Point One

She was tapped for the presidential race exactly 107 days before election day. Within the available time, she is to alchemise a party in disarray into a united and potent force, clinch the nomination that momentarily seemed a toss, redirect the party’s mood from despondent anticipation of defeat to resurgent pursuit of victory, upend a long headstart of victory run by Republican nominee Donald Trump, plus overawe historical prejudices about gender and race. That was the task slate thrust on United States Vice President Kamala Harris over the past week; and so far, she’s maximised the moment. She transformed into the presumptive Democratic nominee without having run a primary, and has rattled the very core of Trump’s candidacy. Harris entered the race after 81-year-old President Joe Biden bowed to pressure and dropped his bid for re-election. No sitting American president reportedly ever dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle. Biden was Democrats’ presumptive nominee for th...

Short of a miraculous upset, Donald Trump is on a rollercoaster back into power as President of the United States (POTUS). Not only has he been formally coronated flagbearer in the November elections by Republicans, he holds the Grand Old Party (GOP) in iron subjection and leverages opportunities to bestride national attention. His obstacle, the Democrats as arrow-headed by incumbent President Joe Biden’s campaign, are  in utter disarray and profoundly backfooted. Trump and his supporters already smell victory for his Make America Great Again (MAGA) comeback and are exulting in exuberant anticipation. The four-day Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin last week was the Don’s party without any rain. The event was dogmatically Trumpist and there wasn’t any speaker, theme or attendee that didn’t reflect what he wanted. His escape a few days earlier from an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, enhanced his indomitable aura and solidified his dominance of the ...

 When he swept to power in an against-the-odds election some two years ago, Kenyan President William Ruto touted himself as “hustler-in-chief.” It was a tag he adopted in identification with the struggling masses of his country and in deliberate distinction, apparently, from the privileged minority.  It would seem Kenyan masses can’t recognise him as what he purported and are up in arms. Ruto was vice-president for 10 years under ex-President Uhuru Kenyatta and should have been the establishment candidate in the August 2022 poll. He, however, claimed he was sidelined from decision-making in the Kenyatta era and ran as an outsider against the power of incumbency that was pitched in favour of veteran contender Raila Odinga. He ran on the platform of a nascent party against Odinga’s platform that had rallied Kenyatta’s ruling party, among others, into a coalition. Ruto framed the contest as between “hustlers” – poor and hard-working Kenyans (his party’s symbol was a wheelbarrow) ...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to his native Australia last week a free man, 12 years after he last breathed the air of freedom. He had spent the past five years in a London maximum security prison, and for seven years before that he was holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in the English capital trying to avoid arrest. Now he is free after fighting a protracted battle against extradition to the United States for trial. His freedom followed a plea bargain with the American government by which he pleaded guilty to one count felony charge of conspiracy to violate the country’s Espionage Act, which under its laws interprets to “receiving and obtaining” secret documents and “willfully communicating” such “to persons not entitled to receive them” (in Assange’s specific case, the public). US prosecutors in turn sought his sentencing to 62 months in jail, but he was not to serve the term post-verdict because it equated to the time he had been held in London’s Belmarsh prison while fi...

It’s a never ending show. Authorities of the Nigeria Police are again at loggerheads with the Police Service Commission (PSC) over 10,000 new recruits for the force. The police accused the service commission of adulterating the published list of successful candidates with unqualified and untested persons, while the commission charged back that the police leadership had wanted to smuggle hundreds of unqualified candidates onto the list but was blocked, hence the bitterness with what got published. The sister organisations are back to an old turf battle that had pitched them in a four-year-long tussle through trial and appellate courts. The PSC on 4th June published a list of what it claimed were the 10,000 successful applicants for constable and specialist cadre jobs in the 2022/23 recruitment for the police. But police leadership slammed the list as fraudulent and demanded a review over alleged sharp practices that it claimed tainted what was published. Force spokesperson Muyiwa Adejob...

Horse-trading got underway over the past week in South Africa as ruling African National Congress (ANC) – Africa’s oldest liberation movement-turned political party – reached out for possible alliances to enable it to form a new government. The party that was once led by legendary Nelson Mandela lost its electoral dominance for the first time in the rainbow country’s post-apartheid history, forcing it into an uncharted territory where it must seek coalition partners to be able to govern. The outcome of the May 29th parliamentary elections in South Africa upended ANC’s 30-year majority rule. It was its worst showing since the end of apartheid. The party came off with 40.18 percent of the votes to win 159 spots in the 400-seat national assembly, down from 230 seats it controlled in the previous assembly. Other big three winners are the main opposition party, Democratic Alliance (DA),  which got 21.81 percent of the votes; uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), 14.58 percent; and Economic Free...

All of a sudden, state governments are scampering to conduct elections into their respective local government system that has been under unelected caretakers for aeons (pardon the hyperbole). Few examples should serve:  On Saturday, 8th June, Yobe State will be staging elections into its 17 council areas. The state rates relatively high in democratisation of the local government system, having held a previous election in 2021 in which the All Progressives Congress (APC), which controls Yobe, won all chairmanship and councillorship seats in the state’s 17 council areas. Later this year, on 21st September, Imo and Kwara states will be conducting polls into their own councils. The last local government election in Imo State was conducted in 2018 by the administration of former Governor Rochas Okorocha, with incumbent Governor Hope Uzodimma having been running the state’s 27 councils with interim caretaker committees since he took office in January 2020. In Kwara State, Governor AbdulR...