Jonathan’s Southwest endorsements
President Goodluck Jonathan was in Lagos last week to commission four warships as well as meet various Southwest leaders over next month’s polls. To win the election, he will need a sizable support...
View Article…And Jonathan gets embroiled in land deal
It is apparently part of politics to defend the indefensible. Otherwise it seems incomprehensible that anyone, let alone a political party that claims to have set norms and standards for Nigeria, will...
View ArticleThe problem with presidential interviews
During his blitz through the Southwest more than a week ago, President Goodluck Jonathan met with many Yoruba politicians and traditional leaders to sensitise them to his political and managerial...
View ArticlePresidential poll as cauldron of intrigues
No fewer than three main plots are believed to be afoot in the run-up to the March 28 presidential poll. First, it is suggested that President Goodluck Jonathan, believing he would be defeated in the...
View ArticlePlotting election stalemate
The March 28 presidential election has been framed as a contest between a young and energetic politician and an old and infirm opposition standard-bearer, between a liberal Christian and a Muslim...
View ArticleJonathan’s desperate forays into Southwest
It was largely the activism of the Southwest that made his ascension to the throne in 2010 possible, and he could not have won as fluidly as he did in 2011 without either the Southwest’s indifference...
View ArticleING to GNU: sheer waste of time
The past few weeks have seen Nigeria seething with rumours and plots of interim government, many of them quite fanciful and far-fetched, and a few somewhat plausible. The plots proceeded from the...
View ArticlePalladium’s endorsement: Voting Jonathan will doom democracy
In 2011, this column endorsed Nuhu Ribadu for the presidency though it admitted he could not win; believed Muhammadu Buhari was best placed to impose meaningful, even if not modern, rule on Nigeria;...
View ArticleUnprecedented election anxiety
The Goodluck Jonathan government should feel deeply mortified by the fact that since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, Nigerians have never felt so anxious and fearful during an election as they...
View ArticleSight and sound of 2015 electioneering
President Goodluck Jonathan is one of the candidates in this year’s presidential election. The problem, it must be emphasised again, is not that an Ijaw man rose to become president of Nigeria, as if...
View ArticleMap for map, they marched to ‘electoral’ war
It was billed either as a contest of ideas — such ideas and philosophies as could be gleaned from their disparate thoughts and statements — or as a contest of men: with Muhammadu Buhari on one side,...
View ArticleLagos’ll vote APC governor
There are fears in some quarters that Lagos State, given the more than 600,000 votes it gave the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the recently concluded presidential election, would vote for the...
View ArticleDressing Jonathan in borrowed ‘statesman’ robes
For conceding defeat to the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, in the March 28 poll, President Goodluck Jonathan has been lavishly described as a statesman. The...
View ArticleBuhari’s delicate victory
Even before one ballot was cast in the March 28 presidential and legislative elections, few could resist the temptation to see the election as a referendum on the Goodluck Jonathan government rather...
View ArticleSoft landing for top officials?
There are indications the incoming government of President-Elect Muhammadu Buhari might be willing to consider a soft landing for a few top government officials to help smoothen the transition process....
View ArticleImpeachment notice: farce and politics in Ekiti
In the continuing saga of Governor Ayo Fayose’s impeachment, it is hard to tell who enjoys the most support: the governor, House of Assembly Speaker Adewale Omirin, or the constitution. Mr Fayose was...
View Article‘Statesman’ Jonathan in last-ditch manoeuvres
Nigeria was awash with reports a day before the governorship and Houses of Assembly polls that President Goodluck Jonathan had visited Lagos on Thursday to confer with PDP leaders on how to win the...
View ArticleAPC and the Tinubu phenomenon
In 2003 when he broke ranks with his fellow Southwest governors and declined to form an ethnically motivated political and electoral alliance with former president Olusegun Obasanjo, few people knew...
View ArticleLast weeks of the Jonathan presidency
President Goodluck Jonathan may have easily conceded defeat to APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, but he is definitely still hurting from the ignominious loss he suffered in the last polls, particularly how...
View ArticleAfter the war, APC struggles to manage the peace
Considering how difficult it has been for them to come up with a zoning formula to share the spoils of war, the still exulting All Progressives Congress (APC) is beginning to discover that the easiest...
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