Reporting News and opinions
What should have been a routine anti-smuggling enforcement - fake chassis number, alleged unpaid duty of N74 million on a vehicle valued at N298 million - turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration appears to have forgotten that rule in its handling of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) controversy. In its determination to destroy the credibility of one man, Prince Adeniyi Matthew Adeyemi, it may have inflicted collateral damage on something far more valuable: the credibility of official government documentation itself.
The flight from London had arrived. I was waiting for the Chief Judge of Kwara state. An elderly man wheezed past me imperiously like he owned Ottawa Airport. Like he personally appointed the Mayor of Ottawa. The unmistakable trade mark of the Nigerian. I was going to hail him and ask if he was my guest.
To understand the modern Nigerian Police Force, one must first understand its origins. The uncomfortable truth is that the institution was never created to protect ordinary Nigerians. It was established to protect the interests of those who ruled Nigeria, first the British colonial administration and later the Nigerian political elite that inherited the colonial state.
In 2004, in the heart of Edo State, 27 people reportedly lost their lives in circumstances so horrifying that they read less like a contemporary news report and more like a medieval witch trial.
