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Tinubu is gone – Babachir *Shettima, Okowa, 20 govs lost their states in 2023
If 21 governors including Ifeanyi Okowa, running mate to Atiku Abubakar in the 2023 presidential election could lose their states in the presidential election and a “special magic” had to be performed to save Kashim Shettima, the Vice President from embarrassment of losing his home Borno State, nobody should lose sleep even if the entire governor of the 36 states empty into the same party.
This was the response of Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) to the mass defection of political office holders including state governors into the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), in support of the re-election of President Bola Tinubu.
A guest of The Morning Show, a breakfast programme on ARISE NEWS television network, the former SGF, said nobody should lose sleep over the development as electoral victory resided with the people and not the governors or any other political figure, as they were incapable of influencing anything.
The former SGF said the former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, is a committed and active member of the group championing the coalition campaign to wrest power from President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2027.
Lawal, also took a swipe at governors and political leaders from the North West, who recently endorsed Tinubu, saying their was no basis for doing so since their zone has remained the most ravaged by activities of criminals in the mode of terrorists and bandits, adding all they did was to lie and deceive the people.
His words: Most of the politicians that are defecting to APC are probably driven by the desire to safeguard their stomachs and to safeguard their luxurious lifestyles that they had acquired while in government, using the people’s money. To them, it’s okay. They can go that way because that’s what they chose to do.
“As for defections, I saw a study last week that showed that 21 governors could not deliver their states to their preferred candidates, which means that the governors have little influence on the voter at the polling unit. Yes, within the party platforms, they have their influences. They can rig the party primaries. A Senator for example who is out of favour with his governor is endangered in that sense because the governor might not give him his return ticket. He could just order everybody not to vote for him.
“But no governor can influence the voter. Take for example, Delta State. The Vice-Presidential candidate for PDP was the serving governor on seat. But he could not deliver. Peter Obi beat them flat. In those days, they will say he lost deposit. In Borno State, it is well-known that the Vice President could not deliver Borno State to the APC until they did magic on the result so that he’s not embarrassed.
“But he knows, the voters know that he was disgraced woefully. So, defection is nothing. It is just the character of the person. Somebody without character will easily abandon you when his interest is threatened rather than when the interest of the masses are threatened.
“So, that is my position, we’re not bothered about defections. It will continue to happen. In 2027, we’ll go to the polls and we’ll see the result. People from the North West shamelessly gathered themselves, drank tea and coffee and said they endorse Bola Tinubu. To do what? “There’s no place in the North West that is safe. The poverty level in the North West is so huge and so terrible, much more than anywhere else. If their so-called leaders choose that it is the path they want, then, good luck. But everybody knows that they’re just liars. They’re deceiving themselves and they’re deceiving their own people.
“If somebody from the Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna, says he’s endorsing Tinubu because his security policies are working, he’s a shameless liar. Whatever induced them to say that is between them and their God and their conscience. But Nigerians know that it is not so. Insecurity has now grown; in places it was not before, it has expanded. They have not done anything.
“This government should better not talk about insecurity. When talking about it, about the economy, it is exactly the same thing. The poverty has multiplied exponentially. Even those who were doing well feel now threatened because there’s no economy, it has collapsed, completely collapsed.
“We are just surviving by the grace of God on a hand to mouth basis, everybody. So what economy? They are putting money that doesn’t arrive in Nigeria before it is spent, even when it arrives in Nigeria, they spend it on intangible things that we cannot show, that are not visible, you know.
“Economy is not for this government, it is not their intention, their attention is to run down this country. That is their intention. But now, it appeared that he just deceived us in those days all along, and now he has gotten the power and is in the mood to ruin the economy, to ruin the security of the country.”
The former APC chieftain, also spoke about the coalition of political leaders in Nigeria to end the tenure of Tinubu, in which he acknowledged being deeply involved say the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had no place in it, having been infested with an “incurable virus.”
His words: “In all the meetings I’ve attended so far, nobody has ever bothered about adopting the PDP as the platform. We all agree that PDP has an incurable virus. No anti-biotics can cure what is ailing the PDP and we don’t want to go into a house that we cannot modify that is not willing to change.”
Nigerians have been warned to be on the lookout during the festive period this week, as Muslims across the world mark the Eid-Kabir, authorities of the Nigerian Army, warned on Monday, as intelligence has filtered in that terrorists would use the opportunity to launch attacks against civilian targets.
Sani Uba, a Colonel and spokesman of the Joint Task Force of the military in a statement, warned the general public to be on security alert, citing indications of the possibility of isolated attempts by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists to exploit the
Sani, Media Information Officer, Headquarters Joint Task Force (North East) Operation HADIN KAI, who noted that the strikes would employ the use of suicide bombers and IEDs, particularly in areas of high population concentration, however, assured that the military had deployed troops and surveillance, and fully activated ISR assets to critical and vulnerable locations ahead of the Wednesday celebrations.
He said in the statement: “Patrols have been intensified, and security forces are operating in close coordination with sister agencies, the CJTF, and community vigilance groups to forestall any threat and guarantee a secure festive period for all residents.
The statement, further advise the public to conduct Eid prayers and festivities as close to their homes and familiar localities as possible, and avoid large open gatherings where practicable, adding: “Exercise heightened vigilance in crowded public spaces such as markets, motor parks, banking halls, and prayer grounds.
“Report any suspicious persons, unattended objects, or unusual movements to the nearest military checkpoint, police station, or civil-military liaison point immediately.
“Cooperate fully with security personnel during patrols and screening operations. Avoid unnecessary movement, particularly at night or in areas with limited security presence. Refrain from spreading unverified information or rumours capable of causing public panic. Rely only on official information from verified government and security channels.”
Stressing the roles of traditional rulers, religious leaders, media organisations, and community stakeholders to actively engage their communities and encourage the timely reporting of credible security information ahead of and during the celebration period, the statement said: “Your cooperation with security forces remains invaluable to the success of ongoing operations
“The Command remains resolute in its determination to deny terrorists any freedom of action and ensure that the Eid El Kabir celebrations proceed in an atmosphere of peace, safety, and dignity for all. The Theatre Command wishes the entire Muslim community a peaceful and rewarding Eid El Kabir celebration.”
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The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders
By Max Amuchie
Last Sunday, I indicated that this week’s edition of The Sunday Stew would pay tribute to the late political economist and public intellectual, Claude Ake. That tribute remains, but its timing has shifted. Later this year will mark the 30th anniversary of his passing — a more fitting moment to revisit the life and legacy of one of Africa’s most consequential intellectual minds. Until then, this column turns to a related but less discussed tradition in Nigerian thought: the rare lineage of framework builders who operated outside the academy yet reshaped how society understood itself.
Nigeria’s intellectual landscape faces a persistent challenge: not the total absence of indigenous frameworks, but their relative scarcity and limited institutional consolidation. Much of our analytical vocabulary still arrives pre-assembled from elsewhere — adapted to Nigerian conditions rather than born from them. We reach habitually for tools forged in other fires, calibrated for other crises, and carrying the residue of other civilisational assumptions. The consequence is not merely intellectual dependency. It is explanatory incompleteness. Borrowed frameworks, however sophisticated, can illuminate local realities, but they do not always capture the structures beneath them.
Yet Nigeria has never been entirely without its own framework builders. What it has lacked is not indigenous conceptual production itself, but its sustained institutionalisation. Alongside the academy, it has historically produced another tradition — rarer, more independent, and deeply sovereign in character.
It is a tradition built largely beyond university faculties and disciplinary boundaries. Its practitioners did not merely interpret events; they created new conceptual vocabularies. They refused inherited explanatory tools when those tools proved insufficient, choosing instead to engineer indigenous frameworks for immediate national and civilisational questions. Their objective was not institutional approval but conceptual sovereignty.
This is the elite class of Nigeria’s framework builders. And it is within this largely extra-academic lineage — one operating beyond the formal boundaries of university production and disciplinary gatekeeping — that figures such as Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu emerge — not merely as statesmen or writers, but as framework builders. Each refused the role of interpreter. Each chose, instead, the more demanding vocation of architect.
Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Newsroom as Primary Laboratory
To understand what Azikiwe accomplished, one must resist the temptation to reduce him to his political biography — to the president, the governor-general, the nationalist icon. These are accurate descriptions, but they obscure the more foundational achievement. Before Azikiwe was any of those things, he was a theorist of communications power.
His intellectual contribution extended beyond communications infrastructure into explicit framework construction. Through Zikism in Africa and works such as Renascent Africa and Liberia in World Politics, he advanced a political philosophy centred on spiritual balance, social regeneration, mental emancipation, economic reconstruction, and political resurgence. Zikism was not merely nationalist rhetoric. It was an indigenous ideological framework — an attempt to articulate a distinctly African vocabulary for liberation, modernity, and civilisational renewal.
Azikiwe understood, with unusual clarity for his era, that newspapers were not passive instruments of reportage. They were engines of consciousness formation. Through The West African Pilot, launched in 1937, he built a mass communications infrastructure designed not merely to inform but to manufacture national awareness where none yet existed in consolidated form. The newsroom became a laboratory of political imagination.
The West African Pilot therefore functioned not only as a newspaper but as the transmission mechanism for Zikism itself — a vehicle through which ideas moved from theory into public consciousness.
This was framework building in the most consequential sense: the creation of a conceptual technology — the politically purposive newsroom — that could transform the relationship between a population and its own self-understanding.
Azikiwe drew from global traditions of activist journalism but adapted them into a distinctly West African instrument of nationalist mobilisation.
The lesson for the contemporary era is unmistakable, and uncomfortable. The modern digital newsroom has, in large measure, abandoned this mandate. Optimised for traffic, calibrated for virality, and disciplined by the imperatives of advertising revenue, it has become a largely reactive institution — faster than its predecessors, but shallower in purpose. Azikiwe‘s example issues a rebuke and a challenge in equal measure: the newsroom cannot survive, in any meaningful civilisational sense, as a purely commercial machine. It must recover its older mandate as a theory laboratory — a place where original socio-political frameworks are serialised, tested, refined, and introduced into the public square. The medium has changed. The obligation has not.
Obafemi Awolowo: The Geometry of State Architecture
Where Azikiwe worked through the newsroom, Awolowo worked through the monograph. And where Azikiwe’s primary instrument was consciousness, Awolowo’s was structure.
Awolowo approached the Nigerian state with something that can only be described as geometric discipline. He did not merely criticise colonial administration or lament political dysfunction. He subjected the Nigerian project to systematic, structural examination. Through works such as Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) and Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (1966), he mapped constitutional arrangements, regional balances, socio-economic organisation, and the friction points embedded within the federation with a precision that distinguished him from his contemporaries. He treated governance as architecture — as a designed system with load-bearing elements, stress points, and the capacity to collapse if its internal logic was violated.
This temperament is what separates framework builders from analysts. The analyst produces interpretation. The framework builder produces a map of the system generating the events that require interpretation. Awolowo was interested not in the headline but in the structure producing the headline — and he was willing to do the painstaking intellectual labour of rendering that structure visible and legible.
The diagnosis of state fragility demands this same architectural temperament today. Nigeria’s security crisis is narrated, almost universally, at the level of events: the attack, the abduction, the reprisal, the press release, the lament.
But events are symptoms. Framework builders map systems. They move beneath the surface of occurrence to identify the structural arrangements generating those occurrences — the incentive structures, the sovereignty vacuums, the institutional failures that are not aberrations but outputs of a deeper logic.
His engagement with federal design, regional autonomy, and constitutional engineering reflected an understanding of governance not as administration alone, but as institutional geometry.
Awolowo‘s method remains not only valid but urgently necessary.
Chinweizu Ibekwe: The Mandate of the Intellectual Border Guard
If Azikiwe built the communications laboratory and Awolowo built the architectural method, Chinweizu performed a different but equally indispensable function. He stood watch.
Chinweizu‘s role was expressed not only through critique but through conceptual production. Among his notable interventions was Culturecide — his framework describing the systematic erosion, displacement, and destruction of indigenous cultural systems through external domination and internalised dependency. It was an attempt to name a process that conventional political language often failed to capture: the destruction of a people’s civilisational software while the institutional hardware of the state remained formally intact.
Through works such as The West and the Rest of Us (1975) and Decolonising the African Mind (1987), Chinweizu issued one of the sharpest warnings in Nigerian — and indeed African — intellectual history: the danger of mental capture. He challenged imported analytical vocabularies with a directness that was, by design, confrontational. He questioned the dependence on external civilisational lenses for interpreting African realities. He argued, with sustained rigour and deliberate provocation, that a society which cannot explain itself to itself in its own conceptual terms is a society that remains, whatever its formal independence, intellectually colonised.
His role was that of an intellectual border guard. Not merely a critic — a guardian of the threshold between conceptual sovereignty and conceptual dependency.
The challenge Chinweizu issued has not expired. It has, if anything, intensified. For every contemporary Nigerian thinker, his questions remain active and uncomfortable: Where are your own tools? What indigenous vocabulary explains your society? What framework have you built rather than borrowed? What analytical structure emerges from your own reading of your own conditions — rather than from the application of a foreign theoretical template to a local dataset?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the standard by which any serious tradition of framework building must measure itself.
The Lineage and Its Continuation
Azikiwe built both the communications laboratory and the ideological architecture of Zikism. Awolowo built the architectural method of state design. Chinweizu defended conceptual sovereignty while naming the dangers of civilisational erosion through frameworks such as Culturecide.
Together, they constitute a tradition — dispersed across time, never formalised as a school, but coherent in its underlying conviction: that the most consequential intellectual work is the construction of original frameworks capable of explaining a society to itself.
The Insecurity Triad is offered in continuity with that tradition. It is an attempt, specific to this moment and these conditions, to construct an indigenous diagnostic framework for Nigeria’s security crisis and its relationship to state decay — one that does not merely apply existing theory but builds the conceptual architecture from the ground up, from the evidence of Nigerian and Sahelian experience, on its own terms.
The tradition is older than any single framework. What matters is that it continues — that each generation of Nigerian thinkers refuses the false comfort of borrowed explanation and accepts, instead, the more demanding obligation of original construction.
Nations are sustained not only by institutions, but by the concepts through which they understand themselves.
That obligation is not academic. It is civilisational.
A Note on This Moment
This is the twelfth edition of The Sunday Stew.
Three months ago, this column launched with a single ambition: to occupy a different intellectual space — one between journalism and scholarship, between immediate events and deeper structures, where Nigeria’s crises could be examined not only through reportage or theory, but through original reflection and framework construction. What has emerged from that ambition has exceeded the original brief.
In twelve editions, this column has produced two original analytical frameworks. The Insecurity Triad — theorising the mechanism by which armed networks sustain themselves relative to state authority through the convergence of a ransom economy, land contestation, and ideological capture — has been presented and deposited across six scholarly repositories, and has received scholarly engagement.
It has increasingly moved beyond commentary toward contribution within debates on the Nigerian state.
The Trinity of State Decay, developed as its companion diagnostic, theorises the structural condition that the Triad sustains: a decoupling into rival sovereignties, in which the state performs authority it no longer possesses while shadow orders exercise authority the state has vacated.
These are not borrowed frameworks dressed in local language. They were built here, in this column, for this crisis.
That is what this lineage — from Azikiwe to Awolowo to Chinweizu — ultimately demands: not admiration, but continuation. The Sunday Stew is, in its modest but deliberate way, an attempt to honour that demand.
Twelve editions. Two frameworks. The work continues.
Trust is Sacred. Stay Seasoned.
Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad and Trinity of State Decay. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.
X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
I will always refer to the encounter I once had with Kenneth Idiodi. He was then the leader of the Rosicrucian Society in Nigeria, otherwise known as Amok. It was a sit-down at Zodiac Hotel Enugu. Then, I was the reporter of The Guardian in the Coal City.
You know the Amok faith bases its philosophy or belief on the law of Retributive Justice – the law of Karma. That is to say, everything you do in life has its rewards or punishment in equal measure – much like the measure you give, the measure you receive.
I don’t know how much this society draws or links this belief from or with the Bible, but I do recall Jesus Christ warning Simon Peter – return your sword to the scabbard – for he who kills by the sword, dies by the sword.
As a child growing up I listened to one of the epics of Oriental Brothers with the lyrics – ogbu mma ga-esi n’mma na, ogba egbe ga-esi n’egbe na ooo! Translated – he who kills by the sword will die by the sword, he who kills by the gun will die by the nozzle of the gun.
Now, here is where this is relevant in present Nigerian reality – the reason I’m putting details of that encounter out publicly once again, having done so previously.
During that encounter, Idiodi used one event in Nigeria to illustrate his point. He told me of a Nigerian leader who commanded the troop that carried out the Asaba massacre in the heat of the Nigerian civil war – an episode, said to have claimed over 2,000 able-bodied men who had come out to welcome the Nigerian soldiers with songs and dances only to fall in the hail of bullets that descended on them like rainstorms – was not spared by fate.
That commander was to meet his own death in a hail of bullets even as a Head of State. He never mentioned the name of the military top brass. But I used my tongue to count my teeth to come to the answer. You could also do same – use your tongue.
Now, how does this relate? You may have followed the outing of General Yakubu Gowon at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre, Abuja, where he presented his autobiography titled: My Life of Duty and Allegiance, that contained what seemed his memoir on the Nigerian civil war, which he prosecuted as Head of State.
I’m sure you must have been observing the debate therefrom that event. Now, I’m not so much enamoured of the debate as I’m of the nuances surrounding that unfortunate episode and the role of Gowon in it, given my takeaway from that Idiodi encounter some two decades ago.
Does Gowon, now a nonagenarian really believe that presenting a pious, if not saintly account of himself to the world as snippets of his book, which I picked up here and there suggests, truly suffices for the atrocities of that period?
Take the Asaba massacre for example. Was that the handiwork of Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Biafran leader, whom the former Head of State seems to blame for everything that went wrong. Was he also the one that commanded that mass slaughtering of innocent men?
Under your nose as Head of State, you watched citizens slaughtered mercilessly like infested herds in the streets – you watched young girls corralled into leprosy colonies and wantonly raped before being wasted – you watched as train coaches bearing people fleeing the scene were stopped and their human cargoes thrown alive into River Benue like rotten goods for fishes to feast on – you watched all these and didn’t lift a finger.
Then as Head of State, you not only supervised but watched millions of children with distended stomachs, tiny feet, glazy eyes, heavy heads on ropelike necks, practically begging for death to come quickly and save them from further punishment.
You supervised and watched the cataclysmic eruptions from the blitzkrieg on churches, markets and hospitals – all to keep Nigeria together. In your mind the brutal and merciless butchery of innocent people who were not soldiers and had nothing to do with the war could be explained away just like that?
O! It was Ojukwu that caused it. Ojukwu was the one who released the bombs, caused the blockades that led to the kwashiorkor that killed millions or other atrocities thereof? What a pity!
Now, I return to Idiodi. How else could anyone interpret today’s Nigeria without introducing the law of retributive justice that the Amok leader spoke of? How do you fault the link of the commander who massacred over 2,000 souls dying by the barrel of the same gun, even as Head of State?
How could anyone fail to relate what is happening to our Gowon today with the past? This is a Geneal that wakes up to see hundreds of his brothers and sisters being buried in mass graves as was done during the onslaught he supervised against another people and he still thinks it has nothing to do with him?
Now, the story you told at that event in Abuja on Tuesday, is not new. You simply repeated yourself. My interpretation of that event is that you’re a man undergoing daily torture. You wouldn’t be a human being otherwise, given what is before you, which didn’t start today.
You’re probably trying to escape your fate by appealing to public sympathy. How helpful could that be in the face of the clear evidence of your culpability in the deliberate wasting of more than three million souls? Nobody would believe you.
Yes! They could humour you. But that’s the best anyone could do for you. I hear money rained like a fountain and that you left the scene with billions of naira in your kitty. At 90? Haba General!
Now, here is the thing General. None of these would help.
None would work. You have tried prayers. But you forget that the prayer of sinner is an abomination and a reproach before God, unless he repents. You have also written the book. Surely, this too would end up in the trashcan of history – meaningless piece of conjectures, propaganda, half-truths and outright lies – perhaps!
But, why don’t you try the one thing you have been running away from, for more than five decades – go on your knees in total supplication and surrender, repentance and penance – then rise, call all Nigerians and empty yourself with the truth.
Thereafter openly apologise to the millions of souls whose tormenting wailing you probably hear every day during your disturbed sleep and in your quiet moments, but choose to suppress with these baby tales. Ask them for forgiveness, genuinely and see. There may lie the answer you seek.
Try that and see if it wouldn’t be a more efficacious cure for this decades-old wound than this Ojukwu-bashing and those wasted prayer sessions. You might not only have atoned for the past, but saved the future. May God guide you.
My name is Sunny Igboanugo, I’m The Tiny Voice
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