Point One

From every indication, the lockdown adventure by separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has gone utterly rogue, true to the saying that it takes just a tip to start a snowball. It not only seems a tough call for government centres in the Southeast to rein it in, it has apparently gone out of IPOB’s own control. Sit-at-homes had always been a handy tack by the outlawed group in pressing its secessionist cause. The current ‘ghost Monday’ campaign  was flagged off 9th August by IPOB avowedly to protest the incarceration of its leader, Nnamdi Kanu, and force government’s hand on his trial and desired release. Recall that Kanu, who fled this country in September 2017 amidst prosecution for offences including alleged terrorism, arms running and insurrection against the Nigerian state, was rearrested abroad last June and dragged back in the dock in Abuja, following which IPOB launched the latest campaign to compel his being freed. Although the lockdown notice met with robust reassu...

 You do not have to be a fan of Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai to acknowledge that he runs against the grain in a noble sort of way. Whether he thereby engages in genuine paradigm shifts or mere optics is debatable; but even if it is optics, he is a master at good optics. And optics, as they say, is everything. When the governor personally took his six-year-old son to enroll at a Kaduna public school in September 2019, and placed the boy on his laps as he himself sat in a guest chair before the school’s headteacher like a dutiful parent, it was good optics to the hilt. He not only made a classic statement of elite confidence in an educational system most of his peers won’t touch with a vaulting pole concerning their wards, even though they have the statutory responsibility to manage and rightly position the system, he also epitomised hands-on parenting amidst pressing stately duties in a manner that reinforced assurance in the moral character of leadership. It is reported tha...

 Willful amnesia about willful crime, even when there is seeming momentary respite, never works. Ask Sheikh Ahmad Gumi. The frontline Islamic cleric cum famous bandits negotiator and advocate has all but chilled now, and that likely is because his ‘amnesty for bandits’ advocacy has done next to nothing in reining in banditry in the land. Criminality is an affront to society’s laws and should be dealt with according to those laws; otherwise, attempts to disincentivise criminality by forgiving ‘repentant’ criminals after the fact of their ruinous adventure, or looking the other way when they give up their ‘booty’ per occasion, would end up like merely running rings. Nigeria seems to be straining to achieve a willful and blanket amnesia at the moment: amnesia about insurgency in the Northeast following ‘repentance’ by some Boko Haram fighters who are drilling out of forest hideouts and handing themselves in to the military; fragment amnesia about banditry in the Northwest and Northcen...