Public Affairs Analyst

  “Politicians campaign in poetry, but they govern in prose.”- Mario Matthew Cuomo, American lawyer and politician who served as the 52nd governor of New York. Last week, I was in five out of the six South-West states (except Lagos) on what I tagged political evangelism. As a consultant on Democracy and Good Governance, I sometimes get opportunities to build the capacity of actors and stakeholders in the sector ranging from political party chieftains, staff of election management bodies viz. the Independent National Electoral Commission and State Independent Electoral Commissions, Civil Society Organisations, media practitioners, security agents, lawmakers at both federal and state levels as well as the electorate.   I was on one of such assignments last week when the Nigeria Women Trust Fund organised training for selected campaign promises trackers in Ekiti and Osun states.   What informed the choice of the two states was the fact that they just had new governors in ...

  It comes with the season but I had thought things will be different now after 23 years of having successive elections in this Fourth Republic, more so, for the first time since the establishment of the National Peace Committee in 2015, the wise men deemed it fit to have a peace accord signed before the commencement of the campaigns rather than at the eve of the elections when the bad deeds must have been done. So on September 29, 2022, barely three weeks ago, at a well-attended event in Abuja, all presidential candidates and their party chairmen signed Peace Pact wherein they promised to have issue-based campaign and eschew violence. Unfortunately, recent development in Nigeria’s polity is very disconcerting. As against the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022, which says there shall be no use of intemperate and abusive language during the campaigns, we have all sorts of name-calling such as a political party being described as a “party of termites” and saying that members of a...

  It is heartrending and most unfortunate that many states in Nigeria are at present ravaged by floods. Recently, the Director General, National Emergency Management Agency, Mr Mustapha Ahmed, said the agency had identified 233 local government areas in 32 states and the Federal Capital Territory that would experience flooding in 2022. He spoke at a national consultative workshop on 2022 Flood Preparedness, Mitigation and Response organised by the agency in Abuja. This followed the 2022 Seasonal Climate Prediction released by Nigerian Meteorological Agency and the Annual Flood Outlook released by Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency. In early September, NEMA DG revealed that flash floods across Nigeria had affected about 508,000 people, killing about 372, injuring 277 and destroying 37,633 houses aside from farmlands and livestock lost, within the last eight months. Given what has happened in the last two weeks, the casualty figures and number of internally displaced persons have...

  Introduction Today, October 12, 2022 marks the 32 nd anniversary of my inadvertent voyage into media advocacy and also a decade of my being a columnist with the highly influential The PUNCH newspaper. Not only that, it’s the 30 th anniversary of my advocacy via electronic media. Thus, it’s triple celebrations! As I said severally, Prof. OBC Nwolise formerly of the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan nudged me into media advocacy way back in 1988. Then, I was a student of Extra Mural Studies organised by the Adult Education Department of the premier university. It however took me two years to summon courage to start writing for newspapers. My first “Letter to the Editor” titled “Complete Iwopin Paper Mill” was a mere one paragraph reproduced below: Complete Iwopin Paper Mill Daily Sketch, Friday, 12 October, 1990. (Page 2) When I got to know that the Iwopin Paper Mill had gulped about N300 million naira and yet remained in its embryonic stage, producing...

  Last Saturday, October 1, Nigeria, the most populous black nation in the world, the biggest economy in Africa and the purported giant in the continent celebrated her 62nd independence anniversary with pomp and pageantry. There were religious services in worship centres, presidential independence day broadcast as well as commemorative ceremonial events at Eagle’s Square in Abuja. There were also town hall meetings, media interviews and analysis, newspaper editorials and sundry activities to assess how we have fared thus far. I was part of many of these events, especially those organised by the media and civil society organisations. I granted several media interviews and was part of a team of analysts on Trust TV and Nigeria Television Authority. I was also one of the speakers at the Lux Terra Leadership Foundation town hall meeting held last Monday in Abuja. Discussing Nigeria on a daily basis across several media channels evokes mixed feelings in me. Sometimes, I join millions ...