BOLA Ahmed Tinubu is said to be a democrat. He flaunts his self-exile as the certificate for that sacrifice and the sacrifices of those who stayed home and faced General Sani Abacha’s bullets do not matter.

Many died. Others were thrown into irrecoverable circumstances. There is no memory in their names.

Tinubu does not know these things. Rather, he behaves as if he was at the centre of the democracy(?) we appear to have. Hundreds of thousands of very ordinary Nigerians routinely seized Nigeria, asking Abacha to leave. Return to civil rule, not necessarily democracy, was won with their lives

Did Tinubu spend the discomfort of exile admiring Abacha? Were there hints that he picked from the five Abacha-created political parties that were falling over each other to adopt Abacha? We watched in amazement at Abacha’s version of democracy that we never expected in Nigeria.

Abacha was military. Abacha hardly spoke to us unless to issue another order. Abacha kept the same type of distance that Tinubu maintains on issues that affect our people. Abacha too was democratic if not a democrat. An election was on the way in which he would have been the only candidate.

Where Abacha was greedy with power, he still wanted us to beg him enough so that the will of Nigerians would be expressed through his election. We started begging him, just anything to please Abacha.

The million marches started. Parts of Nigeria started begging him to save the country. Millions of prescient Nigerians did not know Abacha was a nationalist, a lover of Nigeria.

Abacha was spartan. He saved billions of Dollars for Nigeria. Did he know that those after him would not be as prudent? Nigeria gets “returns” of the money Abacha saved abroad for Nigeria. He has gone for 27 years.

Tinubu is different. He is not greedy, but strategic. Nigerians one thought had balls to tell him democracy was not a one-party state are on long queues trying to reach him with the same message – only Tinubu until 2031.

He has not even completed two years of his first tenure and he has been nominated to run for a second term as the only candidate of his party, and other parties that have pledged their unalloyed loyalty to him.

It is the type of loyalty one of my colleagues calls “blind loyalty”. Any suggestion of clarity on issues is deemed opposition. Blind loyalists do not wear glasses. They will not permit themselves to see anything, lest they say something wrong.

There is a problem, though. Tinubu has claimed there was nothing wrong with one-party state. He wants more people to join his APC where newest joiners are ahead of those who have “suffered” for the party.

He wants us to be patient because his arrival has put Nigeria on the path of steady growth and progress.

What has changed? We are urged to suffer today for a better tomorrow? Whose tomorrow? Abacha was a man of few words. He acted.

Tinubu has transited from President to a god whose worshippers place above the law as they in obeisance crave for his attention for one more minute as politicians of note. They anticipate his wishes and go beyond what he wants.

We are the ones turning Tinubu to a different democrat. He visits a State to “commission” projects, the Governor joins the President’s party, hands his own party over to the President.

The ill-fitting attires they wear sometimes flash on the screens as if it is a clown’s day. It cannot be. We are dealing with lives, many of who have done nothing wrong to put them on the front line of today’s crushing poverty.

Hope is still expressed in tiny voices that stake their right to be seen and heard in the fleeting din to “off the mikes” unless for those who say that one-party state is a democracy.

We hail Nigeria. It is still our own dear native land where the various tongues and tribes with their differences will stand in brotherhood.

Nigeria has too many tongues for one language to utter them.

Finally…

FOR the second time in about three years, the picture of a baby strapped to the dead mother’s back has made a round of the social media. In each case, the baby was alive, unaware of the mother’s death. In the recent case, the baby was still sucking the mother. Both heinous acts were blamed on “foreign bandits”, who if we understand the Federal Government, cannot be attacked or removed from Nigeria because “they are not Nigerians”. The equipment we keep buying to fight insecurity cannot be deployed against “foreign bandits”. How do we find pleasure in explaining the patterned death of Nigerians with trite platitudes? The attitudes are more tormenting than the vacant stare of the babies which reminds the so-minded that care has taken a long vacation. Nothing stops the hollow rites of swearing to adhere to the demands of the Constitution. Section 14(2) (b) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 declares that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Could what is going on be the appropriate interpretation of the Section?

JAMB Registrar, Professor Ishaq Olanrewaju Oloyede and his supporters believe that whatever went wrong with the 2025 UTME was about them and they are in the best position to find the answers. What happened to the 2025 may not be isolated. The “glitch” explanation does not say anything – the cause, whether it was targeted at some candidates, as some claim, if it can happen again, and what and who are responsible. Further investigations are required by bodies other than JAMB and those who work for it, including those who stopped the teary Professor Oloyede from resigning. The entire test should be redone for all candidates.

EXCLUSION of the South East in major projects used to be muted but the Tinubu administration confirms it openly. The intentionality of the decisions also comes with a finality that cannot be lost on anyone. We have not done with the exclusion of the zone from a pre-census committee, the only zone so treated when Tinubu and Company also made no provision for the Anambra-Imo River Basin Development Authority. Senator Kenneth Eze, APC-Ebonyi, in a motion lamented the exclusion of the Anambra/Imo River Basin from the 2025 budgetary provision for irrigation. Senate Leader, Michael Opeyemi Bamidele, popularly called MOB, quickly said the motion would be withdrawn to enable the Senate leadership discuss the matter with the Minister of Water Resources. Nothing was wrong with the exclusion of South East from a N380 billion irrigation budget that was spread across the country. The motion must have rankled. MOB. How dare Senate Eze? MOB is chiefly credited with the bill that changed the national anthem from the 1978 one to the 1960 anthem.

IT took a closed-door session to calm nerves on Tuesday when Senate President Obong Godswill Akpabio tried to stop Senator Henry Seriake Dickson from making a contribution on Nigeria’s growing insecurity. “Mr. President, with due respect, you are not the President of Nigeria. This is the Senate, and we all have equal voices here. We are elected to represent our people, and you cannot continue to act in a way that stifles this legislative body,” Dickson said. Akpabio responded, “I have no intention of overriding anyone’s opinion. My duty is to maintain order and ensure decorum in this chamber.” What happened in the closed session was only for the Distinguished.

Isiguzo is a major commentator on minor issues.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Oseloka H. Obaze

Most Nigerians contend that Nigeria is not working as it ought to. There are several reasons for this, aside from the core governance challenges. Nigeria is dysfunctional because Nigerian leaders continue to overlook soft power and intangible assets that make nations function optimally.  Furthermore, Nigerian leaders no longer prioritize national interest demands and needs. This may be because our leaders think national interest pertains only to foreign policy. If so, such thinking is counterintuitive. 

Putting Nigeria’s governance challenges in perspective requires acknowledging some political and systemic realities.  As John F. Kennedy postulated, “life of freedom is not easy and democracy is not perfect.”  Grappling with the imperfections of democracy requires consensus building, but above all, deferring to common cause and national interest priorities.  Perhaps, Nigeria is dysfunctional because her leaders don’t fit well into the holistic framework of a truly democratic state.  This assertion may be arguable, since our democratic bona-fides are still tainted by military anti-politics.  

There may yet be other rationalizations. According to Aristotle, “democracy is when the indigent and not men of properties are the rulers.”  The opposite is the case in Nigeria.  The ‘indigent’ in Nigeria are not rulers; rather they are stridently cutting corners in order to become ‘men of properties’ and join the ruling ranks. Meanwhile, those within the power-wielding circuit are most unwilling to cede any leadership space.

Responsible statecraft demands prioritization of national interest needs. National interests consist of a country’s domestic drivers and actions that extrapolate national goals and priorities into the foreign realm. National interests are doctrinal and stand on four vital pillars: security, economic, social wellbeing and rule of law.  The ability to outsource or gain access to vital resources that drive the economy is also a key component. One factor that underpins the overall national interest mosaic is national stability.  Realizing targeted national interest priorities also undergird our independence and sovereignty. 

As experts in progressive governance argue, “stability and cohesion do not require every individual to think alike, have the same interests, same religion or same traditions….stability and cohesion do, however, require understanding and support of certain fundamental values expressed in legislation.” More broadly, advancing national interest in a multi-ethnic and secular state like Nigeria requires protecting values of democracy; values anchored on the rule of law. 

National interest recedes when government, her policies and projects are ethnified. That situation is counterproductive in all ramifications. Sadly, that’s our status quo. This largely explains why we can’t tackle banditry, terrorism and sectarian conflicts.  A question that may never have been publicly asked is: Which Nigerian security agency is in the lead on counter-terrorism?  Any answer will be pure conjecture. So we can understand why we continue to perform poorly in tackling domestic terrorism and banditry.  By civilizing the military to undertake purely civilian police duties, we also undermined national interest. 

These days, national interest is hardly a phrase one hears from Nigerian leaders.  It is virtually absent in the consideration of our domestic and foreign policies.  Regrettably, national interest is not an abstract. If it’s continually overlooked, it’s because Nigerian leaders have instinctively changed the political premises and political debate that ought to guide robust good governance.  They have also changed the requisite narratives and attendant heady governance questions.

Just as “common good” has been redacted from Nigeria’s political lexicon, advocacy for the “common man” has equally been redacted from our national discourse. This explains why Senator Godswill Akpabio’s 2023 public appeal to “let the poor breathe” would resonate with Nigerians, notwithstanding its facetiousness.

Politics is about plurality. Nigeria’s rich diversity speaks to her plurality. But how do we coexist? How can we have frank and honest conversation without resorting to a play on presumed ignorance?   How do we obviate the mindset suggesting that the national population is gullible and ignorant? How do we get along, trust and feel secure with each other? How does the interest of one ethnicity not supplant or threaten the rights of others? How do we retrace our strides away from prevalent cancel culture, nepotism and bigotry? How do we circumscribe the default to political idiocy? These are not academic or rhetorical questions. They are critical questions about core issues that drive wedges into our diversity, the coalescing of divergent interests and compel those in different political and ethnic silos from rallying to a common cause for the sake of national interest.

How political positions, projects and institutions are allocated and funded, determine if they promote and prioritize national interest, harmony and unity.  Needs and political means are quite often fungible.  Where they are perceptibly unlinked, there is dissonance, discord and a sense of marginalization. Persons or groups, who feel marginalized or disenfranchised, hardly ever speak to national interests. Neither do those who perceive political gains, the accruing perks and perquisites of office or the dividends of democracy, as their birthrights or yields of their zero sum game, ever speak up.

Those in power and those out of power, is a constant refrain in Nigerian politics.  That disposition gives rise to conflicting interests. It also erodes the efficacy of the political opposition. None of these augurs well for the propagation and advancement of national interest.  If we consider or accept national interest as “the signpost that drives political realism to finds its way through the landscape on international politics,” it means that arriving at that critical juncture, must be premised on a simple cliché: “charity begins at home.”  There must be synergy between national development and the prioritization of national interest concerns. 

Domestic stability, peace and security, equity and fairness are all pertinent variables.  What this calls for, are governance modalities that are introspective as well as retrospective.  Fundamentally, in a stable society, advancing national interests includes “affirming and promoting citizen’s values, belief and culture,” while those in power or government, ensure personal safety of the citizens. A case in point.  If it was in Nigeria’s national interest to remove the oil subsidy; it meant that the accruing benefits of that policy should have been beneficial to all Nigerians. That was not the case. 

Despite extant laws, Nigeria’s looted funds and wealth are domiciled in foreign bank accounts.  Succeeding administrations made it seem like such funds were stolen only during the Abacha regime. That is not true. Whereas it is in the national interest to recovers such looted funds, most of the recovered funds are again systematically looted due to the opacity in handling recovered funds. It would amount to prioritizing national interest by jailing some of those who looted the fund, as deterrence. This has not happened. It’s also in the national interest to account transparently for recovered funds. That too, has not happened. 

Indeed, it’s ironical, that in a country where Prof. Tam David-West, a former Petroluem Minister went to jail for accepting gratification amounting a wristwatch and a cup of tea; many Nigerians who have well-publicized  grand larceny cases to answer for, have succeeded in having their prosecution files buried in the tomb of officialdom and  “your sins are forgiven” dogma. Most walk about freely. 

Whereas the principles of pursuing national interest are overarching, the impetus required to make them concrete have become perceptibly malleable.  Hence, not prioritizing national interest today translates to our mothballed and largely unutilized Ajaokuta Steel Mill; our four moribund national refineries, and our stealthy national carrier- Air Nigeria. It was the dearth of proactive national interest consideration that killed off the sovereign wealth fund, which held out hope of infinite positive possibilities for Nigeria.  

The resultant effects of our non-prioritization of our national interest include our inability to generate up to 10,000 megawatts of electricity for a population of over 220 million, despite spending trillions on naira on energy. Even as a top oil producing country, we continue to import refined petroleum because of our ill-defined priorities. Recently, Nigerians became aware via BudgiT of the jaw-breaking revelation that components of the 2025 national budget pertaining to the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation was padded up from proposed N24 billion to N291 billion. That of Ministry of Agriculture, bloated from N242 billion to a whopping N1.7 trillion. Overall, the FY 2025 Budget was illegally padded with over N7 trillion.  In a country, where national development benchmarks are clearly defined in terms of the national interest, such nefarious acts would be utterly impossible. 

Because we don’t prioritize our national interest, we allowed foreign non-state actors to gain ascendancy in the northern parts of the country; rather than close our borders to keep them out even if we had to suspend the extant ECOWAS protocol temporarily. In that same vein, we allowed small and light weapons from collapsed Libya to flood our country. We are still paying for that singular mistake.  Furthermore, FDIs (foreign direct investments) become remote when national interests are ill-defined. 

Just as we have not prioritized hard power capital projects that underpin growth and national development, we have also not prioritized soft power policies like STEM education, in the national interest.  It was national interest considerations that led to devising the TETfund to fund qualitative tertiary education.  Whereas the Fund is structured to garner sufficient resources annually to keep all public and private tertiary institutions fully-funded, its resources are presently being frittered away for pork barrel contracts and projects unrelated to higher education. 

There is a clear linkage between our abandoning our erstwhile models of national development plan during the military era in favour of political campaign-driven visions and modalities.  That decision has had vast implications for the pursuit of our national interest. Our Democracy is not perfect.  It will not achieve near perfection until we resolve to have within the governing circles, those who grasp the inextricable links between national interest, good governance and development and therefore, prioritize national interest concerns. Until then, Nigeria will continue to wallow in the morass of political idiocy and Malgovernance. 

——

Obaze is MD/CEO, Selonnes Consult – a policy, governance and management consulting firm in Awka.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Marte, the headquarters of the eponymous Local Government Area (LGA) on the western floodplains of the Lake Chad in Borno State, north-east Nigeria, has been a site of lingering contest between Nigerian troops on the one hand and Islamist insurgents of Boko Haram on the other for over one decade. At 3,154 km^2, Marte LGA is just a little under the size of all of Lagos State.

For a while between 2014 and 2015, Boko Haram reportedly bivouacked in Marte on its way to its more permanent operational headquarters in the Sambissa Forest. For much of 2015, control of the town exchanged hands in succession between the Nigerian Army and Boko Haram. Around May 2015, Boko Haram reportedly took back the city from the Nigerian troops who had held it for three months from February of the same year.

For the most part, Nigeria has controlled Marte thereafter with the exception of a brief duration in 2021, when the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) temporarily visited havoc upon a military base in Marte.

All that appears to have changed recently. Around Monday, 12 May 2025, Islamist insurgents reportedly attacked the Forward Operating Base of the 153rd Task Force Battalion in Marte, resulting in considerable carnage. Sources familiar with the early morning attack reported that “over 10 soldiers were killed and hundreds of personnel deserted. The (terrorists) burnt down armored tanks and made away with arms and ammunition.” The beleaguered governor of Borno State, Babagana Zulum, has been left appealing to his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure that Marte does not fall back into the hands of Boko Haram and its allies.

In the same week that they attacked Marte, the insurgents also attacked the 3rd Battalion base in Rann, in Kala Balge district, killing at least five soldiers and leaving at least four others reportedly injured. The intensity and scope of the attacks by Boko Haram in Borno State in the past six months led the state governor to raise an alarm last April, suggesting that the country was “losing ground” in the fight against Islamist terror.

National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, a retired Assistant Inspector-General of the Nigeria Police Force, who has run for and is credibly rumoured to retain ambitions for another tilt at the presidency, ostensibly failed to get the governor’s memorandum.

Addressing the National Summit, so-called, of the APC, the NSA claimed to have killed 13,543 Boko Haram elements in the first two years of the administration and recovered over 11,000 arms from them. He notably did not mention the haul of arms the insurgents have been busy harvesting from Nigerian military formations. Over the same period, he claimed, “124,408 Boko Haram fighters and their families” also surrendered.

It is unfortunate that the ruling party has chosen to make national security a party political matter. It is even more tragic that the wannabe political opposition have allowed them to get away with it. The result is a vacuum of leadership in the security sector filled and fed with an atrocious body count of Nigerian casualties whose death and suffering barely registers on the priorities of the people supposed to protect the country, its people and communities.

The central problem is a failure of strategy. To understand this, it is necessary to explain that the presidency is many jobs in one. A president is – among other things – party leader, chief marketer of the country, head of government, and Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces. Every one of these roles of the president can be delegated except the last. As Commander-In-Chief, the president sets security strategy.

For over 50 years, Nigeria’s national security strategy docked onto the neighbourhood of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There was good reason for that. The country’s northern boundaries feed into the southern rim of the Sahel. With Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to its north as founding members of ECOWAS, the country could count solidly on friendly neighbours as buffers against the historical brutalities of Sahelian violence.

This understanding was at the heart of the transformation of the ECOWAS from an economic integration arrangement envisioned at its foundation in 1975 into a collective security arrangement in 1981. For much of the period since then, this arrangement held together.

However, following the military coup in Niger Republic in July 2023, the country lost its marbles and decided to bite its nose in order to spite its sovereign face. On behalf of ECOWAS, President Tinubu committed the blunder of threatening to invade another member of the ECOWAS collective security arrangement. He alone knows what he was thinking.

The hubris of President Tinubu’s handling of the coup crisis in Nigeria is inexplicable. With a landmass of over 1.267 million km², Niger Republic constituted about 22% of the 5.8 million km²  of the landmass of ECOWAS. The idea of an invasion of the country in order to militarily restore the ousted administration of President Mohamed Bazoum was always worse than bluster; it was plainly unviable.

In invoking war against Niger on behalf of ECOWAS, President Tinubu managed in one stroke to violate the prohibition against the use of force in international law; create the impression that Nigeria’s Sahelian neighbours did not matter; and suggest that France was a more important factor to Nigeria’s neighbourhood strategy than its immediate neighbours.

That much should have been evident to the people who thought up the idea. But the damage was beyond a resort to fantastic bluster where hard-nosed rationality was needed. The costs have been prohibitive and rising; and the result has been devastating.

In September 2023, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger created their own collective security arrangement and orbited off into the realm of Russia’s mercenary diplomacy. Since then, the consequences for Nigeria have been stark. In the period since September 2023 and despite the fantasies of NSA Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s internal security situation has disintegrated into mayhem.

In the north-west states of Sokoto and Kebbi, a new terror group, Lakurawa, has taken root. South of Kebbi, in Kwara State, another new terror group, Mahmuda, runs murderously rampant. To the east of Kwara in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, vast swathes of territory and communities in Benue, Nasarawa, and Plateau states are being emptied in intense attacks credited to so-called “foreign herdsmen.”

The politicians are reluctant to acknowledge what is obvious and the soldiers have been trained not to say that their Commander-In-Chief has left them in an insecurity pickle. But that is exactly what President Tinubu has done with the way he has brought about the transformation of ECOWAS from an integrated security arrangement for the region into a rump of an association of Atlantic West African States (AAWAS).

The evidence is everywhere in the rising casualty count which NSA Nuhu Ribadu will not acknowledge. According to monitoring coalition, Nigeria Mourns, 4,416 people were killed in atrocities in Nigeria in 2023. In 2024, President Tinubu’s first full year in office, the number rose 21.2% to 5,353, including 308 security personnel. 88.5% of these killings occurred in Northern Nigeria. Another 5,171 were abducted.

Behind these numbers are people, families, communities, traumas that both Nuhu Ribadu and the ruling APC will not allow Nigerians to see, hear, acknowledge or mourn. They are the experiences of loss and indignity that the dissolute wannabes in the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) cannot bring themselves to ask the APC to account for or acknowledge.

On 28 May, the civic Coalition Nigeria Mourns invites all Nigerians wherever they may be to spare a thought for all these victims and their loved ones in a National Day of Mourning (NDoM) “to rage, resist, and demand action from the government” in memory of all who have been killed or violated. A more responsible government would not have waited for a group of un-armed, un-elected citizens to remind them.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]