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Igini to Nigerians: You’re not alone, I’m in pain too, I feel so disappointed
Mike Igini, outspoken former Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), in Edo and Akwa Ibom states, has come out to wash his hands of the outcome of the 2023 general elections, saying his advocacy for Nigerians to come out massively and participate was made in good faith, as he believed the process would be credible as promised.
Short of saying he was deceived, Igini, who pointed to his long years of agitation for credible elections, said he was as shocked as many Nigerians about the ugly turn the elections took and was disappointed over the outcome as well.
But the fiery lawyer, whose tenure in Akwa Ibom was marked with a university professor, who was fingered in manipulating elections being sent to prison, also said much of the remedy for rigging in elections rested on the judiciary, maintained that courts must play a role that would instil fears into politicians, who were the purveyors of electoral bad behaviour.
Igini, who spoke in an interview with Vanguard, gave example of Britain, where election rigging was the practice for several centuries until the courts entered into the fray to solve the problem, so much that in more than 100 years, there was no single election petition in the country.
Hear him: “I will never be part of any plot or design to deceive Nigerians, may such a day never come in my life time. My advocacy and passion for free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria did not begin in 2023. Those who have diligently followed my advocacy for election integrity will remember my zealous exertions and subsequent detention in Enugu before and after the annulment of the June 12 Elections in 1993, many also will recall my participation in CODER for electoral reforms after the fiasco that was described as the 2007 general election.
“Those who are keen about elections will also recall how I took the same passion to my supervisory roles in the regulation of the electoral process as a Resident Electoral Commissioner in Cross River, intervention missions in Anambra, lmo state guber elections in both 2011 and 2015, Edo, and later Akwa-Ibom states. Frankly, l don’t think l did anything wrong by the weekly voters’ and civic education that l gave to Nigerians without being paid a dime at a time that l had offers for consultancy that l politely declined because l wanted to be objective in seeing to the implementation of the process that l was part of putting in place before my tenure ended last year.”
“As a lawyer, l feel diminished and ashamed that politicians, majority of whom are not lawyers, semi-educated money-bag politicians could be allowed to bring our noble profession to this level of opprobrium, resentment and distrust from members of the public who no longer respect us because of the unethical conduct of some members of the bar particularly the bench.
“I repeat some members because we have shining members of both the bar and the bench who are exemplary and worthy of emulation. But the very bad ones have ruined our collective reputation. These politicians brag and boast about what they do with members of my constituency to get whatever they want and that is why they are quick at telling opponents to go to court after compromising collation and returning officers.
“Is it not surprising that politicians who go all out to undermine electoral laws and rig elections are the ones that will tell people to go to court ? As noted very correctly by the learned Silk Olisa Agbakoba, recent decision of the Supreme Court like others in favour of individuals that didn’t participate in party primaries has further affected public confidence and this is very unfortunate because of the timing of the decision so close to the 2023 election.”
Calling on the judiciary to always do justice, he added: “Judiciary must stand tall and mighty in defence of democracy and the rule of law. We have to go about solving this problem the way the United Kingdom(UK) itself that introduced Nigeria into election rigging ended electoral rigging and fraud such that for a period of almost 100 years precisely 99 years, there was no post election petition adjudication in England till 2010 with respect to Liberal D
“Historically, the UK was one of the notorious countries noted for vote-buying and election rigging and because of the concern that such practice of use of money could be used by politicians also to capture the judiciary in England by buying judges if the courts were to adjudicate on electoral disputes, allegations of electoral malpractices by way of election petitions were initially determined by parliament and not the courts to insulate the judiciary from potential corruption.
“However, parliament with majority party members expectedly could not deliver electoral justice to opposition petitioners for years. Consequently, it was decided that the courts in England should assume jurisdiction over post election petition, that was how the court became involved. But mindful of the fact that the ills of corruption that prevented justice from being served to petitioners in parliament could be transferred to the courts, parliament had to pass the 1872 secret ballot Act, Electoral corruption and illegal practice Act of 1872 as well as the 1883 ballot Act with range of consequences such as expulsion from parliament, a ban for seven years from politics or for life from politics.
“These were the laws that judges and the courts used strictly in England to do substantive justice to election petitions to discourage potential election rigger politicians in the UK and never hid under technicality that encourages election riggers in Nigeria who are quick to tell people to go to court. Because the courts in England were never a safe haven for election riggers, given that they, politicians linked to election rigging could be banned for life from participation in politics, and with various legislation to strengthen the electoral process free of manipulation and corruption in the UK then as we tried to achieve with the 2022 Act and the BVAS/IREV technology, politicians had to abide by the process because of fear of severe consequences from the courts.
“That is why for a period of almost 100 years, there was no post election petition adjudication in England. The fear of judges by politicians and their judgments on matters of electoral fraud, manipulation and deviation from established electoral laws in England brought sanity to the electoral process in England and ended election rigging.
“Politicians in England and America are afraid of the courts and judges but here in Nigeria, politicians brag about judges as their friends and will get whatever they want from the judiciary. Why can’t we emulate what judges and judiciary did to give meaning and purpose to the ballot as the best means of the expression of the will of the people in a democracy. The judiciary is now the last hope of putting an end to the culture of impunity and election rigging in Nigeria.”
On the criticisms against him that he deceived the public before the elections that the process was going to be credible, the former Edo state REC said: “I can understand the feelings of extreme disappointment, pains and frustrations of fellow country men and women particularly youths, over what was promised and the painful experience they went through during the elections and their unmet expectations.
“We are in this agonising moments of pains together. l have been down emotionally and still in shock over the level of deviation from established laws, issued guidelines and procedures that we all signed into and that l leveraged on, honestly and faithfully to call on Nigerians to participate fully to determine their leaders.”
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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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