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The Oputa Panel’s report remains one of Nigeria’s most thorough official indictments of its own recent past and one of its most thoroughly ignored. After receiving more than 10,000 petitions and hearing only about 150 of them in public, the commission delivered a seven-volume catalogue of institutional failure that still reads like a national audit of impunity.
Every so often a state government invents a policy so novel that the law has not yet had time to catch up with it. Zamfara has done this and, with admirable efficiency, skipped the part where anyone checks whether the law would permit it.
A democracy does not always die at the barrel of a gun. Sometimes, it dies beneath television studio lights, while journalists entrusted with holding power accountable sit silently as politicians explain why nobody can hold them accountable.
In 2015 the APC unseated the PDP and has governed Nigeria ever since. That is eleven years, which in political terms is not so much a tenure as a tenancy with squatter's rights. Mr Tinubu spent the first eight as the party's national leader, with Osinbajo, reportedly his nominee, installed as vice president. Since 2023 he has been president, with Kashim Shettima beside him. Whoever invented the phrase "continuity of government" clearly never imagined it applied this literally.
On the morning of August 6, 2017, gunmen stormed St. Philip’s Catholic Church in Ozubulu, Anambra State. When the gunfire ceased, at least a dozen worshippers lay dead on the pews, including the elderly father of the intended target.
