Point One

Another pageant of sleaze has just played out on national canvass and warrants our re-interrogation of society’s morals. An adulatory crowd massed onto the grounds of Danbaba Suntai Airport in Jalingo, the Taraba State capital, penultimate Saturday to accord a hero’s welcome to their own. It didn’t matter one jot that it was an errant ‘son’ returning. They revelled as the private jet that brought him came to a halt and the gangway opened for him to confer a benevolent wave on the ecstatic kinsmen. Welcome back! Welcome back! The crowd jubilantly cheered – in effect, that is. The snow-white babanriga (flowing gown) of the returnee was a perfect dissemblance of the coal-black morality that took him away and kept him four years behind prison walls. As he alighted onto the tarmac and the crowd crushed on him, he perhaps felt invaded and craved some breathing space. But  it was an ironic charade that he couldn’t have wished otherwise in the circumstance. So, he lived it down. Enter ex-T...

 It is now definitive. Kenyan Deputy President William Samoei Ruto will in a matter of days, maybe hours, be installed the country’s fifth president. He was returned winner of the 9th August presidential election by Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati, who said he came off with 50.5 percent of votes cast. That verdict was challenged in court by runner-up opposition veteran Raila Odinga, said to have polled 48.8 percent of the votes. Now the Supreme Court has affirmed Ruto as duly elected, clearing all hurdles to his being sworn into office as president. Until the supreme court gave its verdict early last week, the international community and all Kenyans – not the least, Ruto himself – could only wait with bated breath.  That mode was dictated by experience with radical courage for which the Kenyan apex court is reputed. In 2017, the court upturned the presidential poll held on 8th August of that year, and of which incumbent ...