Point One

Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu gave voice to a new elephant in the room concerning African electoral democracy, namely the judiciary’s role in facilitating or wonking the culture yet toddling on the continent. Lungu called out the recent precedent of loose-swinging judicial activism by justices in Kenya, with the raucous aftereffects, and admonished his country’s wigs against going that route out of sheer imitation. Speaking penultimate week at an event in Solwezi, northwest Zambia, the president impliedly conceded the separation of power principle; but he also counseled his country’s judiciary against adventure. “My message is: just do your work, interpret the law without fear or favour and look at the best interest of this country. Don’t become a copycat and think you are a hero if you plunge this country into chaos,” he said, adding: “I am not intimidating the judiciary. I am just warning you (judges) because I have information that some of you want to be adventurous. Your advent...

Acts of extreme desperation hardly ever make the cut, not even in the most awful circumstances of life. From the standpoint of conventional social conduct – and not talking now the esoterics of clinical psychology – it is common knowledge that such acts are rarely well considered and thought through, and never correctly weighted against factual realities at play for individuals involved. Nigeria presently waddles in a ‘Great Depression’ of sorts occasioned by the lingering downturn in the national economy. And history records that extreme acts of desperation – mainly suicides – resulted from the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and the American Great Depression that followed, lasting till the outbreak of the World War II in Europe. At the peak of that gloom, some 23,000 people reportedly committed suicide in a single year. You could well say the economic circumstance of Nigeria today bears some semblance with that Western experience. However, ours is a largely communalistic way of ...

It was a giddy leap to sainthood for South African President Jacob Zuma in Nigeria penultimate weekend. His country is Nigeria’s power peer in sub-Sahara Africa, if presumptuous to rule in the entire continent. But Zuma came calling, not as a state guest of his Nigerian counterpart, but in quasi-private capacity on the fare of Imo State Governor Rochas Okorocha. He came unheralded on a visit that has since been duly explained was to sign a memorandum of understanding between his Zuma Foundation and Okorocha’s Rochas Foundation College for Africa. Zuma arrived in town amidst controversy as had dogged his eight-year-long presidency, during which he has survived eight no-confidence votes in the South African parliament. His trip was not made public in Pretoria until he was nearly air borne, and neither was there much hype of imminent ingress of a personage like him in Nigeria – at least, not enough for the public to be expectant. Besides, the South African leader hit the skies en rou...