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Vibes of January 6th

Today is January 6th, a significant day in the United States’ political calendar. It is the day when Vice President Kamala Harris, as president of the American senate, must swallow the bitter pill of overseeing a joint session of Congress that will officially certify the victory of President-elect Donald Trump at the election held on 5th November, last year. She would thereby be also certifying her own loss at the poll. Trump as Republican candidate trounced Democratic opponent Harris in the election, dashing her hope of becoming the country’s first female commander-in-chief and securing a return to the White House after he himself had suffered defeat in the 2020 election by outgoing President Joe Biden. Under U.S. law, Congress on the sixth of January following a presidential poll meets at 1 o’clock in the afternoon in a joint session where state electors, known as the electoral college, would present a slate of votes for certification by the national legislature. This procedure forma...
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Councils funds and uses

 Ebonyi State Governor Ogbonna Nwifuru recently set a peculiar benchmark for financial accountability in local government administration. He ordered chairmen of the state’s 13 councils to settle all outstanding salaries and pensions of their workers within 24 hours or hand in their resignation. There was no subsequent report of any council chairman obliging his resignation directive, or of salaries and pensions remaining outstanding. So, his bluff – if you call it that – worked. The Ebonyi governor was reported to have issued the ultimatum on Sunday, 22nd December, at a Christmas party organised for the elderly and widows by the state government in Abakaliki, the state capital. Addressing some 5,000 attendees at the party, he frowned on a situation whereby most local government areas had failed to pay staff salaries for November and December, saying the development was unacceptable. He described delayed payment of salaries and pensions to council workers in the state as worrisome, ...
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Underground economy

 It is official: ransom payment for kidnapped persons in Nigeria is big business. Some N2.23trillion was paid out as ransom money over 12 months between May 2023 and April 2024, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has revealed. The bureau, which is the nation’s official statistician, said there was an estimated 51.89million crime incidents recorded across Nigerian households in the period under review. In the Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey report recently published on its website, the NBS said the Northwest geopolitical zone had the highest incidence of crime at 14.4million cases reported, followed by the Northcentral zone with 8.8million incidents reported. Conversely, the notoriety of the Southeast zone for insurrectionist violence wasn’t as bad as it seemed, apparently, because the zone reported the least incidence of crime with 6.18million cases. The survey further showed that rural areas experienced more of crime attacks than urban areas, with 26.53million...
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al-Assad’s fall and fallouts

 He withstood a gruelling insurgency in his country for more than 13 years. But when rebel fighters moved to oust him early last week, it took less than two weeks for their final push that resulted in his fall. Bashar al-Assad was kicked out in Syria to end his 24-year-long hold on power. His ouster ended more than 50 years of Assad family rule in the Middle East country, having in 2000 succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who in 1970 seized power in a coup to become Syria’s ruler till his death. Assad’s staying power amidst the turbulence of the volatile region was fabled. Following the eruption of the Arab Spring that saw no fewer than four Arab rulers flushed out of power by mass uprisings, opposition fighters took up arms in 2011 to press for regime change in Syria. Protests rocked many other Mideast countries but elicited different outcomes, with conflicts recorded in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Djibouti, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain,...
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Millionaire constables

From slave labour to sudden wealth. That could well be the story of special constabulary policemen, courtesy of a recent judgment of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria. The court has ordered that more than 22,000 special constables that the police enlisted across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) be regularised by the force, and four-year arrears of allowances paid out to each. By that judgment, millionaire constabularies strutting Nigerian community spaces may be loading. It will be interesting seeing what difference this makes to their psyche and engagement with the public. The industrial court, in a verdict delivered penultimate week, ordered the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Police Service Commission (PSC) to issue the special constables letters of formal employment and pay them the arrears of stipends due to them from way back in 2021. It was late in 2020, under the former Muhammadu Buhari presidency, that the Nigeria Police recruited some 25,...
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Badenoch’s identity blue

 Meursault in Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, ‘The Outsider’, is an anti-hero who lives in acute anomie towards his socio-cultural milieu. He is supremely detached at the death of his mother, as indicated in the famous opening lines of the novel’s first-person narration: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” He intensifies his apathy at the mother’s funeral where he sits through the vigil without showing any outward sign of distress, unlike copious expressions of grief by community members all around him. Meursault’s detachment continues through all of his relationships, both platonic and romantic, and provides a reference point for his sentencing to death by guillotine when tried for his inadvertent killing of a friend’s assailant named ‘the Arab’ in the novel. Newly-elected leader of opposition Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, Kemi Badenoch, is like Camus’ anti-hero Nigeria where she has her ancestral roots, but towards which she exhibits acute anomie. ...
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Indomitable Trump

By their vote last week, Americans may have swapped their legendarily libertarian political culture for imperialism – maybe unwittingly. They returned the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, to office as the 47th president in a sweeping victory for his Republican party that has dumped Democrats on the fringe of political power. With his reputation for pushing the limits of executive authority beyond historically familiar borders, the world might be about to witness unprecedented absolutism in the age-long bastion of democracy that is effectively now a MAGA (Make America Great Again) kingdom. Going by antecedents, which do not necessarily cast the future pathway in stone, that seems the promise of a new Trump era. The thing about presidential elections in the United States is that whereas it is only Americans who vote, the outcomes reverberate far beyond the country’s borders and impact, directly or not, on other nations across the world. That obviously is the reason global interest typica...
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