Notes From Atlanta

INEC’s Farcical Self-Acquittal of Amupitan

2026-04-21T00:00:00.013-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

INEC said it investigated its chairman and found him not guilty of the allegation that he tweeted partisan support for Bola Tinubu in the 2023 election cycle.

If na you nko? How can you fail an exam you set and graded? How can you find yourself guilty in a court you established, where both the prosecution and the defense lawyers are your appointed minions and you are the judge?

There is a name for what INEC did. Self-exoneration. Some people call it self-exculpation. Others call it self-absolution.

It hides behind a blizzard of deceitful phrases without presenting a shred of evidence to support its self-exculpatory conclusions. It is shoddy for at least five reasons.

First, the claim that the timestamp of the “victory is sure” reply appeared earlier than the parent post, and therefore that it is “physically impossible,” ignores the fact that the parent post was edited, which altered its timestamp. The reply reflected the timestamp of the earlier version of the post before it was edited.

Second, as I pointed out in my April 13 post, independent, citizen-led account recovery efforts on the contested X account pointed to the phone number and email address associated with Amupitan’s official CV. If password recovery prompts consistently surface a masked version of a known phone number or email, that is circumstantial evidence of linkage.

Third, the “no archive trace before April 2026” claim actually says nothing. The Wayback Machine does not capture every account or every change in real time. Absence from the archive is not evidence of nonexistence.

The Wayback Machine is known not to archive low-traffic social media posts. Amupitan was an unknown quantity in 2023, so his reply attracted no eyeballs, which means the Wayback Machine had no reason to archive it.

Fourth, the self-exoneration tries to be clever by half by inverting the strongest circumstantial evidence that Amupitan tried to cover his tracks after he was caught pants down. The report said the change of the account’s name and locking it from public view after the partisan tweets were discovered was damage control by an impersonator. Hahaha! That was funny. These INEC “forensic experts” would have better success as comedians than as forensic analysts.

Anyone who is not a silly comedian knows that the most plausible interpretation of that action is that it is panicky, retroactive distancing by the original operator once scrutiny intensified.

Fifth, the fact that multiple fake accounts sprouted in Amupitan’s name after he was announced as INEC chairman says nothing about the authenticity of the X account he created in September 2022 when he was a barely known professor vegetating in obscurity. There were no multiple accounts in his name before he was appointed INEC chairman.

Finally, the threat to arrest and prosecute people who outed Amupitan introduces a frighteningly dictatorial element. That is an example of what in the United States we call a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP).

As I have pointed out in many previous columns, SLAPP is a type of frivolous lawsuit whose ultimate goal is to intimidate critics into silence and self-censorship, not necessarily to seek redress for intentional injury to reputation because, in the case of Amupitan, there is, in fact, no basis to seek any redress since all evidence points to the fact that he did write the tweets he is denying.

When an institution under scrutiny moves quickly from denial to criminalization, it usually signals an attempt to paper over guilt.

Related Articles:

Amupitan’s Past Tweets Show an APC Sympathizer

Nigerians Are Fattening Amupitan’s Bank Accounts!

INEC, David Mark, and Coming Abachaian Coronation

Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara

2026-04-18T00:00:00.002-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Intra-state cultural and subregional tensions are building up in Kwara State ahead of the 2027 governorship elections because of credible worries that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s all-too-well-known Yoruba nationalist agenda is about to upend the state’s harmony through candidate imposition.

First, some background. Like several states in the country, Kwara is a multi-ethnic and multicultural state. It’s customary to divide it into three distinct geo-cultural zones. There is Kwara Central, which encompasses all of Ilorin and its adjoining areas. It’s linguistically Yoruba but ethnically a mixed bag of people who trace ancestry to Yoruba, Fulani, Kanuri, Baatonu (or Bariba), Hausa, and Nupe ancestors but who are, for all practical purposes, Yoruba. It is a little over 6 percent of the state’s landmass but constitutes 38 percent of the state’s population.

Then there is Kwara South, the most ethnically homogeneous part of the state, which is wholly Yoruba and, in many ways, culturally and linguistically indistinguishable from the Southwest. It is a little over 18 percent of the state’s landmass and 30 percent of its population.

Kwara North is the most ethnically diverse geo-cultural region and is peopled by the Baatonu (or Bariba), Bokobaru, Nupe, and Fulani. It is the non-Yoruba-speaking part of the state that constitutes more than 75 percent of the state’s landmass and 32 percent of its population, although Moro, a small part of Ilorin Emirate, was mysteriously grafted onto Kwara North. Nonetheless, the Nupe, Fulani, Baatonu, and Bokobaru people are culturally closer to the far North than they are to any part of the state.

Since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999, Kwara Central, that is, Ilorin Emirate, has dominated the governorship of the state. By the time of the next governorship election in 2027, Kwara Central would have ruled for 20 out of 28 years.

Kwara South produced the governor for eight years, from 2011 to 2019. Abdulfatah Ahmed, from Ifelodun Local Government, is from Kwara South.

But the entirety of Kwara North has never produced a governor for even a day since 1999, and only for a year and 10 months since 1992.

Kwara State governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, from all indications, is committed to course correction in 2027 by supporting a rotation of power to Kwara North. A news report I read said he is lending support to Yakubu Danladi Salihu, the Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, who is from Baruten, the second-largest local government in the country, to succeed him. It may not be true, but it has crystallized in public perception.

Senator Sadiq Suleiman Umar, who represents Kwara North in the Senate and who is from Kaiama, is another contender who enjoys widespread support to succeed Abdulrazaq. Both Baruten and Kaiama used to be part of Borgu Local Government before one half of it was ceded to Niger State in the early 1990s.

Yet although consensus, even among prominent players in Ilorin, appears to be coalescing around the idea that the remnant of Borgu in Kwara State, that is, Baruten and Kaiama, should produce the next governor (because the Nupe briefly produced a governor in the aborted Third Republic), it is said that President Tinubu insists that a Yoruba person from Kwara South must be governor.

Widespread whispers indicate that Tinubu’s preference for Abdulrahman’s successor is a certain Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa, who hails from the same local government as former governor Ahmed and used to be a local government chairman in Lagos.

A self-described “Yoruba irredentist” who has privileged access to people in Tinubu’s inner circle told me a few days ago that Tinubu wants to use his presidency to advance his sense of a pan-Yoruba agenda and be seen as the reincarnation of Oduduwa.

To that end, he said, Tinubu wants to force the election of “Yoruba” governors in Kwara and Kogi states. Since I didn’t listen in on any conversation where Tinubu said this, I can’t be certain that it’s entirely true, but given what I have described as Tinubu’s studied “Visibilization of Northern Yorubas” in my October 11, 2025, column, it would not surprise me if it were true.

But it would be a grave error of judgment to railroad Yoruba governors in multi-ethnic states, particularly in Kwara State. First, as I have pointed out, a person from Kwara South has been governor for eight years.

Second, Mohammed Lawal, Kwara’s first governor in the Fourth Republic, although from Ilorin, self-identified as Yoruba and performed many symbolic acts to signal that.

In fact, Governor Abdulrazaq, although a cosmopolitan person who seems to transcend ethnic and religious boundaries, is Yoruba. At least that was what one Sheikh Abdulrahim Aduranigba said seven years ago when he contrasted him with the PDP candidate for the governorship election.

“We have adopted Abdulrazaq as our governorship candidate because he is a Yoruba, and we have instructed him to conduct his campaigns in Yoruba language,” THISDAY quoted him as saying. “The PDP candidate is Fulani, and we challenge him to conduct his campaigns in Fulani language.”

In other words, the Yoruba are not a marginal group in Kwara that need saving by a reincarnated Oduduwa. The people who need “saving” are the non-Yoruba-speaking people of the state who have never produced a governor.

Third, the pushback that the imposition of a governor on account of his ethnic identity would invite could plunge the state into crisis. Ilorin people will resist it. People in Kwara North will resist it, and it will cause needless friction with the south of the state.

Interestingly, Tinubu’s second most prominent traditional title after “Asiwaju” is “Jagaban Borgu.” Kwara’s Kaiama and Baruten local governments, which have never produced a governor for the state since its founding in 1967, are one half of Borgu. It would be ironic if the champion of Borgu (that’s what Jagaban Borgu means) champions the political exclusion of the people he is symbolically supposed to lead and protect.

Tinubu himself is president because of a deliberate policy of positive political discrimination called power rotation, and he is anchoring his reelection on the basis that the South must complete its eight years, like the North before it.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, political representation at the highest levels is more symbolism than substance. Although the nature of ethnocratic governance we call democracy ensures that people in positions of power give preferential treatment to their kind and places of origin, for the most part, all politicians are the same. They first take care of themselves, their families, friends, and associates before the crumbs spread to their “people.”

Yet political representation is the symbolic conduit through which people vicariously connect with governments. When people of Ayetoro Gbede demonstrated the other day, telling Nigerians to leave their “son” Joash Amupitan alone, even though his past tweets question his neutrality and therefore his suitability as INEC chairman, I understood where they were coming from. He is the symbolic conduit through which they connect to the government. Ours is an ethnocracy, not a democracy.

That’s why it’s my long-term belief that the surest way to sustain the form of government we practice now is to deepen and constitutionalize representational equity. No ethnic group should dominate leadership because it has profound implications for psychic exclusion and the predilection to violence.

Baruten, Kaiama, Patigi, and Edu local governments, the non-Yoruba-speaking local governments in the state, are some of the least developed and most backward places in Nigeria. The first roads were tarred in Baruten only a little over a decade ago, and they are already death traps. Most towns are not connected to the national grid, and healthcare is among the worst.

A governor from the area will be compelled by ethnocratic pressures to attend to the most egregious infrastructural deficits that previous governments overlooked.

Let me end with a full disclosure: I am from Baruten Local Government of Kwara State and therefore from “Kwara North.” But my concerns are located in my broader concerns about representational justice, about which I have written in regard to other parts of the country.

Related Articles:

New INEC Boss and Tinubu’s Visibilization of Northern Yorubas

Tinubu’s Lagos-Centric Yorubaization of Nigeria

North and Tinubu’s Back-to-Lagos Moves

Tinubu’s Buharization of the NNPC

NNPC and Fresh Perspectives on Ojulari’s Identity

Nigerians Are Fattening Amupitan’s Bank Accounts!

2026-04-13T02:02:00.003-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Apparently, in trying to determine if the X handle @joashamupitan (which quickly morphed into @Sundayvibe00 after its pro-APC tweets surfaced) belongs to INEC chairman Professor Joash Amupitan, some Nigerians attempted to log in by using the “forgot password” route.

When you do that, X asks for a username, email, or phone number. People entered the email and phone number listed in Amupitan’s publicly available CV. Once the account was located, X displayed partial recovery identifiers that matched those same details.

To verify further, they tested the phone number through Opay and GTBank transfers. The name that appeared was “Joash Ojo Amupitan.” It can’t get more unimpeachably factual than that. That is fool-proof institutional data tied to BVN-linked banking records.

For additional confirmation, the number was run through Truecaller, where it shows up as “Joash Ojo Amupitan (Prof).” Truecaller is crowd-sourced, but when it aligns with a CV and bank-verified name, the convergence is hard to dismiss.

Nigerians didn’t stop there. They also sent messages to the email address associated with the account, which is listed in his CV and university profile, urging him to resign. That email address has reportedly now been disabled.

At that point, convinced the pro-Tinubu account belonged to him, people began calling and texting the number until it was switched off.

Then they switched tactics. They started sending ₦1 or ₦10 transfers to his Opay and GTB accounts, using the remarks field to tell him to resign.

So now, in a strange twist, public outrage is padding his bank balance. Imagine millions sending token amounts just to deliver a message. His accounts are getting fatter by the day. Call it an inadvertent money-making tragedy, if you like!

At this point, frankly, denying ownership of the account is becoming unbearably embarrassing and eroding the faintest vestige of credibility Amupitan has. It’s like insisting your hands are clean while they are still inside the cookie jar.

Since resignation is unlikely in Nigeria for conflicts of interest, the next sensible step for Amupitan is candor. He should acknowledge his past support for Tinubu as a private citizen and state that he has since shed partisan loyalties as INEC chairman.

It may not be sincere, but it is infinitely better than this current futile attempt to hide behind his finger hoping people can’t see him in plain sight.

Amupitan’s Past Tweets Show an APC Sympathizer

2026-04-11T00:00:00.061-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Several verifiable past tweets by INEC chairman Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan from his time as a professor at the University of Jos unmistakably reveal partisan sympathies for the APC and, more specifically, for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. If he has any regard for institutional integrity, he should own up to them, acknowledge the moral burden they place on his office, and resign. I will return to this.

Amupitan’s neutrality has long hovered under a cloud of suspicion, but I deliberately gave him the benefit of the doubt, to the irritation of many who urged me to call him out earlier and who falsely thought my reluctance to criticize him was the result of my having a relationship with him.

When it surfaced that he had written a tendentious memo alleging a “Christian genocide” without acknowledging equally horrific Muslim deaths in the recurring communal violence in central Nigeria, I attributed it to what I call epistemic closure, a condition where a person’s informational environment is so internally reinforcing that outside evidence is dismissed or never encountered. In that state, complex issues get reduced to narrow, self-confirming interpretations because the person is effectively sealed inside a filter bubble.

For a professor and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, that kind of intellectual insularity is disappointing. It runs against the grain of scholarly training, which stresses self-criticism and transcendence. Still, I did not think it was sufficient to establish bias.

When he was criticized for fixing the 2027 election during Ramadan, I again resisted the rush to judgment. Islam does not prohibit work during Ramadan, and several Muslim-majority countries have conducted elections in that period. Besides, with figures like Malam Mohammed Haruna on the commission, it would be simplistic to assign sole responsibility to him. So, even at the cost of being suspected of unduly shielding him, I held my fire.

But two developments began to strain my charitable reading of his actions. His push to revalidate permanent voter cards, which carried the risk of disenfranchising millions, gave me pause. Then his interventions in the ADC’s internal crisis revealed a man who struggled unsuccessfully to conceal partisan impulses aligned with Tinubu’s apparent determination to fracture the opposition and stall the emergence of a viable challenger.

Even these, troubling as they were, pale beside what emerged on Friday. Evidence now shows that in 2023, about two years before his appointment as INEC chairman, Amupitan used an X account bearing his name to engage in openly partisan commentary.

On March 18, 2023, Dayo Israel, the APC’s National Youth Leader, whom Amupitan followed, boasted that he had flipped his “nearby,” “Igbo-dominated” polling unit from the opposition to the APC. Amupitan replied: “Victory is sure.”

Pause on that for a moment. This was a direct affirmation of a partisan boast couched in ethnically coded language. The reference to an “Igbo-dominated” polling unit invokes the ethnic polarization that defined much of the 2023 election cycle. To respond to such a claim with “Victory is sure” is to align oneself not just with a party, but with a particular narrative of electoral conquest over an implicitly defined “other.”

A day earlier, March 17, 2023, one Okodoro Oro circulated a claim that Peter Obi supporters had repurposed an old photograph of a bloodied man to malign Lagos State legislator Desmond Elliot. Amupitan’s response was: “They are evil in the 24th [sic] century.”

This is not the language of a detached observer. It is the language of moral condemnation directed at a clearly identified political camp. To be fair, future electoral umpires are not expected to be devoid of private opinions, but when those opinions are expressed in such stark, emotionally charged terms in the heat of a contested election, they take on a different significance.

Then came April 25, 2023. A Tinubu support account celebrated the reception Tinubu received at the Abuja airport. Amupitan responded with a single word: “Asiwaju.”

To the uninitiated, this may appear harmless, even innocuous. It isn’t. “Asiwaju” is a political identity marker. In Yoruba, it means “leader” or “one who leads from the front,” much like “jagaba,” his other prominent title from Borgu, but in the context of Nigerian politics, particularly the 2023 election, it functioned as a rallying cry, a badge of allegiance, and a shorthand for loyalty to Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It is the word chanted at rallies, emblazoned on campaign materials, and deployed in digital spaces to signal belonging to a political movement.

When a supporter says “Asiwaju,” it is an affirmation of fealty. So, when a man who would later become the chairman of the electoral commission uses that word in direct response to a celebratory message about Tinubu, he is participating in a community of praise. He is, in that moment, not an observer of politics, but a participant in its partisan theater, in a patterned expressions of alignment.

After these tweets resurfaced, the account in question underwent a series of transformations. The handle changed from @joashamupitan to @Sundayvibe00, rebranded as a “parody” account and then locked from public view. But digital traces are stubborn. Archival indexing still ties the earlier posts to the original identity.

So, the sequence is straightforward. An account using Amupitan’s name made partisan interventions during the 2023 election cycle. That same account later changed identity multiple times, adopted a parody label, and restricted access. The timing of these changes invites obvious questions about transparency and accountability, particularly for someone who now occupies the most sensitive electoral office in the country.

What makes this especially unsettling for me is that I publicly defended him in the past. In my October 11, 2025, column, “New INEC Boss and Tinubu’s Visibilization of Northern Yorubas,” I described him as “an accomplished professor of law and a revered Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has no known record of partisan political affiliations.” That judgment was based on the evidence available at the time. We now know better.

The issue is not that Amupitan, as a private citizen, held political opinions. Every citizen is entitled to that. The issue is that those opinions were expressed in ways that align distinctly with one party, in the very period that defined Nigeria’s most contentious recent election, and that he now presides over an institution that demands not just neutrality, but the appearance of neutrality.

Electoral legitimacy is not sustained by legal technicalities alone. It rests on public trust. Once that trust is eroded, even the most procedurally sound election becomes suspect in the eyes of citizens. That is why electoral umpires are held to a higher standard than ordinary public officials. They must be above reproach not only in conduct but in perception. Amupitan’s past tweets compromise that perception.

He has compounded the problem by failing to confront the matter directly. He should address the public, acknowledge the tweets, and reckon with their implications. The moral weight of his current office is incompatible with unresolved questions about partisan loyalty.

Yes, the law makes his removal cumbersome. The president must initiate the process, and the Senate must approve it with a two-thirds majority. In practice, that threshold is hardly insurmountable for a president who commands legislative loyalty, who gets bills debated and passed in a matter of hours. But it is unrealistic to expect President Tinubu to initiate the removal of a man whose perceived partisan alignment may well have recommended him for the position in the first place.

Which leaves only one honorable path: resignation, which Nigerian public officers loathe. If he has any ounce of integrity left, he should resign because if he chooses to remain, every election he conducts in which the APC prevails will be shadowed by credible allegations of premeditated bias. No serious observer will dismiss such claims out of hand. In trying to protect his position, he would end up damaging both the institution he leads and, ironically, the party he is presumed to favor.

Nigeria has had electoral umpires accused of partisanship before. But rarely has the evidence been this direct, this traceable, and this difficult to explain away.

If he stays, Amupitan risks inscribing his name in history not merely as a controversial INEC chairman, but as one whose tenure deepened, or completely eroded, public distrust in the electoral process.

Postscript:

As I was about to file this column, my editor drew my attention to a news release by INEC’s Chief Press Secretary, Adedayo Oketola, claiming that the Twitter account associated with Amupitan, created in 2022, is “fake.”

That claim does not withstand basic scrutiny. In 2022, Amupitan was an obscure professor. There was no incentive to impersonate him. The tweets now in contention were posted in 2023, before he became INEC chairman.

Fake accounts do not typically maintain a coherent history, then change handles, rebrand as parody, and lock themselves the moment their past becomes inconvenient. That pattern suggests an attempt to obscure prior activity, not random impersonation.

The statement is notably silent on the disappearance of the original handle, the shift to a new identity, the sudden “parody” label, and the decision to restrict public access.

Nafiu Bala Gombe Struggling to Read a Speech

2026-04-09T12:32:00.001-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

This speech by Nafiu Bala Gombe at INEC headquarters today has left me speechless. I can't tell what language he's speaking. I've caught a few stray English phrases fighting for survival, but the rest sound like a rotating medley of Dutch, Double Dutch, Hausa, Yoruba, Latin and what I can only assume is a live reenactment of the Tower of Babel mid-collapse.

If he is being used, as some people allege, then the people using him must be profoundly embarrassed. Many 6-year-olds in Nigeria can read a basic script with more coherence and dignity than Nafiu. If you can’t competently read a prepared speech written in plain, unambiguous English, what business do you have fighting to chair a national party?

How Opposition Tinubu Would Treat President Tinubu

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

By Farooq A. Kperogi

You may resent Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but you can’t deny that he has earned his place in Nigerian political history as one of the, if not the, most consequential opposition figures in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. He constructed a carefully planned political and rhetorical template to oppose central governments effectively and then converted the symbolic capital he gained into a path to the presidency.

By May 29, Tinubu will mark his third year as president. He is beset by the same constraints his predecessors faced and is reacting to opponents almost exactly as they did, perhaps with even more viciousness and guile.

But the opposition seems to be in the wilderness. It is flustered, incoherent, spineless, and in strategic disarray. It would do well to study how an opposition Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu would have confronted an increasingly tyrannical and devious President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

If Bola Ahmed Tinubu were in opposition today, watching a president preside over widening and deepening oceans of blood and rising insecurity, constrict the space for alternative parties, intensify economic hardship and offer only perfunctory condolence optics amid horrendous mass slaughters, he would launch a sustained, strategic, organized, merciless and unsparing regime of critical engagement using every available medium. We know this because we have a record of him doing precisely that.

My recollection of his key moves as an opposition politician aren’t intended to be exhaustive. They are merely representative.

In March 2013, for instance, in remarks widely reported at the time, Tinubu said that if President Goodluck Jonathan could not guarantee security, he should “honorably resign.” By November 2014, his tone had hardened. According to TheCable, Tinubu said that in any serious country Jonathan would have resigned over the scale of insecurity in the country.

In the same 2014, he accused Jonathan’s government of “failure, lack of capacity, vision and creativity” and of misleading Nigerians about the true state of security.

That is the vocabulary Tinubu reaches for when he is not in power. He did not treat insecurity as a complicated policy arena deserving of cautious language. He treated it as evidence of unfitness for office.

An aggregation of all his statements about the insecurity that pervaded the country when Jonathan was in government (which has become worse on his watch) amounted to this: insecurity equals loss of legitimacy. That was one of his most potent rhetorical blitzkriegs against Jonathan, which traveled beyond the shores of Nigeria.

The same pattern holds for economic distress. On January 11, 2012, in an article published by PM News, Tinubu attacked Jonathan’s removal of fuel subsidy, dubbing it the “Jonathan tax.” He said the policy breached the social contract between the rulers and the ruled, described it as a punitive imposition on the poor and, crucially, urged Nigerians to resist it.

He wrote that citizens had a duty to “peacefully demonstrate and record their opposition.” That line matters. It shows that Tinubu, in opposition, does not merely diagnose hardship. He authorizes not just rhetorical dissent but physical rebellion against it.

Following his exhortation, there were disabling, convulsive and fatal nationwide protests and strikes. Tinubu aligned himself with that mood. He did not urge patience. He gave moral and political cover to resistance. Some even said he funded the protests, called “Occupy Nigeria,” in which at least 12 people died. It ultimately forced Jonathan to reverse the withdrawal of subsidies, which Tinubu is now implementing with more soullessness than Jonathan ever did.

He also does not leave resistance unorganized. On February 6, 2013, opposition parties merged into what became the All Progressives Congress. Tinubu was one of the principal architects of that coalition. The merger’s stated aim was to end corruption, insecurity and economic stagnation. It was a calculated attempt to convert grievance into power. Tinubu did not wait for electoral cycles to do their work. He engineered an alternative.

When he believed the Jonathan administration was using institutions against the opposition, he said so without equivocation. In January 2014, during the Rivers State political crisis, Tinubu described the disruption of opposition activity as “a frontal assault against democracy” and even a “coup against democracy.” In November 2014, after the chaos at the National Assembly, he again held Jonathan responsible. He saw pattern, not accident, and he said it plainly.

He went further. In October 2014, when Jonathan sought legislative approval for a $1 billion loan to fight Boko Haram, Tinubu opposed it. He argued that the funds could be used for political purposes rather than security. In other words, he was willing to recast even security spending as partisan maneuvering. That instinct has not been erased by time.

Now bring this record forward.

On April 2, 2026, President Tinubu met victims of the Plateau killings at the airport rather than visiting affected communities, with the presidency citing time and logistical constraints. Strip away the explanations and look at it from the vantage point of opposition Tinubu. This is the sort of image he historically converts into a political weapon. He would not defend it. He would amplify it as proof of cold detachment and deadly incompetence.

In fact, the seemingly intractable and worsening sanguinary communal upheavals that are spreading all over the country and the rising mass abductions for ransom that seem to be unabating would have constituted more than sufficient grounds for opposition Tinubu to delegitimize the presidency of President Tinubu.

There is also the matter of political space. Tinubu’s own rise was made possible by the constellation of opposition forces. The 2013 merger was a deliberate construction of an alternative to an incumbent he portrayed as incompetent and anti-democratic. If he were outside power today and perceived any effort, real or imagined, to frustrate the emergence of rival parties, such as we are seeing with the ADC, he would not respond with restraint. His record from 2013 to 2015 shows a readiness to build countervailing structures and to accuse incumbents of undermining democracy.

In early 2013 when there were credible fears that INEC might block or frustrate the registration of the new opposition merger that became the APC, including the controversy over a rival party using the same acronym, Tinubu framed any attempt to deny registration as authoritarian sabotage of democracy by the president.

Tinubu’s stance as opposition was confrontational and absolutist. When he was outside power, he interpreted procedural or institutional resistance in maximalist terms as existential threats to democracy, not routine political or legal friction.

And he routinely blamed it on the sneaky wiles of the president, not the institutions that were responsible for the actions he railed against. Opposition Tinubu would have put the blame for INEC’s withdrawal of recognition of the David Mark-led leadership of the ADC squarely on President Tinubu’s desk and would have called it Tinubu’s fascist, cowardly, fear-inspired strangulation of a rival, oppositional political space.

What emerges from this is not a series of isolated reactions but a coherent oppositional method. Tinubu indicts insecurity as presidential failure, frames economic pain as betrayal, promotes and legitimizes physical public resistance, works to consolidate opposition power and heaps all blames for the misfortunes of the opposition on the president. He combined rhetoric with organization. He did not do half measures.

Tinubu in opposition would not recognize the defenses now offered on behalf of Tinubu in power. He would reject them, loudly and repeatedly, and he would mobilize against them.

Criticism of Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the grounds that his NADECO-era allies or Southwest loyalists no longer protest policies they had consistently condemned misses a basic truth about power. People rarely mobilize against themselves, their benefactors or the networks that sustain them. Expecting otherwise is naïve.

The more useful lesson is not to lament their silence but to study Tinubu’s own playbook when he stood outside power. He exemplified disciplined opposition, coalition building, strategic messaging and relentless pursuit of institutional leverage. Those outside the orbit of power should stop waiting for insiders to revolt and instead organize to displace them. Power is not donated; it is taken. Tinubu has proved that.

An Oasis of Hope in the Desert of Jos Carnage

2026-04-02T01:00:00.001-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

The heart-rending mass massacres in and around Jos unfolded while I was racing to meet a book chapter deadline, so I missed the news as it broke. When I finally caught up, one report stood out amid the carnage.

In an April 1 story by Daily Trust, a Muslim man, Sa’idu Murtala, recounted how his Christian neighbor hid him in his wife’s room, fed him, asked him to stay the night, and called his father to pick him up the next day.

“He knows I am a Muslim because I used to do my business there every day and leave for my area,” Murtala said. “He knows my faith… I will never forget this man who saved my life.”

That account recalls the actions of Abubakar Abdullahi, the imam who sheltered 262 Christians in Nghar Yelwa, Barkin Ladi, Plateau State in June 2018. At the risk of his own life, he hid them in his mosque and home while armed attackers searched for them.

These moments do not cancel the brutality that surrounds them, but they complicate it. They expose a stubborn truth about human nature: the same social world that inspires and justifies cruelty also contains the resources for inner moral courage.

Hatred depends on abstraction. It thrives when people are reduced to categories, to members of out-groups, when “Muslim” or “Christian” or “other” replaces the irreducible fact of a person. Once that substitution is complete, violence becomes easier to justify and easier to repeat.

Empathy, by contrast, requires a reversal. It asks us to encounter individuals as individuals, to recognize in them a life that is continuous with our own. The neighbor who hides you from the lethal danger of people who are like him or her is not thinking in categories; he or she is responding to an intrinsic human presence that interrupts the logic of group hatred.

I learned a version of this, awkwardly, when I first arrived in the United States more than two decades ago. I befriended a man who turned out to be a racist skinhead. (Skinheads are white supremacist and anti-immigrant bigots who literally shave their heads clean). I did not know what that meant at the time. Others knew and were alarmed, but they hesitated to tell me.

Eventually, a Black American warned me that I was putting myself at risk. By then, the friendship had already formed. We got along easily. He was attentive, respectful, generous and, in his dealings with me, disarmingly kind. Yet he held crude, hostile views about Black people as a group. I was, in his words, “different.”

The contradiction is instructive. His prejudice rested on inherited prejudice, not on lived experience. I was the first Black person he had known closely, and that proximity disrupted the fiction that sustained his beliefs.

When I asked why I was “different,” he had no coherent, noteworthy response. There was none to give. The category had failed in the face of the person.

My own role in that encounter was not moral heroism but ignorance. Had I known the cultural meaning of “skinhead,” I would not have touched him with a ten-foot pole. That ignorance, accidental as it was, allowed me to meet him without the filter of fear or prior judgment. It does not excuse his views, of course, but it reveals how fragile they were in the face of ordinary human contact.

What these stories suggest is not a sentimental claim that individuals are always better than their groups. It is that moral perception begins at the level of the individual. Group identities can organize solidarity, but they can also homogenize perception and permit harm. When they do, the corrective is not abstraction but attention, that is, the discipline of seeing people as everyday humans first.

The Christian neighbor in Jos did not resolve the larger conflict. The imam who sheltered Christians did not end bloodstained communal violence. But each act unsettled the moral grammar that makes such violence possible.

They affirmed that before anyone is a member of a stereotypical group, they are a life, a friend, a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a relative, etc. That recognition can still, even in the worst moments, reorder what we think we are permitted to do to one another.

INEC, David Mark, and Coming Abachaian Coronation

2026-04-01T19:44:00.006-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

With INEC's overtly partisan, intentionally illegal, and possibly remote-controlled withdrawal of recognition for the David Mark-led ADC, Nigeria has officially reverted to full-on Abacha-era suffocation of even the wispiest pretense to competitive electoral politics.

Lawyers have said that the judgment of the appeal court, which INEC invoked as a convenient crutch to carry out a predetermined action, said the status quo should be maintained. In other words, the judgment says David Mark should remain the chairman of the ADC until the merit of the appeal has been determined.

However, it appears that INEC is in the know of what the final judgment will be and decided to jump the gun. Yet the INEC chairman is a professor of law and a SAN! He can't even pretend to be neutral.

It seems obvious that the ADC faction INEC will ultimately recognize, as I predicted in my column of two weeks ago, will be the faction that will merely be an extension of the APC, much like the PDP now is. They will either present dummy candidates or adopt Tinubu as their candidate, which is a distinction without a difference.

It is obvious that Tinubu wants a coronation, not a competitive election, in 2027. He is scared to death about a real electoral contest. We all know why.

Well, according to public records, it cost around ₦300–₦355 billion to conduct the 2023 presidential election. It is projected that it will cost almost ₦870 billion to conduct the 2027 election.

Why should Nigeria spend close to a trillion naira on a preset, make-believe, Abachaian coronation exercise? Let’s kuku cancel democracy and make Tinubu the supreme leader. At least we would save a trillion naira.

No Tears for El-Rufai and Malami

2026-03-28T00:00:00.001-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Nasir El-Rufai and Abubakar Malami are suddenly the objects of public pity in some corners of Nigeria’s political commentariat. Yes, my default ideological temperament is to empathize with and fight for the underdog. But El-Rufai and Malami are no underdogs. They are merely (temporarily) subdued top dogs whose canine viciousness is only momentarily at bay but will recrudesce should they get back in the saddle of power and influence.

Their defenders, some of whom have urged me to intervene on their behalf in line with my record of defending the oppressed, say they are victims of President Bola Ahmed Tibu’s selective justice. I don’t dispute that. Since not even a single manifestly and self-evidently corrupt, Tinubu-supporting APC member is being tried for corruption, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that had El-Rufai and Malami chosen to remain in the APC, they would have been shielded from any legal consequences for their well-documented abuse of power.

Nonetheless, their immediate past history of similar selectivity and invidiousness against opponents and underdogs strips them of consideration for compassion, at least from me. El-Rufai and Malami were no apostles of compassion and due process.

They are now learning, from the wrong end of the stick, what they normalized, defended and inflicted on others when they predominated over the political landscape.

Of course, I don’t expect the folks in the ADC, in whose flock El-Rufai and Malami now fly, to mirror my position. Still, the morally serious response to this moment cannot be to pretend that what is happening to them descended from a moral vacuum.

Even the rhetoric of their defenders is revealing. The ADC has not said El-Rufai and Malami had spotless public records. It has instead said, correctly, that justice should not be selective. Fair enough. But selective justice is precisely the moral and political ecology in which both men flourished luxuriantly just a few years ago. What their defenders demand for them today is what they often denied others yesterday.

Take El-Rufai first. As FCT minister, he earned well-deserved notoriety for cruel, unjust Abuja demolitions and forced evictions on a scale that human rights groups found unacceptably staggering. That is why he is known as “Mai Rusau,” which means the demolisher, among Hausa-phone northern Nigerians. It is similar to his English moniker, “Mr. Demolition.”

On May 15, 2008, for instance, Reuters reported that nearly one million residents had been evicted from their homes in Abuja between 2003 and 2007 as part of the restoration of the city’s so-called master plan. It noted that El-Rufai said he had “no apology” for the demolitions.

You may support urban planning enforcement if you like, but the ruthlessness and human cost of those actions were early glimpses of the governing philosophy that made El-Rufai who he is: power first and only, compassion be damned.

His years as Kaduna governor made the pattern more nakedly political. I have written copiously on this and won’t repeat what I have written. Suffice it to say that he hunted and hounded opponents, including powerless people whose only strength derived from their ability to raise their voices against his tyranny, with a ruthlessness that has no parallel in the history of Kaduna State.

On September 23, 2017, I wrote of “El-Rufai’s Morbid Fixation with Death of His Political Opponents,” among other articles I’ve written of his well-known predilection for unleashing and celebrating murderous violence against people who disagree with him politically, leading me to call him “an intolerant psychopath with homicidal impulses.” That is not the biography of a man whose hands are clean in the politics of intimidation.

Malami’s case is, if anything, even harder to sentimentalize because his most infamous offenses against the rule of law were not hidden in bureaucratic shadows. He defended them openly. On July 26, 2019, TheCable reported him saying he disobeyed some court orders in order to protect “public interest.”

On July 27, 2019, Punch reported that the federal government’s refusal to obey court orders granting bail to Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and Sambo Dasuki were tied to the same twisted Malamian doctrine of “public-interest” judicial selectivity. It is difficult to overstate how corrosive that doctrine was. Once an attorney-general publicly teaches the state that court orders are optional whenever power invokes “public interest,” he licenses impunity from the highest legal office in the land.

In other words, Malami was not some helpless bystander to executive lawlessness. He was one of its clearest doctrinal salesmen.

The same habit persisted into later controversies. On October 13, 2022, Premium Times reported that after the Court of Appeal ordered Nnamdi Kanu’s release, the federal government, on Malami’s watch, said it would not release him.

And on December 6, 2019, Reuters reported that Omoyele Sowore was re-arrested by DSS operatives hours after being freed on bail. Malami said on Dember 17, 2019, that he couldn’t ask the DSS to release Sowore even when the courts said he should. In a delightful twist of fate, Sowore revealed in late February this year that Malami had reached to him and his lawyer “to facilitate his bail from Kuje Prison.”

When people who applauded, excused, or ignored these episodes of lawlessness or selective application of due process that Malami was notorious for ask that he be extended the treatment he denied others, they are simply announcing that procedural abuse is intolerable only when it touches their faction.

This is why the current moral positioning of some defenders of El-Rufai and Malami is so suspect. They are not wrong to insist that prosecutions should be transparent, lawful and non-selective. I endorse that entirely.

But they are wrong to imply that these two men symbolize injured innocence. They do not. They symbolize the instability of factional privilege in a system where the law often trails power like a servant. Their real tragedy is not that they are being treated in ways that are unimaginable in Nigeria. Their tragedy is that they are being treated in ways that are utterly familiar in Nigeria, except that they are no longer on the dispensing end of the familiar cruelty.

There is no denying that Nigerian anti-corruption energy often softens toward the politically useful and hardens toward the politically estranged. That impression is precisely what gives oxygen to the complaints of El-Rufai’s and Malami’s sympathizers. But it still does not make the two men martyrs.

So, yes, El-Rufai and Malami are experiencing the perils of not aligning with the people in power. That is plainly part of the story. But it is not the whole story, and it is certainly not the most morally interesting part of it.

The most morally poignant part is the selective memory of their defenders, who want Nigerians to look at today’s suffering and forget yesterday’s abuses. They want us to respond to current persecution without recalling prior persecution. They want sympathy severed from memory. That is too high a price.

My own view is simple. They deserve due process, because everyone does. But they deserve no canonization, because neither has earned it. And if tomorrow either man returns to the commanding heights of power, nothing in his public record suggests he would become a born-again democrat who suddenly discovers the sanctity of restraint and the merit of tolerance.

Their current misfortune is therefore both political and karmic. It is political because it arises from loss of proximity to power. It is karmic because it is being visited on men who had helped normalize the very abuse whose sting they now feel. So, I will reserve my tears for worthier people.

An Intimate Stranger I Can’t Recall from My BUK Past

2026-03-24T00:35:00.003-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

I’ve been living with a rather strange experience, and I wonder if anyone else has encountered something similar.

A few years ago, someone reached out to me. He said he knew me well from my undergraduate days at Bayero University, Kano. He was two years my junior, but he described a fairly close relationship between us.

The problem is that I have no memory of him at all. His name doesn’t ring a bell, and I can’t recall ever interacting with anyone by that name.

Yet he remembers me with detailed, impressive vividness. He recounts specific stories, mutual connections and shared experiences that place me squarely in his narrative. We were, according to him, members of the same close-knit political and literary circles. He even describes himself as my protégé.

He later sent photos from his time at BUK, which confirm that he was indeed there when I was. Everything he says is plausible. Nothing he recalls is factually suspect.

He even once recalled a 1996 incident in my final year when I challenged (and embarrassed) a history professor who had, in my view, unfairly dressed down a visiting University of Michigan doctoral student after his paper at a symposium my friend Moses Ochonu organized as president of the Historical Student Society.

I was then intoxicated by Karl Marx and critical theory, and I found the professor’s critique of the visiting American scholar wanting. I did not hold back. Students hailed me. The professor had no comeback.

So, I knew the man was legit. Because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, I have gone along with the assumption of shared memories. We interact on that basis, occasionally revisiting what he insists were moments we lived through together, which I have no reason to doubt.

Still, each exchange leaves me with a faint sense of unease, even a feeling of imposture, as though I am inhabiting a version of my past that I cannot access.

I have scrupulously searched and run down my memory lane to the maximum degree possible just to recover any trace of him. Nothing, absolutely nothing, comes back.

What makes this even more curious is that I have experienced the inverse. I tracked down a Ghanaian teacher with whom I shared what I remember as a warm and meaningful relationship nearly four decades ago. I remembered him clearly, but he did not remember me at all. I recounted my experience in a November 8, 2019, post titled “Never Tell a Past Student You Don't Remember Them.”

That contrast sharpens the strangeness of my current situation. In one case, I remember and am forgotten. In the other, I am remembered but cannot remember.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

This photo was taken on October 6, 1995, at BUK. If you laugh at me, your mouth will be contorted forever.😂

Tinubu’s Abacha Tactics Against Opposition

2026-03-21T00:06:00.005-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Although structural, political, and economic conditions appear to constrain any credibly concerted impediment to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2027 reelection chances, at least from my admittedly imperfect reading of the auguries, Tinubu still seems so insecure that he is borrowing a leaf from former Head of State Sani Abacha, his arch enemy, to annihilate the opposition and smooth his path to reelection.

There are at least three reasons why I think the odds are, at least for now, in Tinubu’s favor.

First, the opposition hasn’t coalesced around a single, powerful, unifying candidate, such as the APC did with Muhammadu Buhari in 2015, less than a year before the next presidential election. Meanwhile, Tinubu is already the undisputed candidate of his party and has effectively been in campaign mode, with all the advantages that incumbency confers.

Second, Tinubu’s economic policies have so pauperized a vast swath of the electorate that many voters are even more susceptible to financial inducement in exchange for their votes than at any time in recent memory. In a context where hunger and desperation shape electoral behavior, the moral calculus of voting changes.

Given that Tinubu commands a larger financial war chest than any individual opposition figure and perhaps more than all of them combined, he is better positioned to prevail in a contest defined by voter inducement. It often makes little difference to voters that the source of their hardship is also the source of the money offered to temporarily alleviate it.

Third, the institutions of the state that determine electoral outcomes inspire little confidence in their independence. INEC, which showed flashes of autonomy during Professor Attahiru Jega’s tenure, particularly in overseeing the 2015 transition, no longer enjoys the same level of public trust.

The judiciary, which ought to serve as the final arbiter of electoral disputes, is widely perceived as susceptible to political manipulation. Whether this perception is entirely fair is beside the point; what matters is that it is widespread and shapes expectations about electoral outcomes.

Given these seemingly insurmountable advantages, one might expect Tinubu to sit comfortably and await what could amount to an electoral formality. Yet his actions suggest a deep, crippling anxiety about 2027. He appears determined not just to win an election but to eliminate the possibility of a meaningful contest.

He is stealthily but systematically weakening all the political parties that could provide viable platforms for his opponents in 2027.

The Labor Party, which rode the crest of the wave of Peter Obi’s popularity to emerge from near obscurity to national prominence in 2023, has been mired in irresolvably debilitating internal crises. These crises may have internal origins, but their persistence and intensity have effectively neutralized the party as a coherent opposition force.

The Peoples Democratic Party is also deeply fractured. Through the outsized influence of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, who retains significant leverage within the party despite serving in an APC administration, the PDP has been thrown into a prolonged internal dissension that has eroded its capacity to function as a credible opposition platform.

It would be an exaggeration to say that only APC sympathizers remain in the PDP, but it is accurate to say that its internal divisions have weakened its ability to mount a coordinated challenge.

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) had begun to present itself as a refuge for politicians displaced from the PDP, the Labor Party, and even factions within the APC. That possibility now appears imperiled by an emerging leadership crisis.

While David Mark is widely recognized as the party’s national chairman, Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former deputy national chairman, is contesting that leadership in court. Given how the courts have ruled in the past in respect of the PDP and LP, which many people suspect is induced from the Tinubu camp, it won’t come to me as a surprise if Gombe gets judicial imprimatur to displace Mark.

Allegations that Gombe is aligned with Tinubu or with interests sympathetic to him come primarily from partisan sources within the ADC and have not been independently substantiated. Still, given the pattern observable in other opposition parties, such suspicions are not entirely surprising. If the courts eventually validate Gombe’s claim, the ADC could become inhospitable to the very opposition figures who had begun to see it as a viable platform, as a safe political asylum.

The cumulative effect of these developments is that major opposition figures such as Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rotimi Amaechi may find themselves without stable or credible party platforms on which to base presidential bids. Even if parties remain on paper, they risk becoming hollow shells, fielding “dummy” candidates who pose no real threat and merely sustain the illusion of competition. That’s banana-republic-level perversion of basic democratic norms.

This trajectory calls to mind the 1998 transition program under Sani Abacha. In that case, the regime licensed and controlled the only legal political parties, suppressed dissent, and orchestrated a process in which all five parties eventually adopted Abacha as their sole presidential candidate. It was a carefully managed political ritual dubiously designed to legitimize continued rule. Abacha didn’t get elected because he died before that could happen.

Nigeria is not under military rule, and the present circumstances are not, by any means, wholly identical. But the logic of narrowing the political field to the point where competition becomes illusory bears an uncomfortable resemblance.

There is no point in pretending to be a democracy if something as basic as the latitude to run for the office of president is strewn with avoidable cataracts and oxbow lakes, to paraphrase Nigeria’s most famous sesquipedalian Patrick Obahiagbon.

The danger for Tinubu is that such a strategy, even if it succeeds electorally, could strip his reelection of the faintest scintilla of credibility and render his administration vulnerable to an enervating crisis of legitimacy, including possible international scrutiny. Electoral victory is one thing; perceived legitimacy is another, and the latter is harder to manufacture.

It is true that incumbents often seek every available advantage. Olusegun Obasanjo’s 2003 reelection was marred by widely reported irregularities. He was so intent on extracting electoral insurance against Muhammadu Buhari in 2003 (even though Buhari was actually unelectable at that time) that he got more votes in native Ogun State than there were registered voters. But at least he allowed Buhari to run against him on a prominent political platform.

Goodluck Jonathan also benefited from incumbency advantages. Like Obasanjo, he faced recognizable opposition candidates on functioning party platforms. Even in 2019, when Atiku Abubakar mounted a serious challenge to Muhammadu Buhari, the contest, despite its controversies, retained the basic structure of competitive politics.

Tinubu risks earning a dubious distinction as Nigeria’s only civilian president who appears unwilling to tolerate even the minimum conditions for credible electoral competition. That is a striking departure for a man whose political reputation was built, in part, on opposition to military authoritarianism.

He still has time to recalibrate. The more prudent path is to allow opposition parties to organize freely and to make his case for reelection on the basis of his record. That, more than any tactical maneuvering, is what confers durable political legitimacy.

Kano Governor, Who is Fulani, Has a Special Assistant on Fulani!

2026-03-17T15:06:00.003-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

I just learned that Kano State governor Abba Kabiru Yusuf, who is said to be Fulani, has a Senior Special Assistant on Fulfulde by the name of Rukayya Umar Gadon Kaya in a state that is overwhelmingly Hausa.

This curious detail came to light yesterday after the SSA took a swipe at the majority population, not by naming them directly, but by using “Kado,” a term widely understood as a Fulani slur for Hausa people.

Now, forget the slur for a second. What is the governing logic behind a Fulani governor appointing a Senior Special Assistant on Fulfulde, the language of the Fulani?

Specially assisting him on what exactly?

It is the sort of thing that would raise eyebrows if Kogi’s Usman Ododo, an Ebira man, appointed a Special Assistant on Ebira Affairs in a state where the Igala are the demographic majority. The contexts are not identical, but the incongruity is similar enough to make the point.

Perhaps Governor Yusuf also has a Senior Special Assistant on Hausa, plus a full cabinet of other ethnically curated special assistants.

If so, one wonders whether governance has been outsourced to a directory of identity managers. Either way, it is a curious spectacle.

This American Looks So Fulani—and He Knows It!

2026-03-16T00:03:00.004-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

My family and I went to Masjid Al-Furqan in Marietta, about 20 minutes from our home, for iftar. While at the dinner, I noticed a man who looked so strikingly and unmistakably Fulani that I immediately said to myself there was no way he could be anything else.

My gaze lingered on him. I was convinced I was looking at another Nigerian. When he noticed my friendly, intent stare, he greeted me warmly.

I wasted no time asking if he was Nigerian. (Fulani people are spread across West Africa, of course, but because he looked so much like many Fulani people I grew up around in my hometown and elsewhere in northern Nigeria, I assumed he must be a Nigerian Fulani.)

“You think I am Fulani, right?” he said in a perfect American accent.

I was stunned. How did he know exactly what I was thinking? Was he a Fulani man born and raised in America?

He laughed and said he was from New York. He told me countless Africans had mistaken him for Fulani before, so he already knew what I was about to ask.

The most dramatic encounter he ever had, he said, happened in New York when someone urged him to “not be ashamed” of his “real identity” and simply admit where he actually came from.

“When I said, ‘My grandparents came from…,’” he told me, “the guy’s face lit up in anticipation that I would say Fulani.” Instead, he disappointed him by saying his grandparents migrated from South Carolina to New York in the early 1900s.

Even so, he said he strongly suspects that his distant African ancestry may indeed be Fulani. According to family lore on his father’s side, his ancestors who were brought from West Africa to South Carolina almost 500 years ago were Muslims who tried to practice their faith secretly during slavery, despite enormous odds. Naturally, such efforts could not endure indefinitely under the brutal conditions of slavery.

We didn’t have enough time for me to ask whether he was born into Islam or whether he embraced it later, perhaps inspired by the family stories about his ancestors arriving in America centuries ago as Muslims.

He seemed fascinated when I told him that many historians of the trans-Atlantic slave trade say South Carolina had the largest concentration of enslaved people from Senegambia. I also mentioned Omar ibn Said, the Fulani-born Muslim scholar from Futa Toro (in present-day Senegal) who was enslaved in South Carolina and later wrote an autobiography in Arabic. It remains the only known autobiography in Arabic written by an enslaved person in the United States and is now preserved in the Library of Congress.

It was a brief but lively encounter. Before we parted, I asked for his permission to take this photo with him and share it with my friends on social media.

The Death of Prof. Obododimma Oha

2026-03-14T23:58:00.002-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

I woke up today to a distressing message from Professor Toyin Falola informing a group of us that Obododimma Oha, a well-regarded University of Ibadan professor of stylistics and cultural semiotics, had died. I have been devastated since.

He would have turned 62 in August.

I became acquainted with Professor Oha more than 15 years ago through the USA-Africa Dialogue Series, the listserv Professor Falola founded and moderates where African academics on the continent and in the diaspora converge to converse.

After reading several pieces I posted on the Dialogue Series, Professor Oha reached out to me privately. That was how our friendship began.

We later became Facebook friends and interacted there often. He regularly commented on my updates and columns, and I occasionally did the same when he posted on either of his two Facebook pages.

At one point, after I published a February 16, 2013 column titled “Insults Africans and African Americans Hurl at Each Other,” he called me a "kindred spirit," and we discussed collaborating on a project on the vocabularies of vituperation in Nigeria, an area he had been exploring since 1999. Sadly, we never got around to doing it.

He graciously wrote a blurb for my 2015 book on comparative English usage in Nigeria, the United States and the UK and was remarkably generous in his praise for it.

Professor Oha was a true connoisseur of the written word, a consummate prose stylist and, above all, a fine human being.

At some point I noticed that he had disappeared from Facebook, but I never followed up because I assumed he was simply immersed in a new project. In retrospect, that was an error. I should have checked on him. I have learned a lesson from this.

Professor Oha was brilliant, fearless, fair-minded, considerate and classy. He was also unfailingly even-tempered even when he was impassioned in his engagements. He will be sorely missed. May his soul rest in peace.

Obituary for the PDP

2026-03-14T00:00:00.002-04:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

The diminution of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reached a symbolic pinnacle this week when a wave of defections swept through the National Assembly. Several PDP senators, including former Sokoto State governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, formally dumped the party for the African Democratic Congress (ADC), while multiple members of the House of Representatives also abandoned it for the ADC or the ruling APC.

Not every PDP legislator has left yet, but at this point it’s only a matter of time. With only two term-limited, lame-duck governors in Bauchi and Oyo states (whose continued membership in the PDP can’t even be guaranteed until 2027), I think it’s safe to say the PDP is officially dead.

For people of my generation who followed Nigerian politics closely in the early years of the Fourth Republic, the extinction of the PDP feels surreal. There was a time when the party seemed as permanent as the Nigerian state itself. It governed Nigeria for 16 uninterrupted years and so completely dominated the political landscape that opposition parties looked like pitiful ornamental appendages to the system.

At its height, the PDP controlled 31 of Nigeria’s 36 states, similar to today’s APC. Governors, senators, representatives, ministers, retired generals and career political jobbers all gravitated toward it. It was the ultimate receptacle of power and influence. In those days, joining the PDP was the closest thing Nigeria had to acquiring political insurance.

The arrogance that flowed from that dominance was legendary. In April 2008, the party’s then national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, boasted that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years. He added, with startling candor, that he didn’t care if Nigeria became a one-party state. At the time, the statement sounded like the confident exaggeration of a man who believed he was speaking from the center of history.

It turns out he was speaking from the edge of a cliff. Today, the PDP that proclaimed itself, with egotistical airs, to be Africa’s largest political party is a shell of its former self.

The previously expansive PDP umbrella now effectively shelters only two governors and a sprinkling of legislators (about seven senators and 17 representatives) who are plotting exit strategies from it.

That is a dramatic, never-before-seen political evaporation in Nigeria. But the PDP did not die suddenly. Its collapse has been a long, drawn-out process of self-sabotage punctuated by opportunistic defections, personal vendettas and spectacular displays of elite treachery.

The first decisive blow to the party came in 2015 when the party lost the presidency to the newly assembled All Progressives Congress (APC). For 16 years, the PDP had been the gravitational center of Nigerian politics because it controlled the federal government. Once that power vanished, the coalition that sustained it began to unravel.

Many Nigerian politicians do not join parties because of ideological affinity or programmatic conviction. They join because of proximity to power. When the PDP ceased to be the custodial party of federal authority, it also ceased to be the natural home of political opportunists.

The defections began almost immediately. Ogbulafor, who had said PDP would rule for 60 years, was one of the first PDP politicians to visit the APC secretariat in April 2015, a month before the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as president.

Politicians who had sworn eternal loyalty to the party discovered overnight that their political convictions had changed. Governors defected. Legislators defected. Party chieftains switched allegiances with a speed that would impress Jamaica’s Usain Bolt.

Nothing captures the PDP’s institutional collapse more vividly than the fate of its own former leaders. At least four former national chairmen of the party eventually ended up in the APC: Barnabas Gemade, Audu Ogbeh, Ali Modu Sheriff, and Adamu Mu’azu. In other words, men who led the PDP at the highest level later abandoned it for its main rival.

What remained after 2015 was a wounded party that still had a chance to recover if it had managed its internal conflicts with maturity and discipline. Instead, it chose fratricide. No individual embodies the party’s self-destructive impulses more distinctly than Nyesom Wike.

Wike’s quarrel with the PDP became especially bitter after he lost out in the struggle for the party’s presidential ticket. What followed was a prolonged campaign of internal destabilization that culminated in the notorious rebellion of the so-called G-5 governors, who are now at odds with each other.

During the 2023 election cycle, these governors effectively turned their backs on their own party’s presidential candidate and openly fraternized with Bola Tinubu of the APC. It was one of the most extraordinary acts of partisan self-immolation in Nigeria’s democratic history.

A ruling party undermining itself from within is not unheard of. But a major opposition party actively assisting the ruling party to defeat itself is an entirely different category of political absurdity.

The strange part was that the PDP never summoned the courage to discipline the rebellion. Instead, it spent months pleading for reconciliation with politicians who had already crossed the psychological Rubicon separating loyalty from hostility.

The party leadership appeared incapable of recognizing that the rebellion was not a temporary disagreement but a permanent structural rupture.

In Nigerian politics, when a politician begins to work openly against his own party’s presidential candidate, reconciliation meetings are unlikely to restore trust.

The result was predictable. The PDP entered the 2023 elections deeply fractured and emerged from them even weaker.

Since then, the party has existed in a state of perpetual crisis. Leadership disputes, court cases and factional rivalries have turned the party into a theater of endless internal conflict. Instead of projecting the image of a credible national alternative to the APC, the PDP has appeared increasingly like a quarrelsome family fighting over inheritance while the house burns.

Nothing illustrates this political dysfunction more vividly than recent events in Abuja’s local government elections. A candidate who won a chairmanship seat on the PDP platform reportedly wasted no time switching allegiance to the APC. That act captured the party’s predicament more eloquently than any formal political analysis.

Winning an election under the PDP banner now appears to create immediate anxiety about political survival.

It also reflects the ambiguous political posture of figures like Nyesom Wike, who continues to claim PDP membership while acting in ways that frequently align with the interests of the ruling APC.

The cumulative effect of these developments has been the gradual hollowing out of the party. The PDP still exists as a legal entity. It still has offices and officials. But its actual institutional authority has vanished. What remains is largely the disguised extension of the APC.

There is an irony in all this. The PDP helped normalize the culture of defections that is now destroying it. For years, it enthusiastically welcomed defectors from rival parties, rewarding them with positions and privileges. Party loyalty was never a particularly prized virtue in its political culture.

The party’s strategy was simple: absorb everyone and expand the coalition of power. That strategy worked for as long as the PDP controlled the federal government. Once it lost that advantage, the logic of opportunism that benefited it began to operate against it.

Politicians who previously defected into the PDP now defect out of it. In other words, the PDP became a victim of the political habits it cultivated.

The party’s decline also illustrates a larger truth about Nigerian politics. Political dominance should never be confused with institutional strength. APC will do well to learn this elemental truth.

For 16 years, the PDP looked invincible. It won elections easily, controlled most state governments, and occupied the commanding heights of the federal state. But it never built a durable institutional structure capable of surviving the loss of power.

It was essentially a coalition of powerful individuals held together by access to the resources of the federal government. Once those resources disappeared, the coalition gradually disintegrated.

What we are witnessing today is the final stage of that disintegration. For a political organization that had proclaimed it would rule Nigeria for 60 years, this is a remarkably brief lifespan.

A Note to the Defenders of Ismail Sani’s Fraud

2026-03-13T00:27:00.004-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

There appears to be a small but coordinated campaign to exculpate Ismail Sani, who forged Bayero University Kano documents and assumed a false female identity to scam public-spirited northern Nigerians committed to supporting young people’s education.

A medical doctor I once respected for his erudition and presumed moral clarity is leading the charge, arguing that Ismail broke no school rule and should be spared expulsion. A BUK English lecturer whom I also thought possessed moral scruples echoed this position.

If the doctor genuinely wishes to influence BUK’s decision, Facebook updates are not the way to do it. The posts are clearly meant to emotionally blackmail and guilt-trip me and others who exposed Ismail’s fraud.

For the record, I have never called for his expulsion. I have no idea which university code his conduct may have violated or what penalty it prescribes. No one on Facebook can dictate what BUK should do.

BUK is an institution governed by laws and regulations that students accept as a condition of their enrollment. One of the many reasons most of us are proud alumni is the university’s long-standing zero-tolerance stance toward fraud by both students and lecturers.

When I was an undergraduate, lecturers were forbidden from selling handouts to students, and I am told that rule still stands.

I recall a former classmate named Tokunbo who colluded with clerical staff to falsify his results so he could graduate and enroll in the NYSC. When the fraud was uncovered, his entire degree was withdrawn.

If the disciplinary panel investigating Ismail concludes that his offense warrants expulsion, Facebook apologetics will not cause them to disregard their own regulations. In fact, we do not even know what penalty his conduct carries or whether it formally violates a student code, although forging university documents to impersonate someone else in order to solicit money would surprise me if it violated no policy.

Why anticipate a punishment and then attempt to dictate the university’s response, as if it were a privately run kindergarten under the control of Facebook commentators?

To be fair, when I first spoke with the Dean of Student Affairs about this matter, I said I did not want the young man expelled or rusticated. He is already 29 and has only just completed his second year. My instinct was paternal. But the dean politely reminded me that the committee’s decision would be guided strictly by university regulations and precedent.

I asked if I could instead write a letter pleading for leniency, perhaps allowing him to sign an undertaking acknowledging his wrongdoing. The dean doubted that would work, but I still gave Ismail conditions under which I would seek a “soft landing” for him.

He was to publicly recount how he scammed me and others using the fictitious “Halima Tahir,” reportedly his girlfriend’s identity. He resisted. Combined with the growing chorus of people defending him and attempting to emotionally blackmail me, I informed the dean that I would no longer intervene to suspend the normal disciplinary process. Ismail later said he would comply, but by then it was too late.

What hardened my resolve further was Dr. MD Aminu’s discovery that Ismail had harmed people in Kano by posing as a doctor and administering injections and drugs. That matter has not yet entered the public domain.

When I threatened to publicize his fraud if he didn’t tell the truth about the Halima Tahir persona, his greatest concern was that people would discover he was actually a veterinary medicine student. Now I know why.

To some he had claimed to be a medical doctor. To others he said he was an MBBS student. That deception enabled him to inject patients and dispense drugs to unsuspecting people. That is profoundly dangerous behavior.

I also suspect he may be mentally unwell. Perhaps BUK’s psychiatrists will examine him.

Well, whatever BUK decides will be acceptable to me. If the university lets him off, I will not protest. If it finds him culpable and imposes punishment, I will not grieve. For me, it is enough that his scamming has been stopped.

The “Halima Tahir Scammer” Is a Man I’ve Helped Many Times

2026-03-10T01:18:00.002-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

A few days ago, I shared the story of a scammer who claimed to be “Halima Tahir,” a 300-level microbiology undergraduate at Bayero University, Kano, who scammed me into helping “her” with tuition fees and other school expenses three different times.

Well, after some digital sleuthing, I discovered, to my utmost shock, that “Halima Tahir” is actually one Ismail Sani (https://www.facebook.com/ismail.sani.29309), whom I had helped with tuition fees and other school expenses from 2024 through 2025 even though I didn’t know him from a bar of soap.

Ismail Saleh Sani is a student of Veterinary Medicine at Bayero University Kano who has just completed his second year. He first reached out to me in September 2024.

He said he was a second-year Human Anatomy student at the Federal University in Dutse but had just been admitted to study Veterinary Medicine at BUK. He needed help paying his tuition fees to secure his place.

I helped him. I asked for no verification. He nonetheless sent me evidence of the payment, which I hadn’t demanded because I had no suspicions. He was grateful and gave me unsolicited updates on his progress at school.

He later made two other financial requests, including one to help an old woman who supposedly couldn’t afford medicine for an ear infection, which I granted.

After that, he kept pestering me with an even bigger request to buy laptops to facilitate a JAMB-coaching school he said he had called the Online ExtraMural JAMB Lesson Project. I ignored him.

He then used the name “Halima Tahir” to get more money from me, apparently in cahoots with someone who actually bears the name Halima Tahir Dahiru.

The email address (mbbsabuth15@gmail.com) he used to communicate with me as “Halima Tahir” (recall that the initial display name in the email was Ishmael Sani) appears on the receipt of his last school fees payment retrieved via Remita. The phone number on the receipt was confirmed by Truecaller to belong to Ismail Sani. (He has now deactivated the email address!)

I confronted him with the evidence and was prepared to forgive him if he came clean and apologized. After all, he is a legitimate student. But he flatly denied it, even swearing by Allah. He claimed someone stole his email address to perpetrate the crime.

Fine. I dug deeper and found his 2023 JAMB registration slip. Sure enough, the email he used was mbbsabuth15@gmail.com. I shared the slip with him and asked how he had used the same email address in 2023. I also asked why the initial display name for the email address was Ishmael Sani, which also appears in the alternative address (ishmaelsani611@gmail.com) he uses on Truecaller and with which he had previously emailed me.

I thought that, in light of the overwhelming evidence I showed him, he would be penitent and seek forgiveness. I gave him multiple opportunities to show remorse and apologize. He refused. Instead, he kept protesting his innocence with the exact same words and in the same stylistic register he used when I first called him out for changing the display name from Ishmael Sani to Halima Tahir. He invoked Allah, Ramadan, and every sacred symbol in Islam to swear his innocence even though the evidence against him is incontrovertible. Can you believe that?

He is clearly a dangerous, well-practiced scammer. Or perhaps he is mentally unwell. Whatever the case, he does not belong in polite society. He belongs in prison, or somewhere he cannot harm people.

My search showed that he scammed other friends. He scammed Dr. Hussaini Abdu into helping with tuition fees as “Halima Tahir.” He scammed Mohammed Dahiru (“MD”) Aminu as “Halima Tahir” and also attempted to scam him as Ismail Sani. He scammed Dr. Abdulbasit Kassim (who appears in his Facebook profile photo) both as Ismail Sani and as “Halima Tahir.” I am certain there are many more people he has scammed whom I do not know.

I am sharing his details in the hope that Bayero University, whose proud alumnus I am, will act against this criminal who is dragging the school’s name in the mud.

I am also done helping strangers. The torrents of emails I have been receiving from total strangers since I published the previous scam story should stop. I am no Dangote. In fact, I doubt Dangote himself would still be rich if he granted the requests I have been receiving these past few days.

Barefaced Bank Theft in Nigeria

2026-03-09T16:56:00.004-04:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Nigerian banks may be the only financial institutions in the world where the bank and the government form a tag team against the customer.

They charge you when money enters your account. They charge you when money leaves your account. Then the banks charge you for the privilege of letting the money sit idly where you kept it. Your account is basically a toll gate.

A friend told me just yesterday that he once opened a domiciliary account and deposited $500 in it. Years later he returned to withdraw it. The bank informed him that the entire $500 had been consumed by “account maintenance"!

Maintenance of what exactly? The air surrounding the account?

If a stranger took your money this way, we would call it theft. But when banks do it, we call it banking and then applaud when they announce billions in annual profits.

The saddest part is that Nigerians have made peace with this daylight corporate pickpocketing by banks.

Bwala’s Self-Indicting Post-Interview Alibi for Poor Performance

2026-03-08T01:34:00.003-05:00

By Farooq Kperogi

I have said far more about Daniel Bwala’s sensational Al Jazeera rhetorical incineration than I am inclined to, and honestly wanted to move on, but his ludicrous, self-indicting post-interview ego defense has drawn me in again.

I will isolate only the most egregious alibi he invoked to explain away his embarrassing lies, contradictions, inconsistencies, and lack of basic decency to admit the truth.

He says he should have been told in advance that his past criticisms of Tinubu would come up in the interview so he could “prepare himself.” That is a remarkable confession.

In journalism, interviews are not take-home exams where guests receive the questions beforehand, rehearse answers and stroll in to recite them like memorized lines in a secondary school debate.

If that were the standard, every interview would sound like a badly rehearsed stage play, or what my friend and former colleague Crispin Oduobuk used to call a “stand-and-deliver” performance.

The entire point of a personality interview is to test what a guest actually knows and believes when confronted with real questions.

What Bwala has accidentally revealed is far more interesting than his ego-defending, self-pitying lamentation. By complaining that he was not forewarned, he has essentially told us that for all his appearances on Nigerian TVs, he always gets the questions ahead of time. In other words, the “analysis” viewers watch is often scripted, pre-packaged theater.

That’s not journalism. That’s PR. As I pointed out in my August 26, 2020, article titled “Fani-Kayode: All Great Journalists Are ‘Rude’” and again in my February 09, 2023, reflection titled “Kwankwaso’s Superhuman Restraint During Arise TV Interview,” our job as journalists is to rupture the composure of politicians, to so rile them up that they trip up and say things that are unscripted and therefore newsworthy.

"Smart politicians know this," I wrote. "Instead of allowing themselves to be immobilized by impotent anger, they respond to high-pressure, 'embarrassing' questions with poise, and disarm adversarial reporters with humility, grace, and gentleness."

That a presidential spokesperson who fancies himself as a towering intellect does not know that real journalists do not send interview questions in advance, and who did not anticipate, much less prepare for, questions about his own past, says a great deal about him.

And the exam analogy writes itself. Imagine a student protesting after failing a test: “The lecturer never told me these were the questions he was going to ask!”

That protest does not expose the lecturer. It exposes the student. Bwala is, in effect, complaining that he failed the exam because he didn’t get the “expo.”

It makes you wonder how he passed his exams in his educational career, particularly since, for a lawyer, he seems to struggle a great deal with English grammar, his tool of the trade.

He apparently has zero clue what subject-verb agreement means in spoken English. He also appears not to have learned even a little about English plurals and uncountable nouns, which would explain why he said, “this is a water” during the interview.

So, despite the post-interview spin, the complaint says what no critic could say better: he walked into the room unprepared, and the questions did what questions are supposed to do.

Related Articles:

Fani-Kayode: All Great Journalists Are “Rude”

Kwankwaso’s Superhuman Restraint During Arise TV Interview

What Critics of Rufai Oseni Don’t Know about Journalism

Partisan Comparisons of Channel TV’s Seun and Arise TV’s Rufai

Daniel Bwala’s Al Jazeera Humiliation

2026-03-07T00:00:00.002-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 because of his impassioned opposition to the choice of Kashim Shettima as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public break from the APC, he came across to me as a voluble, ignorant and opportunistic careerist, not because of his stance on Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim running mate, but because of what struck me as his facileness and self-seeking obsessions.

His dramatic volte-face from being a virulent Tinubu critic to a fawning, vicious Tinubu battering ram has proven that my hunch about him was accurate.

Yet I felt sorry watching him eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera on Friday, March 6. He willingly participated in the detonation of what remained of his credibility before the world. In the process, he did incalculable reputational damage to the Tinubu government he is paid to protect.

What viewers saw on Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head was the spectacle of a presidential spokesman arriving unarmed to a firefight he should have anticipated, then trying to fight back with nervous laughter, evasions, amnesia and the old Nigerian official fallback of whataboutery.

His evasiveness and prevarications were so unnervingly apparent that Hasan was compelled to say, “At the weekend, you put out a video to music of you and your team researching and prepping for this show and...now every time I ask you say you are not aware of that....what were you researching in that video...?"

The most striking thing about Bwala’s performance was not that he was challenged hard. Anyone who agrees to sit opposite Mehdi Hasan knows the interview will not be a tea party. The disgrace was that Bwala looked startled by facts he should have mastered before stepping into the studio.

On insecurity, on corruption, on Tinubu’s own words and even on his own prior statements, he oscillated between denial, deflection and the sort of desperate verbal stalling that makes a government look smaller than its critics claim it is.

The problem was not that Daniel Bwala appeared lazy or obviously unprepared. In fact, he looked prepared, even thoroughly rehearsed and robotic. He had the posture, the confidence and the choreographed mannerisms of a man who believed he had done his homework. But his carefully planned performances collapsed pitifully when they collided with Hasan’s hard, cold, indisputable facts.

Political wordplay can sometimes survive on friendly platforms or on Nigeria’s tame media spaces where assertion is mistaken for argument. It cannot survive a fact-driven, scorched-earthed, bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred interrogation. Facts are facts. And Mehdi Hasan is a man of facts. He has the rare gift of making heavy, devastating facts sound almost light in conversation. That quality made Bwala’s evasions even more painful to watch.

The exchange over “context” illustrated this perfectly. When confronted with evidence that insecurity had worsened under the current administration, Bwala retreated to the mantra that “context matters.” Yet the context he invoked was little more than semantic fog and intentional, self-impressed verbal obfuscation.

Hasan, by contrast, used numbers and reports that any government spokesman worth the title should already know. The moment became absurd when Bwala insisted that the context of worsening statistics was that things were not getting worse. The dialogue is worth reproducing:

Hasan: You are failing. Amnesty International says you are failing at security. The numbers don't lie.

Bwala: It's unfortunate and as a government working day and night that situation. I don't agree to [sic] the fact that it's getting worse.

Hasan: How can it not get worse if more people die in one year than the previous year?

Bwala: Context matters.

Hasan: What's the context?

Bwala: The context is not getting worse.

Hasan: What!

Bwala: Yes.

Hasan: The context is not getting worse?

Bwala: The context is that it is not getting worse, because you, you see this is a water [sic], right?....

Forget, for now, Bwala’s inexcusably horrible grammar, especially for a lawyer, his tortured logic and his buffoonish articulation. That was some cringeworthy self-own.

The numbers he tried to wave away are not inventions of hostile foreigners with an anti-Nigerian agenda. Nigeria’s own National Human Rights Commission reported that at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits or insurgents in the first half of 2025 alone.

Conflict monitoring groups have recorded even higher totals for the full year. Amnesty International has repeatedly warned that violence has intensified since Tinubu assumed office. In other words, Hasan’s central point was merely a summary of documented reality.

This is what made Bwala’s performance so damaging. He was not merely disputing interpretations. He was disputing arithmetic. When a spokesman tells the world that things are not getting worse while credible datasets show that they are, he is insulting the intelligence of everyone listening, especially Nigerians who bury the dead, pay ransoms, withdraw their children from schools and avoid highways after dark.

But the interview’s most morally satisfying feature was Hasan’s methodical dismantling of Bwala’s denials about his own past words. Bwala tried the trite and tired Nigerian political trick of pretending that statements made in opposition exist in a separate moral universe from statements made in office. Hasan did not let him get away with it.

Bwala denied on air having said Tinubu and his camp created a militia and threatened him. Yet those remarks were widely reported during the 2023 campaign. He also denied saying that bullion vans seen at Tinubu’s Bourdillon residence were ostensibly for vote buying, despite the fact that the comments were carried by multiple Nigerian outlets at the time. So, when Bwala asked who said such things, the answer was brutally simple. Daniel Bwala said them.

The same pattern appeared on corruption. Tinubu did in fact proclaim at a public event that Nigeria had “no more corruption,” a line that was widely reported and widely mocked and that provoked Omoyele Sowore to call Tinubu a “criminal” for which he is being tried now. Bwala’s attempt to rescue the statement by retroactively inventing a narrower meaning was not the contextual clarification he wanted it to be. It was out-and-out mendacity.

On the appointment of Abubakar Bagudu as minister of budget and economic planning, Bwala again reached for evasion. Yet the record is clear that Bagudu returned about $163 million linked to the Abacha loot investigations in a settlement with authorities. Whether or not one calls that a conviction, the public controversy around his appointment cannot honestly be dismissed as drunken rumor.

Then there is the overarching irony that electrified the interview. Bwala was confronted with the fossil record of his own mouth. Before joining Tinubu’s camp, he publicly attacked the same man over allegations of corruption, the drug forfeiture case in the United States and the bullion van episode. What Hasan exposed was the speed with which partisan appetite can digest prior conviction and call the indigestion growth.

Bwala’s performance mattered for a reason larger than one man’s embarrassment. It showed in concentrated form the disease afflicting Nigerian political communication. Too many spokesmen believe their job is not to illuminate but to survive the segment. So, they deny what is documented, nervously laugh when cornered, compare Nigeria with unrelated countries, abuse the word “context” and hope that shamelessness can do the work preparation cannot.

Daniel Bwala went to London to defend the government. Instead, he displayed its worst habits: contempt for evidence, indifference to contradiction and the assumption that public memory is so short that a man can disown his own recorded words without consequence.

Mehdi Hasan did not disgrace him. Bwala did that himself. Hasan merely kept the receipts.

Video of Daniel Bwala Saying Tinubu Threatened His Life

2026-03-06T19:29:00.004-05:00

In his Al Jazeera interview, Daniel Bwala denied ever saying that Bola Ahmed Tinubu threatened his life or that a militia had been created to take down opposition politicians.

Yet that is exactly what he says in this January 22, 2023, video clip:

To understand this, perhaps the rest of us "uncontextualized" souls simply need to enroll in the Bwala School of Context, where statements mean one thing when you say them and quite another when someone plays them back.

It gets even worse o. This video clip below juxtaposes four things Daniel Bwala flatly denied saying during his interview with Mehdi Hasan and what he unmistakably said on the record. At one point, in a moment of wounded dignity, he declared: “I want to put it on record on my own honor that’s not what I said.”

Obviously, Bwala's honor isn't worth anything. Its mendacity wrapped in fresh mendacity.

A Scammer Pretending to Be a BUK Microbiology Student

2026-03-05T00:46:00.005-05:00

By Farooq Kperogi

Sometime last year, someone who identified herself as Halima Tahir (although I now suspect it's a man who colluded with a woman) contacted me to request help paying her tuition fees.

She claimed to be a student in the Department of Microbiology at Bayero University in Kano who had lost her father in 2024 and was struggling to continue her studies. I helped her.

A few months later, she reached out again with another request related to school expenses, which I also obliged.

But several red flags caused lingering doubts about her identity. Her initial email to me in 2025 carried the name "Ishmael Sani" as the display name, even though the content of the email itself identified the sender as Halima Tahir.

Within minutes, she sent another email with the same content but with "Halima Tahir" as the display name. Both Ishmael Sani and Halima Tahir used the same email address: mbbsabuth15@gmail.com

When I confronted "Halima Tahir" about this, she offered an explanation for the discrepancy, although I no longer recall what it was.

To convince me she was genuine, she sent a screenshot of an invoice that showed how much she supposedly owed Bayero University in tuition fees. The invoice had the name “Halima Tahir” on it.

However, the name on the Zenith Bank account she provided, number 2126100907, was "Halima Dahiru." Because Dahiru is often used as a variant spelling or pronunciation of Tahir in northern Nigeria, I dismissed the discrepancy.

A few days ago, she contacted me again with another request. But something about the message immediately struck me as odd. Her email still said she was in 300 level. She had already told me she was in 300 level during the 2024/2025 academic session.

By now she should be in her final year. At that point, I knew something was wrong.

That was why I asked to be connected with students or lecturers in Bayero University’s Department of Microbiology here on Facebook.

A professor I contacted, who happens to be the 300 level coordinator, told me there is no student by the name of Halima Tahir in the department, either in the 2024/2025 session or now.

He also pointed out that the invoice the scammer sent me was fake. Among other red flags, he said, the scammer listed “Faculty of Science” instead of the correct “Faculty of Life Sciences.”

I am not wealthy, but over the years I have quietly helped many genuine students across the country whom I do not know and will probably never meet. I do it because I know what it means to struggle and to lack.

Unfortunately, a few people have taken advantage of that willingness to help and have tried to scam me. I know I am not the only one this happens to.

I am sharing this not to discourage helping students in need but to remind people to be cautious and vigilant.

Help! My Uncle is Kidnapped in Nigeria!

2026-03-04T00:43:00.004-05:00

The author, a Nigerian journalist and graduate student in journalism here in the United States, sought my help to amplify his family's anguish and desperate search for help. If you read this, please help in any way you can. You can reach him through his email at the end of the article. Thanks!

By Haruna Mohammed Salisu

Three weeks ago, my uncle did not come home.

He had left at dawn, the way he always does. A poor man moving through the world before it fully wakes, returning to a family that waits for him. He did not return. Gunmen took him from the road, into a forest that stretches from Taraba, Plateau, and Bauchi, and they have kept him there ever since. As I write this, he is still in that forest. He is still alive. And we are running out of time.

My uncle is not a man of wealth or influence. He holds no government position, owns no land beyond what feeds his family, has no cousin in Abuja to call. He is a man who has spent his life in the honest arithmetic of survival — working, providing, asking for nothing beyond safety and the right to return home at the end of each day. He is the kind of man who, in a just world, the worst of the world would leave alone.

The worst of the world did not leave him alone.

When they first took him, the kidnappers were calculating. They had watched him. They knew what he owned, what he earned, what his family could plausibly raise. A man who has spent his life negotiating between hunger and enough does not present as a profitable target. So they held him. Days became a week. A week became two. Two became three. And then, without warning, they changed their demand.

They are now asking for N100 million.

I want you to sit with that number for a moment. At Nigeria's minimum wage, N100 million is 119 years of earnings. My uncle does not have 119 years. A subsistence farmer in Northern Nigeria might earn N400,000 in a good harvest year. To raise N100 million through farming alone would take 250 uninterrupted years of harvest. Our family does not have 250 years. We have days. And they are passing.

We did not go public immediately. When he was first taken, we made the difficult decision to stay quiet. And that is because the moment kidnappers learn that a hostage has a relative abroad, the ransom inflates.

I am in the United States, completing a graduate degree. My being here is not wealth. But perception is the currency of the kidnapping economy, and we could not spend it carelessly. We waited. We prayed. We negotiated the way poor families in Nigeria are forced to negotiate — alone, in whispers, with nothing.

They found out anyway that I’m in the US. They whispered to him that they know his nephew is in America. The ransom did not go down.

The Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics recorded approximately $1.42 billion paid in ransoms between May 2023 and April 2024. Billions of naira. Thousands of families sitting exactly where we are sitting. This is not a rare tragedy. In Northern Nigeria, it has become a regular feature of life. It has become the particular cruelty of an armed economy that preys on the poor because the poor are accessible, because their names do not appear in newspapers, because their grief does not slow traffic in Lagos.

My uncle's name is not in any newspaper. He is a quiet man from a village that no one outside of it has heard of. He has never asked for anything except to live in peace.

I am his nephew. I am a journalist. I have documented exactly these kinds of kidnap for ransom in Nigeria. I know how it feels. I'm feeling it now.

So I am doing the only thing left available to me. I am asking for help. Publicly. On the record.

If you have any connection to the Nigerian security services, to community and religious leaders, to anyone who operates in or near the forests, please help. Act. Help us bring a poor, decent, hardworking man home to his family before what little time we have runs out.

My uncle and 9 other captives deserve to come home. Not because of who I am. Because of who he is: a man who never harmed anyone, who worked every day of his life, and who is sitting in a forest tonight wondering why the world has gone so quiet.

Please. Help us make some noise.

Haruna Mohammed Salisu publishes WikkiTimes and writes this from the United States. He can be reached at harunababale@wikkitimes.com

History and Psychoanalysis of El-Rufai’s Troubles with Ribadu

2026-02-28T00:00:00.047-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Given the depth and intensity of the friendship they cultivated over decades, many people are befuddled by why the personal conflict between former Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai and National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu has burst into the open with such virulence. As I’ll show, it’s inspired by deep-seated envy, ego trip and bruised self-construal.

Both were born in 1960 (with El-Rufai being about nine months older), graduated from ABU in the 1980s (with El-Rufai graduating three years earlier), have a reputation for boldness and outspokenness, and were stars of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration.

From the outside looking in, it appears to me that although both men had mutual admiration for each other, the scale tilted a little in favor of El-Rufai. I say this for at least two reasons.

One, according to a recent social media post by presidential aide Gimba Kakanda, who appears to be close to both men, Ribadu named his son in honor of El-Rufai. I am not aware that El-Rufai requited Ribadu’s gesture even though he has had boys. If my assumption is wrong, I apologize. If it’s right, that bespeaks a deep, unspoken, but nonetheless significant inequality in admiration.

Second, on page 358 of El-Rufai’s 2013 autobiography titled The Accidental Public Servant, which has made the social media rounds, El-Rufai revealed that when the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua sought Ribadu’s support to be president and said Obasanjo had already endorsed him, Ribadu rebuffed Yar’Adua, saying, “Well, Obasanjo has not told me, and as far as the presidency is concerned, I have my candidate for president, and that is Nasir El-Rufai. I am going to have to speak to Obasanjo about this.”

So, El-Rufai internalized the asymmetry in their admiration for each other. He took for granted that Ribadu thought higher of him than he did of Ribadu. There can be no greater endorsement of this fact than Ribadu’s perception that El-Rufai was the best Nigerian qualified to succeed Obasanjo.

However, in 2011, when Bola Ahmed Tinubu was shopping for a young northern candidate to fly the flag of the ACN, he commissioned a public opinion poll to determine which northern candidate enjoyed the most national acceptance, according to Akin Osuntokun’s February 20, 2026, Arise News interview.

Osuntokun not only worked with both men during the Obasanjo presidency, he is also friends with them. Plus, I’ve heard this story from several people close to El-Rufai and Ribadu, but this is the first time it’s out in the open.

Osuntokun’s revelation that the national poll showed Nuhu Ribadu with a significantly higher rating (about 45 percent) compared to Nasir El-Rufai (around seven percent) is consistent with what I’ve heard.

Based on that result, Tinubu backed Ribadu’s candidacy within the ACN. It also marked the beginning of Ribadu’s relationship with Tinubu.

El-Rufai’s exaggerated self-construal of his superiority over Ribadu was badly shattered, and he couldn’t take it. But I am not surprised by the outcome of the poll. It occurred at the height of Ribadu’s popularity in the country.

As I pointed out in a past column, my own paternal uncle, a UK-educated health professional, named his son Ribadu, not Nuhu, in honor of Nuhu Ribadu’s exploits at the EFCC. When I told him Ribadu is the name of a town in Adamawa State where Nuhu hails from, he was surprised. We still laugh over it.

El-Rufai’s ego was badly bruised because he had a hard time accepting that Ribadu, who didn’t think of himself as presidential material in 2007 and who instead thought El-Rufai should succeed Obasanjo, should be considered worthier of being president in 2011 by more Nigerians. As a result, the previously impregnable walls of friendship between them began to collapse irretrievably.

By 2015, El-Rufai rode on the coattails of Muhammadu Buhari to become governor of Kaduna State. According to people familiar with the dynamics of their relationship, El-Rufai studiously used his influence in the Buhari government to exclude Ribadu.

But by 2023, when Tinubu became president, Ribadu got his groove back. El-Rufai believes that the rejection of his ministerial nomination by the Senate on “security” grounds was inspired by Ribadu, who was retaliating for El-Rufai’s own underhanded exclusion of Ribadu during the Buhari presidency.

Most regular people with no hangups would take it in their stride and wait for their “time.” But El-Rufai isn’t a “regular” person. He must be in on the action or everything must be scattered. So, he set out to do at least three things to get at Ribadu: 1. Show that Ribadu is dangerous and vindictive. 2. Show that he is incompetent. 3. Show that he is a craven fellow who can’t return, much less match, El-Rufai’s lethal rhetorical salvos.

These points overlap. If you are vindictive but are afraid of being seen as such, then you’re a coward. If you’re a coward and you control the security of the country, then you’re also incompetent. If you don’t respond to my personal attacks, it’s because you fear that I’ll reveal more damaging information and also lack the rhetorical and intellectual firepower to fight back, which harkens back to your fitness for the job of protecting the country.

Of course, El-Rufai knows that Ribadu is anything but a coward. In The Accidental Public Servant, El-Rufai recounts an incident from their undergraduate days at Ahmadu Bello University to illustrate what he presents as Ribadu’s boldness.

According to El-Rufai, Ribadu was confronted by an armed robber who pointed a gun at him. Instead of complying or retreating, Ribadu slapped the robber and challenged him.

El-Rufai told the anecdote as an example of Ribadu’s fearlessness and impulsive self-confidence during their student years and to sketch Ribadu’s temperament early on, suggesting that Ribadu’s later public persona as an anti-corruption crusader was consistent with traits visible even as an undergraduate.

In his only public reaction to El-Rufai’s constant personal attacks, Ribadu was conciliatory and even-tempered. “Despite the incessant baiting and attacks, I have never spoken ill of Nasir on record anywhere,” he wrote on February 24, 2025. “This is out of respect for our past association and our respective families. I will not start today.”

El-Rufai’s supporters read the statement, whose grace should have disarmed anyone, as evidence of cowardice. But had he attacked El-Rufai back in the fashion that El-Rufai savaged him, the public, which tends to side with the underdog (in this case anyone outside the orbit of the reigning government), would see El-Rufai as the victim and Ribadu as the villain.

This gave El-Rufai the illusion that he was winning the war and led him to dig in even deeper with that self-sabotaging Arise News interview, which overstepped the bounds of reasonableness and landed him in the hot water he is in now.

In spite of people’s natural predilection to sympathize with the underdog, outside of partisan political circles, El-Rufai’s troubles aren’t eliciting the profusion of support, outrage and empathy anyone else would have received. And it’s because he is being given a taste of his own medicine.

As a governor, he routinely abducted and tortured critics and then bragged about it. He engineered and cheered the mass massacres of at least a thousand Shia Muslims. There is nothing El-Rufai is going through now that he did not inflict on others multiple times over.

For those who want to sympathize with him, which is perfectly legitimate, I leave you with these words he uttered on January 22, 2012, at the Yar’Adua Center, Abuja, at a presentation at the T2T (Transformed To Transform) Nigeria Conference for Youth Corps Members:

“We have no politics of public interest or public good. And you know the politicians proudly tell you that politics is about interest. If they don’t get what they want, they’re ready to collapse the system.

“Every military coup in Nigeria’s history was engineered by civilians. They have lost elections, right or wrongly. If a politician contests for a position and he doesn’t get it, he’ll not support a party member that got the nomination.

“He would rather move to the opposition and ensure that the person that defeated him fair and square loses the election. So, we have a political culture where the primacy of personal interest trumps everything else.

“Now, what is the difference between human beings and animals? So it is with most Nigerian politicians: everyone for himself, no one for the country, no one even for the party. It’s an interesting political culture. And it’s ingrained. Politicians believe that is the way, that is politics, and to change it will take quite an effort. This is a problem.”

Related Articles:

El Rufai’s Arise News Mind Game with Ribadu

El-Rufai’s Morbid Fixation with Death of His Political Opponents

Nasir El-Rufai’s Scorched-Earth One-Man Opposition

El-Rufai’s Betrayal and Akpabio’s Buffoonery

“Body Bag”: El-Rufai’s History of Rhetorical Violence and Semantic Duplicity

Tinubu Must Address Rising Mass Massacres Now

2026-02-21T00:00:00.005-05:00

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Recent events show a widening pattern of killings, abductions and reprisals stretching from Borno to Zamfara, Kebbi, Niger, Kwara and elsewhere. The scale of fatalities alone demands sustained national attention. But the Bola Ahmed Tinubu government’s muted presence in the public response raises troubling questions about its priorities and its appreciation of the fierce urgency of the moment.

Start with Borno State, long regarded as the epicenter of Boko Haram’s insurgency. International media outlets reported last Friday that Boko Haram militants attacked a Nigerian military formation, killing at least eight soldiers and leaving dozens wounded. Casualty figures varied across accounts, but the deaths of eight soldiers were consistently reported.

Incidents of this nature once triggered nationwide debate and highly visible federal reaction. They now pass with limited public engagement outside specialist security coverage. That shift in attention probably reflects outrage fatigue, but it does not reduce the severity of the threat.

In the northwest and north central zones, mass casualty attacks have become distressingly frequent. Reports from Kebbi and Zamfara States describe repeated bandit raids, civilian deaths and abductions.

Again, an Associated Press dispatch from last Friday documented coordinated assaults in Kebbi resulting in at least 33 fatalities. That number alone represents a catastrophic loss for rural communities, yet the federal government hasn’t even acknowledged these tragedies much less comfort victims. This is increasingly becoming a pattern.

The Borgu region, where I am from, illustrates how violence transcends state boundaries while policy responses remain fragmented. Borgu’s communities span Kebbi, Niger and Kwara States. They share historical and cultural ties but operate under different administrative authorities. Armed groups exploit this fragmentation. Attacks in one area of the region reverberate across others and reshape daily behavior far beyond the immediate site of violence.

In Tungan Makeri, Konkoso and Pissa in Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State, news reports and police statements from this week confirmed deadly pre-dawn raids by gunmen. Initial figures indicated about 32 civilians killed across the affected settlements.

Specific breakdowns varied, with six deaths reported in Tungan Makeri and as many as 26 in Konkoso, according to local accounts cited in early coverage. These numbers represent entire families extinguished within hours. They also underscore the persistent vulnerability of communities repeatedly targeted by armed groups.

Earlier in the year, Borgu recorded another mass casualty episode at Kasuwan Daji market. Credible reporting placed the death toll at 30 or more people killed, with several others abducted. Shops were burned. Civilians were shot. Survivors described chaos, devastation and disorientation.

The recurrence of large-scale lethal attacks within the same geographic zone should have triggered an unmistakable escalation in federal visibility. That response has not been evident at the level many residents consider commensurate with the losses.

Across the Kwara axis of Borgu, the psychological impact of nearby massacres is now frighteningly noticeable. In Baruten, formerly part of the historical Borgu configuration, fear recently overwhelmed a weekly market day.

A vehicle passed through town. Someone suspected it might be transporting terrorists. The reaction was immediate and visceral. Traders and buyers fled. Goods were abandoned. People ran without coordination, and injuries followed. Some residents reportedly broke limbs in the stampede. Elderly individuals fell and required hospitalization. Many retreated indoors, remaining inside overheated rooms for hours. Goods abandoned in the market were stolen.

But no attack occurred. The vehicle posed no danger. It was the panic itself that inflicted the harm. This happened in my hometown on a Wednesday, a bustling market day that serves as both an economic outlet and a space of interaction, exchange and communal vitality.

Such reactions are not irrational. They reflect what psychologists call learned responses in environments where credible violence repeatedly erupts nearby.

In adjacent Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State, residents recount continual episodes of extreme brutality in the hands of bloodthirsty terrorists, the recent mass slaughters in Woro and Nuku that captured the national and international attention being the latest.

Residents across Borgu consistently describe a sense of exposure and disabling siege. In the Niger State sector, communities report repeated attacks on the same settlements. In Konkoso, for example, locals say after militants killed large numbers of villagers, the assailants returned on February 17 to burn the remaining homes. Whether every detail withstands subsequent verification, the pattern of repeated raids across the region is corroborated by multiple independent reports of killings and abductions.

Governmental reaction shapes how citizens interpret both tragedy and state legitimacy. In Kwara State, the governor’s visit to sites of violence in Kaiama was widely noted by affected residents. Such gestures cannot reverse fatalities, but they acknowledge suffering and communicate presence. Insecurity is not only a military problem. It is also a political and psychological one.

In contrast, many inhabitants of Niger State’s Borgu communities express dissatisfaction with the state government’s posture following major incidents. Residents recount episodes in which official statements emphasized blame.

After the Papiri abductions, villagers say responsibility was publicly shifted toward school authorities without a gubernatorial visit to the affected location. Following reports that more than 70 people were killed in Kasuwan Daji, locals similarly describe narratives of fault attribution unaccompanied by direct engagement with survivors. These perceptions may not capture every administrative constraint, but they significantly influence public trust.

The more pressing concern, however, lies at the federal level. The cumulative death toll across Borno, Kebbi, Niger and Kwara States in just these few cited incidents exceeds any threshold that should trigger unmistakable national urgency.

Eight soldiers killed in Borno. Thirty-three civilians killed in Kebbi. Thirty-two civilians killed across Tungan Makeri, Konkoso and Pissa. Thirty or more killed in Kasuwan Daji market, with local claims of even higher figures, including over 70 fatalities. Locally reported deaths approaching 300 in Woro and Nuku. These are not sporadic disturbances. They are large-scale lethal events distributed across multiple states.

Yet the federal government’s public posture has lacked the intensity typically associated with crises of this magnitude. There has been no sustained national address centered on these specific killings. No widely visible mobilization signaling exceptional concern for Borgu’s repeated devastation. No consistent federal narrative that conveys to affected populations that their losses command the same urgency as tragedies elsewhere.

I agree that security challenges in Nigeria are undeniably complex. Intelligence failures, logistical limits and political coordination problems complicate rapid response. None of these constraints, however, justify the normalization of mass fatalities or the attenuation of federal visibility. When killings of dozens or hundreds struggle to command durable national attention, citizens inevitably question whether their suffering is fully recognized within the national hierarchy of concern.

Persistent violence also produces cumulative secondary effects. Economic activity contracts. Mobility declines. Educational continuity suffers. Residents alter movement patterns, avoid gatherings and recalibrate routine decisions around perception of threat. Fear becomes a structural condition rather than an irregular reaction.

Operation Savannah Shield, recently launched to address insecurity across parts of the north, offers an opportunity for recalibration. Its effectiveness will depend not only on tactical operations but on geographic scope. Borgu’s border communities, repeatedly affected by lethal raids and abductions, require explicit incorporation into security planning. Fragmented jurisdiction has long benefited attackers. Coordinated federal presence could begin reversing that asymmetry.

The number of people who have died unjustly in the hands of nihilistic terrorists this week alone is already staggering. A repetition of this number would signal deeper systemic failure. Preventing that outcome requires more than periodic, contingent deployments. It demands sustained federal attention, interstate coordination and a public posture that communicates unmistakable commitment to civilian safety.

It is worth recalling that even at the height of insecurity during President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, the scale and frequency of mass killings did not approach what many communities now experience, yet Bola Tinubu, then an opposition figure, publicly urged Jonathan to resign.

Invoking resignation today, however, feels like an exercise in futility because no Nigerian elected official has ever relinquished office solely on account of failure, incompetence or public dissatisfaction. Rather than dissipate intellectual energy on an outcome with no historical precedent, a more pragmatic appeal is necessary.

The president should address the nation directly, acknowledge the severity of the crisis, and demonstrate a visibly intensified commitment to protecting lives. If the state proves unable or unwilling to guarantee basic security across vulnerable regions, then a serious national conversation must also consider whether citizens should be legally empowered to defend themselves, including through responsible firearm ownership, instead of remaining defenseless sitting ducks in the face of unremitting terrorist and bandit violence.