News
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.”
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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