The Shettima Danger for Tinubu
By Farooq A. Kperogi Sometime in January this year, a senior Lagos-Ibadan journalist called my attention to a news story in which Hannatu Musawa, President Tinubu’s Minister of Art, Culture,…
Author: Farooq Kperogi
Farooq Adamu Kperogi is a Nigerian-American professor, author, media scholar, newspaper columnist, blogger and activist. He was a reporter and news editor at many Nigerian newspapers including the Daily Trust, Daily Triumph and the now defunct New Nigerian.
Terrorism in Oyo and Tinubu’s Yoruba Test
By Farooq A. Kperogi For more than a year, a conscientious, cosmopolitan retired senior military officer from the North has told me that his worst fear for Nigeria is the…
Tinubu’s Baffling Northern Exclusion Strategy
By Farooq A. Kperogi The late Muhammadu Buhari wrested power from Goodluck Jonathan in a never-before-seen political upset of an incumbent in Nigeria precisely because of the northern establishment’s strategic…
War Against Nigeria’s Academic Title Fraud
By Farooq A. Kperogi The federal government’s decision to prohibit recipients of honorary doctorates from prefixing “Dr.” to their names is one of the most unexpectedly sensible things to come…
A Coup Trial Without Precedent
By Farooq A. Kperogi I came of age in Nigeria during absolutist, totalitarian military regimes and was shaped by the anti-military rhetoric and activism that surrounded me. Although democracy hasn’t…
Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara
By Farooq A. Kperogi Intra-state cultural and subregional tensions are building up in Kwara State ahead of the 2027 governorship elections because of credible worries that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s…
Amupitan’s Past Tweets Show an APC Sympathizer
By Farooq A. Kperogi Several verifiable past tweets by INEC chairman Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan from his time as a professor at the University of Jos unmistakably reveal partisan sympathies…
How Opposition Tinubu Would Treat President Tinubu
By Farooq A. Kperogi You may resent Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but you can’t deny that he has earned his place in Nigerian political history as one of the, if not…
No Tears for El-Rufai and Malami
By Farooq A. Kperogi Nasir El-Rufai and Abubakar Malami are suddenly the objects of public pity in some corners of Nigeria’s political commentariat. Yes, my default ideological temperament is to…
Tinubu’s Abacha Tactics Against Opposition
By Farooq A. Kperogi Although structural, political, and economic conditions appear to constrain any credibly concerted impediment to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s 2027 reelection chances, at least from my admittedly…
Obituary for the PDP
By Farooq A. Kperogi The diminution of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reached a symbolic pinnacle this week when a wave of defections swept through the National Assembly. Several PDP…
Daniel Bwala’s Al Jazeera Humiliation
By Farooq A. Kperogi I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 because of his impassioned opposition to the choice of Kashim…
History and Psychoanalysis of El-Rufai’s Troubles with Ribadu
By Farooq A. Kperogi Given the depth and intensity of the friendship they cultivated over decades, many people are befuddled by why the personal conflict between former Kaduna State governor…
El Rufai’s Mind Game with Ribadu
By Farooq Kperogi Nasir El-Rufai claimed in his interview with Arise News that someone intercepted and recorded his former friend Nuhu Ribadu’s phone call in which Ribadu allegedly instructed El-Rufai’s…
Tinubu’s Türkiye Fiasco Spotlights His Age, Health and Wife
By Farooq A. Kperogi President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s state visit to Türkiye this week dramatized two uncomfortable realities: the visible toll of age or ill health on the president and…
Kwankwaso-Yusuf Rupture and Echoes of Saraki
By Farooq Kperogi The public rupture between Gov. Abba Yusuf and his “godfather” and in-law, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, has the visible trappings of carefully orchestrated political theater. Several people have…
Why Giving in Nigeria Often Backfires
By Farooq Kperogi I have learned two interrelated lessons about giving in Nigeria. First, giving large sums of money to economically deprived people to start a business, in the hope…
Wike Getting Awfully Close to Fighting Tinubu
By Farooq A. Kperogi Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike revels in controversies, contentious public disputations, vituperative recriminations, and tensile political stress like a pig exults in mud. Peace…
Tinubu’s Top-Down, One-Partyist Reelection Strategy
By Farooq A. Kperogi What most Nigerians recognize as Nigeria’s creeping descent into stifling one-partyism, with what seems like the unstoppably expanding defections of major elected officials into the APC,…
When a Tax Law is an Illegality
By Farooq A. Kperogi What began as a routine legislative reform of the Nigerian tax system by the Bola Tinubu administration has transmogrified and metastasized into an allegation of unexampled…
Tinubu’s New Tax Regime as Sovereignty for Sale
By Farooq A. Kperogi For weeks, I deliberately avoided commenting on the sweeping new tax regime the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration plans to roll out next year. It’s not because…
Remi Tinubu’s Power Trip with Gov. Adeleke
By Farooq Kperogi Sometime in 2022, when it became clear to me that Tinubu would win the APC presidential nomination and go on to win the presidency, I shared my…
Why is Matawalle Still a Defense Minister?
By Farooq A. Kperogi Even the severest critics of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration admit that the last few days have seen what appear (at least on the surface) to…
Trump Effect in Gen. Musa’s Ministerial Appointment
By Farooq Kperogi While I am delighted that President Bola Tinubu appears to be taking security more seriously than he previously did (signaled by the appointment of General Christopher Musa…
Nigeria’s Return to the 2014 Nightmare
By Farooq A. Kperogi The events and atmospherics of the past few days in Nigeria feel eerily and frighteningly familiar. They are redolent of the disabling instability and helplessness (and…
Trump, Christian Genocide, and Terrorism in Nigeria
By Farooq A. Kperogi Nigeria’s online and offline discursive arenas have been suffused with frenetic, impassioned, and intensely heightened dialogic exchanges in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s designation of…
The Coup That Dare Not Speak Its Name
By Farooq A. Kperogi I was initially disinclined to write about the alleged attempted coup to dislodge President Bola Ahmed Tinubu from power because the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) has publicly…
With AI, We’re Now Fully in Baudrillard’s Hyperreality
By Farooq Kperogi It seems our world is inexorably moving in the direction of replacing the authentic with the synthetic. Increasingly, the lines between the real and the imitation, the…
Maryam Sanda and Tinubu’s Crisis of Clemency
By Farooq A. Kperogi President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, like his predecessors, has the constitutional right to grant clemency. He draws this right from Section 175 of the 1999 Constitution, which…
New INEC Boss and Tinubu’s Visibilization of Northern Yorubas
By Farooq A. Kperogi Everyone who is familiar with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s unabashed Yorubacentricism expected him to appoint a Yoruba person to succeed Professor Mahmood Yakubu as INEC chairman.…
Tinubu’s Presidential Dissociative Disorder
By Farooq A. Kperogi There have been at least two prominent instances when President Bola Ahmed Tinubu betrayed what I have called presidential dissociative disorder, which I define as power-induced…
Paradoxical Privilege of Success
By Farooq Kperogi One of the English proverbs I memorized in high school is, “Nothing succeeds like success.” This simple proverb encapsulates why it’s easier to get a job when…
Why Moghalu’s Exit from ASG Matters for Africa
By Farooq A. Kperogi When former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) deputy governor Professor Kingsley Moghalu was appointed last year as the inaugural President and Vice Chancellor of the Kigali-based…
Obi’s Litigious Reflexes vs Adeyanju’s Burden of Truth
By Farooq A. Kperogi In what irreverently humorous social media denizens are calling the battle between the “social media president” and the “Temu lawyer” (unflattering epithets to suggest that Peter…
Jonathan’s Entry Would Radically Shake the 2027 Election
By Farooq A. Kperogi If the whispers from the smoke-filled inner rooms of northern political conclaves are to be believed, former President Goodluck Jonathan is being courted to return to…
Why We Should Stop Renaming Well-Established Universities
By Farooq A. Kperogi In Nigeria, there’s a disturbingly haunting temporariness in the appellative identity of every university that derives its name from its location. If the current trend holds,…
Ten Days in Japan
By Farooq A. Kperogi I was in Japan for a 10-day vacation (workation for my wife), which gave us an opportunity to see our first daughter, a final-year engineering student…
On Buhari’s Death
By Farooq Kperogi It has been announced that former President Muhammadu Buhari passed away in London. Anyone familiar with my writings and commentary knows I vigorously disagreed with many of…
AI’s Threat to Journalism, Scholarship, and Self-Expression
By Farooq A. Kperogi On June 16, the final day of my three-week visit to Nigeria, I met with my dear friend Malam Ali M. Ali, Managing Director of the…
Seeing Nigeria from My American Daughter’s Eyes
By Farooq A. Kperogi Sometimes, it takes the unburdened and free-spirited perceptions of outsiders, particularly children, to appreciate taken-for-granted cultural peculiarities. This fact came to the fore for me after…