Reporting News and Opinions
In the grand theatre of Nigerian public life, where every scandal eventually finds its way into a press release, a tweet, and then a court that politely declines to be bothered, the saga of Emeka Ike’s voter details has reached its predictable third act. The curtain has fallen. The audience is still waiting for justice. The actors have already left for the after-party
There’s a special kind of Nigerian magic that turns a man who once dodged military bullets for democracy into the man who now decides which opposition party is allowed to breathe near a billboard.
In the grand theatre of Nigerian politics, where truth occasionally stumbles onto the stage like an uninvited guest who has had one too many, Alwan Hassan has just delivered a masterclass in accidental honesty.
Nigeria has seen this political movie before. The costumes have changed, the actors have acquired new titles, and the language of justification has become more sophisticated. But beneath the democratic vocabulary lies a familiar ambition: the concentration of political power in the hands of one man, the weakening of opposition, and the conversion of a multiparty democracy into a political arrangement in which everybody is expected to agree with the president.
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.
