Indepth Analysis of Nigerian News & World Reports
By Farooq A. Kperogi Wherever Nigerians congregate in the diaspora, conversations about our country almost invariably gravitate toward electricity. That was what happened after I delivered a keynote address at…
By Farooq A. Kperogi In Vice President Kashim Shettima’s caustic barbs at former Vice President Atiku Abubakar during the inauguration of the APC Presidential Campaign Council in Abuja on October…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Apparently, the omniscient, omnicompetent “invisible hand” of the market has suddenly developed an infirmity that requires the helping hand of the Nigerian state. After more than…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Something extraordinary is happening across the world. Governments are losing sleep over the intolerably rising prices of petrol and diesel. They are cutting taxes, subsidizing fuel,…
By Farooq A. Kperogi A few days before Nasir El-Rufai’s trending, impassioned September 23 letter talking about the “apparent silence” of friends and family members he had “publicly stood by,”…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Nigeria has tried almost everybody except the people who actually frighten the system, who can shake, even extirpate, the status quo and who can cause the…
By Farooq A. Kperogi I didn’t get a chance to write a retrospective evaluation of Professor Is-haq Oloyede’s tenure as JAMB registrar when most people did after his departure in…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Last week, I argued that Atiku Abubakar’s promise to restore petrol subsidy had rattled President Bola Ahmed Tinubu because it finally opened a policy flank on…
By Farooq Kperogi Nigerians have become so listlessly accustomed to the epidemic of dubious awards. Every week, some grandiloquently named organization nobody has heard of announces a “Man of the…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Salvador embodied Africa in more ways than the preservation of Yoruba religion, as highlighted last week. Our Candomblé-believing tour guide, who used to be Catholic, also…
By Farooq A. Kperogi For the past couple of years, my wife and I have instituted a yearly self-care ritual of taking at least one vacation in a part of…
By Farooq A. Kperogi A disturbing pattern of unending, self-destructive administrative chaos in appointments to consequential public office positions is defining the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu government, which signposts Tinubu’s…
By Farooq A. Kperogi Because human beings are prone to perceive nonexistent patterns, connections and intentional design even in random or unrelated events, a cognitive tendency called apophenia, and because…
By Farooq A. Kperogi When I received an email in April inviting me to be the keynote speaker at the June 24-26 International Media and Communication Conference at the University…
By Farooq A. Kperogi I first received a WhatsApp forward about the scandal from notable University of Texas history professor Toyin Falola. I didn’t read it. I thought it was…
By Farooq A. Kperogi When I chose to visit Nigeria in 2023 after seven years of staying away, family and friends cautioned that the change of leadership from Muhammadu Buhari…
By Farooq A. Kperogi My April 18, 2026, column titled “Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara” used privileged information I received from a self-described Yoruba irredentist to advance…
By Farooq Kperogi Today’s Federal High Court judgment ordering INEC to deregister the African Democratic Congress is difficult to understand as anything other than politically engineered judicial violence against democratic…
By Farooq A. Kperogi The kidnapping of schoolchildren and teachers in Oyo State is horrifying enough by itself. It does not need the embellishment of lies, half-truths, conjectures and opportunistic…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
