Reporting News and opinions
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.
When major corporate milestones unfold, they often bring complex legal questions in their wake. Recently, discussion has swirled around whether public-private partnerships involving state governments and philanthropic foundations to buy shares in the historic Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals Initial Public Offering (IPO) run afoul of corporate laws—specifically regarding a company financing its own shares.
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.
In journalism, the oldest truism is that "dog bites man" isn’t news. A dog is supposed to bite. If a dog bites a postman, you don’t stop the printing presses; you only call the front desk if the postman bites the dog back
