Opinion
Love, sex and scam in 2022, by Tunde Odesola
As the new year unfurls its carpet of promise and hope, it won’t be nice to stain the carpet, so early, with footprints from the dunghill of sufferings created last year by the retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari-led incompetent regime.
Therefore, I won’t dwell on President Buhari and his regime in my inaugural article of 2022. There are more worthwhile issues to discuss than the depressing news of killings and teary graves across Nigeria.
Even if it’s for a few hours in the new year, the stone-hearted in powerful corridors nationwide know, without conceding, that Nigerians deserve a break from the endless reportage of killings, kidnappings and crises fast replacing the national anthem.
So, in this article, I’ll ignore the Fulani general and his star-studded cabinet that have come unstuck like the incisors of a poisonous snake while rats catwalk in sight.
Herein, I’ll talk about a rising trend among Nigerian youths, which is, the act of kneeling to propose marriage. Is it real or fake? What’s your view about it?
Love is a four-letter word, and so is scam. A profound article by a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, Louann Brizendine, explains the vast difference between the brain of a female and that of a male.
Brizendine, a member of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, says while the female brain is driven to seek security and reliability in a potential mate before she has sex, the male brain is fuelled to mate and mate again…for life.
In the article entitled, “Love, sex and the male brain,” published on CNN website on March 25, 2010, the member, National Board of Medical Examiners, also says male brains have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in female brains.
She writes, “If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day. But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day. This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.”
Brizendine further observes that all that testosterone drives the ‘Man Trance’, which she describes as ‘that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts’, stressing that men can’t stop themselves from entering the trance.
She remarks that men look at attractive women the way women look at pretty butterflies, adding that minutes after men snapped out of their one-second reveries, women are still fuming that men looked at other beauties.
However, the MD and clinician discloses that the male brain can fall in love just as hard and fast as the female brain, stressing that men have stronger emotional reactions than women but ‘they just don’t show it very often…men use their analytical brain structures, not their emotional ones’.
The 69-year-old American scientist summarises her article in these words, “The best advice I have for women is to make peace with the male brain. Let men be men.”
To differ completely from the submission of Brizendine is to ignore the hooting horn of the train called science.
To submit in totality to Brizendine’s advice, however, is tantamount to the female laying herself vulnerable to the whims of the average male who’s ready to go to great lengths to satisfy his libido.
I’ll advise the female youths to be careful, think with their heads, and not their hearts, when a guy comes kneeling down like the lame at the Beautiful Gate.
Proposing on one knee is a tradition that dates back to medieval times when knights bowed before noblewomen, asking them the age-long phrase, “Will you marry me?”
But today, the practice has become one of the tricks young Nigerian men employ to lure young women into steady sexual relationships, and satisfy their testosterone loads, fleeing after breaking their promises – most of the time.
I’m not saying that ladies open up their hearts to men only when they propose on their knees, I know the economic situation of the country has made many girls open their legs to men with plates of noodles or akara or suya etc.
I’m saying ladies lose their heads and hearts thinking marriage is in the bag when men propose with rings on bended knees.
Like many misunderstood western traditions, I’ve seen videos of proposing Nigerian males going down on two knees like someone serving corporal punishment; medieval knights proposed on just one knee!
You never appreciate what you have until you lose it. I strongly believe that the gains of Nigerian marriage rites that include presentation of rings and food items during ceremonies outweigh the momentary showiness of bended-knee proposal.
Nigerian marriage rites not only strengthen nuptials, they also symbolise that the union of a man and a woman as husband and wife is family-based unlike the misdone bended-knee concept which underscores the me-and-my-husband idea of marriage.
Before a man can go on bended knee, he should’ve, beforehand, sounded the lady’s opinion about the possibility of marrying him, he should’ve secretly told some members of her family about his decision, chosen a location, and known her ring size and preference.
It’s childish to knee down in a mall, buka, or nightclub, and pop out misfitting engagement rings on a lady who isn’t in love with you, in the first place. That’s a scam. That’s the type of union that ends in e-divorce.
A black American friend of mine, Tina Martin, who lives in Decatur, Alabama, sees nothing wrong with proposing on bended knee, saying it portrays humility and commitment. Martin, however, adds that most bended-knee proposals don’t live up to the promises.
Two white Americans, Jennifer Henderson (36) and Shaylor Terry (29), who work in Hartselle, Alabama, expressed their preference for a private proposal, just as another white lady, Emily Jeffers (20), spoke in support of a lavish, public proposal.
My secondary schoolmate, Kemi Samuel, who’s based in the UK, and a US-based friend, Olusegun Adeyina, described kneeling to propose as negating African tradition.
Sometimes, we truly never know the value of a practice until it becomes a memory. Nigerian languages are dying today because the English Language has been promoted over them. Nigeria should be the only country in the world where pupils are fined in schools for speaking their mother tongue. Likewise, Nigerian native dresses are despised while English dresses are approved to be worn to work and schools from Monday to Thursday by authorities.
I believe that the buba and sokoto Nigerian dress is more fitting and more convenient than the shirt and trousers bequeathed to us by colonialists.
In the US, nobody really notices what you wear if you’re in shirts and trousers etc, except when you wear sports jerseys or designers. But when you wear any African dress, genuine words of appreciation from blacks and whites will follow you till you return home. People will stop you at malls to ask where they can get the type of dress you’re wearing. It happens to me every time I wear African dresses.
Returning from church one Sunday, I went off to a mall in company with my children. A young black American lady walked towards me, and asked where she could get my kind of Nigerian attire to buy.
I thought she was trying to sell a product to me. I smiled at her, and said, “Some other time, please,” and walked away.
My shocked children caught up with me and asked me what I told the lady. I said I told her I didn’t want to buy any policy or product. They all burst out laughing, saying she wasn’t asking to sell anything to me. They explained that she was only appreciating my dress and was asking where she could buy it. I felt bad, went back to the spot but she was nowhere to be found.
Since that day, I got the nickname, “Some other time,” from my children.
Please, let’s appreciate our values before we lose them all. Happy New Year!
Email: tundeodes2003@yahoo.com; Facebook: @tunde odesola; Twitter: @tunde_odesola.
Published in The PUNCH on Monday, January 3, 2022.
Opinion
2027: Tinubu May Get Less Than 10% of Northern Votes — Ard
2027: Tinubu May Get Less Than 10% of Northern Votes — Ard
President Bola Tinubu could suffer a dramatic collapse in his Northern support in the 2027 presidential election, securing less than 10 per cent of votes from the region if the poll is free and credible, Convener of the League of Northern Democrats and key promoter of the All-Democratic Alliance (ADA), Dr Umar Ardo, has predicted.
Ardo made the prediction on Monday in an interview on Frontline, a current affairs programme on Eagle 102.5 FM, Ilese-Ijebu, Ogun State, arguing that the outcome would largely reflect how Northern voters assess the Tinubu administration’s performance.
He identified insecurity, worsening poverty, economic hardship and the rising cost of living as major issues likely to influence voting decisions in the region.
According to him, the persistent insecurity affecting communities, farmers, traders and businesses remains one of the administration’s biggest challenges.
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“You can solve the issue of insecurity and insurgency in one year,” he said, insisting that the Federal Government could significantly reduce the crisis with the right strategy and sufficient political will.
Ardo also faulted the administration’s economic reforms, particularly the removal of fuel subsidy, questioning whether ordinary Nigerians had experienced corresponding benefits.
“Subsidy removal, is it a benefit?” he asked, arguing that the reforms had eroded purchasing power and made basic necessities increasingly unaffordable.
He said the impact had been particularly severe in Northern Nigeria, where a large proportion of the population is economically vulnerable.
“The economic reform has pushed from the state of poverty to destitution,” he said.
The political commentator also raised concerns about political representation under the Tinubu administration, arguing that the composition of government could shape public perception of its commitment to different regions.
Ardo said Northern voters should not be assumed to be permanently aligned with the voting pattern recorded in 2023, stressing that prevailing economic and security conditions would determine their choices in 2027.
“If a free, fair and credible election is conducted in Nigeria, Tinubu can’t get 10 percent of the Northern part,” he declared.
His prediction puts the spotlight on the opposition’s capacity to exploit any erosion of Tinubu’s Northern support, with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and other opposition figures potentially positioned to benefit from any major electoral realignment.
2027: Tinubu May Get Less Than 10% of Northern Votes — Ard
Opinion
Beyond the Ballot: Shaping a Bar That Works for All
Beyond the Ballot: Shaping a Bar That Works for All
By Asiwaju Kunle Kalejaye, SAN
The inaugural address of Mrs. Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, titled “From the Call to the Cause,” marks a historic turning point for the legal community as she officially assumes office as the 33rd President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) as she wa sworn in by her predecessor, Afam Osigwe, SAN, at the High Court complex in Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
Her leadership, the hiccup of her emergence notwithstanding, represents a historic milestone as the first woman elected to the NBA presidency through a competitive, though highly disputed, national ballot. Her address presents a powerful vision for a “bolder Bar” that actively confronts internal fractures, deep professional disconnects, and economic vulnerabilities. Central to her message is the core understanding that an association tasked with safeguarding judicial independence and speaking truth to power cannot effectively fulfill its national mandate if it remains internally fragmented. By focusing on the professional survival of young lawyers and vowing to act decisively against public misconduct, Badejo-Okusanya highlights an urgent reality: institutional strength requires collective solidarity and institutional determination. Fostering lasting unity within the NBA under this administration demands a deliberate shift from performative governance to deeply institutionalized, structural changes that build bridges across classes, factions, generations, and geographical divides.
To bring the NBA together, the new administration must incorporate proactive mechanisms for post-election reconciliation directly into its governance framework. The leadership must deliberately distance itself from divisive rhetoric and provocative nuances. The competitive nature of Bar elections often leaves behind lingering bitter factions that can stunt long-term cooperation and slow down progressive policies. By building an “olive branch” initiative that integrates runner-up contestants and their core campaign stakeholders into strategic national committees, the leadership can transform former rivals into active co-creators of the Bar’s future. Indeed this strategy which I dubbed the Abraham Lincoln strategy remains an eternal clincher.
Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election and famously appointed his chief Republican nomination rivals to key cabinet positions. Lincoln believed the country faced extreme peril during the crisis leading into the Civil War l. He wanted the most capable and influential leaders in his administration regardless of past personal competition. He valued robust debate over agreement, using differing viewpoints to make better decisions. This inclusivity must simultaneously bridge the widening economic and generational gap between senior practitioners and younger advocates. Enforcing standardized minimum remuneration and welfare requirements across all local branches will help reduce the economic alienation felt by younger members. To make this sustainable, the administration should establish joint mentorship hubs where senior legal practitioners collaborate with tech-savvy young lawyers on modern areas of practice, such as artificial intelligence, data privacy, and digital commerce, turning a generational divide into a symbiotic avenue for mutual professional empowerment.
True unity also requires restoring civil digital discourse through a comprehensive Digital Ethics Enforcement framework, fulfilling the President’s explicit warning against the breakdown of professional etiquette on social media. The profession has lost some vast mileage due to the digital posture of some members. To achieve this, the NBA can look to established global precedents where foreign bar associations have successfully navigated the complexities of digital misconduct. For instance, the American Bar Association (ABA) successfully integrated technological expectations into its framework via the Ethics 20/20 Commission, explicitly modifying its Model Rules of Professional Conduct such as Rules 1.6 and 8.4 to govern online confidentiality, misleading public statements, and deceptive digital behaviour. Similarly, the Law Society of England and Wales updated its practice note and compliance frameworks to penalize offensive online remarks, reinforcing that comments made by a lawyer in a personal capacity can still be actively disciplined as professional misconduct if public trust is damaged. By adopting a similar structure, the NBA can expand its own Rules of Professional Conduct into a clear code for online behaviour, utilizing its network of regional Ethics and Disciplinary Committees to monitor digital spaces and safely review flagged misconduct via secure portals.
Backing this framework with public disciplinary actions and a tiered system of sanctions will allow the NBA to decisively penalize cyberbullying, transitioning professional disputes into mediated internal forums rather than chaotic public platforms. This digital accountability should be reinforced by introducing mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) modules in digital etiquette, ensuring that practitioners maintain technological and behavioral competence.
Immediately, the NBA must dismantle the persistent perception that it is a “Lagos-Abuja centric” organization. Actively decentralizing national activities, rotating National Executive Council (NEC) meetings across various geopolitical zones, and providing direct financial and technical resources to smaller, rural branches will make every lawyer feel valued regardless of geography. Ultimately, by integrating these targeted, practical strategies and internationally proven ethical standards into the foundational ideals of her inaugural address, the administration can successfully unite its members and establish a cohesive, resilient front capable of defending the rule of law across Nigeria.
The new administration must pursue a deliberate policy towards attracting many docile members back into its fold.
If the new administration must know, the opaque electoral processes that had dogged the association in recent history has adversely affected the morale of a significant number but silent members of the Association. Chief Yomi Alliyu graphically stated the disturbing position when he posited in an opinion piece that: “The NBA has been hijacked by political lawyers to the disaffection of real practitioners of law. “Elections from 2016 or so vide e-voting had been manipulated to favour members of this class.”
The new administration must therefore consciously pursue reconciliatory steps that rein in all members. As at now, the silent class war must end for NBA to achieve its full potential.
I was sorely tempted to headline this peice: Nigerian Bar Association: the road to Kigali. I refrained because I still saw a silver lining which this new administration can latch on to save the NBA from itself!
The “road to Kigali” serves as a grim warning about the risk of total institutional fracture, polarization, and potential irrelevance. If proactive steps are not taken to unify and reform the body, it faces the danger of fracturing into competing, ethnicized, or regionalized professional factions, effectively ending the era of a single, unified voice for the Nigerian Bar.
The 1992 Port Harcourt Conference Crisis, was a definitive moment that brought the NBA to the brink of permanent destruction. Today, unless we play the ostrich, the cries of war are abroad but the present leadership could etch their names in gold if the NBA is consciously, deliberately and clinically steered from self implosion. Their job is cut out for them.Failure to seize the moment may end up placing us all on the road to Kigali.
Asiwaju Kunle Kalejaye SAN
Eagle102.5 FM Ilese-Ijebu
Opinion
Why Atiku’s subsidy gambit rattles Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi
Why Atiku’s subsidy gambit rattles Tinubu, By Farooq Kperogi
On Thursday, barely a day after official campaigns began for the 2027 presidential election, Atiku pledged to restore petrol subsidies if Nigerians elect him president. That pledge, more than anything he has done lately to dislodge Tinubu, is the clearest signal yet that he is prepared to wrest power from the president.
Before now, Atiku expended money, time and energy excavating Tinubu’s past, much of which Nigerians already know. Tinubu’s 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 to the US government in a case that grew out of a heroin-trafficking investigation has been public knowledge for years. It was Sahara Reporters that first reported it on September 15, 2008. Fresh FBI or DEA papers are unlikely to suddenly alter electoral attitudes.
The Chicago State University expedition was even less politically useful. Tinubu genuinely attended and graduated from CSU in 1979. Caleb Westberg, the university’s registrar, said so under oath. He agreed that the photocopy Tinubu submitted to INEC did not look like the 1979 samples shown to him, but CSU’s diploma templates changed over the years and the BBC found that Tinubu’s copy resembled replacement diplomas from the 1990s. Westberg also said the missing portion of the university logo could have been cut off during photocopying because American diplomas are unusually large and aren’t intended to be photocopied.
In America, diplomas are largely ceremonial documents that people frame and hang on walls. Transcripts are the official records routinely used to verify attendance and graduation. Atiku’s legal expedition ironically helped establish that Tinubu has a CSU transcript and graduated with honors.
The BBC Global Disinformation Team found no evidence for the claim that Tinubu forged the CSU diploma he submitted to INEC. The report, in fact, won “Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist” at the 2024 African Fact-Checking Awards in Accra. In other words, Atiku spent enormous political energy helping to settle a question whose answer was electorally barren.
Tinubu understood this and mostly ignored the attacks. More importantly, Atiku offered little policy distance from Tinubu on the economic question that has tormented Nigerians since May 2023. He had promised during the last election to remove petrol subsidies within his first 100 days in office. On the most consequential economic policy of the Tinubu presidency, Atiku was traveling on the same ideological road.
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That changed this week. Atiku asked the question millions of Nigerians have been asking: where is the money supposedly saved from subsidy removal? He then promised a new subsidy structure that would privilege locally refined petrol, give qualifying Nigerian refineries crude at preferential prices, impose a fixed annual spending ceiling, trace subsidized crude to actual domestic production and punish diversion. His formulation is that “the subsidy will follow the barrel.”
That is a more serious proposal than the Presidency’s caricature of it. And Tinubu suddenly found his voice. He personally dismissed Atiku’s pledge as a demonstration of “serious ignorance” of governance and the economy. Atiku’s previous assaults on Tinubu’s character produced studied presidential indifference. But his challenge to the economic orthodoxy that has pauperized Nigerians produced presidential irritation. That means he struck a raw nerve.
If Atiku’s proposal demonstrates ignorance, what does Tinubu’s policy demonstrate? Any honest person knows the answer: cruelty. Between ignorance and cruelty, which is more benign? You be the judge.
The anti-subsidy theology that Tinubu and his neoliberal choristers recite has always rested on a false premise. Subsidy simply means government assistance. Every functional society subsidizes something its people need for survival and economic productivity. Governments subsidize food, agriculture, housing, healthcare, transportation or energy according to the peculiarities of their societies.
For Nigeria, petrol occupies a uniquely central place because it doubles as an infrastructural substitute. People buy petrol because public electricity is unreliable. Small businesses generate their own power. Goods move mostly by road. Workers commute in vehicles powered by fuel. Farmers, artisans, traders and manufacturers absorb fuel costs and pass them on through prices.
A petrol subsidy therefore travels through the economy. Its removal travels through the economy too, only in the opposite direction. It raises transportation costs, production costs, food prices and the cost of nearly everything that depends on movement or power.
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I warned about this exactly one month before Tinubu was inaugurated. In my April 29, 2023 column titled “Six Agenda Items for Tinubu’s Success,” I warned that any policy that caused an arbitrary and unbearable increase in petrol prices without a corresponding improvement in incomes and living conditions would sink Tinubu. That warning was elementary commonsense.
The subsidy removal has since wreaked havoc on the economy, deepened poverty, killed businesses, murdered hope, hollowed out the middle class and democratized misery. Reuters now describes the aftermath of Tinubu’s reforms as the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation. Nearly 80 percent of Nigerians in a recent voter tracker said the country was headed in the wrong direction.
The government’s answer is always the same sterile, tired, intentionally dishonest incantation: temporary pains will yield permanent gains. But we have heard that sermon before.
Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program came with the same vocabulary of sacrifice, deregulation, currency devaluation, subsidy withdrawal and deferred prosperity. Nigerians were told to endure pain today for abundance tomorrow. By the time Babangida left in 1993, manufacturing had been battered, purchasing power had collapsed and social misery had spread. The promised gains vanished into the ether.
Only living people can enjoy future gains. A government that starves people in installments cannot redeem itself with a hypothetical prosperity scheduled for an undefined tomorrow.
Tinubu’s most frequently advertised dividend of subsidy removal is that states now receive more money and can pay salaries and pensions. That is useful to salary earners, pensioners and the relatives who depend on them. Every Nigerian with a functioning brain cell knows that formal salary and pension earners constitute only a small fraction of Nigeria’s population. The wellbeing of state treasuries is a poor substitute for the wellbeing of the vast majority of citizens.
What kind of economic triumph makes governors more solvent while making citizens poorer? Government has improved the liquidity of public treasuries by draining the liquidity of household economies.
Atiku has finally opened a policy flank that Tinubu cannot wave away with moral insults, ethnic mobilization or tales of macroeconomic “reform.”
Nonetheless, Atiku’s conversion deserves scrutiny. He promised in 2023 to remove the same subsidy he now wants to restore in a redesigned form. I disagreed with him then. A politician who changes his mind after observing the destructive consequences of a policy can reasonably plead that evidence changed his assumptions. Nigerians also have abundant reasons to distrust politicians who discover compassion during campaigns.
They campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Tinubu, after all, told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign that if he failed to give them electricity and returned for a second term, they should not vote for him, although he inserted an escape clause about giving “adequate reasons” for failure. Muhammadu Buhari promised a paradise of security, prosperity and integrity before power exposed the hollowness of his promises.
Atiku therefore has work to do. He must keep explaining the cost of his subsidy plan, its funding source, its legal path under the Petroleum Industry Act, its anti-corruption safeguards and the mechanisms that will ensure cheaper energy reaches households and industries. He should put these commitments in language that can be measured and used against him if he wins.
In spite of my well-justified distrust of the promises of politicians, including Atiku who supervised a ruinous privation program when he was vice president, I can’t help but concede that this is the first truly useful political argument of the 2027 campaign.
Policy contrast is finally replacing pointless and unproductive character assassination. Nigerians already know that Tinubu has a morally complicated past, but they live every day with something more immediate: the extortionate price of food, transport, electricity, medicine and survival.
Atiku has finally moved the contest from Tinubu’s old files in America to Nigerian kitchens, markets, factories and motor parks. That is where Tinubu is most vulnerable. Tinubu can survive old scandals, but the mass hunger his “reforms” have created is a more formidable opponent than impotent darts thrown at his character.
Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based professor of journalism.
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