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BREAKING: GRV drags Buhari, Tinubu, Sanwo-Olu, Oluomo, 14 others to ICC, alleges genocide *See full list
President Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and Musiliu Akinsanya, alias MC Oluomo, may become guests at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, The Netherlands, if lawyers to Gbadebo, Rhodes-Vivour, governorship candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the March 18 governorship election, are able to push their case through.
The lawyers have fired petition to the court, charging the All Progressives Congress (APC), chieftains and other key elements in the Nigerian polity, accusing them of genocide and crimes against humanity, following the aftermaths of the 2023 general elections.
Others named in the petition, seeking investigation for their roles in the mayhem, which resulted in the deaths and bodily harms to citizens, include former Minister of Aviation, Fani Kayode, APC Presidential Campaign Council (APC-PCC), spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), counterpart, Reno Omokri.
The group of lawyers in the petition, addressed to Karim A. A. Khan QC, the Prosecutor of the Court, dated 30 March 2023, also included the Inspector General of the Nigeria Police; Chief of Military Intelligence; Deputy Inspector of General of Police; Commissioner of Police, Lagos State.
In it, MC Oluomo, identified as the Chief thug of Tinubu, was also named alongside Sam Omatseye – a journalist, Otunba Biodun Ajiboye, Dele Alake another journalist, Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, and a traditional ruler; the Baale of Igbara Jakande area in Eti-osa Local government area of Lagos State.
The petition, entitled: Complaint and a request for the initiation of an investigation into crimes against humanity in Nigeria pursuant to Articles 13©, 15 & 53 of the Rome Statute, on the basis of information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, reads in full:
Dear Prosecutor,
We act for the following “Complainants/Petitioners” under whose instructions we address this complaint to you. They are:
Architect Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour – The Labour Party Gubernatorial Candidate in Lagos State, Nigeria;
Princess Abiodun Oyefusi – The Labour Party Deputy Gubernatorial Candidate in Lagos State, Nigeria;
Mr Emmanuel Adogbeji – Labour Party Election Agent in Lagos State, Nigeria;
Mr Ebere Chinedu – Labour Party member in Lagos State, Nigeria;
Mr Chukwudi – Lagos State, Nigeria;
Mr Austin Iruobe Asuerimen – Labour Party, Lagos State;
Mr Henry Ogheneovo Afiowor – Labour Party, Lagos State;
Dr Gladys C Nwankwo – Labour Party, Lagos State
Ms Chidinma – Labour Party, Lagos State
Mr Sunday Olakunle – Labour Party, Lagos State
Hon. Seyi Lawal – Labour Party, Lagos State
Mr Femi Badiah – Labour Party, Lagos State
Mr Raphael George – Labour Party, Lagos State
Specified Members of the Labour Party of Nigeria.
NB:
Other victims’ names shall be joined in due course, together with supplementary submissions.
They are citizens of Nigeria who are interested in the protection of human and civil rights in Nigeria. They are also members of the Labour Party; a leading political party contesting for the 2023 general elections in Nigeria.
This complaint is against the below-mentioned persons “Respondents” who have jointly and severally committed genocide and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. These persons and officials of the state of Nigeria are the subjects of the request for investigations and criminal charges and prosecution:
(a) Muhammadu Buhari – the President of Nigeria; and a member of All Progressive Congress “APC” the current political party in government;
(b) Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu – the Governor of Lagos State, Nigeria; “APC”
(C) Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Presidential Candidate of the All Progressive Congress “APC” (and whose full and further particulars are unknown)
(D) The Leaders of All Progressive Congress “APC – a political Party;
(E) The Inspector General of the Nigeria Police;
(f) Chief of Military Intelligence;
(g) Deputy Inspector of General of Police;
(h) The Commissioner of Police, Lagos State;
(i) Mr Musiliu Akinsanya (also known as MC Oluomo) – the chief thug of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and a member of APC
(j) Mr Femi Fani Kayode – a member of the APC
(k) Mr Bayo Onanuga – a member of APC
(l) Mr Sam Omatseye – a journalist
(m) Otunba Biodun Ajiboye – a member of the APC
(n) Mr Reno Omokri
(o) Mr Dele Alake – a member of APC
(p) Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State, and APC member
(q) Traditional ruler; the Baale of Igbara Jakande area in Eti-osa Local government area of Lagos State
The above-mentioned Respondents have jointly and collectively incited genocide and tribal conflicts in Nigeria during and around the 2023 general elections in Lagos State, Nigeria; and which incitement has resulted in deaths, grievous bodily harm and injuries, destruction of lives and properties.
We have compiled and are compiling the following documents for submission:
(a) A detailed complaint with specific particularity including online links to video, photos, and publications to support the allegations; and,
(b) A Schedule of Links which are, material evidence, reports and investigations by Human Rights Bodies and Non-Governmental Organizations “NGOs” for ease of reference.
(C) Nigeria is a signatory to the Rome Statute and it deposited at the UN its instrument of ratification of the Rome Statute, thus becoming one of the first 60 State parties which contributed to the entry into force of the Rome Statute on 1st July 2012.
(D) In light of the gravity of the situation in Nigeria, in particular a history of continued repression including attacks on independent media, arrests and torture of opposition leaders and supporters, and a failure to prosecute those responsible for incitement of violence and extra-judicial killings, we strongly urge the Office of the Prosecutor to immediately use its power under Article 15 of the Rome Statute to initiate a preliminary investigation on “the basis of information on crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court” (Article 15(1)).
(E) A number of non-governmental organizations have conducted preliminary investigations and prepared reports that strongly suggest that crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been and are being committed. Credible information from “states’ organs of the United Nations, intergovernmental or non-governmental organizations and other reliable sources,” including eyewitness accounts (Article 15(2)), is readily and widely available. The “seriousness of the information” available is beyond doubt, which is why this complaint is aimed to call for accountability and justice. The reports are as detailed hereunder.
(f) The general elections in Nigeria were held on the 25th of February 2023, and on the 18th of March 2023; these are for the Presidential and the National Assembly elections, and the States Gubernatorial and State House of Assembly elections respectively. During these periods, the Respondents actively incited ethnic violence and crimes against humanity with brazen impunity; none of them have been arrested by the law enforcement agents in spite of the fact that their individual and collective conducts resulted in deaths, grievous bodily harm, destruction of lives and properties of victims.
NB:
(g) We shall compile more names of perpetrators and collate further evidence of crimes for onward submission to your office from time to time.
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
As defined by the Rome Statute (Article 7), “crimes against humanity” means any of the following when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Persecution against a group or collectivity based on its political, racial, national, ethnic or religious character;
(C) The crime of apartheid (inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutional regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another racial group, with the intent to maintain that regime).
PARTICULARS OF CRIMES
There have been several incitements to ethnic violence, extra judicial killings, torture, physical assaults, abductions and gross abuse of human rights in Nigeria which include but are not limited to:
ORGANIZED VIOLENCE, ETHNIC BAITING, AND ATTACKS
(a) A few days before the election day, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu while addressing his supporters during a town hall meeting ordered his party members and his thugs to violently grab, snatch and run away with ballot boxes during elections; the plan was to denied Peter Obi and other Labour Party candidates their popular mandate. It might be argued that this conduct does not fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC, it is however evidence that the said conduct resulted in several casualties and fatalities to individuals. Herewith video evidence of Tinubu’s infamous address:
(i) Herewith a video where Tinubu inciting ethnic violence in Lagos:
- Video of Tinubu Inciting Ethnic Violence in Lagos Election 2023
Translation: “These are people who left their villages, came into Lagos from childhood, 12 years of age. We accommodated and took care of them. Now, they want to bite the fingers that fed them”. He further said proverbially that “their case has now become that of hen”. When a western/Nigerian leader can express this much animosity against certain people in public, there’s trouble.
(ii) Video of Tinubu giving orders to APC members and thugs to grab, snatch and run away with ballot boxes
(b) Subsequent to Tinubu’s address, and on and about the 25 February 2023 being the Presidential election day, on 18 March 2023 being the Gubernatorial election day and post-election days; Mr Musiliu Akinsanya, Tinubu’s chief thug also known as MC Oluomo; his supporters and followers acting upon Tinubu’s orders and in compliance thereof took to the streets and unleashed mayhem in and around the country. Some of these barbaric incidents are as documented hereunder.
(c) Furthermore, also acting in concert with other Respondents, the following persons incited ethnic hatred and violence which resulted in injuries and deaths during and after the general elections in Nigeria.
These are: Mr Bayo Onanuga, a journalist member of the APC and the Director of Media and Publicity for Tinubu’s presidential campaign; Mr Femi Fani Kayode the Spokesman for Tinubu; Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State; Mr Sam Omatseye a journalist in one of Tinubu’s media companies; Otunba Biodun Ajiboye a member of APC; Mr Dele Alake a member of APC and Reno Omokri:
(i) Herewith a link to a newspaper which reported that the government of the United Kingdom has collated names of people that incited violence and voter suppression for ease of reference.
(ii) Herewith a link to a newspaper report on MC Oluomo and Governor Yahaya Bello invitation by the Nigerian Human Rights Commission for inciting genocide.
(iii) Herewith a link to a newspaper report where Bayo Onanuga was telling people of Igbo tribe to steer clear of Lagos State.
(iv) Herewith a link to a newspaper report of Bayo Onanuga inciting ethnic violence.
(v) Herewith a video and newspaper links where MC Oluomo is threatening to kill opposition voters of different ethnic group living in Lagos should they not vote for APC.
Video of MC Oluomo threats to kill igbos in Lagos should they not vote for AAPC
(c) These attacks and incidents where the results of incitement to ethnic hatred by the Respondents, politicians and their agents who actively participated in these criminal acts, they supplied arms and ammunitions to their foot soldiers and incited them to kill and inflict grievous bodily harm on other individuals of different ethnic groups in Nigeria.
They further publicly warned members of other ethnic groups who reside in Lagos State not to show up to exercise their fundamental human rights on the election dates.
(E) On 19 March 2023, following the completion of the gubernatorial and other elections in Lagos State, the attacks on opposition party supporters continued after various ethnic baiting tweets by Mr Bayo Onanuga, Femi Fani Kayode, Reno Omokri and others.
These tweets had fuelled election and post-election violence against individuals from the specific ethnic group who were the target of the incitements, and therefore must be treated as crimes against humanity.
(f) The promotion of attacks and violence against targeted groups residing in a particular area is a clear violation of international law which falls within the jurisdiction of the ICC. The ICC is hereby called upon to take action and to prevent a repeat, and also to hold the perpetrators to account. The comments on their social media handles are nothing other than hate speech.
(g) Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s inciting rhetoric about other ethnic groups living in Lagos State is largely responsible for the obvious suppression, oppression, attacks and killings witnessed during the recently concluded general elections in Nigeria.
There are material evidences of persons of non-Igbo tribes that suffered similar fate as the Igbo just because they look like the Igbo.
(h) The eerie silence, or rather the acquiescence of the Mr Sanwo-Olu the Executive Governor of Lagos State shows that he is complicit. There has not been any arrest made, and no one has been held responsible for these crimes. Mr. MC Oluomo is the Head Lagos State Park Management Agency which is a political appointment of the government of Lagos State; he was seen making open threats against people of other ethnic groups living in Lagos, there are videos of him inciting hate and violence against targeted individuals during the just concluded general elections in Lagos State. These proofs of organized crimes against humanity.
(i) The political attacks of the members of the Labour Party during a political rally in Lagos State on the 11th of February 2023 by the members and political thugs of the APC. They acted under the command of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Presidential candidate of the APC; and the Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
We have evidence of these attacks on video and the links are hereunder for your perusal:
(i) Video attack on Bus of Labour Party Lagos
(ii) Video attack on Bus 2 Labour Party
(iii) Video attack on Bus 3 Labour Party
(iv) Video attack on Labour Party in Lagos
(j) Further, on 15th of February 2023 at Aguda in Surulere area of Lagos State, there were brutal attacks on the Labour Party Deputy Governorship candidate, Princess Oyefusi and her campaign entourage. These attacks occurred under the watch of law enforcement agents who stood idly and without doing anything.
They are vicariously liable and complicit. One wonders why they did not carry out their duty of “to serve and protect” citizens and properties. Herewith, a video link of one of those injured in the process for ease of reference:
Video attack on Princess Oyefusi campaign train on 15 Feb
(v) On 11th of February 2023 Mr Bamidele Akpata a Labour Party was brutalized near Femi Okunnu Estate at Jakande, Lekki area of Lagos State during a Labour Party political rally. They were gathered peacefully when APC men with all kinds of weapons arrived in a bus, suddenly came down from it and brutally assaulted them. Some of the victims sustained various degree of injuries in addition to losing valuable items during the attack. Herewith video evidence of the attack:
Video attack on Labour Party at Jakande Lagos
(k) On 11th February 2023 at Adeniji Adele area of Lagos Island, members of the Labour Party were attacked, brutalized and their buses vandalized by APC thugs on their way to a political rally. These attacked happened under the watch and command of the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu; the State Commissioner of Police; the national Inspector General of Police, and the national and state leadership of the APC. Herewith, video evidence of the said attack for ease of reference:
Video attack on Labour Party in Lagos 2
(l) A certain traditional ruler; the Baale of Igbara Jakande area in Eti-osa Local government area of Lagos who happens to be a member of APC release an audio material in which he made a death threat to people should they cast their votes against APC.
Herewith a newspaper report on the threat audio material for ease of reference.
(m) The political attacks of members of the Labour Party at their homes and political offices in Ebonyi State by members and political thugs of the APC under the command of Governor David Umahi through the commander of Ebubeagu, and security details attached to Governor David Umahi. Kindly take note that the Ebubeagu vigilante group was recently disbanded by a court of competent jurisdiction in Nigeria for their nefarious and criminal activities.
Here is a link to a publication in respect hereof.
(n) These crimes occur on a daily basis without check, and without any form of assistance for the victims and their families. The persons and offices whose names appear as Respondents parties should be held jointly and severally liable for these crimes by virtue of their official capacities and the authority imbued therein.
AIDING AND ABETTING ROME STATUTE VIOLATIONS
The Complainants/Petitioners submit that for there to be true justice and accountability, the investigation should include; whether certain Nigerian officials or state actors have aided and abetted in any way the commission of crimes against humanity in Nigeria for prosecution.
An Individual can be convicted of a crime against humanity in the International Criminal Court if he or she “aids, abets or otherwise assists” in the commission or attempted commission of the crime, “including providing the means for its commission” (Article 25). By issuing the shoot to kill orders and other orders that go against any set standard of humanity then, the military commanders, police chiefs and any other state actors have aided and abetted the commission of crimes against humanity.
TORTURE, MURDER, PAIN AND SUFFERING
As defined by Article 1 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
During these current political campaigns in Nigeria, several opposition aspirants and supporters have been tortured through illegal detentions, physical assault, brutalized with machetes, guns, and assault weapons by APC thugs.
Below are some of the victims and pictorial evidence of their injuries; some attacks happened on the 18 of March 2023, while some attacks happened after the elections have been finalized. Some of the victims were waylaid at Abule Ado area of Lagos on their way back from church services on Sunday 19 March 2023, a day after the Gubernatorial elections in Lagos:
(i) Video of a victim with multiple machete wounds to head and body
(ii) Video and pictorial evidence of Austin Iruobe Asuerimen with severe head injuries
(iii) Pictorial evidence of victim Austin Iruobe Asuerimen with stitches on his head
(iv) Video of Ebere Chinedu with machete cuts wounds to his head and body
(v) Video evidence of Ebere Chinedu in the hospital in bandages
(vi) MORE EVIDENCE OF FATALITIES, VICTIMS AND THEIR IDENTITIES
Herewith a link to many victims’ identities and their injuries.
(vii) Mr. Onyeka Abali a Labour Party member and our Polling Unit agent at K1 lost his brother who also was a Polling Unit agent at Trade Fair area of Lagos State.
He was shot on Saturday 18 March 2023 by APC thugs. His body has been taken home to the East by his mother yesterday.
Herewith a pictorial evidence for ease of reference:
Photo of Onyeka Abali and his deceased brother who was killed by APC thugs in Lagos
(viii) Herewith video of Emmanuel Adogbeji with eye injury sustained during APC attacks in Lagos:
Video of Emmanuel Adogbeji Oberhiri with eye injury
(ix) Video evidence of Henry Ogheneovo Afiowor who was brutally attacked by APC thugs at Ikorodu during the Gubernatorial election on 18 March 2023:
Video attack on Henry Ogheneovo Afiowor in Ikorodu
(x) Video evidence of Ms Chidinma who was brutalized by APC thugs at Oshodi area of Lagos during the Gubernatorial election on 18 March 2023:
Video of attack on Ms Chidinma at Oshodi
(xi) Pictorial evidence of attack on Dr Gladys Nwankwo with a leg injury
(xii) Below are pictorial evidences of victims with injuries sustained during the Sunday 19th March 2023 attacks by APC thugs at Abule Ado area of Lagos State, a day after the Gubernatorial election:
NAMES OF OTHER VICTIMS:
Uchenna Murphy
Uchenna Nwazuo
Ekwonna Chukwubuike
Emeka Frances
Sochima Ezekwem
Walter Okoro
Okundu Anukeyi
Nwaorie Obinna
Orakwe Emeka
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 1
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 2
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 3
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 4
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 5
Picture of Abule Ado Victim 6
Picture of Abule Ado Victim with multiple injuries to head 7
Many other opposition party members have been killed, detained and tortured for several hours in Lagos State during political rallies, or at their homes.
There has also been unwarranted use of tear gas to disperse unarmed civilians in addition to brutal beatings and brutal handling of civilians by the different state agencies around the country.
The Complainants/Petitioners submit that all the perpetrators, culprits and state actors who were involved in the commission of crimes against humanity and who also subjected civilians to torture have never been arrested or held accountable; and the State is silent about the same.
The Complainants/Petitioners further submit that all the requirements for the initiation of an investigation pursuant to Article 15 have been clearly met. The “information available to the prosecutor provides,” at the very least, “a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court have been or are being committed” (Article 53(1) (a). The “gravity of the crimes and the interests of the victims” warrant an investigation, and there can be no doubt that such an investigation would serve the interests of justice (article 53(1) (c)).
The Initiation of an investigation would send a clear message to all those involved either in committing or in aiding and abetting of the aforementioned crimes that they stand to be held personally accountable for their actions. This could help end the continuing breaches of International laws and put an end to the impunity that has underpinned the ever-increasing violence in Nigeria, which has caused and continues to cause extreme suffering to its civilian population.
The President of Nigeria; Muhammadu Buhari is joined to this proceeding by virtue of the office he occupies as the Chief Security Officer of the country. No relief is sought against him, save and in the event of him opposing this proceeding, in which event, it is totally the discretion of the Prosecutor to make a value judgment on whether or not to extent the investigation to his office. It should however be noted that during the current campaign period, Mr. Buhari as commander in chief of the armed forces has not been responsive to all the crimes and atrocities happening under his watch.
Mr. Buhari further has deployed military blockade on roads, where soldiers openly extort money from poor citizens, they sometimes kill innocent citizens, and they deny opposition members access to all highways and impeding their campaign teams from campaigning; all these are in violation of the basic principles of free and fair elections. Despite several efforts to engage the Nigeria Human Rights Commission, the West Africa Regional Office of the International Human Rights Commission and the Independent National Electoral Commission “INEC” to address violations and attacks on the democratic process, the Head of the Electoral Commission continues to be partisan, aiding and encouraging the conduct of the offenders.
These persons are criminally culpable because of their command responsibility over security forces operating under their directions or control and who are terrorizing tens of millions of Nigerians specifically because of their ethnic and political leaning. The crimes include, incitement to violence, ethnic baiting, extrajudicial killings, abductions, torture and sister unspeakable horrors. They are grisly hallmark of crimes against humanity.
The Complainant/Petitioner, should it become necessary, shall cooperate with the ICC to gather more photographic, video, and testimonial evidence of the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Respondents and their accomplices.
The prosecution of the Respondents and accomplices before the International Criminal Court would prompt the United Nations Security Council to immediately commence the process of sanctions against the President of Nigeria and other co-accused.
CONCLUSION
It is respectfully submitted that there are prima facie evidences of crimes to warrant investigation by the International Criminal Court “the ICC” for violation of international human rights law, violations of the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other norms of international law, both customary and by convention.
The Nigerian organs of state and prosecutorial system have become the instruments of such violations and as such the vehicles used to arrest and impose detention.
We await your kind response in this regard.
Your faithfully,
Austin Okeke Esq.
Head: International Litigation and Diplomacy
Tel: +27837289081
News
The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders
By Max Amuchie
Last Sunday, I indicated that this week’s edition of The Sunday Stew would pay tribute to the late political economist and public intellectual, Claude Ake. That tribute remains, but its timing has shifted. Later this year will mark the 30th anniversary of his passing — a more fitting moment to revisit the life and legacy of one of Africa’s most consequential intellectual minds. Until then, this column turns to a related but less discussed tradition in Nigerian thought: the rare lineage of framework builders who operated outside the academy yet reshaped how society understood itself.
Nigeria’s intellectual landscape faces a persistent challenge: not the total absence of indigenous frameworks, but their relative scarcity and limited institutional consolidation. Much of our analytical vocabulary still arrives pre-assembled from elsewhere — adapted to Nigerian conditions rather than born from them. We reach habitually for tools forged in other fires, calibrated for other crises, and carrying the residue of other civilisational assumptions. The consequence is not merely intellectual dependency. It is explanatory incompleteness. Borrowed frameworks, however sophisticated, can illuminate local realities, but they do not always capture the structures beneath them.
Yet Nigeria has never been entirely without its own framework builders. What it has lacked is not indigenous conceptual production itself, but its sustained institutionalisation. Alongside the academy, it has historically produced another tradition — rarer, more independent, and deeply sovereign in character.
It is a tradition built largely beyond university faculties and disciplinary boundaries. Its practitioners did not merely interpret events; they created new conceptual vocabularies. They refused inherited explanatory tools when those tools proved insufficient, choosing instead to engineer indigenous frameworks for immediate national and civilisational questions. Their objective was not institutional approval but conceptual sovereignty.
This is the elite class of Nigeria’s framework builders. And it is within this largely extra-academic lineage — one operating beyond the formal boundaries of university production and disciplinary gatekeeping — that figures such as Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu emerge — not merely as statesmen or writers, but as framework builders. Each refused the role of interpreter. Each chose, instead, the more demanding vocation of architect.
Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Newsroom as Primary Laboratory
To understand what Azikiwe accomplished, one must resist the temptation to reduce him to his political biography — to the president, the governor-general, the nationalist icon. These are accurate descriptions, but they obscure the more foundational achievement. Before Azikiwe was any of those things, he was a theorist of communications power.
His intellectual contribution extended beyond communications infrastructure into explicit framework construction. Through Zikism in Africa and works such as Renascent Africa and Liberia in World Politics, he advanced a political philosophy centred on spiritual balance, social regeneration, mental emancipation, economic reconstruction, and political resurgence. Zikism was not merely nationalist rhetoric. It was an indigenous ideological framework — an attempt to articulate a distinctly African vocabulary for liberation, modernity, and civilisational renewal.
Azikiwe understood, with unusual clarity for his era, that newspapers were not passive instruments of reportage. They were engines of consciousness formation. Through The West African Pilot, launched in 1937, he built a mass communications infrastructure designed not merely to inform but to manufacture national awareness where none yet existed in consolidated form. The newsroom became a laboratory of political imagination.
The West African Pilot therefore functioned not only as a newspaper but as the transmission mechanism for Zikism itself — a vehicle through which ideas moved from theory into public consciousness.
This was framework building in the most consequential sense: the creation of a conceptual technology — the politically purposive newsroom — that could transform the relationship between a population and its own self-understanding.
Azikiwe drew from global traditions of activist journalism but adapted them into a distinctly West African instrument of nationalist mobilisation.
The lesson for the contemporary era is unmistakable, and uncomfortable. The modern digital newsroom has, in large measure, abandoned this mandate. Optimised for traffic, calibrated for virality, and disciplined by the imperatives of advertising revenue, it has become a largely reactive institution — faster than its predecessors, but shallower in purpose. Azikiwe‘s example issues a rebuke and a challenge in equal measure: the newsroom cannot survive, in any meaningful civilisational sense, as a purely commercial machine. It must recover its older mandate as a theory laboratory — a place where original socio-political frameworks are serialised, tested, refined, and introduced into the public square. The medium has changed. The obligation has not.
Obafemi Awolowo: The Geometry of State Architecture
Where Azikiwe worked through the newsroom, Awolowo worked through the monograph. And where Azikiwe’s primary instrument was consciousness, Awolowo’s was structure.
Awolowo approached the Nigerian state with something that can only be described as geometric discipline. He did not merely criticise colonial administration or lament political dysfunction. He subjected the Nigerian project to systematic, structural examination. Through works such as Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) and Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (1966), he mapped constitutional arrangements, regional balances, socio-economic organisation, and the friction points embedded within the federation with a precision that distinguished him from his contemporaries. He treated governance as architecture — as a designed system with load-bearing elements, stress points, and the capacity to collapse if its internal logic was violated.
This temperament is what separates framework builders from analysts. The analyst produces interpretation. The framework builder produces a map of the system generating the events that require interpretation. Awolowo was interested not in the headline but in the structure producing the headline — and he was willing to do the painstaking intellectual labour of rendering that structure visible and legible.
The diagnosis of state fragility demands this same architectural temperament today. Nigeria’s security crisis is narrated, almost universally, at the level of events: the attack, the abduction, the reprisal, the press release, the lament.
But events are symptoms. Framework builders map systems. They move beneath the surface of occurrence to identify the structural arrangements generating those occurrences — the incentive structures, the sovereignty vacuums, the institutional failures that are not aberrations but outputs of a deeper logic.
His engagement with federal design, regional autonomy, and constitutional engineering reflected an understanding of governance not as administration alone, but as institutional geometry.
Awolowo‘s method remains not only valid but urgently necessary.
Chinweizu Ibekwe: The Mandate of the Intellectual Border Guard
If Azikiwe built the communications laboratory and Awolowo built the architectural method, Chinweizu performed a different but equally indispensable function. He stood watch.
Chinweizu‘s role was expressed not only through critique but through conceptual production. Among his notable interventions was Culturecide — his framework describing the systematic erosion, displacement, and destruction of indigenous cultural systems through external domination and internalised dependency. It was an attempt to name a process that conventional political language often failed to capture: the destruction of a people’s civilisational software while the institutional hardware of the state remained formally intact.
Through works such as The West and the Rest of Us (1975) and Decolonising the African Mind (1987), Chinweizu issued one of the sharpest warnings in Nigerian — and indeed African — intellectual history: the danger of mental capture. He challenged imported analytical vocabularies with a directness that was, by design, confrontational. He questioned the dependence on external civilisational lenses for interpreting African realities. He argued, with sustained rigour and deliberate provocation, that a society which cannot explain itself to itself in its own conceptual terms is a society that remains, whatever its formal independence, intellectually colonised.
His role was that of an intellectual border guard. Not merely a critic — a guardian of the threshold between conceptual sovereignty and conceptual dependency.
The challenge Chinweizu issued has not expired. It has, if anything, intensified. For every contemporary Nigerian thinker, his questions remain active and uncomfortable: Where are your own tools? What indigenous vocabulary explains your society? What framework have you built rather than borrowed? What analytical structure emerges from your own reading of your own conditions — rather than from the application of a foreign theoretical template to a local dataset?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the standard by which any serious tradition of framework building must measure itself.
The Lineage and Its Continuation
Azikiwe built both the communications laboratory and the ideological architecture of Zikism. Awolowo built the architectural method of state design. Chinweizu defended conceptual sovereignty while naming the dangers of civilisational erosion through frameworks such as Culturecide.
Together, they constitute a tradition — dispersed across time, never formalised as a school, but coherent in its underlying conviction: that the most consequential intellectual work is the construction of original frameworks capable of explaining a society to itself.
The Insecurity Triad is offered in continuity with that tradition. It is an attempt, specific to this moment and these conditions, to construct an indigenous diagnostic framework for Nigeria’s security crisis and its relationship to state decay — one that does not merely apply existing theory but builds the conceptual architecture from the ground up, from the evidence of Nigerian and Sahelian experience, on its own terms.
The tradition is older than any single framework. What matters is that it continues — that each generation of Nigerian thinkers refuses the false comfort of borrowed explanation and accepts, instead, the more demanding obligation of original construction.
Nations are sustained not only by institutions, but by the concepts through which they understand themselves.
That obligation is not academic. It is civilisational.
A Note on This Moment
This is the twelfth edition of The Sunday Stew.
Three months ago, this column launched with a single ambition: to occupy a different intellectual space — one between journalism and scholarship, between immediate events and deeper structures, where Nigeria’s crises could be examined not only through reportage or theory, but through original reflection and framework construction. What has emerged from that ambition has exceeded the original brief.
In twelve editions, this column has produced two original analytical frameworks. The Insecurity Triad — theorising the mechanism by which armed networks sustain themselves relative to state authority through the convergence of a ransom economy, land contestation, and ideological capture — has been presented and deposited across six scholarly repositories, and has received scholarly engagement.
It has increasingly moved beyond commentary toward contribution within debates on the Nigerian state.
The Trinity of State Decay, developed as its companion diagnostic, theorises the structural condition that the Triad sustains: a decoupling into rival sovereignties, in which the state performs authority it no longer possesses while shadow orders exercise authority the state has vacated.
These are not borrowed frameworks dressed in local language. They were built here, in this column, for this crisis.
That is what this lineage — from Azikiwe to Awolowo to Chinweizu — ultimately demands: not admiration, but continuation. The Sunday Stew is, in its modest but deliberate way, an attempt to honour that demand.
Twelve editions. Two frameworks. The work continues.
Trust is Sacred. Stay Seasoned.
Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad and Trinity of State Decay. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.
X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
I will always refer to the encounter I once had with Kenneth Idiodi. He was then the leader of the Rosicrucian Society in Nigeria, otherwise known as Amok. It was a sit-down at Zodiac Hotel Enugu. Then, I was the reporter of The Guardian in the Coal City.
You know the Amok faith bases its philosophy or belief on the law of Retributive Justice – the law of Karma. That is to say, everything you do in life has its rewards or punishment in equal measure – much like the measure you give, the measure you receive.
I don’t know how much this society draws or links this belief from or with the Bible, but I do recall Jesus Christ warning Simon Peter – return your sword to the scabbard – for he who kills by the sword, dies by the sword.
As a child growing up I listened to one of the epics of Oriental Brothers with the lyrics – ogbu mma ga-esi n’mma na, ogba egbe ga-esi n’egbe na ooo! Translated – he who kills by the sword will die by the sword, he who kills by the gun will die by the nozzle of the gun.
Now, here is where this is relevant in present Nigerian reality – the reason I’m putting details of that encounter out publicly once again, having done so previously.
During that encounter, Idiodi used one event in Nigeria to illustrate his point. He told me of a Nigerian leader who commanded the troop that carried out the Asaba massacre in the heat of the Nigerian civil war – an episode, said to have claimed over 2,000 able-bodied men who had come out to welcome the Nigerian soldiers with songs and dances only to fall in the hail of bullets that descended on them like rainstorms – was not spared by fate.
That commander was to meet his own death in a hail of bullets even as a Head of State. He never mentioned the name of the military top brass. But I used my tongue to count my teeth to come to the answer. You could also do same – use your tongue.
Now, how does this relate? You may have followed the outing of General Yakubu Gowon at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, where he presented his autobiography titled: My Life of Duty and Allegiance, that contained what seemed his memoir on the Nigerian civil war, which he prosecuted as Head of State.
I’m sure you must have been observing the debate therefrom that event. Now, I’m not so much enamoured of the debate as I’m of the nuances surrounding that unfortunate episode and the role of Gowon in it, given my takeaway from that Idiodi encounter some two decades ago.
Does Gowon, now a nonagenarian really believe that presenting a pious, if not saintly account of himself to the world as snippets of his book, which I picked up here and there suggests, truly suffices for the atrocities of that period?
Take the Asaba massacre for example. Was that the handiwork of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, whom the former Head of State seems to blame for everything that went wrong. Was he also the one that commanded that mass slaughtering of innocent men?
Under your nose as Head of State, you watched citizens slaughtered mercilessly like infested herds in the streets – you watched young girls corralled into leprosy colonies and wantonly raped before being wasted – you watched as train coaches bearing people fleeing the scene were stopped and their human cargoes thrown alive into River Benue like rotten goods for fishes to feast on – you watched all these and didn’t lift a finger.
Then as Head of State, you not only supervised but watched millions of children with distended stomachs, tiny feet, glazy eyes, heavy heads on ropelike necks, practically begging for death to come quickly and save them from further punishment.
You supervised and watched the cataclysmic eruptions from the blitzkrieg on churches, markets and hospitals – all to keep Nigeria together. In your mind the brutal and merciless butchery of innocent people who were not soldiers and had nothing to do with the war could be explained away just like that?
O! It was Ojukwu that caused it. Ojukwu was the one who released the bombs, caused the blockades that led to the kwashiorkor that killed millions or other atrocities thereof? What a pity!
Now, I return to Idiodi. How else could anyone interpret today’s Nigeria without introducing the law of retributive justice that the Amok leader spoke of? How do you fault the link of the commander who massacred over 2,000 souls dying by the barrel of the same gun, even as Head of State?
How could anyone fail to relate what is happening to our Gowon today with the past? This is a Geneal that wakes up to see hundreds of his brothers and sisters being buried in mass graves as was done during the onslaught he supervised against another people and he still thinks it has nothing to do with him?
Now, the story you told at that event in Abuja on Tuesday, is not new. You simply repeated yourself. My interpretation of that event is that you’re a man undergoing daily torture. You wouldn’t be a human being otherwise, given what is before you, which didn’t start today.
You’re probably trying to escape your fate by appealing to public sympathy. How helpful could that be in the face of the clear evidence of your culpability in the deliberate wasting of more than three million souls? Nobody would believe you.
Yes! They could humour you. But that’s the best anyone could do for you. I hear money rained like a fountain and that you left the scene with billions of naira in your kitty. At 90? Haba General!
Now, here is the thing General. None of these would help.
None would work. You have tried prayers. But you forget that the prayer of sinner is an abomination and a reproach before God, unless he repents. You have also written the book. Surely, this too would end up in the trashcan of history – meaningless piece of conjectures, propaganda, half-truths and outright lies – perhaps!
But, why don’t you try the one thing you have been running away from, for more than five decades – go on your knees in total supplication and surrender, repentance and penance – then rise, call all Nigerians and empty yourself with the truth.
Thereafter openly apologise to the millions of souls whose tormenting wailing you probably hear every day during your disturbed sleep and in your quiet moments, but choose to suppress with these baby tales. Ask them for forgiveness, genuinely and see. There may lie the answer you seek.
Try that and see if it wouldn’t be a more efficacious cure for this decades-old wound than this Ojukwu-bashing and those wasted prayer sessions. You might not only have atoned for the past, but saved the future. May God guide you.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice
“Now that the court has ruled against it, we are sure that, in the coming days, we will witness a mass exodus from the ruling party,” were the words with which the African Democratic Congress (ADC) welcomed Wednesday’s ruling of the Federal High Court, Abuja reversing the deadline for party primaries, among others.
Bolaji Abdullahi, spokesman, who conveyed the party’s excitement over the development, said it viewed the ruling as vindication of its objections to key aspects of the electoral body’s guidelines at the time they were issued.
Recalling its specific objections to the strict timelines on membership registration as well as the conduct of party primaries, the statement, said: “The decision of the court on these issues, including those that directly contradict the constitution, is therefore a welcome vindication of our position.”
Stressing that the ruling, which removed the impediment placed by the guidelines on politicians who wished to seek alternative platforms to contest elections, was a positive development that would promote freedom of association, the statement, added: “We believed at the time that that particular restriction was designed to prevent people from leaving the ruling party, APC.”
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