Point One

From the prism of dispassion, the visa ban slammed in last week by Washington on Nigerian political actors who violated due processes of the last general election should be seen as a moral rebuke directed at the elemental desperation and primitivity that hobbles our electoral culture. But partisans can get confoundingly opportunistic wringing out subjective capital from every happenstance; hence from their deductions, you would think the United States government was handing down the ultimate verdict on the validity, or otherwise, of the poll’s outcome. The U.S. State Department had in a statement on Tuesday announced Washington’s imposition of visa restrictions on unnamed Nigerians believed to have directly or complicitly undermined the country’s democracy in the course of the 2019 elections. State Department spokesman, Morgan Ortagus, said inter alia : “The United States is a steadfast supporter of the Nigerian democracy. We commend all those Nigerians who partic...

Unless something hardheaded and urgent is done to rein in the escalating ethnic sabre-rattling in the present content of Nigerian national conversation, this country is reaching over too strenuously from its already precarious perch on the precipice. And it may indeed be daringly staring down the proverbial road to Kigali. That is where an insane gush of primordial passions could, wittingly or otherwise, be inflamed in the grassroots populace as could result in unhinged fratricidal conflicts. This looming danger needs to be harshly flagged because as political leaders and leaders of thought trade verbal jabs, in ethnocentric conversations that are obviously aimed at winning admiration and support from tribal groups for which they respectively hold brief, the bile of ethnic animosity is meanwhile being deeply seeded among ordinary – in some cases, naïve – citizens who do not even have any grasp of political brinkmanship and are driven in the main by what they hear t...