Point One

 It was a brutal, though benignly couched rite of passage at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in the United States, last week. President Joe Biden was cheered off into history by an adulatory crowd at an event where he could well have delivered an oration at his own funeral. He had strongly pushed to stay on, and had the imprimatur of the party’s primary elections to lead Democrats into battle against former President Donald Trump of the Republican Party in the forthcoming national polls in that country. But his hands were forced by his party to pull his re-election bid, and he was at the convention in Chicago formally passing the torch to Vice-President Kamala Harris. Politics is glamourous, but it can also be cruel.  Until he folded his campaign about a month earlier, 81-year-old Biden was his party’s presumptive nominee and had looked forward to delivering the keynote on the final night of the 2024 convention after he would have formally accepted the presidential no...

Security operatives penultimate Wednesday, i.e. 7th August, raided Pascal Bafyau Labour House where the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has its national headquarters and secretariat in Abuja. The 10-storey building in the vicinity of the Federal Ministry of Finance, in the federal capital’s Central Business District, houses NLC’s offices on its three topmost floors with tenants occupying other spaces. It was the NLC itself that broke the news of the raid. In a late night statement on the said day, the congress made known that heavily armed security agents at about 8:30p.m. stormed its offices in a raid it suspected linked to its sympathetic disposition towards then roiling hardship protests that began across the country on 1st August. NLC spokesman, Benson Upah, said in the statement that the security squad – initially assumed to also involve Department of State Services (DSS) agents – “swooped on the 10th floor of the NLC (building) and arrested the security operative on duty and then c...

Britain was in recent weeks convulsed by violence resulting from the behaviour of protesters waging a xenophobic cause. The riots were so unhinged that the Nigerian government had to issue a travel advisory to Nigerian citizens going to, or resident in the United Kingdom – a stinging role swap with a country that has been in the habit of periodically issuing travel alerts to her own citizens about Nigeria. Over the past couple of weeks, crowds spouting anti-immigrant slogans stood up to law enforcement personnel in one of the UK’s worst violence in more than a decade, leading  to arrest of hundreds of rioters who hurled bricks and other projectiles at the police, looted shops and attacked hotels housing asylum-seekers. The unrest was allegedly instigated by far-right agitators who used the social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls aged between six and nine years penultimate Monday at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, a coastal ...

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...