An Invitation to Participate — Register with the African Democratic Congress (ADC)

The redemption of a nation is seldom achieved by the mere expression of opinion. However vigorous the discussion on social media may be, it does not in itself alter the character of public institutions or the direction of governance. It may awaken attention, but attention without organized civic action rarely produces meaningful change.

If Nigeria is to be rescued from its present difficulties, the responsibility must be accepted by citizens who are prepared not merely to comment on events, but to participate in shaping them. Political renewal, in any serious society, is the result of citizens acting together through institutions rather than observing them from a distance.

It is for this reason that those who seek a different future for our country should take a practical step: register with the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and become participants in the democratic process through the party.

Importantly, the party has embraced Direct Primaries for the selection of candidates. This means that candidates will no longer emerge merely through the influence of a few powerful financiers or political “money bags.” Instead, registered members themselves will vote directly to choose who represents the party. In such a system, popularity, credibility, and the confidence of ordinary members carry far greater weight than wealth or patronage.

But participation must not end with personal registration. Each supporter carries a civic duty to encourage others within their immediate circles, family members, friends, neighbours, and community members, to register as well. Political strength is never the work of isolated individuals; it is the result of organized citizens acting with purpose.

If thousands of people in one state can mobilize and register, there is no reason another region should imagine itself incapable of demonstrating equal determination. Political change is not secured through complaint, but through numbers, organization, and persistence.

Let us therefore replace frustration with participation. Let us register, mobilize, and take part. A better Nigeria will not arrive by wish or rhetoric alone; it will come only when citizens decide that the future of their country is a responsibility they are prepared to assume.

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Great, meeting Barrister Chinwe

The Infinity Cap and the Temptation of Endless Power.

In Nigerian street wisdom, there is a blunt proverb: “Na Thursday we dey take know how weekend go be.” It is Nigerian, born from the everyday realism of people who have learned to read the signs of what is coming before it fully arrives.

By Thursday, the shape of the weekend is already visible.

That proverb should guide how Nigerians interpret the curious political symbolism that has followed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his supporters, particularly the infinity symbol increasingly seen on caps worn by his longtime supporters and now members of the so-called City Boys Movement.

The infinity symbol is not neutral. In mathematics, it represents endlessness, something without beginning or end. In politics, such symbolism deserves interrogation.

Because democracies are not built on infinity, they are built on limits.

Political symbolism often reveals ambitions long before formal declarations. Across history, movements seeking prolonged power frequently begin by normalising the imagery of permanence; leaders become indispensable figures rather than temporary office holders, political movements morph into personal loyalty cults and symbols quietly suggest eternal rule.

Nigeria’s constitutional order, however, is explicit; the presidency is limited to two four-year terms. That limitation exists precisely to prevent the concentration of power in one individual.

When political branding introduces an infinity symbol, citizens are justified in asking what message is being prepared.
Even supporters acknowledge that the current administration has struggled under the weight of economic hardship, insecurity, and public dissatisfaction. For many Nigerians, the first term of the Tinubu presidency has appeared shambolic, marked by economic turbulence, rising hardship, and uncertain policy direction. In a free and fair election, the ruling party knows it will be booted out.

In such circumstances, the immediate political goal is obvious; secure a second mandate.

But the deeper danger lies in what might follow. The political calculation could be simple and cynical; seek renewal of the mandate through the ballot box, and once power is secured again, initiate a project of tenure elongation.

At that stage, the arithmetic changes.

If the attempt to extend tenure succeeds, the reward is extraordinary; the transformation of a democratically elected president into a de facto life ruler. If the attempt fails, there is little to lose. The constitutional limit would have ended the presidency anyway.
In other words; all potential reward, minimal personal risk.That asymmetry is precisely why societies must be vigilant when leaders begin to flirt with symbols of permanence.

The country has previously confronted the temptation of extended rule.

Before the Fourth Republic, we had once toyed with exchanging the khaki for Babanriga. Recall that all then so-called political parties adopted Mr. Sani Abacha as their Presidential candidate. But for providence, we know where we all would have been.

During the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo, the controversial Third Term Agenda attempted to amend the constitution to allow the president remain in office beyond the established limit. That proposal was eventually defeated through the resistance of legislators, civil society, and public pressure.

But history teaches a sobering lesson; ambitions for prolonged power rarely disappear, they simply wait for another opportunity.

Tenure-elongation projects rarely unfold peacefully. Across the world, when leaders attempt to convert democratic mandates into indefinite rule, a predictable pattern emerges; opposition figures begin to disappear, state violence becomes normalised, security agencies are weaponised against dissent, and critics are silenced through intimidation or worse.

In the most extreme cases, the state begins to practise what can only be described as politically motivated disappearances, state-sponsored killings, and systematic targeting of opposition voices. These are not abstract fears, they are the historical consequences of leaders who decide that power must become permanent.

When a leader begins to believe that his rule must never end, the opposition ceases to be political competitors, it becomes an existential threat that must be eliminated.

The danger therefore lies not only in constitutional manipulation but in the psychology of permanence. The infinity symbol subtly promotes three ideas; leadership as destiny, power as permanence, and opposition as obstruction.

Once those ideas take hold, democracy becomes a mere ritual rather than a genuine mechanism for change.

That is why Nigerians must remember the proverb: “Na Thursday we dey take know how weekend go be.”

By the time a society recognises the full shape of authoritarian ambition, it may already be too late. Symbols appear first. Narratives follow. Constitutional manoeuvres arrive last.

The infinity cap may be dismissed as branding, it may be nothing more than political theatrics, but history suggests that citizens ignore such signals at their peril.

Because democracy survives not by trusting the ambitions of leaders, but by questioning them early, loudly, and relentlessly.

Thursday has already arrived. The question Nigerians must ask is simple: What kind of weekend is being prepared?

The Eternal Meddlers: When the West Plays Chess with Other People’s Nations.

There is a familiar ritual in Western diplomacy. A crisis erupts somewhere beyond the comfortable boulevards of Europe or the tidy suburbs of America. Analysts furrow their brows, television panels convene, and the conclusion arrives with solemn certainty; the region in question is simply “unstable.”

However, history tends to ask an awkward question before accepting that explanation: unstable compared to what, and unstable since when?

Today’s political landscape of the Middle East did not emerge spontaneously from ancient quarrels or mystical fatalism. Much of it was assembled, rearranged, and occasionally detonated by outside powers convinced that they were the rightful engineers of global order. The West, armed with commerce, scripture, ideology, and occasionally gunboats, has long treated vast portions of the world as a chessboard where the pawns belong to someone else.

Long before modern geopolitics acquired its bureaucratic language, Europe had already rehearsed the art of moralized intervention. The medieval expeditions known as the Crusades were framed as sacred pilgrimages but functioned equally well as campaigns of conquest and resource extraction. Faith and power have always been close companions.

Centuries later, the language changed but the instinct remained. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed during the First World War, Britain and France quietly negotiated the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement. With little regard for the societies that actually lived in the region, diplomats carved the Middle East into zones of influence using lines drawn on European maps.


What followed was not stability but a slow-burning inheritance of artificial borders, rival mandates, and political arrangements designed less for local coherence than for imperial convenience.

If the twentieth century proved anything, it is that borders drawn in foreign ministries have a peculiar habit of producing problems that last far longer than the ministries themselves.

Perhaps no episode better illustrates the paradox of Western intervention than the story of Iran in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1951, the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh pursued what might seem a rather ordinary policy for a sovereign state: he nationalized the country’s oil industry, long dominated by the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, aka, British Petroleum.
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To Iranian voters, this was an assertion of economic independence but to Western governments, it was unacceptable.

Two years later, British intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency collaborated on Operation Ajax, a covert operation that removed Mosaddegh and restored the authority of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah. Stability, Western officials declared, had been secured.

Yet the stability that followed depended on repression, secret police, and the growing perception among Iranians that their political destiny had been outsourced to foreign powers. When revolution erupted in 1979, replacing monarchy with the Islamic Republic, Western observers expressed astonishment, as if the earthquake had appeared without tectonic pressure beneath it.

In truth, the shockwave had been building for decades.

Iran was not unique. The logic of strategic convenience has repeatedly shaped Western alliances in the region. One decade’s indispensable partner becomes the next decade’s existential threat.

Consider Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq, a ruler alternately courted, tolerated, and ultimately overthrown in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That invasion was justified with urgent warnings about weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

Democracy, we were told, would flourish once the old regime disappeared.

Instead, the region witnessed a cascade of sectarian violence, fragile institutions, and geopolitical rivalries that continue to reverberate today. It turns out democracy is not a consumer product that can be shipped overseas in military convoys.

What makes this pattern remarkable is not simply the interventions themselves but the persistent amnesia that accompanies them. Western governments often speak as if they are reluctant participants in foreign crises rather than frequent contributors to them.

Sanctions regimes punish populations while political elites remain insulated, proxy wars transform regional conflicts into global contests and arms sales flourish in the name of stability while instability grows in their wake.

All of it is wrapped in the vocabulary of universal principles; freedom, order, democracy. These ideals are noble in theory, in practice, their application has sometimes resembled something closer to demolition followed by instruction.

One might call it demo-cracy; demolish first, then prescribe governance.

There is a curious irony at the heart of global politics. The Western world represents a minority of the planet’s population, yet its influence on the political architecture of other regions has been immense. Through colonial administrations, military alliances, financial institutions, and ideological exports, it has often functioned as the conductor of a global orchestra.

The problem, of course, is that the musicians did not always choose the music.

None of this absolves the governments of the Middle East, or any region, of responsibility for their own choices. Authoritarianism, corruption, and internal conflict have their own local roots, societies are not passive victims of history.

But honesty requires acknowledging that many contemporary crises were not purely local creations. They were shaped, accelerated, or intensified by external interventions pursued in the name of order.

And that is the paradox of Western power; it frequently arrives proclaiming stability while leaving behind landscapes that must spend generations rediscovering it.

Perhaps the time has come for a modest experiment in restraint. A world in which the great powers resist the temptation to rearrange other societies like pieces on a geopolitical chessboard might look unfamiliar at first.

But it might also be quieter.

History, after all, suggests that the world’s most persistent conflicts often begin with the same move; someone else deciding the game.