Reporting News and opinions
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.
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.
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.
