Point One

If recent elections in Kogi and Bayelsa states correctly indexed Nigeria’s current standing as regards universal hallmarks of pluralist electoral democracy, we have a virulent relapse of political incivility on our hands. Primitive brigandage is back with force in our political environment. Thus, the November 16 off-season governorship and constituency polls in the two states were characterised by raw violence and impunitous electoral violations, which raged with such brazenness you would think we should’ve outgrown over the past 20 years of unbroken electoral democracy in our country. The prime motivation for this tendency was elemental desperation for power by political gladiators at whose respective instance thugs deployed as foot soldiers, leveraging a brutal sleigh of hand to advantage their candidates in disregard for genuine preferences of rational voters. That was the undercurrent of wanton violence, banditry and other ill practices witnessed in the Kogi and Bayelsa electi...

They are embedded just about everywhere across this country and in diverse cloaking of religious affiliation. Within a space of some two months, Nigerian security operatives have dug up a rash of purported rehabilitation centres for drug addicts and other social deviants, but which in truth were hostage camps where hapless inmates were being held against their will and subjected to gross human rights abuses. And it seems certain many more centres remain out there and are only waiting to be unearthed within the polity. Since the first discovery in September of a facility in Rigasa area of Kaduna State, where the police found some 500 inmates including children held in appalling conditions, the lid has been blown off more centres in Daura, Katsina, Lagos and Ibadan, among other locations. The latest instance was the uncovering of an alleged torture centre inside the Oloore Central Mosque at the Ojoo end of the Lagos-Ibadan highway, in the Oyo State capital. At that facility, which was...