It was difficult to miss the trending videos, photos and reports of Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike and Naval Officer Lieutenant A. M. Yerima staring each other down at a property site in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, recently.

The full picture may never be known, but there are many versions of the narratives, which may or may not be from Wike’s office or the military establishment. There are numerous write-ups and analyses on whether Wike or the officer was right or wrong.

Perhaps, one day, an opportunity will present itself for various sides to tell their own versions of the event. In this digital age, there are many possibilities to colour stories, or even mislead the public.

But what happened between Wike and the naval officer was yet another portrayal of a power show (thanks to Fela Kuti, the Afro-beat King), and a failure of law and order in the society. It started a long time ago, and it is getting worse.

Individuals, institutions and governments use and misuse their authorities, their wealth, and their instruments of power including positions, guns, uniforms, security personnel… – to force their way, and achieve their objectives. Whether the objectives are right or wrong, it does not matter.

The use of established, official adjudication process is disregarded, and not even explored. Might is right.

There are real-life examples of how it happens every day. At levels small and big.

A soldier stands by the side of the highway and waves down every truck (or trailer, as we call it) that passes by.  He needs a lift, after all, he is in uniform, purportedly serving the nation. Wrong!  He is on a mission for illegal extortion. He is one of the many service personnel in uniform who accompany trucks across the country on highways. It is not official business. But they profit from the fact that there are many roadblocks manned by police, customs, immigration agents, and other unformed entities.

Some of these entities extort “monies” from truck drivers for “assisting” them through the roadblocks. A soldier sitting next to the truck driver means that the truck gets a through pass without paying an illegal toll. Instead, the soldier is “settled” by the truck driver for the “service”. It is cheaper and faster for the truck driver.

Some individuals with strong connections in the military can obtain the services of soldiers to help them secure their properties against intruders. Whoever can mobilise soldiers to secure the property has a higher claim, irrespective of whether the property is illegally acquired.

A tenant who fails in his financial obligations but can pay his way through the police or the court can scare his landlord away.

Policemen accompany criminals and “big men”, who break the law, and provide cover or security to keep others at a distance.

The rogue behaviour of these military or unformed persons are not necessarily backed or approved by their superiors or their organisations.

Yet, there are too many examples of the use/misuse of uniformed security officials for illegal purposes. It is not limited to the uniformed services. Politicians also use their positions to bend rules and circumvent normal processes and procedures.

Some senior government officials assume all manner of powers. A well-connected politician can take over public roads, public facilities and access areas, and “nothing will happen”. Having a political title is power.

Such power is used to determine who votes and how. Hence, snatching of ballot boxes and disenfranchising voters in so many ways has become the norm.

A wealthy person can “buy” security officials, or pay for the rights of ordinary persons to be taken away. An innocent citizen can be arrested for any reason, jailed or detained illegally for a long time.
If and when the citizen musters the means to go to court against the wealthy or money bag, the case could go on for years until the highest bidder prevails.

It is not a new trend, but it is wrong, and it must stop. It may not be easy to stop, but it can be minimised. Unfortunately, the trend is rather on the increase.

In full public glare, Wike and the naval officer demonstrated the use of “power” to determine who/what is right.

Sadly, it degenerated into another “two-fighting” power play – the one representing government power and the other, a decoy for his Oga, representing the power of the military uniform. A regular citizen could not have stood against either of them. S/he would be destroyed and “nothing will happen”.

By shouting at each other in public, Wike and the naval officer represent the unqualified use of authority that has effectively replaced the application of due process for adjudication of contending claims.

The FCT authorities and the former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo, who is said to be the owner of the property in question, could have used other legal and dignified mechanisms of adjudication to settle the matter, without unnecessary drama. There was no need  for the “show of power.”

This legitimate process of adjudication is no longer attractive to those who have the power to determine the outcomes of their own matters. They use their positions, wealth, uniforms, and paraphernalia of office to force their way through. Those lacking such powers are denied justice.

Both Wike and the naval chief will ultimately sort out their differences. The bravado in public only reinforces the “powerlessness” of the ordinary citizen.

Citizen Nigerian has no standing against Wike and his arsenal, or the naval officer and his boss. Under these circumstances, it is immaterial whether Citizen Nigerian has genuine documents or legal claims; S/he is the loser in the game between and among the powerful in society.

Bunmi Makinwa is an Analyst and CEO, AUMIQUEI Communication for Leadership.

An unlikely coincidence of elections in over a period of 45 days period from the middle of September to the end of October 2025 has cast a new light on the state of democratic governance in Africa and now threatens to unscramble the ritual hollowness that has become the fate of elections on the continent under the indifferent watch of the African Union and other regional institutions in Africa. How the continent’s leaders and institutions handle the aftermath could have serious implications for the stability of the continent.

On 16 September 2025, Malawi went to the polls to elect their president. The last time the country did that in 2019, it produced results that were so transparently rigged that five judges of the Constitutional Court of Malawi wearing bullet-proof vests were needed to set aside the result declared by the electoral commission. That was only the second time in Africa’s history that a court would nullify the declared outcome in a presidential election.

The annulled result had favoured then incumbent and fifth president of the Republic, Peter Mutharika (a long-serving law professor and brother of Malawi’s third president, Bingu wa Mutharika), in a contest against Lazarus Chakwera, a theologian and pastor with the Assemblies of God Church in Malawi. In the re-run that followed the judicial nullification in 2020, Chakwera prevailed, and the people ousted Peter Mutharika from the presidency.

The contest in September 2025 pitted 85-year-old Peter Mutharika in a sequel against his nemesis, Lazarus Chakwera. In the preceding five years, President Chakwera had managed to implausibly squander the considerable civic goodwill that powered him into office. Despite being 15 years younger than President Mutharika, President Chakwera lost resoundingly to his older opponent who secured 56.8% of the vote.

Malawi may have vindicated the trust of both the voters and of the candidates in a test of the will of the people but it is an outlier in a continent that has grown used to seeing elections as charades. This reluctance for credible ballots was evident when the central African country of Cameroon went to the polls nearly one month later on 12 October 2025, to elect their president. The incumbent, Paul Biya, was a 92 year-old whose sojourn in Cameroon’s government dates back to his appointment as Chief of Staff in the cabinet of the Minister of Education in 1964. In 1975, President Ahmadou Ahidjo made him Prime Minister. On 6 November 1982, two days after the resignation of President Ahidjo on grounds of ill-health, Biya ascended to the presidency and has ruled the country for 43 years since.

At 92, Paul Biya is the oldest serving president in the world, only outlasted in office by Teodoro Obiang, president of the neighbouring Equatorial Guinea, who has been in office since he toppled his uncle, Macias Nguema, in August 1979 before executing him. In the election this year, his main opponent was Issa Tchiroma, a 35-year veteran in the cabinet of President Biya, who stepped down from the ruling Cameroon Peoples’ Democratic Movement (CPDM) and from the Cabinet in order to run against his former boss.
It took the Constitutional Council 15 days to tabulate the figures in an election which had 8.1 million registered voters with an average turnout of about 68.5%. When it eventually declared that outcome on 27 October, the Constitutional Council announced Biya as winner with 53.66% of the votes in disputed results and in an election in which he was unable to campaign because of infirmity. Independent analysts who have examined the official numbers insist he “couldn’t have won.”

With the result, Biya, who was born one month after Adolf Hitler assumed office as German Chancellor and in the month preceding the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the president of the United States of America – entered upon his seventh presidential term in a country in which the median age belongs to children who were born in 2006. By the time of the next election, he will be nearly one century old. In the wake of the announcement, United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, pointedly declined to extend congratulations to President Biya, instead focusing his attention on the need for a “thorough and impartial investigation” of the “post-electoral violence and…. reports of excessive use of force.”

Paul Biya can at least claim that he had a genuine contest against a genuine opponent. In Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa, the contest two weeks later on 25 October 2025 pitted incumbent president, Alassane Ouattara, whose ambitions drove the country to the brink of fragmentation at the beginning of the millennium – against no one.

When the result
was announced, President Ouattara, a child of the Second World War, having been born on New Year’s Day in 1942, contrived at 83 years to award himself nearly 90% of the vote and a fourth term in office in an election from which he barred every credible competition. That was indeed a generous four percentage points lower than the 94% of the votes that he awarded himself in 2020. In power since 2010, Ouattara was supposed to be term-limited after two terms of ten years in office. At 83, he expects to rule until at least he is 88, which would still be five years younger than President Biya’s current age.

The election in Tanzania four days after Côte d’Ivoire’s took place in a graveyard. The incumbent and candidate of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) was Samia Suluhu Hassan, who inherited the office when her principal, John Pombe Magufuli, died in March 2021.

Ahead of the contest, however, it became evident that Samia would not tolerate a contest. Under her leadership, the government unleashed what Amnesty International described as a “wave of terror” designed to make her candidacy unopposed and the ruling party unchecked in its march to a pre-determined seventh decade in power. On the day of the contest on 29 October, protests unexpectedly erupted in key cities, such as Dar-Es-Salaam, Arusha, Mbeya, and Mwanza. Under cover of a media blackout complemented by an internet shutdown imposed on the day of the ballot, Samia’s government orchestrated a campaign of targeted mass murder in population centres suspected to be opposition strongholds.

President Samia’s electoral commission declared her winner with 87% voter turnout and nearly 98% of the vote. As Tanzanians in different parts of the country woke up to find bodies on their courtyards with fatal injuries from unknown persons and morgues overflowing with fresh cadavers reportedly being disappeared under instructions of the government, President Samia turned up at a military base in new capital city, Dodoma, where on the fourth night following the vote, she was stealthily inaugurated for a new term.

Initial estimates putting the casualty count in the hundreds were quickly eclipsed by more updated tallies of over 3,000 killed in under 72 hours. Fresh reporting by the New Humanitarian put the number over 5,000 and suggests that the casualty count may indeed be over 10,000. Around the country, initial trepidation gave way to alarm at the scale of the massacre. That alarm has now been ousted by outrage.

Meanwhile, for the first time in their histories, official election observer missions deployed by the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) both concluded separately that the election in Tanzania “did not comply with AU principles.” This caught many people unprepared. Now both institutions are scrambling to figure out what to do. There is an emerging consensus that President Samia is illegitimate. The leaders of both institutions must articulate consequences and citizens have a right to expect them to do so clearly.

The consensus is also growing around the urgent need for an independent, international investigation and accountability. Meanwhile, Tanzania’s young people prepare for nationwide protests on 9 December 2025. The symbolism is significant: it is World Anti-Corruption Day; it is the anniversary of the adoption of the Genocide Convention; and it is Tanzania’s Independence Day.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu.

Let’s stop pretending: Nigeria behaves like a country allergic to seriousness. And nowhere is this unseriousness more boldly displayed than in its tragic, never-ending refinery circus.

When Bayo Ojulari was appointed Group Chief Executive (GCEO) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), many Nigerians—myself included—thought an outsider with real industry credentials might finally break the NNPC culture of waste and political capture.

Two years down the road, what do we have? The same old script, the same tired excuses, and the same dead refineries gulping billions and producing absolutely nothing.

The author, Ifeanyi Izeze

Ojulari has blended so seamlessly into the old NNPC way of doing things that you would think he spent his entire career there. No radical ideas. No shift in culture. No operational aggression. Just recycled talking points, familiar bureaucratic lethargy, and a dangerous willingness to become yet another puppet of the Presidency’s petroleum politics.

Then came the bold claim in Abu Dhabi: Nigeria will soon hit 2 million barrels per day, and even 3 million by 2030. But this is precisely the kind of grandstanding that keeps Nigeria trapped. Our upstream sector has never been the problem.

If we had real investment capital, Nigeria could hit 3 million bpd in under two years. So let’s cut the noise. Production targets don’t fix refineries. All they do is distract from Nigeria’s real oil-sector funeral ground: the downstream.

And this is where Ojulari and his team will be judged—if not crucified.

Two years after Bayo Ojulari took over NNPCL, the refineries remain cold, silent monuments to Nigerian government’s legendary incompetence and elite fraud. With talk of selling them and no crude oil available to run them, Nigerians have every right to ask: Is the NNPCL truly sincere with feigned plans to bring them back to life?

Two years in office and not a single one of Nigeria’s refineries has blinked back to life. Not even a cough. Yet the government now wants Nigerians to believe that selling the plants will magically solve decades of incompetence, corruption, and sabotage. We’ve heard it all before.

Special Adviser on Energy, Olu Verheijen, floated the idea of selling the refineries or finding “technical equity partners.” Ojulari echoed the same line, talking about searching for firms that can “run the refineries to international standards.”

Here is the truth no one at NNPCL wants to say publicly: There is no crude oil to give these refineries. Zero. Not a drop.

Forget the technical issues. Forget the EPC contracting drama. Forget even the pipelines. Those challenges can be fixed. But when the refineries have no guaranteed crude feedstock because Nigeria’s entitlements were mortgaged under Buhari and Kyari in those reckless crude-for-cash arrangements, what exactly are we “rehabilitating”?

This is why the talk of selling refineries is laughable. What investor wants to buy a refinery that cannot be supplied crude? What operator wants to manage a plant that is technologically obsolete, structurally decayed, and strategically trapped in a market now dominated by Dangote, who is already preparing to expand his refinery to become the world’s largest?

Between 2021 and 2023, NNPCL reportedly poured nearly $3 billion into these facilities:

– $1.5B for Port Harcourt

– $897.6M for Warri

– $586M for Kaduna

Yet none is working!

Worse still, between 2013 and 2023, an estimated $25 billion was wasted on “repairs,” “rehabilitations,” and “turnaround maintenance.”

Former President Obasanjo has openly said the refineries may never work again. Dangote calls the entire turnaround-maintenance model a monumental scam—likening it to installing a new engine in a 40-year-old wreck that can’t handle modern technology.

He’s right. And he should know. Because while NNPCL was burning billions trying to resurrect dead refineries, Dangote quietly built a modern, globally competitive one from scratch—now on track to dominate Africa.

Even if the government finds a buyer, which investor will commit billions into plants that are outdated, uncompetitive, and will be fighting for survival against the Dangote Refinery—a facility already positioned to dominate Africa’s refined-products market and expanding towards becoming the world’s largest?

This is the dilemma NNPCL refuses to confront. No investor will touch a refinery that cannot source crude, is technologically obsolete, and is entering a market where a private giant is aggressively expanding capacity.

So let’s ask the painful question: Who exactly will buy a Nigerian refinery today? A plant with no crude, no efficiency, no technological relevance, and no competitive edge? This is not privatisation—it’s attempted disposal of national embarrassment.

Bayo Ojulari should understand something. History will not remember how many giant targets he announced at foreign conferences. He won’t be celebrated for talking Nigeria toward 3 million or even 5 million barrels per day. Nigerians judge results, not rhetoric.

He will be remembered for one thing alone: Did the refineries come back to life under his watch?

So far, the answer is a very loud, very expensive, very embarrassing “No.”

God bless Nigeria.

(IFEANYI IZEZE writes from Abuja. Contacts: iizeze@yahoo.com; 234-8033043009)