Chikelubawritings

In 1968, Stanislav Andrzejewski, the former Polish soldier and prisoner-of-war, who later founded the Sociology Department at the University of Reading in England, coined the word ‘kleptocracy”, which he defined as “a system of government [that] consists precisely of the practice of selling what the law forbids to sell.” He saw in the system of Nigeria’s First Republic, “the most perfect example of a kleptocracy” in which “power rested on the ability to bribe”. According to Andrzejewski, the defining characteristic of a kleptocracy “is that the functioning of the organs of authority is determined by the mechanisms of supply and demand rather than the laws and regulations.” In a democracy, there are two things access to which should not be determined by the economic laws of  buying and selling . One is the legitimacy of government; the other is the authority of the courts in the  administration  of justice. Today in Nigeria, however, the authority to govern is conferred no...

A viral, contentious dialogic confrontation between Arise TV’s Rufai Oseni and one Jesutega Onokpasa, identified as a lawyer and “APC chieftain,” on October 30 has once again centralized conversations about who a journalist is and what constitutes journalism, which I’d addressed in previous columns. In the exchange, Oseni asked Onokpasa a legitimate, well-chosen question about the deleterious consequences of the removal of fuel subsidies on ordinary citizens and on the national economy. Onokpasa tried to prevaricate. He said Tinubu didn’t remove fuel subsidies. Buhari did before he left. That’s technically true, but it was Tinubu’s recklessly precipitous and ill-advised announcement in his inaugural speech that subsidies were gone for good that sparked an instantaneous but totally unjustified spiraling of the cost of petrol, which also touched off a devastating hyperinflationary inferno that’s still consuming Nigeria. As any journalist invested in the pursuit of the truth should do, Os...

Efforts to get justice and overturn the victory of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress (APC) at the February 25 polls by Peter Obi of Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) finally ended in fiasco at the Supreme Court. The apex court as envisioned simply toed the line of the lower tribunal, upheld the election of Tinubu and dismissed the appeals of both petitioners for lacking in merit. What this implies according to the seven-man Justices led by James Iyang Okoro was that the election was free, fair, credible and had substantially complied with the electoral laws, guidelines and the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria. The summary of the judgment in a layman’s language means that challenging the declaration of Tinubu as president was simply a waste of time.   Some salient questions deserved to be raised at this juncture of our national political and economic life. Was justice really done in both tribunal and the Su...