News
Raymond Aliga: X-raying a ray of hope for humanity
By Alozie Ibe
Some people don’t like you because your strength reminds them of their weakness. Don’t let the hate slow you down. – Dr Thelma Bryant Davis
There is an African adage – which is very prominent among the Yoruba people – that discourages parents and people generally from comparing children with one another. Specifically, the adage says that if we compare one child with another, we may end up beating the other one who is not doing so well to death. So, it is better we allow all kids of different characters, traits, talents and abilities to grow at their pace and time.
Having digested the theme of this adage, we in Africa over the years have learnt how not to compare two people at all, whether they are kids or adults. So in a family, community, workplace etc, we just silently dispense favours, benefits, commendations, awards, disciplinary actions and punishments on the basis of those who are deserving of any of them.
This is a culture we have to revisit for the purpose of inspiring, especially the younger generation to aspire for greatness. Because of this recent culture and the humility, modesty and fear of God in certain individuals, the fact that these individuals don’t blow their own trumpet, some persons have been seeking to rewrite our recent history and pull wool over the eyes of unsuspecting people by dressing truth as falsehood and packaging heresy as gospel. These people are trying to launch a lie that if we allow them to sustain in the front burner of discourse, it will begin to look like the truth.
Based on recent events in the political landscape of Abia state , we have to begin to separate the wheat from the chaff for the purpose of posterity. Raymond M. Aliga, a proud indigene of Nenu in Obingwa LGA of Abia state, a self-made, wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist par excellence, is one of the underrated titans that I am talking about. A great, patriotic Nigerian who has for decades dominated the business landscape of the state and environs like a colossus and who has now expanded his terrain to Lagos and other parts of the country. An Industrialist of repute, Aliga has over two decades of experience in Shipping and General Marine Consultancy, Oil Field Services, Procurement Services, Construction, Oil and Gas, Hospitality, Agriculture and Manufacturing.
He is a multi-talented personality with a proven record of successfully steering organisations from humble beginnings to limelight. He holds a Masters in Business Administration (MBA), Human Resource Management option from the prestigious Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomosho, Oyo state. He also holds a Post Graduate Diploma (PGD) in Planning (Transport) from Lagos State University (LASU), and a Higher National Diploma (HND) in Shipping Management from the Certified Institute of Shipping, a Maritime University. Aliga is a Chartered Shipping Practitioner having been awarded Associate of the Chartered Institute of Shipping of Nigeria.
In 2005, he founded Allray Maritime Services Limited, an integrated shipping company which commenced operations immediately, offering services in Shipping, Air and Sea freight, LCL Consolidation, Trucking, Project Logistics, General Marine Consultancy, Oil Field Services and Procurement Services.
A restless entrepreneur, Raymond Aliga also founded Goodseed Foundations, which is a co-founder of Australian Academy in Nigeria. The Goodseed Foundation, an Africa-based philanthropic organisation, focuses on vocational training and providing short courses for artisans.
He is also the Chairman of Goodseed Industries with technical college called Kiara De – Luke Academy and with clusters of six industries which include Goodseed Farms Ltd,Integrated Farm, Logistics, De Luke Garment Manufacturing Company Ltd, a company whose specialty is textile and garment production, Logistics De Luke furniture manufacturing company Ltd, that is employing over 100 Abians, Logistics De Luke Construction Company Limited which specialises on construction of all kinds of building and roads, Logistics De Luke Electrical and Logistics De – Luke Fabrications.
Aliga has a strong flair for humanitarianism and hospitality. He is the managing Director of Staywell Hospitality Services Nigeria Limited; operators of Aries Suites Hotel, Osborne Foreshore Estate, lkoyi, Lagos, Nigeria. He serves as a community leader in Abia State, also an Elder of United Evangelical Church.
Mr Aliga is furthermore, a member of the Board of Directors, Vica Hope Foundation (VHF) a humanitarian organisation whose mission is “to provide a platform for enhancing the status of women, teenagers, and children through education, empowerment, welfare, healthcare provisions/ skills development and to undertake interventions in poverty reduction, obnoxious widowhood and teenage girl abuses as well as promote maternal and childcare, women, and children’s rights.”
Democracy, with its accompanying freedom of expression, is however a leveller… The sort of leveller that makes all manners of roadside charlatans and nonentities take advantage of the lack of adequate gatekeeping on social media to spew all sorts of ridiculous stuff against honourable gentlemen who have over the decades toiled day and night to get to the top and build mighty empires that are the envy of all and sundry.
As a result of the failure they have made out of their own below-average lives, some persons have conditioned their warped minds to think that it is impossible for anyone to make it as a result of decent toil or hard work. Because of their criminal mindset which would have made them loot the God’s own state dry if they ever got close to the cookie jar, they think people like Aliga had also depended on illicit money from politics to reach the heights it pleased God to take him to.
Let us however set the records for the sake of posterity, not for the purpose of these shady characters who are obviously uncoachable and can never learn. Aliga’s success in business did not start with the outgoing administration of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu. In fact, it was Aliga’s office that served as Ikpeazu’s campaign office when he aspired to be governor and won in 2015. It is therefore preposterous for people to insinuate or allege that Aliga made his fortunes from illicit funds from the Abia state government under Ikpeazu.
Aliga has for years been making game-changing impacts on the business climate of the state and beyond long before the coming of Governor Ikpeazu. Contrary to the lies the vocal minority would want to feed people with, all sane Abians will agree with me that Aliga has been making impact in philanthropy, human development, employment generation and community development and advancement of Christendom with his legitimate resources years before the coming of Governor Ikpeazu.
It was his contribution to philanthropy and humanitarian causes that earned him the national honour of Member of the Order of Niger (MON), which was bestowed on him by President Muhammadu Buhari last year. Even though he had prior to that time won several awards and commendations locally and internationally, the one from highest authority in a country like Nigeria is a crowning glory of his efforts over the years and a fitting tribute to his sacrifices and impact on his people. In a nutshell, Elder Aliga’s giant strides have over the decades been noticed by the people that matter in Abuja even though envious people do not know that their evil thoughts would never stop the work of God.
For us to be able to build a Nigeria of our dreams and reach the proverbial Promised Land, we have to be a society that gives honour to whom it is due. By the time we elevate the crooked elements among us and rubbish the icons who are deserving of celebration, we give our young ones the wrong impression that hard work doesn’t pay and that cutting corners pays, and by doing so, we destroy our society gradually.
Elder Raymond Mkpuruoma Aliga, MON, deserves better !!!
Ibe, wrote from Aba, Abia State
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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