Point One

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is no stranger to controversy. He exudes the vibes: sometimes frontally like an army of occupation exudes aggression, at other times latently like a decaying organism exudes putrid smell. Either way, you can’t miss the vibes or keep out of its stormy orbit. You get pulled in willy-nilly by the sheer bravado of the old man’s postulations. And he seems to relish all the fuss. With his characteristic imperial temerity, you can’t help recalling that his daughter and ex-Senator of the Federal Republic, Iyabo Obasanjo, once accused him openly of behaving like he is God and owner of Nigeria. ‘Baba Obasanjo,’ as he should be rightly addressed at 86 years of age, rides controversy like a storm. Sixteen years on after he left office as two-term president of the current political republic, besides a three-year stint in the late 70s as military head of state, Obasanjo carries himself as Lord of the Manor. He dictates rules of conduct for everybody based on his pe...

If you ever have to undergo surgery at a Nigerian hospital, you may need to play safe by undertaking inventory scan of your body organs before and after the surgery, just so to be sure the organs remain intact. That is the lesson to learn from the experience of the Kamal couple in Jos, Plateau State. The couple has been in the news over alleged harvesting of one of the kidneys of the wife, Kehinde Kamal, by a neighbourhood practitioner who the victim’s husband, Busari Kamal, recently dealt out to the police. The ‘doctor’ is Noah Kekere and the ‘hospital’ is Murna Clinic and Maternity located in Yanshanu community, Jos North council area. The police in Plateau State took Kekere into custody after Busari Kamal, a businessman, reported him to the Nasarawa Gwom police division, accusing him of having removed his wife’s right kidney during a surgery in 2018. The surgery Kekere conducted on Mrs. Kamal had nothing to do with her kidneys, but he allegedly invaded that region of her body anyway...

 Another African country fell under the jackboots last Wednesday with the ouster of President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon in a coup d’état. It was the eighth coup in West and Central Africa within three years and the second in just barely above a month, coming after the Niger Republic coup on 26th July. It also marked further rollback of the influence of France on the continent, the successive coups that have taken place being in its former colonies – and that includes Gabon. Ali Bongo, 64, was sacked on the heels of being declared winner of an election conducted penultimate Saturday by the Gabonese electoral board. He was said to have won with 64.27 percent of the vote over his main challenger, Albert Ondo Ossa, a university professor, said to have secured 30.77 percent votes. That election was, however, anything but credible or transparent, and the opposition argued it was downright fraudulent. Contrary to global best practice, international observers were not allowed,  forei...

Revenge is a dreaded forte of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He deals the hand coldly and assuredly. In the wake of the mutiny in his country last June, Russia watchers branded Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin a ‘dead man walking.’ Prigozhin had led his Wagner mercenary troops to rebel again Russian military command, seized a southern Russian city and threatened to overrun Moscow – coming within 250 kilometres of the capital before the mutiny was pulled at the instance of a hurried pact that wrung humiliating concessions out of Mr. Putin. The Russian leader survived the rebellion appearing demystified and weakened. The Putin mystique was dented, but pundits predicted it wasn’t the final word. The final word, as is seems, was Prigozhin’s mangled remains in a plane wreckage, unless fate wrought a chilling coincidence on the mercenary warlord.  Prigozhin, 62, was a longtime ally of the Russian strongman and Wagner, his 25,000-strong private army, has been a major fighting force for Ru...

Nigeria currently has a vicious war on her hands. Only that the war hugs the backlines of national attention unless something dastardly happens as it did last week when another set of gallant soldiers fell to the battle against terrorism. Some officers and men lost their lives in a Nigeria Air Force (NAF) helicopter crash in Shiroro council area of Niger State. The official narrative was that the helicopter crashed in bad weather while on casualty evacuation mission en route to Kaduna, but terrorists laid claim to shooting it down for assaying to attack their positions. Whichever is true, this country is ruing  her loss of high grade manpower to the mishap. The surveillance MI-171helicopter crashed near Chukuba village in Shiroro council area last Monday, according to a statement by the military. Air Force spokesman Edward Gabkwet, Air Commodore, said the aircraft departed Zungeru Primary School on its way to Kaduna, but was discovered to have crashed near Chukuba village. “Efforts...

For 19-year-old Mmesoma Ejikeme, the claim to being the top scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has turned out to be a crown of nails. She has been exposed by the examination body as a fraudster, or at the least duped by a syndicate of fraudsters. But even if duped, the board says, it has been with her complicity. Mmesona claimed she scored 362 marks in the examination whereas JAMB said its own record showed she scored 249 marks. Following the controversy, the board withdrew her score and slammed her with a three-year ban. But she mounted a daring front to impugn the board’s credibility. She postured like the biblical puny David taking on the huge Goliath. Only unlike David, she didn’t off with Goliath’s head. The examination body brought the controversy into the open early last week by accusing Mmesoma of manually inflating her scores to hoodwink the public into showering her with undeserved reward...

 In his 23-year hold on power, Russian President Vladimir Putin woke up to the most rattling test of his iron clad rule penultimate weekend. He faced a day-long mutiny by forces of Wagner Group, a mercenary army led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The mutiny not only progressed nearly unchallenged while it lasted, it was called off by Prigozhin on concessional terms extracted from Putin that were widely viewed as caging his dreaded sting. Much to the disappointment of his many foes, Putin survived in power. Only he did at the cost of coming across as demystified and vulnerable, rather than impregnable as was hitherto assumed. Effectively, the Putin mystique was dented, but it may be a long way yet from being ended. Paramilitary Wagner Group had been a major fighting force for Russia in her invasion of Ukraine that elicited worldwide condemnation and was met with robust alliance with Ukraine by the West to thwart the expansionist aggression. It may be tangential but nonetheless noteworthy tha...