Opinion

Fayose-Obasanjo: Two eboras dragging same pair of trousers (2)

Published

2 months ago

November 28, 2025

Trends Admin

Tunde Odesola

Fayose-Obasanjo: Two eboras dragging same pair of trousers (2)

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, November 28, 2025)

On June 26, 2012, when the Ekiti governorship election was two years and four months away, Ebora Fayose, with the coals of ambition burning in his heart, set forth at dawn by writing a letter from his country home at No. 1, Odo-Ode Street, Afao-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria. Fayose sent the seven-paragraph letter to Agbe L’Oba House, Quarry Road, Ibara, P.O.Box 2286, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, the cave of the Balogun of Owu, Ebora Obasanjo, who keeps grudges and gunpowder warm.

Fayose’s letter read, “Dear Baba,

“There is no denying the fact that my relationship with you has gone sour as a result of my action and inaction, which have definitely caused you embarrassment in public, and this has marred our very good father-son relationship in the past.

“I take responsibility for my overreaction and disrespect to your person, which is most regretted. I am indeed sorry.

“I pray that God will give you the grace to let go of the past, knowing full well that I am human and therefore not infallible, especially considering the circumstances surrounding my removal from office.

“To further buttress my willingness to seek peace with you, I could recall that I had made several efforts to this effect by consulting your close allies in the persons of Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), Chief Omilani, and Pastor Oyedepo, among others.

“Lastly, kindly disregard all insinuations or political blackmail suggestive of my doing or saying anything contradicting my present disposition as contained in this letter.

“My reconciliation with your good self may not go down well with some of my political opponents, but you remain the father of all.

“My wife sends her greetings.”

With high regards.

Signed: Ayo Fayose.

In a four-paragraph letter, Obasanjo, on July 18, 2012, wrote to Fayose, saying, “Dear Ayo, I write to acknowledge the receipt of your letter dated June 26, 2012, pleading with me to forgive you, as you put it, for your action and inaction which have caused me embarrassment in public.

“As for the embarrassment and personal insult to me, forgiveness is divine, and I will not withhold forgiveness since I believe that God will not withhold forgiveness for my inadequacies.

READ ALSO:

“However, for me, the personal aspect can be handled by me, but the party aspect has to be handled by the local, state and national levels of the Party.

“I wish you all the best and God’s blessing.

Yours sincerely,

Signed: Olusegun Obasanjo.

The exchange of letters between Afao-Ekiti and Ibara-Abeokuta in 2012 signalled the official cessation of hostilities after the two-time Ekiti governor and the three-time Nigerian ruler had clashed during the 60th birthday anniversary of a former Osun Governor, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, held in Okuku, in February 2011.

But some scars do not disappear even after they heal. A governor, who was scurried out of the Ekiti State Government House, Ado-Ekiti, in the booth of a car like a bag of garri Ijebu, would never forget the ordeal. Neither would an elder publicly insulted by a younger fellow. So, both Obasanjo and Fayose seethed in controlled animosity against each other. Years after his controversial removal from power in the early morning of December 15, 2006, over alleged corruption in a state government-owned poultry business, Fayose contested his removal from office, and the Supreme Court, in April 2015, declared his impeachment illegal.

Fayose, who walked into the dining room of Oyinlola, where political giants like former Head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida; then-Oyo State Governor, Chief Adebayo Alao-Akala, etc, were being fêted, snubbed Obasanjo while greeting other leaders. The birthday boy, Oyinlola, noticed the insult and quickly went to Fayose and asked, “Did you not see Baba Obasanjo?”

“Obasan-who? I don’t know anyone by that name,” Fayose said flatly. “I hope you’re not blind,” Oyinlola countered with jocular seriousness, and added firmly, “Ayo, go and greet Baba before you sit down.” Obasanjo heard the dialogue. And he fired a verbal shot: “I don’t know bastards, too.” If the bullet hit Fayose, he didn’t show it. He only fired back, “You’re a bastard, too!”

After the Okuku exchange came the two letters of apology and acceptance. Two years after the letter-inducing ceasefire, Fayose coasted home to a famous victory in the Ekiti governorship election of October 16, 2014, defeating the incumbent governor, Gentleman Kayode Fayemi, by a stretch. Thus, Fayose became the poster boy of the PDP in the South-West, while Obasanjo maintained his title as the party’s godfather and disciplinarian-in-chief.

READ ALSO:

As the 2015 general elections approached, Obasanjo turned into a thorn in the flesh of the President Goodluck Jonathan administration, publicly tearing his PDP membership card, and endorsing the late President Muhammadu Buhari as a better candidate for the 2015 presidential election.

In his controversial three-volume book, My Watch, which was presented to the public on December 9, 2014, at the Lagos Country Club, Ikeja, Lagos, Obasanjo describes Jonathan as clueless, weak and selfish, even as he reserves uncharitable words for former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, a former Governor of Delta State, Mr James Ibori; and a former Governor of Kwara, Bukola Saraki, among other PDP chiefs.

A national chieftain of the PDP, Buruji Kashamu (now deceased), who hailed from Ogun State like Obasanjo, went to an Abuja High Court, where he obtained an order to stop the book’s release, claiming it was fraught with libellous claims. As a result of his loyalty to the PDP and financial muscle, Kashamu emerged as the axehead of the pro-Jonathan group against Obasanjo within the Ogun PDP. The book’s public presentation became the subject of intense national political debate as fever-pitch fear gripped the polity over Obasanjo’s safety. The Jonathan government did not shut down the venue of the book launch as anticipated. I was an eyewitness in the audience.

So, when Kashamu died on August 8, 2020, Obasanjo sent a letter of condolence to the Ogun State Governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun. It read, “I received the sad news of the demise of Senator Esho Jinadu (Buruji Kashamu), a significant citizen of Ogun State. Please accept my condolences and those of my family on the irreparable loss.

“The life and history of the departed have lessons for those of us all on this side of the veil. Senator Esho Jinadu (Buruji Kashamu), in his lifetime, used the manoeuvre of law and politics to escape facing justice in Nigeria and outside Nigeria. But no legal, political, cultural, social or even medical manoeuvre could stop the cold hand of death when the Creator of all of us decides that the time is up.

“May Allah forgive his sin and accept his soul into Aljannah, and may God grant his family and friends fortitude to bear the irreparable loss.”

Signed: Olusegun Obasanjo.

Not a few Nigerians saw Obasanjo’s letter to Abiodun as insincere and sarcastic because of its tone. It is also not on public record that Obasanjo sent a letter of condolence to Kashamu’s family, fuelling the allegation that vindictiveness, and not grief, was the inspiration behind the condolence letter.

As PDP governor in Ekiti, Fayose queued up behind Jonathan, attacking Obasanjo for alleged anti-party activities, saying the former president behaved as though he owed Nigeria. Thus, the two frenemies left the path of peace again and pitched their camps at opposing ends. In an eternal tug-of-war, two eboras forcefully grabbed the same pair of trousers; each thrust his foot in one leg of the trousers, one leg in, one leg out, each struggling, each pushing, each tugging and staggering, whipping up dust in a battle of self-interest. Unmistakably, the battle line was drawn in blood red colour.

Jonathan lost his re-election bid and went back to the creek quietly. The PDP won’t forgive Obasanjo; he’s the architect of their misfortune. Fayose continued to lambast Obasanjo, calling him a corrupt, manipulative and egocentric leader. He demanded a refund of the money he donated on behalf of Ekiti State to the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta, saying PDP governors were arm-twisted by Obasanjo to donate state funds to the library, a claim Obasanjo had refuted.

During his first coming as governor, Fayose, fiercely loyal to Obasanjo, climbed a table inside the hallowed chamber of the Osun State House of Assembly venue of the South-West regional hearing on constitutional amendment, ordering out activists like the late Bamidele Aturu, Abiodun Aremu (deceased), and a host of others, who had stormed the sitting, protesting that the hearing was a ruse to guage the people’s feeling on a third term for Obasanjo. South-West PDP governors, deputy governors, senators, House of Reps members, ministers, speakers, etc, were present at the event. I was an eyewitness.

READ ALSO:

The above-painted scenario was the state of affairs between Obasanjo and Fayose until the latter turned 65, and he decided to call on Nigerians from all walks of life to celebrate with him. Speaking with me on the phone, Fayose said, “Excuse me, sir, I don’t want to discuss Obasanjo anymore because we are all going to become history one day. But we must be mindful of our legacy. What is wrong with turning 65 and reaching out to everyone to celebrate with you? He wasn’t the only person I invited. Is there a sin in that? I told Osita (Chidoka), who gave me his (Obasanjo) number. I called and informed him about my birthday; he said he wished to come, but that he was out of the country, and I sent him $20,000, only for him to come and start abusing me at my birthday party. I’m not contesting any election. What do I need him for? I do not regret everything I said.”

The Ebora Owu has kept mute over Fayose’s outburst. “A knife cuts the child’s finger, the child flings the knife away. Has the knife not achieved its goal?” Obasanjo’s silence seems to say.

Looking beyond the theatrics of the cat-and-mouse fight between the two leaders, an ominous cloud of bad leadership examples descends, nudging me back to the twin metaphors of accident and misfortune upon which this article is predicated. I repeat, many Nigerian leaders arrive in office by accident, and many are a misfortune in office. Nigeria’s democracy is the government of the few, by the few, for the few.

Many National Assembly members, including Osun-born Senator Ṣola Adeyeye, had come out to say that Obasanjo gave millions of naira to federal legislators to accommodate a third term in the constitution. Adeyeye, who said he didn’t collect the N70 million shared to each legislator, maintained that Obasanjo sought a third term in office.

Fayose jumping on the table and ordering policemen to chase out human rights activists during the constitution amendment hearing in Osogbo, the Osun State capital, showed he was an accomplice, ready to do anything to subvert the Constitution for the President’s interest. This is the misfortune of Nigerian democracy.

The latest outburst between Fayose and his former godfather wasn’t a clash of morality. No. It was a fight of ego, revenge, and self-righteousness. Both clothes are cut from the same cloth, both are dyed deep.

Probably wanting to finally bury the hatchet, Fayose thought 65 was the age to retire from war, but Obasanjo was not only the Balogun of Owu Kingdom, but he was also a war-tested Aloku Soja (Old Soldier), with an unforgetful brain, a tribute some say makes him unforgiving. Ara Owu ki i ranro, awi menu kuro ni t’Owu.

I think Obasanjo was utterly wrong to collect $20,000 from Fayose and board a plane from Rwanda to deliver a baggage of insults at Fayose’s birthday. Fayose going to Obasanjo’s house to invite him was a show of repentance, and OBJ’s acceptance to grace the occasion should have been an enduring lesson in forgiveness. But Obasanjo flunked the opportunity.

Like a foxy old soldier, Obasanjo had his revenge strategy pre-planned. His enumeration of Fayose’s sins on a sheet of paper and his choosing to be the last speaker at the event all evidenced his mission. Either to show purpose or charge himself up, Baba Iyabo, at 88 years of age, ran up the stage, waving Juju legend, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, to cut the music. And he began his sermon on the mountain.

Was Fayose’s outburst wrong? I don’t think so, because he didn’t make his response public. Obasanjo did. Who wouldn’t be annoyed? Obasanjo didn’t blast Fayose alone; he lambasted his wife, too, saying the couple lacked integrity – Enyi mejeji e ki i se Omoluabi. What did Ebora Obasanjo expect to get from Ebora Fayose? A bunch of roses? Fayose crowned him with a garland of thorns, instead.

Both Obasanjo and Fayose are leaders whose decisions have impacted the lives of the Nigerian masses, either positively or negatively. Both are community leaders. Both are family men with wives and children. One is in combat with his children in his nuclear family. The other is at war with his siblings in his extended family. Both are our leaders. At various times, they decided the fate we live today.

* Concluded.

Email: [email protected]

Facebook: @Tunde Odesola

X: @Tunde_Odesola

Fayose-Obasanjo: Two eboras dragging same pair of trousers (2)

Related Topics:eboras Fayose Obasanjo trousers

Up Next

How Nigeria Turned U.S. Pressure into Strategic Advantage

Don't Miss

Nigeria’s return to the 2014 nightmare, By Farooq Kperogi

Opinion

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

4 hours ago

January 24, 2026

Trends Admin

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

Farooq Kperogi

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

The New York Times of January 18, 2026 published an explosive story showing how unverified and methodologically questionable data produced by a little-known Onitsha screwdriver seller who moonlights as an NGO activist, Emeka Umeagbalasi of Intersociety, traveled upward into US Republican politics and helped shape a narrative of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, culminating in Trump-ordered airstrikes in Sokoto State.

Umeagbalasi, who runs Intersociety from his home and relies largely on secondary sources, assumptions, presumptions and Google searches, admitted that he rarely verifies deaths, often imputes victims’ religious identities based on his understanding of what I like to call Nigeria’s emotional geography, and inflates figures that conflict researchers and even church leaders dispute.

Despite these flaws, his claims were cited by Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz, Rep. Riley Moore and other Republicans, and echoed by the White House. It illustrates how fraudulent data, ideological advocacy and US culture-war politics converged to misframe Nigeria’s complex violence as a one-sided religious slaughter rather than a crisis of state failure affecting Christians, Muslims, traditional religious worshipers and nonreligious people.

But a certain class of Nigerians have chosen to either not read the New York Times story (instantiating my recent Facebook post about Nigerians’ fixation with forming opinions based only on headlines) or to read it but allow their preconceived biases to befog their comprehension.

Some low-information, high-ignorance Nigerians even claim that the New York Times report was bought with the reported $9 million the Bola Tinubu government paid to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington, DC. I will return to this point shortly.

Interestingly, a December 26, 2025 investigation by the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit reached strikingly similar conclusions to those of the New York Times. The BBC investigation, which surprisingly did not gain traction in Nigeria when it was first published, also showed that the figures underpinning the “Christian genocide” narrative are unverifiable, internally inconsistent and sharply at odds with independent conflict-monitoring data.

It noted that groups such as ACLED document widespread killings across Nigeria but find no credible evidence of a coordinated campaign targeting Christians alone. Violence in Nigeria, the BBC observed, is better explained by state weakness, banditry, insurgency and impunity, dynamics that endanger Muslims and Christians alike.

READ ALSO:

Crucially, the BBC report situates the persistence of the genocide framing within southeastern Nigeria’s political history. It highlights how some of the loudest voices amplifying the narrative are rooted in Igbo political grievances and are entangled with pro-Biafra networks that have long sought international sympathy by portraying the Nigerian state as genocidal.

Recasting Nigeria’s complex security crisis as a religious extermination campaign provides a morally powerful export narrative, particularly when targeted at US evangelical and conservative audiences.

The report quoted a Biafran separatist group as admitting to playing a major role in promoting the “Christian genocide” narrative in the US Congress. “The Biafra Republic Government in Exile, BRGIE, described it as a ‘highly orchestrated effort,’ saying it had hired lobbying firms and met US officials, including Cruz.”

That framing found fertile ground in Washington. Lobbying firms and advocacy networks tailored the message for American culture-war politics, where persecution of Christians abroad resonates strongly. Republican lawmakers, often unfamiliar with Nigeria’s internal dynamics, repeated the claims with little scrutiny.

In that sense, the genocide story was less the product of rigorous evidence than of ideological alignment, diaspora activism and a lobbying ecosystem eager for simple moral binaries.

This does not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggest that Christians are not being killed in large numbers in northern Nigeria or that victims are unjustified in framing their suffering in religious terms simply because many of the perpetrators identify as Muslims. My first column on this issue acknowledged this fact.

But the pushback is warranted because the narrative is built on false data and amplified to US lobby groups by people whose agenda is not primarily about Christian genocide. It is also warranted because Muslims are being murdered in large numbers by the same actors who are killing Christians.

On the surface, it may seem defensible to argue that since the people killing Muslims are also Muslims, only the killings of Christians matter. But that position is both morally and sociologically problematic.

First, every unjustified death should concern us. Second, human beings inhabit a multiplicity of identities. Being Muslim is not the sum total of the lives of people murdered by bandits and terrorists.

To suggest that the murder of Hausa and sedentary Fulani by bandits and terrorists does not matter as much as the murder of Christians simply because the villains and victims share the same faith betrays a lack of humanity.

READ ALSO:

In my part of Nigeria, broadly speaking Borgu, which stretches across parts of Kebbi, Niger and Kwara States, scores of our people are murdered regularly. To imply that those deaths do not matter because most people there are Muslims cuts deeply. And that is where the “Christian genocide” narrative has led.

The internationalization of this narrative in the service of separatist advocacy makes it particularly jarring. That is why independent international media have been drawn to interrogate it, and why the story is now crumbling under sustained scrutiny.

Now, back to the conspiracy theory that the New York Times story was spurred by the Nigerian government.

There is no relationship between the Nigerian government’s reported payment to a conservative lobbying firm in Washington and the New York Times investigation that dismantled the Christian genocide narrative. None. The two events merely occurred in the same news cycle, and coincidence is being mistaken for causation.

To begin with the basics, there is no credible historical record of the New York Times ever accepting monetary inducement to write or slant a story. Not from governments, not from corporations, not from foreign lobbies.

In more than a century of operation, the paper has been sued, criticized, corrected, embarrassed and sometimes wrong, but it has never been shown to have sold its news judgment for cash.

The Times is not a fragile outfit scrambling for influence money. It is a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company whose value runs into the low tens of billions of dollars, whose brand is widely regarded as America’s newspaper of record and whose reporters earn, on average, six-figure salaries.

Its institutional power flows from credibility, not access fees. Destroying that credibility for a $9 million foreign lobbying contract, money that would not even pass through its books, would be commercial and reputational suicide.

Just as importantly, the lobbying payment itself is being misunderstood. Lobbyists in Washington influence government policy, not news coverage. They target lawmakers, executive agencies and regulatory processes.

They do not buy front-page investigations at elite newspapers, especially not papers that routinely antagonize conservative politicians and administrations. The idea that a conservative lobby would bribe a liberal newspaper to undermine a conservative narrative is internally incoherent.

The contrast with Nigerian media practices is uncomfortable but unavoidable. In the United States, mainstream news organizations do not accept bribes to write stories. Paying journalists to publish or suppress coverage is a career-ending offense. Newsrooms are legally exposed, aggressively scrutinized and professionally policed in ways that make such conduct extraordinarily risky.

That does not mean American journalism is perfect or bias-free. It means its failures are not transactional in the crude cash-for-coverage sense that some Nigerians assume or know.

So why does the bribery explanation feel plausible to some Nigerians? The answer lies not in evidence but in cognition and experience.

People rely on the availability heuristic, drawing on what they know best. If influence at home is often bought with money, money becomes the default explanation everywhere else. This is reinforced by analogical overreach, that is, the assumption that foreign institutions must function like local ones despite radically different incentive structures and accountability systems.

There is also institutional opacity. When people lack procedural knowledge of how elite Western media operate, they substitute a simpler question for a harder one. Instead of asking how a newspaper verifies sources or decides newsworthiness, they ask who paid whom. Add correlation-as-causation bias, the temptation to connect two adjacent events, and a narrative writes itself.

Layered onto this is monocausal populism, the belief that complex outcomes must have a single villain, usually money, and epistemic provincialism, the assumption that local moral failures are universal features of power.

In low-trust environments like Nigeria, conspiracy rationality becomes an ordinary mode of explanation rather than a fringe pathology. It supplies coherence where institutional trust is absent.

Finally, there is what in media studies we call narrative closure bias. The bribery story feels complete. Institutional independence feels abstract and unsatisfying. Closure beats accuracy.

Put plainly, the claim that a conservative lobby bribed a liberal American newspaper to publish an investigation that undercut conservative politicians tells us far more about how Nigerians make sense of distant power than about how American journalism actually works.

The New York Times story stands or falls on its evidence and methods. So far, critics have attacked neither. They have simply imagined a transaction that never happened.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based professor of Journalism.

Views expressed on this opinion are personal and do not reflect the thoughts and beliefs of newstrends.ng or its owners.

New York Times and Onitsha screwdriver sellers’ data, By Farooq Kperogi

Opinion

Farooq Kperogi: Celebrating ASUU-FG’s historic reset with caveats

Published

1 week ago

January 17, 2026

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi: Celebrating ASUU-FG’s historic reset with caveats

After sixteen years of stalemate, serial strikes and ritualized brinkmanship, the Federal Government and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have finally signed a renegotiated agreement that replaces the moribund 2009 pact. This is at once historic, consequential and praiseworthy.

For the first time in a generation, Nigeria’s public universities have a framework that promises industrial harmony, predictability of academic calendars and an end to the cruel cycle in which students lose years of their lives to shutdowns that have nothing to do with them. If implemented faithfully, the agreement will allow students to graduate on time, restore confidence in public universities and begin the long task of rebuilding Nigeria’s battered higher education system.

Credit is due to the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, and to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for pushing this through. In fact, the ASUU agreement is about the only major promise Tinubu made in the poetry of campaign that he has clearly kept in the prose of governance.

The symbolism is even more striking when contrasted with the immediate past. The Muhammadu Buhari administration presided over one of the most destructive eras in the history of Nigerian university education.

This was made all the more tragic by the presence of Adamu Adamu as Minister of Education. Before his appointment, Adamu, for whom I had enormously unconditional respect, was a well-known public defender of ASUU in his intrepid newspaper columns in the Daily Trust. Once in office, however, he turned out to be one of the most hostile ministers Nigerian academics have ever encountered.

On October 9, 2022, at the height of that administration’s war with ASUU, I wrote on social media: “Adamu Adamu, an erstwhile ASUU ally, is turning out to be the deadliest foe ASUU has ever had. With help from Ngige, he’s dealing the union one crushing blow after another…. Lesson: the fact that someone is your friend today doesn’t mean they can’t be a murderous foe tomorrow.”

The Tinubu administration has, at the very least, reversed that posture of antagonism and replaced it with negotiation, compromise and a willingness to reset the relationship between government and academia.

At its core, the new pact addresses the three issues that have driven nearly two decades of conflict: pay, welfare and the structure of university funding.

READ ALSO:

First is a 40 percent salary increase for lecturers, effective January 1, 2026. Someone rightly remarked that it’s the single largest upward review of academic salaries in over a decade. It’s a long overdue correction after years of erosion by inflation and currency collapse.

For professors, this comes with a new professorial cadre allowance of about 140,000 naira monthly, while readers (roughly equivalent to associate professors) receive about 70,000 naira. Earned academic allowances have also been restructured and tied more clearly to actual academic labor such as postgraduate supervision, fieldwork and research coordination.

Second is a major reform of retirement benefits. Professors who retire at the statutory age of 70 are now guaranteed pension benefits equivalent to their full annual salary. This provision alone is transformative. It ends the shameful tradition of professors retiring into poverty after decades of service and sends a powerful signal to younger academics that a life devoted to teaching and research will not be punished at the end.

Third is the institutionalization of research funding through the proposed establishment of a National Research Council, funded at not less than one percent of GDP. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, research financing is being embedded in national planning rather than left to donor whims and sporadic government interventions.

If implemented properly, this could anchor doctoral training, strengthen laboratories and libraries and finally position Nigeria as a serious knowledge producer.

Fourth is a new funding structure for universities that links capital funding, infrastructure development and staff development to long-term planning rather than emergency interventions. TETFund remains central, but funding is now part of an overarching reform framework.

Fifth is a recommitment to university autonomy and academic freedom, including protections against political interference in hiring, curriculum and internal governance. If faithfully implemented, which is never a guarantee but noteworthy nonetheless, vice-chancellors may not be the glorified political appointees that many of them are now, and universities may cease to be extensions of the civil service.

Finally, the agreement formally buries the 2009 pact that haunted the system like a zombie document. The new framework, produced by the Yayale Ahmed Committee after fourteen months of negotiations, is structured, phased and subject to periodic review. This gives ASUU leverage and gives government predictability.

Yet it is important to separate celebration from illusion. The new agreement is a noteworthy improvement on the living and working conditions of Nigerian university lecturers. But it is not yet competitive by continental standards, and it is unlikely, on its own, to halt academic brain drain.

READ ALSO:

Before the agreement, a full professor in a federal university earned roughly 525,000 naira to 630,000 naira monthly. With a 40 percent raise and the new 140,000-naira professorial allowance, a senior professor will now earn in the range of 1 million naira to 1.1 million naira per month, depending on rank and allowances.

That sounds impressive in naira terms. In continental terms, however, it remains deeply uncompetitive.

In South Africa, professors earn the equivalent of about $4,500 to $5,000 per month. In Kenya, professors earn around $1,300 monthly. In Uganda, the figure is about $1,100. In Ghana, professors earn roughly $700 to $800 monthly. In Egypt and Morocco, senior academics earn well above Nigeria’s new scale.

At current exchange rates, a Nigerian professor earning 1.1 million naira a month makes roughly $700. That places Nigeria near the bottom of Africa’s academic pay ladder, ahead of only a handful of fragile economies.

This is why Nigerian universities continue to hemorrhage talent. Professors are leaving for South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Botswana, the Gulf, Europe and North America not because they dislike Nigeria but because Nigeria does not value academic labor competitively. A Nigerian professor now earns in a month what a South African professor earns in a week.

The salary increase is therefore a necessary correction, not a strategic solution. It slows the bleeding. It does not stop it.

There is also a potential booby trap embedded in the agreement that deserves sober reflection. The guarantee of full-salary pensions for retired professors has been widely welcomed, and rightly so. But pension experts have warned that this provision resembles a return to the old defined-benefit pension system that Nigeria abandoned two decades ago because it was fiscally unsustainable.

A January 16, 2026, report by TheCable highlighted the controversy sparked by the Director-General of the National Pension Commission, who defended the ASUU deal amid fears that it could undermine the contributory pension scheme. Critics argue that guaranteeing pensions equivalent to full salaries without a clearly defined funding mechanism risks recreating the very problems that forced Nigeria to reform its pension system in the first place.

If the new pension promise is not carefully structured, transparently funded and legally insulated from political manipulation, it could become a future flashpoint for industrial conflict that unfairly punishes students and parents.

Expectations will rise. Budgetary pressures will mount. Regulators will resist. And another round of industrial disharmony could follow.

There is one more omission in the agreement that deserves attention. My friend Prof. Moses Ochonu and I have long argued that the federal government should not simply accede to ASUU’s demands, however legitimate, without also insisting on mechanisms for instructional accountability, research productivity, service delivery and innovation.

Without a system to institutionalize accountability and transparency, students will always be shortchanged, and the nation will be betrayed by lecturers who show little commitment to their craft or to genuine knowledge production and dissemination.

It has become a disturbing culture in Nigerian universities for lecturers to show up in class whenever they please without consequence. In my undergraduate days, I took courses where lecturers appeared only twice in the entire semester, first to introduce themselves and last to set an exam on material they never taught. My conversations with today’s undergraduates suggest that this still happens.

Of course, not everyone is guilty of this. Many Nigerian academics are dedicated teachers and serious scholars working under brutal conditions. But not even one person should be allowed to get away with such negligence.

University lecturers should also not be allowed to publish in substandard, pay-to-play, predatory journals simply to climb the academic ladder. Promotion should reward intellectual rigor, not transactional publishing.
If Nigeria is going to invest billions in salaries, pensions, and research funding, it must also demand excellence in return. Anything less is a betrayal of students and of the country’s development aspirations.

This agreement gives Nigeria a chance to rebuild. Whether it becomes a renaissance or another chapter in the long story of squandered opportunity will depend on what happens next.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Opinion

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

Published

2 weeks ago

January 11, 2026

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Where’s Kano’s former SSG Bichi? By Farooq Kperogi

In late 2024, it came into the open for the first time that the relationship between Dr. Rabiu Kwankwaso and his protégé, Gov. Abba Kabiru Yusuf, had fractured. But it was quickly papered over and dismissed as mere noise, a distraction engineered by enemies of Kwankwasiyya.

Then a few people in Gov. Yusuf’s government, accused of standing in the way between Dr. Kwankwaso and Gov. Yusuf, were fired. The most prominent of such firings was that of Prof. Abdullahi Baffa Bichi, the Secretary to the Government (SSG).

Prof. Bichi’s firing shocked me, so I reached out to a friend of mine who seems to be deeply inserted into, or at least close to people who are denizens of, the Kwankwasiyya power structure to seek explanations for why Bichi was let go.

He confided that Prof. Bichi was one of the arrowheads of the people who were goading Gov. Yusuf to assert his independence from Dr. Kwankwaso. That shocked me.

It shocked me because when Dr. Kwankwaso called me sometime in late 2023, he was with Prof. Bichi. He introduced Bichi with a lot of enthusiasm and asked if I knew him because we are both professors who graduated from Bayero University.

READ ALSO:

I said Bichi graduated before me but that I knew him by reputation because of his service as the Executive Secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) from 2016 to 2019. He had a major falling out with former Education Minister Adamu Adamu, which caused his unceremonious firing, about which I wrote at the time.

Kwankwaso spoke very highly of Bichi and said he wanted me to get close to him. We never did. Kwankwaso did not remember to send me Bichi’s phone number as he promised, and I never reminded him.

But they seemed to have a great chemistry, and I got the impression that Bichi was one of Kwankwaso’s metaphoric eyes in the government, a trusted sentinel planted at the nerve center of power.

You can imagine my shock when I was told that he was one of the engineers of a political divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso.

But now that the divorce between Yusuf and Kwankwaso appears to have happened even after Bichi has been sacrificed in the service of signaling the indissolubility of the political bond between them, what do we make of this?

Where is Bichi? What is he saying about all this? Is he having the last laugh?