News
Criticisms from Tinubu’s men: ‘Juvenile fulminations of non-juvenile people’ – Chimamanda
“I’ve seen a few things that people have sent to me and it’s kind of been amusing to read the juvenile fulminations of non-juvenile people,” were the exact words with which popular novelist and activist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, pushed back against her critics in the All Progressives Congress (APC), who went after her for trying to discredit the February 25 presidential election.
The renowned novelist, had last week fired a letter to Joe Biden, US President not to give credence to the flawed election that produced Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu as winner by recognising him, while at the same time questioning the rationale for the congratulatory message already sent by the State Department, which ought to know how bad the election was.
But, her efforts had earned her the vitriol of the APC, with Festus Kenyama, Femi-Fani Kayode and Bayo Onanuga, all spokesmen of the APC Presidential Campaign Council (APC-PCC), not only attacking her person, but also urging the POTUS and his go ernment to ignore and even thrash the letter because it was worthless.
But reacting to the criticisms, while appearing on Prime Time, a current affairs programme on Arise Television, she dismissed the verbal lashing that came with it as not useful adding that as a Nigerian, she had the right and duty to speak out on matters concerning her country.
Hear her: “I don’t think it is useful criticism. I should say first of all, that I’ve never been fazed by criticisms. I wrote this knowing fully well that there would be criticisms from certain quarters. I seen a few things that people have sent to me and it’s kind of been amusing to read the juvenile fulminations of non-juvenile people.
“But that said, I actually tried very hard and I should say that I have two homes – I have a home in Lagos and I have another home here in the US. I’m very often here. I tried very hard to get my PVC and the reason I tried very hard is because I’d been assured that technology would save us – that it had worked in Osun, worked in Ekiti and I think in Anambra – that it would save us. So, I really tried. So, we should also talk about how difficult it was to collect PVCs and how that in itself is a form of voter disenfranchisement. And so, I had done the first part, but I couldn’t collect my PVC. So, yes, I did not vote. But my not voting does not mean that I can’t comment on an election. I’m a Nigerian citizen. Every Nigerian citizen has a right to have an opinion about this election.
“So, when people say that BVAS worked but IReV didn’t work, which is sort of a way of countering the accusation that technology was manipulated, really, the response is, both have to work for the election to be credible. So, BVAS was about making sure that we didn’t have ghost voters and that people who were there actually voted. But that defeats the purpose if you then do not upload the results. You’ve made sure that the real people voted. But those results, we can’t see them in real time, we cannot see them as Prof. Yakubu Mahmood said. He said, and I’m going to quote him because I’ve read it so many times that the public would be able to view the polling unit results as soon as elections are finalised on election day.
“So, I think that is an important thing to talk about and address with the Nigerian people. The Electoral Act, gave INEC the legal backing to have electronic transmission of results and did say in a format that INEC would decide. And we know that format because the Chair of INEC told us what that format would be when he said results would be uploaded at the end of voting from the polling units. That was not done. And it seems to me strange to sort of deflect from that important issue and talk about how someone is not in Nigeria. Those are not the point. The point is what happened?”
She also dismissed any worry about possible legal implications, against the backdrop of threats that she would be sued for her utterances, arguing that any fair-minded person in Nigeria, who was honest enough would acknowledge that the rumours are circulating, was justified given the nebulous nature of the entire process and the silence of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that conducted the election.
“No, I’m not worried at all,” she said, adding: “Again, I think these are what is trying to deflect from what is important and what it is at stake. It will be very useful if people are able to point out what is untrue in the letter.
“I think it is important. We all know these stories about people who complained about how what we voted at the polling units is not what we saw in the result. Yes, there are anecdotes. But I think that gave us useful insight into what happened in that election in a way that all of those anecdotes become a kind of tidal wave of truth-telling. I think the rumours surrounding this election are part of the story this election.
“If you leave a gap in information, people will fill that gap. It is how human minds work. Again, this our country is such a low-trust society and people are so desperate to believe in something and we believe in this election but it doesn’t work out well and nobody gives us convincing reasons. Of course people are going to rumour about people being compromised. Also, our political landscape is steeped in people being compromised. So, I’m not worried about that.
“I think any fair-minded person in this country who is honest will acknowledge that these rumours are circulating. I stated very clearly that there are no evidence for them, but I do think it is important to see in the story of this election that many people are starting to think that what explained what happened is this compromising.
She condemned those trying to tint her position in tribal colours, arguing that terms like “tribesman” with which her identification with Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), was being seen, were such an outdated and strange expression, which said much about whoever was using it.
“I think that kind of accusation is a practice of what psychologists call projecting. You’re doing something, but you accuse someone else of doing it even though they’re not.
I did not support Peter Obi because he’s Igbo as I am. I’m a person who does not take positions lightly. And so, while I very much admire Peter Obi and respect him, there are so many Igbo men I admire and respect, but I’ll never vote for them for President, because I don’t think they’ll make good President. My support for Peter Obi is actually rooted in real things. It’s rooted in my faith in his ability.
“Actually, I got to know Peter Obi years ago when he came to pay homage to my parents because he got to know that my father was the first Professor of Statistics in Nigeria and that my mother had retired as the first female Registrar of the University of Nigeria. So, this man just arrived and said he wanted to pay homage. I was very impressed by that because it showed me how much he values education.
“Then he becomes governor of Anambra State and he takes Anambra State to number one in Education. I remember being impressed by the story of how he had given his personal telephone number to all of the senior prefects in secondary schools in Anambra, which also showed me that he’s interested in what ordinary people think. You just don’t want to hear from the ministries, you want to hear from the students about what is really happening.
“Then his focus on security. He really tackled kidnapping in Anambra. And I also remember that he really clashed with the Anambra elite, when he was tackling insecurity and kidnapping. That showed me that he’s very decisive. He has a bit of a stubborn streak. He’s very focused on things. That’s really why I support him. So, this idea of ethnicity is just really a way of deflecting. Let’s focus on what really matters. It’s unfortunate. Can I just say that it’s only one part of the spectrum that is politicising ethnicity and I think it is very unfortunate. I don’t think most people in Nigeria really care about ethnicity as much as they care of having a country that works.
“We want good leadership. We want the hospitals and the schools and the roads to be good. That affects everyone – Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw – everyone.”
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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