Point One

Ghanaians head to the poll today, 7th December, 2020 to elect their president for the next four years in a race widely billed as a “battle of two giants.” Incumbent President Nana Addo Akufo-Addo of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) is facing-off with former president, John Dramani Mahama, who is the torchbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).  Although there are 12 candidates vying for the presidency, including three women, and for the first time a woman standing for vice president on the ticket of a major party, the contest is effectively between Akufo-Addo and Mahama. It is also the third consecutive election where the two politicians are squaring up for the highest office – with both having previously won apiece: Akufo-Addo in 2016 and Mahama in 2012. Whereas it is the third match-up by the ‘big two,’ however, it is the first time in the electoral history of the West African neighbour of Nigeria that voters are having to choose between a sitting president and a fo...

Indications emerged last week that the official universe of the United States had finally come to terms with the win by former Vice President Joe Biden in the 3rd November presidential election in that country and the inevitability of his taking over power on 20th January, 2021 from President Donald Trump.  Since Biden won the election three weeks earlier, Trump had – unlike what was known of American electoral culture – refused to concede the poll and allow formal transition to Biden White House. He plied conspiracy theories that the election was fraught with fraud and pursued multiple lawsuits across U.S. states to overturn results announced in favour of Biden. As at late last week, he had lost more than three dozens of those suits while many key states had certified Biden’s victory, even after some obliged vote recounts. In effect, the president-elect held comfortably to his 306 electoral votes over Trump’s 232 (270 are needed to win the presidency) and an edge of more than 6mil...

After some respite apparently occasioned by restive temper in the citizenry, we are back in Nigeria on the stretch racks of periodic hikes in the cost of petrol that government believes citizens will sooner than later come to terms with. But there are indications the idea isn’t flying that easily. All is thankfully calm for now, but another blowout may well be brewing. Recent experience teaches that the trigger could come so gratuitously and improbably that it might not even seem connected with the issue of fuel price and concomitant economic hardships. Seething exasperation over hardships disposes citizens to any stray trigger, just the way it takes only a slight pinch to unleash hot air from an inflated balloon. Government, penultimate week, announced a new price regime by which the ex-depot price of petrol was raised to N155.17 – thereby nudging marketers to sell at between N165 and N173 per litre to consumers. The move followed from the policy since March 2020 to deregulate the dow...

Ever since they stepped into the frame of the #EndSars protests, hoodlums defaced the protests and made the entire venture deeply galling – not just for government, but also law-abiding Nigerians. From a largely civil composure of peaceful protests by youths to end police brutality, hoodlums substituted an orgy of violence that nearly tipped the country over into a state of anarchy. They forced peaceful protesters onto the sidelines and headed up a reign of lawlessness that incurred security crackdown, which more adversely affected civil protesters than the thugs as in the controversial 20th October Lekki tollgate shootings in Lagos widely regarded as a watershed in the protests. Even after the crackdown, hoodlums got fiercer, raiding and wantonly setting ablaze public and private assets. Not the least affected were police offices where criminals looted ammunitions and lynched police personnel in most gory patterns. A fest of looting soon kicked in – arrowheaded by hoodlums but as well...

You wouldn’t recognise the cause at the last count from where it began. The agitation kicked-started three weeks back as an iconic movement of Nigerian youths protesting police brutality against citizens and seeking the disbandment of the notoriously cruel Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). By the time it ran aground, it had morphed into wantonly vengeful violence and racy criminality as arsonists ran riot, torching private and public assets they had marked out. In a number of cases, hoodlums lynched security personnel perceived as adversaries in a manner reminiscent of arbitrary immolations of alleged witches during the protestant renaissance of the Middle Ages. It was youthful venom unleashed as never seen before in this country’s history. But the upheaval also bore clear markings of a class revolt – with warehouses of government, public utilities and treasure stores of private personages looted and vandalised by impoverished masses who seemed to be exacting a pound of flesh from the...

It was a highly controversial unit of the Nigerian Police that got defunct in circumstances not too different from those in which it sprouted: the squad came into being in a crisis and was dismantled in a crisis. By the time Police Inspector-General Mohammed Adamu felt sufficiently compelled to hack down the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) on 11th October, there was already palpable yearning in the Force for exorcism of its memory from the entire system. This was because no police personnel or facility having the flimsiest connection with the opprobrious SARS was safe from the rage of protesters. The squad’s offices which the Inspector-General ordered taken over by regular police became sitting ducks for public attacks, such that there were reports of new occupants falling collateral victim of public fury intended for SARS. You could guess the fate of any ex-personnel of the controversial squad who dared flaunt that identity. Actually, it became hazardous just to be a personnel of th...

Buffalo soldiers historically were all-Black personnel of the United States Army who served on that country’s Western frontier following the American civil war, and were carved into cavalry and infantry regiments by the 1866 Army Organization Act. Established by Congress as the first peacetime all-black squads in the regular U.S. Army, their functions involved settling railroad disputes, building telegraph lines, repairing and building garrisons (Americans call these ‘forts’), helping the settler population to colonise lands violently taken from native Indians and protecting the colonisers from the displaced natives seeking to reclaim their homeland. Although they mainly served the interest of their Caucasian masters, legendary Reggae icon, the late Bob Marley, in his famous song titled ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ linked the exploits of these servicemen to survival fighting and recast them as symbolising of black resistance. Incidentally, it was Marley as well who taught the wisdom of measured...