(Being Prof. Adebayo Okunade’s 70th Birthday Anniversary and Valedictory Lecture Delivered at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, on Wednesday, 12th of March, 2025)

Professor Bayo Okunade has crossed into the seventh bracket; he is now effectively a septuagenarian—that state of hoariness where he joins the gang of the sages who have been given the capacity to connect divinity with humanity in terms of wholeness. Seventy is a weighty number in spiritual and cultural terms. In spiritual terms, seven and ten elevates sacredness in numerical reckoning both for the Israelites, the ancient Egyptians and the Yoruba. Seven indicates perfection and ten signals completeness. Must be the reason why Psalms 90 says “The years of our life are seventy.” This makes seventy years a most notable year that represent fullness—the time of reckoning and deep reflection and appreciation. And yet, for the Yorùbá, in terms of the chronological reckoning as àgbà, àgbàlagbà, arúgbó, we also see why seventy is just another chance at consolidating a life well-spent. 

That he would eventually become a teacher was something that was almost inevitable. Being born to parents who were teachers could not possibly have been rosy for any young child. Teachers, especially those who have strong cultural knowledge about parenting and child upbringing, could only be seen back then as efficient taskmasters. They are those who were already seen as exemplary and who, by the force of societal expectations, also expect their children to take after them exemplarily. So, when he resumed his teaching trajectory at the Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, it was a critical juncture that would not only lay the foundation of his political science teaching and scholarship—he was the Government teacher. It was also the point at which a young, suave and brilliant Government teacher began to enlighten me particularly as a green-eye Aáwé lad about a possible future in political science tutelage. 

This is why, on this occasion, I am celebrating Prof. Okunade’s in terms of the consummation of his stature in the political science scholarship in Nigeria. A brief historical note will serve the purpose of properly situating the significance of Okunade. The emergence of political science in Nigeria was chequered by two significant issues. The first was the colonial administration and its fear of a possible emergence of an ideologically sophisticated student body. The second reason for the delay in the establishment of political science as a discipline was a similar fear by the nationalist elite who suspected that political science will radicalize the Nigerian masses and expose the elite’s standpoint. 

By the time Okunade would be completing his undergraduate and graduate studies, he was already getting drawn into the foundational curriculum and pedagogical issues that would shape the political science teaching orientation and scholarship at Ibadan, and provide the stimulus for redirection. From independence to the Nigerian civil war and the aftermath of military incursion into politics, Nigeria was already going through a flood of postcolonial national issues, replicated across Africa, that demanded that political science needed to be taught differently. Bayo Okunade the student was a witness to these curricular unfolding and growth. And Bayo Okunade the teacher was eminently situated at the preeminent citadel at the University of Ibadan, that was to serve as the bastion of the political science education in Nigeria, as part of a critical mass of change agents who had been saddled with the responsibility of bringing political science theorization to bear on the sociopolitical and national experiences of the postcolonial Nigerian state. 

This scholarly enthusiasm attending the deployment of social science scholarship to the understanding of the Nigerian national experiences is demonstrated in his first set of over fifty publications, from 1985 to 2010, and the legion of others thereafter. These publications range from local government structure, public policy, public bureaucracies and human rights to foreign relations, electoral processes, constitutionalism, democracy and democratization. This entire corpus signals the urgency of mastering the conceptual, intellectual and empirical bases of the symptoms and morbidities of the Nigerian state and its multiple consequences on and for Nigerians. It was inevitable that the Department of Political Science would be at the forefront of the radical discourse on revolutionary possibilities that ensured. For instance, that a staple of our intellectual and academic learning was the Marxian political economy perspectives on the postcolonial frameworks and trajectories of the Nigerian state was inevitable. Dependency and World System theories and its centre-periphery structure made strenuous efforts that provided the basis for a class analysis of the Nigerian society, especially given the capitalist accumulation enabled by colonialism and its deepening by the postcolonial comprador elements. As the radical fervour of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary scholarship started to wane on the rubbles of the collapse of the communist Soviet Union, it became increasingly important that political philosophers, political scientists and other committed scholars began to explore alternative theoretical resources and praxis that could facilitate a critical understanding of the structural, institutional and historical bases of Nigeria’s federal system and its hobbled economic development which had from then till now made national development a mirage. 

This is the critical defining juncture that opens up the fundamental significance of Prof. Okunade’s social constructivist theoretical framework which enabled a formidable research contribution to the body of scholarly knowledge about political engineering as it relates to Nigeria’s sociopolitical dynamics. With Naija Marxism and the Nigerian Left floundering, and the Nigerian federalism in a lopsided constitutional mire, the next best thing on the table was the idea of restructuring. In the absence of the possibility of a revolution, how do we restructure the political structure of the postcolonial Nigerian state that has been hobbling national development, nation-building and democratic governance for more than six decades since independence? Prof. Okunade has not minced words on this issue: it cannot work. According to him, “any system that is not totally off the mark can work. It takes people for a system to work. For a system to work, there has to be consistency with the construed norms and supportive ethos that will make it work. If we change the system, even with restructuring or whatever, how much of what were on ground are we substantially complying with? And then we change to another system. They are the same thing.”

On the contrary, a much more fruitful course of discourse should be on leadership, and how it could be deployed in facilitating the emergence of a well-ordered society in Nigeria. For sixty-four years, it would seem that Nigeria has been locked in a national question that has not produced any significant governance and development answer by which the lives of Nigerians could be transformed. And, to quote Albert Einstein, insanity is precisely to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result. And such a society, for Okunade, would revolve around the critical variables like the rule of law, constitutionalism, human rights and local governance. These requisite institutions and their fundamental ethos make for an efficient public administration that backstop good governance and our idea of a society that functions efficiently for the betterment of the citizens. The responsibility to pull all these variables together in the service of a vision of a society that governs for her citizens rests squarely on the shoulders of a good political leadership. Such a leadership must be, on the one hand, morally and technically good; and on the other, effective in terms of governance programmes and policies. 

Beyond Chinua Achebe’s announcement and analysis of the leadership predicament, Prof. Okunade provided a fundamental iteration of the political leadership as a “big challenge.” This challenge is grounded on a more empirically sophisticated frameworks of the variables involved in bad leadership and the consequences that have kept Nigerians impoverished since independence. And that empirical political analysis has been further demonstrated by the inability of the continent itself to throw up a critical mass of leadership figures that is able to win the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership for four consecutive years. The transformational qualities that the Mo Ibrahim Award requires of the recipient is what Prof. Okunade infuses into his own deep analysis of what leadership requires. The worth of a leadership, as Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson demonstrates, in Why Nations Fail (2012), derives from whether their decision facilitates the emergence of extractive or participatory institutions. The issue is critically about “how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do.” And then, there is the equally fundamental issue of how these decision aggregate in the design and operational function and optimality of public institutions. 

What we see, between Okunade’s concession to political leadership, and Acemoglu and Robinson’s concession to institutionalism, is the agelong discourse on the relationship between agency and structure. Yet, both are caught in an empirical grip of counterexamples that undermine their theses. On the one hand, the authors of Why Nations Fail are hard-pressed to explain why China has kept progressing economically under successive authoritarian regimes (same can be said about Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, as well as other Asian Tigers) while India’s progress might be hard to attribute to its putative democratic leaders. On the other hand, Prof. Okunade’s thesis also need to explain the successes of China and Singapore whose leadership demonstrated governance effectiveness without the accompanying ethical imperative.   

To rehabilitate Prof. Okunade’s theory of leadership out of this quandary requires first that we undermine the intrinsic assumption in Okunade’s theory, about the leader as a change agent with singular capacity to make people do what is needed. This is evident, in Okunade’s inaugural lecture, from his assessment of leadership activities from Tony Blair and George Bush to Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. I think that this understanding of political leadership stifles the significance of the relationship between leadership, social change and infrastructural development. Indeed, it puts a lot of over-extended pressure on a political leader in terms of the expectation of magical transformation by a wave of the leader’s wand that turns poverty to prosperity. We must therefore ask, legitimately, if this understanding of political leadership is sufficient for national transformation. This question is justified when we take cognisance of Nigeria’s unique political sociology and how it throws up compromised leaders who are forced to play bad politics with the commonwealth to hold on to power. There is a one-to-one relationship between this skewed political sociology and the construction of elite nationalism in Nigeria. 

An alternative articulation of the nature and role of leadership can be found in the change space model of leadership. The change space model is meant to facilitate the capability of the institutions and systems of government to encounter and engage changes while factoring in contextual pressures and circumstances. It therefore depends on a distributed and multilevel understanding of leadership that requires, (a) a political leader as the lead change agent, and (b) a critical mass of change agents who can bring abilities/competences, resources and context together in facilitating genuine and transformational change through a problem-solving approach. 

Apart from helping us move away from the idea of a leader as a change agent with a singular capacity, it also proposes the understanding of leadership as what influences the difference between a change that is intended for development, and the one that is actualized through infrastructural development. A change leadership is the one that initiate the change space and motivates it efficiently to achieve desired transformation. With this model, therefore, we have a conceptual framework to make sense of the relationship between “leader” and “leadership” in understanding how the change space through leaders and the leadership dynamics that mobilize people, ideas, resources and infrastructures in order to be able to catalyze change. The leadership is therefore expected to: (a) build coalition for change; (b) assemble a team with sufficient IQ, wisdom and commitment to initiate, implement and deliver the change; and (c) grant required authority, incentive and support, with accountability, to these team of leaders in their own right, so they could achieve optimal productivity, performance and impact, that will deliver the change. 

It would be interesting to see what a change space model of Nigeria’s political trajectory would have yielded if interjected into Prof. Okunade’s analysis of leadership. More worthwhile is what the idea of distributed and multilevel leadership framework could mean for our understanding of impactful politics and national development. This in my assessment of Prof. Okunade’s “big challenge” of the political leadership in Nigeria—a leader who has the capacity to build and motivate a change space populated by different levels of leadership frameworks, political, religious, social, bureaucratic and civil. It is therefore safe to hypothesize that while a leader is a key and critical factor in transforming a state, it does not by itself resolve the myriads of predicaments and problems that bedevil the Nigerian state and society.

To conclude: Prof. Bayo Okunade stands in a continuum of scholarly excellence that has at one end the scholarly genius of Billy Dudley, E. U. Essien-Udom, Peter Ekeh, Bayo Adekanye, John Ayoade, Tunde Adeniran, Busari Adebisi, Larry Ekpebu, Alex Gboyega, Femi Otubanjo, Fred Onyeoziri, Jimi Adisa, Kunle Amuwo, Eghosa Osaghae, Adigun Agbaje, OBC Nwolise, Rotimi Suberu, and the host of other stellar personalities and scholars that lit up the credentials of the Department of Political Science. Prof. Bayo Okunade’s theory of political leadership—a systematic and empirically sophisticated articulation of Chinua Achebe’s diagnosis of the Nigeria problem—unarguably presents a research outline that speaks to the need for more theoretical and practical engagement with the leadership phenomenon in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. I see this as a critical challenge to the political science scholarship in Nigeria; the challenge of articulating theoretically feasible and nuanced understanding of what ails the Nigerian state, her leaders and leadership and her citizens.

Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, has accused Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, of betrayal.

In a chat with journalists on Wednesday in Abuja, Wike specifically accused Governor Mohammed of betraying the ‘G5 Governors’ prior to the 2023 elections.

The defunct ‘G5’ governors, who are all members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), include Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State and former governors Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, Ifeanyi Ugwuwanyi of Enugu and Samuel Ortom of Benue State.

Daily Trust reports that the group is believed to have contributed to Bola Tinubu’s victory in the presidential election.

Narrating what played out, Wike said: “Bala Mohammed was having a problem with Atiku and Co. That day, I was going to commission a lounge at the airport. When he landed, I said there was no need to come to town when I was coming to the airport. He called me. Ibrahim Adoke, the former Attorney-General, was there.

“He said Atiku would kill him if Atiku wins and that we must support Asiwaju. We organised G5 to pay Bala a visit in Bauchi, not knowing that he was using us to settle with Atiku. When we got there, he was happy. The next day, Tambuwal led a team to go and see Bala, and Bala abandoned us.

“That’s why I say before you hold some position, you must be a man of character. That’s why I always talk about character.”

[DailyTrust]

Members of the National Working Committee, NWC, of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, are currently meeting in Abuja, the nation’s capital.

The meeting, which is being held behind closed doors at the party’s national headquarters, is presided over by the PDP National Chairman, Umar Damagum.

This comes two days after the Supreme Court dismissed a motion for a stay of execution of a High Court judgment removing Senator Samuel Anyanwu from office as National Secretary and replacing him with Sunday Udeh-Okoye.

There was a heavy presence of security personnel, including operatives from the Department of State Services, DSS, the police, and the Civil Defence Corps, at the PDP headquarters in Abuja.

Earlier, party staff clashed with thugs and some members loyal to the embattled PDP National Secretary.

A PDP staff member who witnessed the clash and requested anonymity told journalists that the scuffle began when supporters of Samuel Anyanwu entered the party premises.

According to him, the pro-Anyanwu supporters attempted to lock out some members of the PDP National Working Committee who were arriving for their usual midweek meeting. However, they were overpowered by staff, private security guards, and some police officers attached to the secretariat.

The incident led to the deployment of additional security personnel to prevent a further breakdown of law and order.

[DailyPost]

Actress and filmmaker Omoni Oboli has announced her movie “Love In Every Word” is back on YouTube after being taken down due to copyright issues.

The movie, which had gained over 7 million views, was removed from the platform after a Canadian-based network engineer, Chinonso Obiora Skyberry, filed a copyright infringement claim against Oboli.

However, Oboli revealed on social media that the issue has been sorted out and the movie is now back on YouTube. 

She expressed gratitude to her fans for their love and concern during the period the movie was taken down.

“Love in Every Word is back! Hey, besties, thank you for the love and concern. We deeply appreciate you all for your calls, messages, posts, tweets, comments, everything! I’m sorry I couldn’t respond at the time. 

“There was a little misunderstanding with our movie LOVE IN EVERY WORD. It’s been sorted out now, and we are back stronger than ever! So let’s make up for the time lost, besties. 

“Time to make sure the whole world watches LOVE IN EVERY WORD on Omoni Oboli Tv on YouTube. God will forever be glorified,” she wrote.

“Love In Every Word” is a romantic movie starring Uzor Arukwe and Bamike “Bambam” Olawunmi. 

The movie has received positive reviews, with many praising the chemistry between the lead actors.

[TheNation]

Born on May 21, 1913, to the Egba family of the Lagos lawyer Olawolu Moore, Lady Kofoworola Ademola was a Nigerian educationalist, writer and advocate for women’s education.

She was the first Black African woman to be awarded a degree from the University of Oxford.

Kofoworola studied English Literature and Education at St Hugh’s College, Oxford from 1932 to 1935 and was set on becoming a teacher. Her time at St Hugh’s College was also significant in that she paved the way for more black women to study at Oxford. She wrote a biography during her time at Oxford about her life and experiences, a book which challenged the stereotypes of African people in 1930s Britain. Her account appeared in colonial civil servant and historian Margery Perham’s 1936 collection, Ten Africans, a book of cultural importance both at its time of publication and today. Kofoworola understood from her own experience the benefits of cultural collaboration and felt that meeting people from other cultures would improve peoples’ cultural understanding, providing the potential to create a more peaceable world. With this in mind, she suggested that at least two African women should be admitted to study at Oxford each year.

As the only African woman at Oxford, Kofoworola said that she was regarded as a “’curio’ or some weird specimen…, not as an ordinary human being.” And that people would make “ineffectual remarks about our ‘amazing cleverness’ at being able to speak English and wear English clothes.”

Kofoworola worked tirelessly to advocate for women’s education and women’s rights more broadly. Having attained her degree from Oxford, she returned to Nigeria to fulfil her ambition of becoming a teacher. Kofoworola began teaching at a prestigious girls’ school in Lagos and co-founded two new schools for girls: the Girls Secondary Modern School in Lagos and New Era Girls’ Secondary School, Lagos where she also worked as a teacher and head teacher.

She wrote numerous children’s books, often basing her tales in the folklore of West Africa. Her stories include Tortoise and the Clever Ant and Tutu and the Magic Gourds, which form part of the Mudhut Book series.

In 1939, she married Adetokunbo Ademola, a civil servant. They had five children. As the wife of a Yoruba prince, she was entitled to the style of Oloori – and as the daughter of one, she was herself an Omoba as well – but due to the fact that her husband was also a knight, it is as Lady Kofoworola Ademola that she was best known.

In 1958, Kofoworola Ademola was elected the first president of Nigeria’s National Council of Women’s Societies where she continued to advance the rights and representation of women. She became the first Nigerian woman to be appointed Secretary of the Western Region Scholarship Board, a department of the Ministry of Education.

Kofoworola also became director of the Western Region of the Red Cross. She was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1959 by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and an Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) in Nigeria by Tafawa Balewa’s government for her ongoing work and contribution to Nigerian society. She continued her work up until her death in 2002 at age 89.

President Bola Tinubu has nominated Melvin Ayogu to the board of the Central Bank of Nigeria and has requested Senate confirmation for the appointment.

The Special Adviser to Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, made this in a statement on Wednesday.

Tinubu also sought Senate confirmation for Nwakuche Ndidi as controller-general of the Nigerian Correctional Service.

He said the requests, conveyed in letters to Senate President Godswill Akpabio, were read during Tuesday’s plenary.

Tinubu had previously nominated Robert Agbide, Ado Wanga, Murtala Sagaley, Urom Eke, and Olayinka Aliyu to the CBN board in February 2024.

However, on February 29, 2024, the senate confirmed four people as members of the board of the CBN after Eke rejected the offer, citing “conflict of interest”.

Tinubu replaced Eke with Ruby Onwudiwe on March 13, 2024; however, a day after, reports circulated that the president withdrew her nomination over political affiliation with the Labour Party, an opposition of the All Progressives Congress.

The decision reportedly followed pressure mounted on the president by members of the APC, as Onwudiwe publicly supported Peter Obi, who contested on the LP platform against Tinubu, at the 2023 presidential elections.

[Punch]

Nyesom Wike, minister of the federal capital territory (FCT), says Siminalayi Fubara, governor of Rivers state, should face impeachment if he violates the constitution.

Speaking at the media chat in Abuja on Wednesday, Wike said politics should not be taken lightly and that removing the governor would not be a criminal offence.

“Politics is not play. If you have committed an offence to be impeached, what’s wrong? Is it a criminal offence? It’s provided in the constitution. Am I a member of the Assembly?” Wike asked.

“If you have committed an infraction of the constitution, and the Assembly deems it fit to say you should be impeached.

“I have heard people say, ‘Oh, if they impeach him, there will be a breakdown of law and order.’ Rubbish! Nothing will happen.”

More to follow… 

[TheCable]

In a filing on March 12, the SEC said it needed "a longer period" to consider the proposal. The SEC initially accepted Grayscale's application in January, starting a 45-day review process that can be extended up to 240 days.

The next deadline for a response is May 21, but a final ruling could take until mid-October.

As Grayscale waits for a decision, Franklin Templeton has joined the race for an XRP ETF by submitting its own proposal with the SEC. Franklin XRP ETF seeks to provide exposure to XRP's spot price, with the assets custodied by Coinbase Custody.

Shares for the XRP ETF would trade on the Cboe BZX Exchange after being created and redeemed using cash converted into XRP via a third party. Importantly, investors would not have access to XRP Ledger forks or airdrops.

Franklin Templeton's filing is the latest addition to the growing list of asset managers seeking approval for an XRP ETF, following Bitwise, 21Shares, Canary Capital, WisdomTree, and CoinShares. The SEC has 240 days to evaluate the application and make a decision.

However, analyst Eric Balchunas is not keeping high hopes from the SEC. He posted on X, "This is the 64th alt/meme coin ETF filing that is now awaiting approval, by the way."

The ETF filing process involves both an asset manager and an exchange working together. First, the asset manager (like Franklin Templeton or Grayscale) submits an S-1 (or S-3) registration statement to the SEC, detailing how the ETF will function. At the same time, the exchange (like Cboe BZX or Nasdaq) files a 19b-4 rule change proposal to list and trade the ETF. The SEC then has 45 days to review the exchange’s filing, with the option to extend the deadline up to 240 days for further evaluation before making a final decision.

At press time, XRP trades at $2.20, up by 3.52% in the last day.

[The Street]

 Bolivia's state energy firm YPFB will use cryptocurrency to pay for energy imports amid a painful shortage of dollars and fuel in the landlocked South American nation, a company spokesperson and a government official told Reuters on Wednesday.

The country is battling a dangerous slide in foreign currency reserves afters years of dwindling exports of natural gas, which has sparked off a fuel crisis in the country with regular long lines at gas stations and scattered protests.

A spokesperson for state-run energy firm YPFB told Reuters that a system had been put in place to use cryptocurrency to purchase fuel imports after a government approval to use digital assets to help meet demand.

"From now on, these (cryptocurrency) transactions will be carried out," the spokesperson said, adding that the new purchasing system was designed to help support national fuel subsidies in Bolivia amid a shortage of hard currency.

A government spokesperson said that YPFB had not yet made use of digital currency to purchase energy imports, but that it was planned to do so.

Bolivia, for decades a net energy exporter due its large reserves of gas, has become reliant on imports as domestic gas production has dwindled amid a lack of major new finds.

[Reuters]

Bitcoin jumped past $83,900 after new Consumer Price Index (CPI) data revealed inflation rising less than forecasted, easing fears of aggressive Federal Reserve rate hikes and fueling risk appetite in both crypto and traditional markets.

The February CPI report showed a 0.2% monthly increase, below the 0.3% forecast, while year-over-year inflation slowed to 2.8% versus expectations of 2.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, rose 3.1% year-over-year, also softer than expectations.

Following the report, Bitcoin surged more than 3%, with Ethereum climbing to $1,938, while altcoins like Solana (SOL) and XRP posted 5% gains. Stocks also reacted positively — Dow Jones Industrial Average futures rose 223 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 advanced 0.8% and 0.9%, respectively.

Market sentiment had been shaky in recent weeks as inflation concerns clashed with trade policy uncertainty following President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. However, the lower-than-expected CPI print revived investor confidence, with traders now pricing in a higher probability of Federal Reserve rate cuts in the coming months.

Thursday’s Producer Price Index (PPI) data could further shape inflation expectations. If wholesale prices also show a cooling trend, markets may rally further in anticipation of monetary policy relief.

In the past 24 hours, a total of 116,409 traders were liquidated, with total liquidations amounting to $427.96 million, according to CoinGlass.

The largest single liquidation order occurred on HTX, where a BTC-USDT trade worth $60 million was wiped out.

After posting losses earlier this week, crypto stocks are finally rebounding in pre-market trading following softer-than-expected CPI inflation data. The largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, MicroStrategy (MSTR) climbed 2.46% to $267.00, while crypto exchanges Coinbase (COIN) gained 2.46% to $196.40 and Robinhood (HOOD) led the recovery, surging 6.30% to $38.65. Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings (MARA) remained flat at $13.32. The bounce-back in crypto-linked stocks follows renewed investor optimism, with risk assets rallying across both crypto and traditional markets.

[TheStreet]