Tag: Chidi Amuta
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Education: From Bumbling to Babel – By Chidi Amuta
President Buhari’s Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, is a man who likes to take himself seriously. In ordinary circumstances, he should pass as one of the islands of some enlightenment in the arid cabinet of the outgoing administration.
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Playing Games with Poverty – By Chidi Amuta
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has stirred an unnecessary storm and in the process may have scored an inconsequential victory. Last week, the NBS revised the definition of poverty by shifting from the now proverbial living on $2 a day to something called “multidimensional poverty”. This has unsettled our politicians.
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Campaigning Amidst the Carnage – By Chidi Amuta
The current landscape of Nigeria is somewhere between a violent crime scene and the ruin of an imperfect edifice. It is like ‘the day after’ a great holocaust, an atomic upheaval or some other man made disaster. Those who left here seven years ago can no longer easily recognize familiar places. The highways are dangerous just…
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2023: What if Machiavelli votes? – By Chidi Amuta
Ordinarily, the hidden hands of an ancient Italian devious thinker should have no relevance to Nigeria’s 2023 election. But Machiavelli lived in a bad time and in a treacherous political terrain pretty much like the Nigeria of 2022. Like in the Florentine city state, our politics has been reduced to seasonal undeclared civil wars moderated…
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Enemy at the Door – By Chidi Amuta
On the matter of ensuring national security by all means necessary, I accept being called a hawk. But on the concomitant cautious fear that bad things could happen to the nation if our defenses are lax, I will accept the title of coward. In short, a nation is entitled to deploy maximum force to ensure…
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The Rise of Tyrant Governors – By Chidi Amuta
An urgent threat hovers over Nigeria’s democracy. It is not just the spectre of bad elections or the predominance of atrocious politicians. It is instead the rise and increasing numbers of authoritarian governors all over the country. Though enthroned by our often murky democratic process, an increasing number of state governors now carry on more…
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This Time Next Year – By Chidi Amuta
The distance between political campaign promises and their fulfilment is an infinity. Between when these promises are made and the end of the tenure of those who usually promise paradise and deliver hell, people are often too dazed to remember. As it were, empty promises seem to be part of the language of political campaigning.…
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My crowd is bigger than yours – By Chidi Amuta
The crowds of power wear an amorphous but identical face. It does not matter whether they are the Roman plebeians, renegade factions of the Athenian metropole or the rough racist hounds that accompanied Donald Trump to defile the US Capitol on 6th January 2021. They are all roughly the same. Political crowds troop out in…
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Buhari as Change Agent – By Chidi Amuta
The truths of history often reveal themselves to us by a ruse. A president who in 2015 happened on us on a mantra of ‘Change’ is today the object and embodiment of a clamour for decisive urgent change. Call him Mr. Change and pronounce it anyway you like, something is clearly undeniable. Mr. Buhari has…
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Putin: Loneliness of the Tyrant – By Chidi Amuta
Tyrants and mad men suffer a common ailment: they are condemned to a feeling of loneliness and a routine of endless wandering in search of what they alone understand. No other world leader at the present time better illustrates this ancient folk wisdom than Russia’s Vladimir Putin.