News

Tinubu’s certificate saga: Now, Gani’s spirit can truly rest in peace – Atiku

Published

3 years ago

October 5, 2023

“Gani’s soul can now rest in peace. The task he started is now completed,” were the words of Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February 25 election, as he underscored the import of the release of Tinubu’s academic records by the Chicago State University as ordered by a US court.

Atiku, armed with the document, which he said contradicted Tinubu’s submission to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), at a world press conference in Abuja, said that the soul of late legal icon, Gani Fawehinmi, would now rest in peace following the discovery of the truth on the (CSU) record.

Atiku, who recalled that 23 years ago, Gani Fawehinmi began the process of unravelling the mystery surrounding Tinubu’s educational claim in Chicago, said the late fiery human rights activist had been vindicated.

Tinubu, ahead of the 1999 election, had as candidate of Alliance for Democracy (AD), in the run for the governorship of Lagos State, had claimed that he attended Government College Ibadan and the University of Chicago.

Gani Fawehinmi argued in court that the claims were false. But he could not proceed with the case because Tinubu enjoyed constitutional immunity as Governor of Lagos State.

Apart from Faweihinmi, Atiku, also paid tribute to investigative journalist, David Hundeyin and millions of other young Nigerians who continued to put the truth about Tinubu on social media even when nobody was listening.

He said the quest against Tinubu was carried out to expose the truth. He appealed to his counterparts in the Labour Party, Peter Obi, and New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso to join him in redeeming the image and respect of Nigeria as he takes the evidence he obtained from the U.S. to the Supreme Court.

During the questions and answer session, Atiku denied the claim that Tinubu was his benefactor.

He said it was true that in 2007, Tinubu offered him the Action Congress of Nigeria platform to contest the presidency. Atiku said shortly afterwards, Tinubu withdrew the support because he (Atiku) refused to accept Tinubu as his running mate. Atiku said Tinubu decided to support the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, the candidate of the PDP in the election.

Atiku said in 2003, he was the one who prevailed against Obasanjo not to take Lagos State from Tinubu during the PDP tsunami in the South West. PDP swept all the states in the election except Lagos.

When asked if he was not worried about a backlash to his business interest in Nigeria by fighting the president, Atiku said whatever interest he had with the government was already terminated by then-President Muhammadu Buhari. According to Atiku, none of his businesses has a relationship with the government.

On what exactly he discovered about Tinubu’s records, Atiku asked a lawyer to address the issues.

The lawyer, Kalu Kalu listed the issues, including;

The Certificate Bola Tinubu submitted to INEC did not emanate from Chicago State University
The Qualifying Certificate from South West College used by Tinubu to gain admission to CSU, bears female which clearly means it does not belong to him.
In the CSU documents, Tinubu attended Government College Lagos and graduated in 1970. The said school came into existence only in 1974. It also means the Government College Lagos document is a forgery.
In the CSU document, Tinubu has American citizenship. But Tinubu swore under oath in an INEC form that he does not have any citizenship other than Nigerian citizenship.
In the CSU document, the initial ‘A’ in Tinubu’s name is Adekunle. Whereas, the ‘A’ in President Tinubu’s public record is Ahmed.

The lawyer also dismissed the claim that the evidence would not be admitted by the Supreme Court. He said in several rulings of the apex court, parties can present fresh evidence once certain conditions are met. He said the court cases in the U.S. has satisfied that requirement.

Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the February poll, Atiku Abubakar, has dismissed claims that he betrayed President Bola Tinubu during their political alignment in 2007.

At a press conference on Thursday, Atiku said that instead of the narrative of betrayal, Tinubu is indebted to him for standing up to former President Olusegun Obasanjo who wanted to take control of Lagos.

“Those of you who are old enough will also remember that in 2003, the PDP took over all the South-Western states, with the exception of Lagos. I stood between Obasanjo and himself (Tinubu) and I said no, you (Obasanjo) can’t take over Lagos. Leave it and he (Obasanjo) left it. So, who is indebted to whom? Is it me or Bola Ahmed Tinubu?

“There are other things which I will not want to go into, Atiku called on other political leaders such as Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso to join his camp in the fight to unseat Tinubu.

He said: “This quest is not for or about Atiku Abubakar. It is a quest for the enthronement of truth, morality, and accountability in our public affairs. In line with this, therefore, I am calling on all well-meaning Nigerians, leaders of thought, our religious leaders, our traditional leaders, our community leaders, our political leaders, and in particular, Governor Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP and, the leaders of every political party in Nigeria, and, indeed, every single person who loves this country, as I do, and who wishes nothing but the best for the country, as I do, to join me in this campaign to enshrine probity, accountability and the basic principles of justice, morality and uprightness in our country and in our government. This is a task for each and every one of us.”

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Columns

The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay

Published

14 hours ago

June 14, 2026

Whirlwindnews

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

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Editorial

Rabe Abubakar et al: Different military, shame of a nation!

Published

14 hours ago

June 14, 2026

Whirlwindnews

What does Dura community of Dura-Du area of Jos South Local of Area of Plateau State, 2018, Okporo, Ihuoma and Amaifeke communities in the Orlu Local Government Area of Imo State, 2022, and Okuama community of Ughelli South Local Government Area of Delta State 2024 have in common? Do they ring a bell?

Certainly! They are just a few of many demonstrable examples of military anger, recently on display in the Nigerian polity. Here are some details.

In September, 2018, Idris Alkali, was declared missing. The retired Major General of the Nigerian Army, was said to be travelling through Jos, Plateau State to Bauchi when he disappeared.

Reactions: The army came calling! In what they termed “search and rescue operation,” soldiers descended on communities along the route. It was a brutal exercise – the imprimatur of military operations. The youths of the communities, especially Dura-Du area in Jos, virtually disappeared into the bush or scampered out of town to escape the blitzkrieg.

Scores of the unlucky ones who fell into the wide net they cast on the entire area, meant to drag everyone in, regardless of status, were reportedly subjected to some of the most harrowing experiences they might not forget in their lifetimes.

The situation even worsened when the remains of the ex-military top brass was discovered in a disused well in one of the communities. That was when war was actually declared on the people in their bid to fish out the supposed culprits – albeit – military style.

Even after more than four years, the people of Okporo, Ihuoma and Amaifeke communities, are still nursing the physical and psychological wounds they sustained in the hands of the military who came visiting in April 2022.

Their only crime was to be the host of a hot gun battle between soldiers and elements said to be members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), during an ambush, which reportedly left casualties on both sides.

Many reportedly lost their homes and businesses in inferno, as the soldiers who descended on the communities, reportedly set many facilities on fire outside mowing down many residents, who they termed IPOB members.

What about Okuama? The case of the Delta community perhaps the freshest in mind. There, residents are still reeling in the pain inflicted on them in similar circumstances as their counterparts in Plateau and Imo, following the military operations that took place after some 16 personnel, including two officers were reportedly ambushed and killed by natives.

Tukur Gusau, then spokesman of Defence Headquarters (DHQ), Nigeria’s seat of military authorities, who reported that the troops from the 181 Amphibious Battalion were deployed in the Bomadi region and were on a peace-keeping mission in the Okuoma community when they were killed, had indicated that there would be grave consequences.

That promise was kept to the letter, with virtually nobody escaping the wrath of the military, from the ordinary citizens, the community leaders and even the traditional institutions. Even the fishes in the river and trees in the forest of the Niger Delta community, felt the anger of the soldiers.

Now, the question: Where is that anger today? On Saturday, Nigeria and its citizens were dazed from the hangover of another celebration of Democracy Day with the news of Abubakar Rabe, a retired Major General and former spokesman of the Nigerian Army.

The ex-military boss, just retired after more than three decades of service to country, died like an infected chicken in the hands of some rag-tag ruffians, unfit to polish his military boots when he was in service, who took him hostage and detained him in the bush in the last two weeks.

Yes, for two weeks, Rabe, who was abducted alongside his wife while travelling through Katsina, a hotbed of terrorist activities in Nigeria, was kept in the bush in a decrepit condition with signs of obvious failing health quite evident.

There was even a video of him begging the authorities including the Katsina State Government to come to his rescue, all which failed to get any positive result until he eventually took a bow on Friday, the same day the same country he served were celebrating what they termed – Democracy Day. What an irony!

Neither the central government under President Bola Tinubu, Katsina or the military authorities to whom he devoted his youth, could lift a finger to help him, or his wife, whose fate even remains unknown after the sad incident. What a nation!

But Rabe Abubakar is not an isolated case. Maharazu Tsiga (rtd), a Brigadier General and former Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) was abducted by bandits from his hometown in Bakori Local Government Area of Katsina State, spent 56 days in captivity before eventually regaining his freedom, while Rabi’u Garba Yandoto, a retired colonel and two of his children were abducted along the Gusau-Tsafe road in Zamfara State, also spent 10 days in captivity before regaining freedom.

They were the lucky ones. Others who were not that lucky, never lived to tell their story. One of them was Musa Uba. The late Brigadier General, and former Commander of the 25 Task Force Brigade, was leading his men and members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) when insurgents struck.

The attack, which reportedly happened along the Damboa–Biu axis, led to the killing of four operatives: two soldiers and two CJTF members.

However, Uba, who reportedly escaped the initial ambush, was again encircled by the terrorists as he was communicating with military authorities on how to be rescued and returned to base. He was captured and subsequently killed.

Again, on April 8, 2026, Oseni Omoh Braimah, another Brigadier General Commander of the 29 Task Force Brigade, under Operation Hadin Kai, also met a fatal fate in the hands of the same Boko Haram -ISWAP fighters.

They were said to have launched a coordinated, midnight assaults on military formations in Benisheikh, a strategic town in the Kaga Local Government Area of Borno State.

Before then, Alex Bardeh, a retired Air Vice-Marshal and former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) was killed on December 18, 2018 by hoodlums who attacked his convoy on the Keffi- Kaduna Expressway while he was returning from his farm on the border between Nasarawa State and the Federal Capital Territory.

Ironically, all these tragedies took place under the nose of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a party, which, before assuming power in 2015, had made a song and dance of how they were going to offer Nigerians a breather from what they saw then as the parlous condition of the Nigerian polity, particularly in insecurity.

Interestingly, the government of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which they heavily assailed as incompetent and clueless in arresting the situation, did not count a single case of a General being killed in such a manner.

Today, the terrorists who had hitherto seemed to be acting scared by hitting soft targets and disappearing, now appear quite frontal unfazed.

They no longer limit themselves to civilian targets. Outside kidnapping and outright carnages on civilians, which are now daily stories, they have since upped the ante – hitting even some of the highly-fortified military bases, slaughtering soldiers at will.

After Alex Bardeh, Musa Uba, Omo Braimah and now Abubakar Rabe, the question that seems quite natural now, is who is next? The other question, is where is the notorious Military Anger that kept the polity in check and the nation safe?

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News

BREAKING: Two weeks after, Rabe Abubakar, retired General, dies in kidnapper’s den!

Published

2 days ago

June 13, 2026

Whirlwindnews

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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