Kperogi is a patriot.

Prof. Dr. Farooq Kperogi

We have an "anti-corruption" president who blatantly lied just to defend the corruption of his close aides. In his letter to the Senate "clearing" Babachir David Lawal of multi-million naira "grass clearing" corruption, the president said the senate didn't invite Lawal to defend himself. Lie. He WAS invited via a letter, which his secretary acknowledged, and via three newspaper adverts. But he spurned the invitation. The president said only three senate committee members signed the letter asking for Lawal's resignation and prosecution. Another lie. Seven senate committee members did.

A man who knowingly and intentionally lies has no integrity. Worse, a man who defends the blatant corruption of his close aides while pretending to be fighting corruption involving his political opponents has no integrity. How can any person with even a smidgen of conscience defend a man who stole from desperately poor and vulnerable Boko Haram victims, a man who once publicly bragged about receiving monetary bribes from a governor, a man who is so corrupt he is tagged "cash and carry" in government circles?

This doesn't surprise me, though. In my December 24, 2016 column titled "Tragicomedy of a corrupt anti-corruption government," I wrote: "I was regaled with troubling tales of the mind-boggling corruption against close, loyal aides that [Buhari] swept under the carpet at the PTF, The Buhari Organization (TBO), and at the defunct CPC. Babachir Lawal was a dominant figure in CPC; he knows President Buhari well enough to know that nothing will happen to him for all his villainous rape of vulnerable IDPs in Borno and Yobe as long as he can impress the president that he is irrevocably 'loyal' to him."

This is far and away the most hopelessly unjust government in Nigeria's entire history.

Farooq Kperogi

Buhari or, more correctly, the prehistoric, reactionary cabal of dunderheads that puppeteer him, have just "suspended" Chief Justice of Nigeria Walter Onnoghen and immediately replaced him with Justice Ibrahim Tanko Mohammed as part of their strategy to nullify the judicial challenge to their impending plot to rig the vote.

It's elementary knowledge that in a presidential democracy, the president has no power to arbitrarily suspend, hire, or fire the Chief Justice Nigeria, just like he doesn't have the power to remove the Senate President or the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the spirit of the principle of separation of powers. This is unprecedented ironclad civilian tyranny!

The scared, desperate Aso Villa cabal acting for vegetative Buhari are so inept and so illiterate that they will burn Nigeria to the ground. But they will be consumed by the conflagration they've ignited. Their only luck is that media and civil society organizations are compromised and quiescent because they're in the pockets of the Presidency and held in check by the hegemonic awe of Bola Tinubu who deludes himself into thinking that Buhari will hand over power to him in 2023.
What we're seeing today is the definite beginning of the end of all pretenses to democracy--and perhaps of Nigeria itself.