Reporting News and opinions
A rumour becomes a scandal. A disagreement becomes a conspiracy. An inconvenient question becomes evidence of a plot. An opponent is not merely wrong, but corrupt, compromised, bought, controlled or secretly working for somebody else.
In the United States, corporate culture has a colorful vocabulary for the hyper-sycophant: the brown-noser, the bootlicker, the corporate shill. But in Nigeria, this behavior isn't just a personality trait of that one annoying guy in middle management. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply institutionalized standard operating procedure known colloquially as "Eye Service."
The Legislature does not check the Executive; it curtsies, takes notes, and asks the Executive what time it should pack its bags.
There is a peculiar comfort in cartography. Draw a line around a catastrophe, label it, and it becomes something one can point to on a map rather than something one must answer for. Africa, in the twenty-first century, has been organised into four such catastrophes with the tidiness of a continental league table the Great Lakes, the Horn, the Sudans, and the Sahel each running its own fixture list of massacre, displacement and denial, each independently promoted from "concern" to "crisis" to "protracted emergency" without ever being relegated back down to "peace."
MC Oluomo, born Musiliu Ayinde Akinsanya on March 14, 1975, in Oshodi, Lagos, embodies a classic rags-to-riches narrative intertwined with the raw mechanics of street power, union politics, and partisan loyalty in Nigeria. His legacy is polarizing: celebrated by supporters as a self-made leader, philanthropist, and champion of transport workers, yet criticized by opponents as a symbol of thuggery, electoral intimidation, and impunity.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 