Reporting News and opinions
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.
President Tinubu has inherited a constitutional system in which political parties are legally entitled to compete, governors possess electoral mandates, and opposition parties can challenge the government without seeking permission from the president. These are fundamental differences between the Fourth Republic and Abacha’s military dictatorship.
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.
The First Niger Bridge belongs to Nigeria. It does not belong to David Umahi, Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress or any religious congregation.
