Point One

In 1973, there was the famous bank robbery at the Norrmalmstorg Square in Stockholm, Sweden, which resulted in a hostage crisis best known as the origin of the ‘Stockholm syndrome.’ This syndrome is the psychological condition whereby a victim of kidnapping or hostage-taking shows up a curious feeling of trust and affection towards his/her captor, while simultaneously growing rebellious towards potential rescue authorities such as the police. In the particular case of the 1973 Stockholm robbery, there was a hostage who became romantically attached to one of her captors and serially frustrated moves by security forces to secure her freedom. Recent developments in the Nigerian political space symptomised the Stockholm syndrome at its patronising and cronystic best. The governed, or at least a significant portion, seem in sedate thrall to the power elite who hold the levers of power in unyielding captivity. Rather than put those power actors to task by calling them to painstaking accou...

By established reputation that he has done deliberately little to repudiate, President Donald Trump is renown for carrying himself with the ultimate supercilious swagger. In his own eyes, he is the centre of God’s universe around which all other existences must gravitate or otherwise fall off into ignoble oblivion. Actually, as it seems, they pass or fail the test of qualification for survival on his terms. When he comes in contact with those other existences as is inevitable under heaven, he readily throws up pejorative labels for persons or groups against whom he runs in, or whose chemistry simply don’t jell with his own. Not that he has much challenge using those labels openly and with defiant sensationalism. But even where such labels occur Freudianly in private conversations, and later on get leaked to pose awkward public relations or diplomatic moments, he typically spares no time for trite niceties of retraction or other forms of remediation. He is The Donal...