that the visit was part of a partnership to strengthen Nigeria’s investment climate ahead of a proposed World Investment Summit.

PM News similarly reported that EFCC Chairman Ola Olukoyede received him and his team. In the images and accounts that circulated later, the EFCC encounter took on even more symbolic weight because of claims that Adeyemi received an EFCC plaque. Whether or not every detail of that ceremonial exchange survives independent verification, the larger fact is that a supposed fake agency gained access to the nation’s foremost anti-corruption institution, among several prominent institutions.

Perhaps the most curious is the council’s appearance in the national budget. ICIR and Channels TV reported that the council was captured in the 2026 budget with more than N1.3 billion. That single fact turns this from a case of impersonation into a study in state porosity.

An impostor can print a fake letter. He can design a fake letterhead. He can borrow solemn English from government circulars and paste a coat of arms on a document. But how does a nonexistent presidential council find its way into the budget?

The .gov.ng domain controversy deepens the absurdity. Nigeria’s .gov.ng domain is not supposed to be bought from roadside web designers. It is reserved for government institutions and requires official authorization and verification. If pfipc.gov.ng existed, and if it passed through the required government gatekeeping protocols, then somebody either forged papers successfully through a sleeping verification system or someone within the state gave it a helping hand. Either possibility is damning.

Adeyemi, for his part, has not gone quietly. He says he had a genuine appointment. He has accused Gbajabiamila of collecting N400 million through a proxy, demanding another N200 million and asking for 48 percent of a purported N27.4 billion take-off grant. He says his refusal to surrender the share caused his troubles.

These are grave allegations, but they are still allegations. So far, the public has not seen bank records, messages, recordings and receipts that would independently establish them.

Adeyemi is not a neutral witness in his own cause, so we can’t assume the facticity of his claims on face value. The Presidency and TheCable have drawn attention to his earlier public self-fashioning as a leader of the World Youth Organisation, which Nigerian newspapers once reported as an affiliate of the United Nations.

That claim later came under challenge because no such UN youth organ existed in the form he presented it. In other words, the man at the center of the PFIPC scandal appears to have a prior history of manufacturing proximity to grand institutions.

But the Presidency should not celebrate too quickly. Adeyemi’s credibility problems do not absolve the state. A thief who steals police uniform is a criminal. But if he uses the uniform to sleep in police barracks, command patrol vans, receive salutes from officers and collect allowances from the police budget, the scandal no longer belongs to the thief alone. It belongs to the police.

That is why the most plausible explanation is not a tidy binary. It is not simply that Adeyemi beat the system. Nor is it yet proven that Gbajabiamila co-designed the scheme and later turned on him after a quarrel over loot sharing.

The evidence available to the public supports a more troubling middle ground. Adeyemi was likely the prime mover of an elaborate institutional fraud, but he almost certainly benefited from either complicity, negligence or the habitual stupidity of Nigerian bureaucracy.

There are global parallels, but none is an exact twin. In Gujarat, India, a man named Sandeep Rajput allegedly created a fake Irrigation Project Division office, forged seals and signatures, submitted official-looking proposals and got more than 40 million Indian rupees in government grants released. That is probably the closest parallel because it involved not just impersonation but entry into public finance.

Also in India, Kiran Patel allegedly posed as an official of the Prime Minister’s Office and enjoyed official security and hospitality in Jammu and Kashmir before his arrest. His case resembles Adeyemi’s use of proximity to the presidency as a password to bureaucratic reverence.

In China, Zhao Xiyong posed as a State Council official, toured provinces, gave speeches and was received by local leaders who apparently lacked the courage or curiosity to ask basic questions.

In Ghana, a fake U.S. embassy operated for years, issued counterfeit visas and survived partly because corrupt officials were reportedly paid to look away.

These cases tell us something universal about power. Bureaucracies worship symbols. A seal, a title, a convoy, a letterhead, a foreign-sounding summit, a grandiose acronym and a confident fool in a well-cut suit can suspend institutional reason. In societies where hierarchy is fetishized, verification is often treated as disrespect or, as we like to say in Nigeria, “rudeness to constituted authority.”

The Nigerian state is at once overbearing and absent, performative and incompetent, obsessed with protocol but contemptuous of process. It will ask a poor widow for a sworn affidavit before paying her pension arrears but will allow a phantom council to stroll through elite institutions with the swagger of presidential legitimacy.

The question Nigerians should insist on is not merely whether Adeyemi forged documents. The Presidency has made that case and the court will decide. The bigger question is who opened the doors.

Who gave him office space? Who received his letters? Who cleared his delegation? Who processed his domain? Who inserted or failed to remove the budget line? Who saw the words “Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council” and did not ask, “Which law created this body?”

The scandal is not that Nigeria produced a man audacious enough to impersonate the state. Every country produces such men. The scandal is that the Nigerian state, with all its security agencies, protocol offices, budget departments, domain regulators and anti-corruption theatrics, may have been too hollow to notice that it was being impersonated from within its own shadow.

Adeyemi may yet be shown to be a lone con artist. Gbajabiamila may yet be vindicated. Or an independent investigation may uncover something darker. But what the public already knows is enough to indict the system. A government that can be mimicked this successfully has already confessed to being indistinguishable from its counterfeit.

Release Sowore and Hausa Activist Maisango

2026-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

When I chose to visit Nigeria in 2023 after seven years of staying away, family and friends cautioned that the change of leadership from Muhammadu Buhari to Bola Ahmed Tinubu should not anesthetize me into a false sense of security.

But many people that I know to be close to President Tinubu swore that he had vowed never to hound any critic and that I would never be arrested or detained.

They said Tinubu was a discursive democrat who recognized the right of citizens to vigorously ventilate their angst and anger, however disagreeably they may do so. They pointed me to the fact of his having never sued anyone even when multiple people libeled him daily. I was persuaded.

In fact, a bragging right among Tinubu supporters is that even as a candidate he never sued anyone for libel in spite of the steadily unceasing cornucopia of manifestly defamatory statements against him on social media. Even as president, with complete control over the instruments of coercion, his supporters say, he has been remarkably restrained in the face of withering criticism from commentators and opponents.

I was almost convinced that Tinubu was genuinely persuaded by what theorists Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have called agonistic pluralism, which is the idea that vigorous and intense disagreements are fundamental to a healthy democracy and that society should channel passionate political disputes into productive debate rather than strive for forced and false consensus.

But the last few weeks have shown that Tinubu, or people in his close circles, are trying to borrow a leaf from the book of past presidencies by showing intolerance for deliberative pluralism.

The ongoing detention of Omoyele Sowore and Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango, the Hausa activist known on social media as Bichiia Maisango, is a troubling signal that the Tinubu administration is either losing its democratic nerve or is allowing people acting in its name to drag it into the familiar cesspit of state intimidation.

Sowore is, of course, no stranger to state harassment. He has built a public life around provocation, resistance and confrontation with power. He can be intentionally abrasive, sometimes rhetorically excessive and almost always allergic to political conformity. But none of these is a crime. Democracies do not imprison citizens because their words offend the fragile ears of power. They do not turn presidential displeasure into a criminal justice project.

The charge against Sowore, stripped of its procedural clutter, is that he called President Tinubu a “criminal” on social media. The DSS reportedly demanded that he delete the post. He refused. The state then activated the Cybercrimes Act against him, like Buhari did a few years ago.

Now he is in Kuje Correctional Centre after the court revoked his self-recognition bail and issued a bench warrant for his absence on June 16, even though he had appeared in court on June 15, when the court did not sit, informed court officials that he would be traveling to Lagos and requested a later date, only for the matter to be rescheduled for the very next day in what looked like an effort to ensnare him.

People can argue about Sowore’s tone. But the proper answer to harsh speech is more speech, not handcuffs. A president with Tinubu’s long history in opposition politics should know this more than most people. He benefitted from the moral economy of dissent. He used the oxygen of protest, media criticism and oppositional defiance to rise to national prominence. It would be a historic irony if, as president, he now helps to suffocate the very liberties that made his political career possible.

The case of Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango is even more disturbing because it is shrouded in the familiar opacity of Nigeria’s security state. His wife, Hauwa Mundi, says he was invited to DSS headquarters in Abuja on June 2, 2026, and detained after honoring the invitation. For two weeks, the family reportedly had no access to him. She was later allowed to see him but expressed concern about his health.

Maisango is not a bandit. He is not a terrorist. He is not known to lead an armed cell. He is only a Hausa activist whose social media advocacy centers on Hausa ethnic consciousness, the distinction between Hausa and Fulani identity, insecurity, northern leadership, banditry and what he considers the political marginalization of ordinary Hausa people in the North.

I have followed, studied and written about these questions for years. Although I have issues with Maisango’s idea of Hausa ethnic purism, which is sociologically and historically impossible, I have often said that the lazy, ahistorical “Hausa-Fulani” label is a political shorthand invented by the Southern press to simplify the complexity of Hausaphone northern Muslim identity. Read, among many articles I wrote on this, my January 9, 2016, column titled “Is There Such a Thing as ‘Hausa-Fulani’?”

Hausa and Fulani are distinct peoples with distinct histories, even though centuries of contact, Islam, intermarriage, commerce and state formation have created deep cultural entanglements between them. To insist on that distinction is not incitement. It is not treason. It is not a threat to national security. It is, at worst, a contestable claim in the marketplace of ideas. At best, it is a necessary correction of a historically sloppy elite vocabulary.

If Maisango has called for violence, charge him publicly and let the evidence speak. If he has threatened anyone, put the threat before a judge. If he has broken a law, arraign him in open court. But detaining him in the shadows while unnamed officials mutter darkly about “dividing the country” is pure, unacceptable intimidation by insinuation.

Nigeria’s security agencies have perfected the art of treating thought as contraband. They arrest first, search for justification later and outsource explanation to anonymous whispers. When citizens ask why someone is being held, the response is often a fog of national security language designed to scare people away from scrutiny. That is how illegitimate and insecure states behave.

The DSS reportedly says it does not detain people without detention orders. That is not reassuring. A detention order is not a moral blank cheque. It is not a substitute for transparency. It does not answer the question about what exactly Maisango did. If his offense is serious enough to justify detention, it should be clear enough to state. If it is too embarrassing to state, then it is probably too flimsy to sustain.

There is a deeper danger here. The North is a graveyard of unasked questions. Entire communities are being emptied by bandits. Farmers pay taxes to terrorists. Villagers negotiate with kidnappers because the state has abandoned them. Traditional institutions have lost moral legitimacy in many places. Young people are angry, suspicious and politically restless. In such a climate, suppressing speech about Hausa identity, Fulani power, banditry and northern elite failure will only produce more resentment, drive debate underground, cause mutual suspicions to fester and convert grievances into conspiracies.

Tinubu should understand this. He was once on the receiving end of state repression. His political mythology is built around NADECO, exile, resistance and pro-democracy activism. His supporters still invoke June 12 as evidence of his democratic credentials. But June 12 and its symbolism mean nothing if the state can detain activists for speech, criminalize insult and hide behind security agencies when citizens demand accountability.

This is why Sowore and Maisango should be released. In Sowore’s case, the government should end this needless prosecution. A president who is daily called worse things by angry citizens should not be seen to be hiding behind the Cybercrimes Act to hound an activist. If Tinubu truly has the thick skin his admirers attribute to him, he should prove it by refusing to dignify insult with prosecution. Let Sowore speak. Let people judge him. That is how democracy works.

In Maisango’s case, the DSS should either charge him immediately in open court with a recognizable offense or release him without further delay. His health and access to family should not depend on the benevolence of security officials. He is a citizen, not a captive of imperial power.

The presidency also needs to send a clear message to security agencies that criticism of the president, ethnic self-definition, historical argument and social media advocacy are not crimes. Nigeria is already too fragile for the state to manufacture new enemies from citizens with strong opinions.

Tinubu still has a chance to show that the people who assured me in 2023 that he would not hound critics were not merely laundering wishful thinking as insider knowledge. He can show that his democratic credentials are not museum artifacts from the 1990s.

Release Sowore. Release Ibrahim Aliyu Maisango, known to his followers as Bichiia Maisango. Let the country breathe. Let citizens speak. Let arguments be defeated by better arguments, not by detention orders.

No One Has Authority to Decide Who Gets to Identify as Anything

2026-06-22T16:46:20.259-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

My intervention on a Trust TV interview in which a retired ABU professor called Alkasum Abba said Shehu Shagari and Muhammadu Buhari were not Fulani, presumably because they did not speak the language and inhabit the cultural universe of the Fulani, provoked an interesting conversation.

Since I study and write about collective identity and am working on a book on the rhetoric of collective identity construction, I want to share further insights on the issue.

First, in identity studies, no one has unilateral authority to decide who can identify as what. Collective identity is the product of a multiplicity of different things, including self-identification, descent, cultural practice, language, external recognition and power.

Applied to the point at issue, the person who speaks Fulfulde and lives in a Fulani community has standing to speak about cultural competence and insider norms, but such a person has no standing to erase the Fulani identity of people whose Fulani descent is known, who self-identify as Fulani and who are recognized by others as Fulani.

There’s an identity scholar by the name of Fredrik Barth who said ethnic groups are not defined simply by a checklist of cultural traits. He said they are defined and sustained by boundaries, especially by what he called “self-ascription and ascription by others.”

In other words, identity is partly what people say they are and partly what relevant others take them to be. In the case of Shagari and Buhari, the relevant others here were their immediate neighbors in Katsina and Sokoto who ascribed Fulani identities to them.

Joane Nagel also treats ethnicity as perpetually in flux and as shaped both by the agency of people who define themselves and by external political, social and economic actors who define them from outside.

Barth’s and Nagel’s argument is important because it shows that language, dress, occupation, culture and residence can change while the ethnic boundary remains socially meaningful.

Richard Jenkins, another identity scholar, makes the same point but with a sociological twist. He argues that identity emerges through a dialectic between internal identification and external categorization.

But, unlike Barth and Nagel, the decisive issue, he contends, is power. It is not enough for someone to categorize others. The question is whether that person, institution or community has the social and symbolic leverage to make that categorization count. Alkasum Abba, or what he thinks he represents, has no social, symbolic or any kind of authority to decide who can and who can’t be Fulani.

Abba is a Fulfulde-speaking cultural insider. He can make only one legitimate but narrow claim: “Shagari and Buhari are not culturally Fulani in the fullest lived sense.” That is different from saying, “Shagari and Buhari are not Fulani at all.” The first is a defensible cultural judgment. The second is an indefensibly arrogant, even ignorant, overreach.

Roger Blench’s work on Fulani identity in Nigeria notes that only some of the people who call themselves Fulani actually speak Fulfulde. He also describes Fulani communities that have lost Fulfulde, adopted Hausa, Nupe or Yoruba and yet continue to regard themselves as Fulani while also being recognized as such by neighboring peoples.

For example, a 2018 study of Fulani people in Ilorin by Yeseera Omonike Oloso found that 95 percent of respondents identified Yoruba as their first language, but 75 percent still identified as Fulani. The study’s conclusion was that language shift did not automatically produce identity shift.

And that’s consistent with the predominant conclusion in identity scholarship. Linguistic identity and ethnic identity aren’t always coterminous.

So, in scholarly terms, Fulani identity can exist in at least three registers: Fulani by descent, Fulani by cultural-linguistic competence and Fulani by social recognition. Some people will satisfy all three. Others will satisfy only one or two. The mistake is to privilege any form of identity as the only legitimate form of identity.

This does not mean every claim is valid, of course. Descent claims can be fabricated. External labeling can be hostile or mistaken. Phenotypes can be unreliable as evidence, although they can become socially consequential when people use visible features to assign identity.

Kanchan Chandra’s constructivist account helps here. It argues that ethnic identity is usually constrained by descent-based attributes, but that the identity that is “activated” is the one a person professes or is assigned by others. Language and culture may strengthen the claim, but they are not always the sole basis of membership.

People who can trace patrilineal or both patrilineal and matrilineal descent to Fulani ancestors, who self-identify as Fulani and who are called Fulani by the surrounding community are Fulani. This also applies to other ethnic identities.

So, yes, Shagari and Buhari were acculturated, linguistically assimilated or maybe even culturally distant Fulani people, but saying they were not Fulani at all amounts to deploying an unsociological and ahistorical cultural-purity test as an ethnic veto. The scholarship on identity does not support that as a basis for determining who belongs to collective identities.

Buhari and Shagari Said They Were Fulani

2026-06-21T13:33:35.395-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

One Professor Alkasum Abba told Trust TV yesterday that a Fulani man has never been president and that Muhammadu Buhari and Shehu Shagari were not Fulani.

Well, here's Buhari at 18 writing "I am a Fulani" in his application letter to join the military in October 1961.

I also have Shagari's autobiography titled "Beckoned to Serve." On page 2 of the book, he wrote that he is paternally Fulani from the "Alibawa" clan and also maternally Fulani from the "Yolorbawa" clan.

So, unlike Buhari who was only paternally Fulani (his mother was Kanuri and Hausa), Shagari was full-blooded Fulani, from his own admission.

You can't sit in the luxury of an easy chair in a TV studio and casually redefine who people are without any shred of evidence beyond the vapors of your mind and expect people to take you seriously.

I hope this Professor Abba isn't the same former firebrand Marxist scholar at ABU who was the late Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman's protege. If he is, he may be battling the ravages of old age.

Maybe we should cut him some slack because any of us who is lucky to get that old may suffer that kind of cognitive unravelling. And I don't say this with ageist intentions.

Tinubu Proved Me Wrong in Kwara

2026-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

My April 18, 2026, column titled “Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara” used privileged information I received from a self-described Yoruba irredentist to advance a narrative that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had planned to impose a Yoruba candidate from Kwara South as Kwara State’s APC governorship candidate at the expense of the Borgu people in the state, who are found in Baruten and Kaiama local governments and of whom he is the Jagaba, that is, champion.

Well, after surviving several fits and starts, maneuvers, negotiations, disappointments and unpleasant surprises, a Borgu man from Baruten, Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is the current Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, emerged as APC’s governorship candidate.

Since it is difficult to imagine anyone emerging as APC’s governorship candidate in today’s party structure without at least Tinubu’s acquiescence, several Tinubu supporters privately wrote to challenge me to openly admit that I was wrong in my assumption that he would impose a certain Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa on the state in furtherance of his “Yoruba agenda.”

They alleged that I wrote my column out of “hate” for Tinubu. I do not “hate” Tinubu. Hate is a mental and emotional burden that I have no capacity to carry for anyone. As much as I have been his critic, I have also defended Tinubu in the past, even when no one else did, when I was convinced that he was unfairly attacked. My impassioned, consistent defense of the validity and legitimacy of his Chicago State University certificate, which drew false accusations that I had been compromised, is a case in point.

And anyone who has followed my public commentary for more than two decades will concede that I am never shy about publicly owning up to my mistakes, apologizing when I err and correcting my assumptions when irrefutable, overwhelming evidence contradicts them. I recognize that I am only human and that my imperfections are the biggest proof of my humanity. So, I was going to write this column even if I wasn’t prompted by private, angry messages challenging me to do so.

Of the several messages I received after Malam Yakubu Danladi Salihu was announced as the winner of the Kwara APC primary election, the one by Pastor John Dara, former presidential candidate in the 2011 and 2019 election cycles and chairman of the African Development Investment Limited, was the most conciliatory.

“Please do a follow up article to thank President Tinubu and Governor Abdulrazaq for supporting the emergence of a Kwara North Governorship Candidate. They both did,” Pastor Dara, who is Yoruba from Kwara South, wrote on May 22. “We also need to call on the people of Kwara State to support this just and positive development.”

I hesitated to write straight away because of the uncertainties that attended the primaries and the resistance, however feeble, that Salihu’s emergence appeared to be generating in a few places. What if I wrote and his victory was reversed?

But Oloriewe Raheem Adedoyin, former Kwara State Information Commissioner and veteran journalist, implied in a June 17 article in the Vanguard that Salihu’s victory is sealed. It is typical in any political contest for people who lose out to discredit the outcomes and for those who win to acclaim them. “The primaries in Kwara are no less credible than those conducted in Lagos or elsewhere,” wrote Adedoyin, who is from Kwara South.

Now that it is fairly certain that both the Kwara State governor and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu are committed to course correction, representational equity and inclusivity, I won’t mince words in saying they deserve plaudits. Kwara North (and Borgu in particular) would never have produced APC’s governorship candidate without them.

It would be too self-important to assume that the president had a change of mind after reading my column, which he probably didn’t even read. But on the off chance that he or the people close to him did and decided to change course partly because of it, it demonstrates admirable sensitivity to public opinion and reasoned arguments.

It didn’t matter to me who between Senator Sadiq Suleiman Umar, Kwara North’s senator who hails from Kaiama, and Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is from Baruten, won the APC nomination. They are both sons of Borgu in Kwara who are as qualified as anyone who has ever been governor of the state. I am glad that in thanking President Tinubu after his announcement as the winner of the APC governorship primary, Salihu acknowledged that Tinubu has lived up to his title as the Jagaba of Borgu.

Both the governor and the president were obviously under competing pressures from several constituencies, but they resisted them and chose to throw their weight behind a candidate from a part of the state that has never produced a governor since the state’s creation in 1967 and that has remained in its geographic, political and symbolic margins ever since.

It is gratifying that a wide swath of people from the state recognize the imperative of the inclusion of its most peripheral part into the mainstream. After the publication of my April 18 column, countless people from Ilorin Emirate reached out to me to say they saw merit in my arguments and were committed to remediation.

It still honestly and pleasantly shocks me that so many people from Ilorin Emirate concede that the remainder of Borgu in Kwara State should produce the next governor of the state.

My pleasant surprise springs from my knowledge that it takes conscious effort to acknowledge that you are the beneficiary of unfair advantages and to willingly let go of those advantages. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to be on the same page on this issue, but my sense is that the vast majority of people in both Ilorin Emirate and Kwara South are sold on this.

Perhaps it’s not altogether out of place that most people in Ilorin Emirate support the shift of power to the North. After all, they have produced the governor for 19 of the 27 years since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999.

Plus, many Ilorin indigenes, my younger sister’s husband being an example, have distant Borgu ancestral roots, even if they are now, for all practical purposes, Yoruba people, and therefore may have some emotional investment in the emergence of a Borgu person as governor.

But the fact that many prominent and not so prominent people from Kwara South are on board is the bigger pleasant surprise for me. Kwara South has had only one 8-year shot at the governorship since 1999. That many of them think conceding the governorship to a part of the state that has never produced a governor for even a split second is worthwhile is commendable.

You won’t appreciate what I am driving at until you realize that there are many multi-ethnic states in Nigeria where just one ethnic group dominates the governorship in perpetuity.

An example that stands out like a sore thumb is Benue State. Since the state’s creation in 1976, every elected civilian governor has come from the Tiv-speaking part of the state. The governorship has never gone to Idoma, Igede or any other non-Tiv group in a civilian election. So, every child in Benue who isn’t Tiv has little reason to imagine that they could someday become governor.

In complex, transitional, multi-ethnic and plural countries like Nigeria, conscious efforts should be made to formalize strategies for the symbolic inclusion of all collective identities in governance structures. That is the only way people can relate to governance and feel a vicarious identification with power and authority.

It obviously is not a substitute for good governance, accountability, transparency, performance and improvement in the lot of the people, but it’s an indispensable precondition for getting every citizen invested in the business of government.

Kwara has now shown that even in a country where exclusion often masquerades as democracy and “meritocracy,” power can still be made to travel to the margins when conscience, pressure and enlightened self-interest meet.

Judicial Bandit Lifu May Be Suffering from Judicial Santi

2026-06-16T18:01:33.414-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Yesterday, I called Justice Peter Lifu's judgment calling for the deregistration of ADC and other parties "pure judicial banditry." The Court of Appeal in Abuja just called it "judicial rascality." Same difference. A judicial rascal is a judicial bandit.

A senior editor told me a while ago that Lifu's judicial banditry (or, to use the Court of Appeal's language, rascality) isn't ordinary. He said a certain minister of particular concern who shall remain nameless "overfed" Lifu to the point that Lifu took leave of his senses and committed what I like to call, borrowing from Hausa, "judicial santi," i.e., lyrical excess activated by satiation from sumptuous food.

For some cultural context on "santi," read this April 21, 2025, article titled, "'Santi': My Wife’s Favorite Hausa Word."

If Nigeria were a regular country, Lifu should have been out of his job by now. But nothing will happen to him.

And all the illiterate lawyers who validated that rape of elemental justice, I am looking at all of una with one kain eye. Una go school so? Or are you all judicial "santied"?