The remains of former President Muhammadu Buhari, on Tuesday morning, departed London, the United Kingdom, for Daura, Katsina State, ahead of a state burial.

According to The PUNCH, the body of the late president was conveyed on a Nigerian Air Force craft.

Vice President Kashim Shettima is, leading a high-level Federal Government delegation to finalise documentation and logistical arrangements for the repatriation of the ex-president’s remains.

On Monday, the federal government said that President Bola Tinubu will receive the former President’s remains in Katsina ahead of his final interment in Daura, Katsina State.

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The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, disclosed this during a press briefing in Abuja.

According to Idris, the body of the former president, who died on Sunday in a London hospital, is expected to arrive in Nigeria by noon on Tuesday.

“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, will personally receive the remains of the former President in Katsina.

“Upon arrival in Katsina, a brief military ceremony will be held at the airport before the body is moved to Daura.

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“The Jana’iza (funeral prayer) will take place thereafter, followed by interment at the late President’s residence,” Idris said.

The minister said as part of national mourning, Tinubu has directed that condolence registers be opened across all Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies, as well as at Nigerian embassies and missions abroad.

He said another register is to be opened at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre in Abuja.

Idris also noted that world leaders have continued to send in condolence messages.

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“The condolences coming in from Heads of State and Governments across the globe are a testament to the global stature and legacy of President Muhammadu Buhari,” he said.

To ensure what he described as a “dignified and well-coordinated programme,” Idris said the President has constituted an Inter-Ministerial Committee chaired by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Senator George Akume.

The committee will work in collaboration with the Katsina State Government and the Buhari family.

The minister further announced that 25 members of the Federal Executive Council have been directed to proceed to Katsina for the burial rites and to remain in Daura for the Third-Day prayers scheduled for Wednesday.

By Suyi Ayodele

It was meant to be a joyous occasion. Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State has just been affirmed as the governor of the state by the Supreme Court. Okpebholo’s election was challenged by Asue Ighodalo, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the September 22, 2024, governorship election. The soft-spoken former senator had won all the litigations from the petition tribunal, through the Appeal Court and up to the Supreme Court. Such a feat calls for celebration.

The governor’s party’s stalwarts from the All Progressives Congress (APC) gathered somewhere in Abuja to savour the victory; the last of any litigation that could come his way on the account of the election. The mood was peaceful. Leaders, one after the other, took time to appraise the situation. All of them gave glory to God for seeing their candidate and party through the tedious court proceedings. They were united that it was time for Governor Okpebholo to hit the ground running and bring good governance to the people of Edo State.

Then it was time for Comrade Adams Oshiomhole to talk. Penultimate Saturday in Benin City at the APC South-South stakeholders meeting, Oshiomhole was reduced to a mere seconder of the motion to adopt President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and all the four APC governors from the zone for a second term. Senate President Godswill Akpabio presided over that engagement. Oshiomhole, a former governor of Edo State, former National Chairman of the APC and former President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) was reduced to a mere spectator at the Victor Uwaifo Creative Hub, the venue of the APC meeting. Why did that happen?

I hate to speculate. Methinks that the leadership of the meeting knew that Oshiomhole might pollute the atmosphere if allowed to talk. He had at the Progressives Governors Forum (PGF) meeting held in the same Benin City days earlier made some unguarded statements! One may, therefore, conclude that shutting him out was to avoid another verbal disaster. You don’t have to believe this claim, especially if you are not familiar with the politics of the Senate Presidency playing out in the South-South.

Now back to the Abuja celebration of Okpebholo’s victory at the Apex Court. Immediately Oshiomhole held the microphone, all attention shifted to him. And he answered his name that day. Ogun, the Yoruba god of iron, is praised as Okùnrin kúkúrú abìjà kankan (The short man with a tenacious fighting spirit). Oshiomhole shares that praise name with Ogun. This is what the septuagenarian politician cum labour leader said:

“You now have the time to look into that hotel about which they say Edo money, in tens of billions of naira, was spent, and now they claim it’s just a minority shareholding. You have time to revisit all those roads that were built at the worst costs compared to the ones I built and that are still there. Governor Obaseki must come out of hiding to answer these questions.”

From those statements, it is clear that the only thing that is paramount in the mind of Oshiomhole is the probe of former Governor Godwin Obaseki, the immediate past governor of the state. Obaseki, as we know, is Oshiomhole’s successor as governor. But a long-articulated vehicle has since passed between the once-two-jolly-good-fellows! How Obaseki, who at a time was Oshiomhole’s best man at his wedding, turned to be an archenemy of the senator representing Edo North Senatorial District is what should interest political scientists and anyone desirous of studying ‘how friends become enemies’ as a research proposition.

My immediate reaction to Oshiomhole’s call for the Obaseki probe is to quickly look at how convenient it is for Oshiomhole to speak from the two sides of his mouth without qualms! What sort of human being can have two or more opinions about an individual within a short space of time? Again, how come that of all the lofty ideas anyone could give to Governor Okpebholo, the only one that easily came to Oshiomhole is the idea of a probe and its attendant distractions? Why do our leaders don’t consider the consequences of their utterances first?

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Dr. John L. Gustavson is a Neuropsychologist in Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. He is reputed to have “special training and skill in evaluating and treating nervous system disorders, and determining how illnesses, injuries, and diseases of the brain and nervous system influence the way a patient feels, thinks, and behaves.” When asked to define why people talk first before thinking, Gustavson named such a condition as “Verbal Disinhibition” or simply “Disinhibition.” Here is his definition of the neuropsychological term, Verbal Disinhibition:

“Verbal disinhibition” or simply “disinhibition.” is saying or acting impulsively without considering the potentially damaging or embarrassing consequences of the words or deeds. Disinhibition may result from a brain injury, intoxication, mental illness, or MERE STUPIDITY (emphasis mine).”

How fitting is this definition? While the 2024 Edo governorship electioneering lasted, all the statements that could have caused the APC the election were made by Oshiomhole. He, for instance, almost ruined the APC campaign then with his allusion to a couple married for many years without a child between them! Yet, he is an elder statesman, going by his age, experience and political outings.

The elders of my place reason that when there is an elder in the marketplace, a child strapped to her mother’s back is not likely to have his neck twisted (Àgbà ki wà l’ójà kí orí omo tuntun wó). But shouldn’t we rethink the axiom, given that we have elders in the mould of Oshiomhole around us? Or which is more dignifying to ask the governor: to give the best to the people and to ask him to go witch-hunting for an imaginary frenemy? Why do Oshiomhole’s friends always turn to his enemies?

For instance, when in 2016, Oshiomhole was selling the same Obaseki to the Edo people, he called him the compressor of the air-conditioning of his government’s economic car. That was at a time Oshiomhole appointed Obaseki as the head of the economic team of the government for eight years. Oshiomhole told the entire Edo people that his administration would not have achieved anything but for Obaseki who generated the funds and managed the state’s economy, prudently!

At another time, specifically on January 18, 2018, when the then Governor Obaseki bought a fleet of buses for intra-city transportation, Oshiomhole enthused: “I am humbled by your accomplishments, and I am proud that we made promises on your behalf during the 2016 electioneering period and you have accomplished a lot of the promises. You are working tirelessly to industrialise the state and make life easy for the people. Many governors are complaining that there is no money, and they are unable to pay salaries, but you have developed your creativity to attract resources to the state.” Today, the same Obaseki, in Oshiomhole’s judgement, is the lead character in the Arabic folk tale, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, and he must be probed!

Obaseki is not the first to suffer from Oshiomhole’s “verbal disinhibition.”. On July 16, 2012, after Oshiomhole was declared winner of his second term governorship bid election, he described the then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan as, “…Indeed a statesman, a man of honour because there were adequate and effective presence of security agents on ground. I am impressed because the army actually played a neutral role in the election.”

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Move forward to June 14, 2017, when Oshiomhole was assessing the same President Jonathan, hear his magisterial conclusion: “Nigeria was in danger if Jonathan continued in office.” The same “statesman and man of honour” suddenly became the one of whom Oshiomhole would later say: “Once I concluded that Nigeria was not in good hands, I also had to do everything possible to ensure that he (Jonathan) was not re-elected…”

The Edo-born politician did not spare his own too. On November 7, 2019, as the National Chairman of the APC, Oshiomhole’s verdict on the performance of the late President Muhammadu Buhari was a president that “has done well”. He eulogised Buhari, who passed on, on Sunday, in a London hospital, and said: “President Buhari can beat his chest to say I have started well; I have started fast. You cannot call him Baba Go Slow now. This time, he is Baba Fast,”

Fast forward again to Saturday, June 28, 2025, and listen to Oshiomhole describe Buhari’s administration as the ruiner of the nation’s economy. Speaking at the PGF meeting in Benin City, Oshiomhole said the Buhari administration, by using the Ways and Means policy, “printed over N31 trillion”, adding that the “excessive printing of money” crippled the naira.

“This is what the immediate past CBN governor was doing. In the Senate, we have the record that they printed over N31 trillion which they called Ways and Means. You know when the government wants to deceive people they use jargon. They called it Ways and Means but I can tell you what it means: it means a situation in which the government prints banknotes, not based on what we have earned or any resources, just print banknotes to go and share with the people to meet their money illusion. It is the result of that excessive printing of banknotes that led to the collapse of the naira,” Oshiomhole ruled of the same administration he once said was the best ever!

So, when he counselled Okpebholo to probe Obaseki, I wondered how the voluble politician would explain how he transformed from a khaki-wearing labour man to a man of stupendous wealth that he is today! Is Oshiomhole ready to answer questions such as: What was his worth as a labour leader? What is his worth today? How did he acquire his Iyamoh countryside village-within-village home? How about the property in Abuja, the vehicles in his convoy and many more luxuries?

Please get me right. Okpebholo should by all means probe Obaseki. No past leaders suspected to have helped himself to our patrimony should keep and enjoy the proceeds of such heists. But, please, let us extend the probe to Oshiomhole. Let us see how clean he was as a governor. If he turns out to be a saint at the end of the exercise, let us raise a fund-me-account to sponsor his beatification!

Thankfully, Governor Okpebholo appears to have heeded Oshiomhole’s prompting. The governor has said that he would probe Obaseki. He even mentioned some outrageous figures he alleged Obaseki misappropriated. I think in the interest of the public, Obaseki should be made to account for what he did or failed to do while in the office.

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I also hope that Okpebholo himself will begin to keep a clean slate of events while in the saddle because no matter how long he spends in office, he will vacate it one day, and he will be summoned to account for all his actions and inactions. I think Nigeria is on the path to good governance with this call to accountability.

The only advice here is that Okpebholo should not allow those with low emotional control to dictate the pace to him. The governor should know that his primary duty is good governance to make life more abundant for the Edo people, home and in the diaspora.

I don’t know the governor’s mental aptitude to cope with distractions. He should do a self-assessment to determine if he can combine governance with political distractions of probes and what have you. More importantly, he should know the Obaseki camp will not sit back; and that it is not going to be an amala and ewedu exercise.

More importantly, Governor Okpebholo, I think, should begin to change the narrative that he is a man without his mind. Now that the distraction of litigation over his governorship is over, he should begin to demonstrate that he has the capabilities in all ramifications, to direct the affairs of the state according to his personal convictions and judgment of what is good for the state and its people. He must show that he doesn’t need a human prompter like Oshiomhole before he can take the right step as the governor of the state.

The governor should not allow any individual to use him to settle any personal score. If probing Obaseki is the best for his administration and the people of Edo State, Okpebholo should go ahead and do that. But if that exercise is just to satisfy the bruised ego of some megalomaniacs somewhere, the governor should think twice.

Oshiomhole brought Obaseki to Edo State and made him the head of his economic team for eight years. Against all protestations, he went ahead and made Obaseki governor, deploying all the state’s machinery to back him up. Whatever went sour between him and his godson after 12 years of romance remains personal to the two of them. Nobody has the illusion that Oshiomhole fought Obaseki because the latter was not doing the right thing. We can only hope that one day, the duo will have the moral courage to tell the whole world what went wrong between the groom and his best man!

I hate to dwell on the reality that if Oshiomhole were to have his way, Okpebholo would not have been in the saddle today as the governor of Edo State! In fact, Okpebholo’s clan, the entire Esanland, would not have been anywhere near the Dennis Osadebey Avenue known as Edo State Government House! But success, they say, has many relations. If there is equity in the Edo political structure today, the credit goes to Obaseki and his sense of fairness and tenacity of purpose when it mattered. His Esan Agenda proposition and the tenacity with which he prosecuted it, produced a governor of Esan extraction in Okpebholo today! Oshiomhole, the new adviser-in-chief today, had other plans!

I submit, however, that the fact that Obaseki pushed for a governor of Esan extraction, is never an excuse why he should not be called to account for how he managed Edo affairs and its finances when he was governor. The only plea here is that Governor Okpebholo should look beyond Obaseki and probe how much of Edo money was committed to, for instance, the Airport Road project and the Benin Water Storm project. The probe should be holistic!

By Lasisi Olagunju

She spoke with so much authority on the sleaze and dirt that make our lawmakers so fat like the well-fed pigs in Animal Farm. The headline above is from a trending, obviously leaked, video of a committee clerk at the National Assembly levelling unimaginable allegations against politicians in both chambers.

I have received that video more than ten times from social media users who keep forwarding it with unceasing interest. The clerk in the video is a woman who identified herself as Ifeoma (Ofili). I have also learnt that she is an about-to-retire Level 17 director in the service of the National Assembly.

I asked and was told that she dropped her trending bomb at a staff forum meeting at the National Assembly. She said our legislators talk about oversight of government agencies but “how do you account for the fact that the flight ticket to go and oversight somebody was paid for by that somebody? What are you coming to write?” Madam Ifeoma asked, and added, sensationally: “You go there, they tell you what to write. They give you money, they quarter you, they give you flight, and the (National Assembly) members will come (back) to fight over the money that was given to them.”

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U.S. Senator Carl Levin (1934-2021) once said that “you can’t get good government without good oversight.” Political scientist and 28th president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, in his classic doctoral thesis, ‘Congressional Government’ published in 1885 wrote that the legislature should “look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents.” Our legislators in Nigeria do not think their constituents have wisdom, but they do oversight, they also “look diligently into every affair of government”. The problem is what they look for and why. The more the oversight, the brighter the sight of their purse. Now you should understand why federal roads, particularly my Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, are difficult to fix. The supervising ministry is in full charge of legislators who should oversight it.

Director Ifeoma also spoke about the threats regularly issued against ministries and agencies of the Federal Government by our lawmakers. “We are talking about punishing MDAs. They would come on TV and say this MDA did this and that…(but) all the atrocities that are being committed in the National Assembly, who punishes them?”

I have read ‘A Legislator Looks at Legislation’ published in October 1937 by T. V. Smith and Garland C. Routt. The authors propose that “lawmakers themselves must be governed by law” and that “rules of etiquette should always be observed.” That was in the last century and in the authors’ far away country. Here, the legislature is the Baba, clearly empowered to sit atop the law. Our angry director was being naive and, even rude, in asking who punishes “atrocities being committed in the National Assembly”. I should tell her that legislators are creators of the law and so they are naturally above their creation, the law. Just like their senior colleagues in the executive, Nigerian legislators have the right to use and misuse the powers conferred on them by INEC, their elector.

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Then I heard the word ‘collapse’ from Madam Ifeoma: “They will budget money for staff training, money for clinic, money for books…they then collapse everything. It is in the National Assembly that I started hearing about ‘collapse’. What is collapse? Collapse is…Allowances that are budgeted for National Assembly staff are collapsed…And then, we don’t have the power to go and hold a press conference because we are sworn to oath of silence.” I like this ‘oath of silence’ coinage; it is more ghastly appropriate than the ‘oath of secrecy’ which we inherited from the British.

I am not done with Madam Ifeoma; or I should say she is not done with our husbands who make laws for us. The woman spoke about her director-colleagues who retired into want and suffering and death because their retirement benefits have been “collapsed” by politicians whose throats are the only routes to Oyo.

“Go and see them (retired directors). They look like scarecrows…they beg for money to fuel their cars… So, apart from what the constitution says (about oversight), who is looking at what they (legislators) are collapsing and chopping? They chop their own; they chop our own and (even) put excesses there.”

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Put simply, the question she asked above is: who oversights the oversighter? She ought not to have asked that question because, as we say in Yorubaland, if one’s father has married a new wife and she is older than your mother, you call her mother. The legislators are the boss; you don’t question or query them.

Now, let me quickly say my own and withdraw into my shell: Oversight, appropriation and representation through law making are the three reasons the legislature exists all over the world. This Nigerian democracy is 26 years old. I will laugh very loudly if anyone says our National Assembly has scored above 30 percent in each of those categories. Yet, we keep pumping money into that opaque system. This year alone, almost half a trillion naira is their budget. Do not complain. They need even more than that. Remember in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, only the pigs take milk and apples because it is for the good of all that the pigs’ brainpower and leadership’s health remain topnotch. It is for the farm’s success. If our pigs are not healthy, Mr. Jones will return, and that will be a tragedy for this democracy.

But then, if politicians fail us, their constituents, without consequences because we are collectively stupid, should they fail their staff also? Politicians, if they ever leave, leave government solidly made for life; retired civil servants leave service to be bedridden; they die waiting for their benefits. What a democracy!

An Ilorin musician sings in an album that God is the adjudicator and judge between cat and rat. That is the relationship between those who have kidnapped this democracy, and we the people. As Madam Ifeoma said: They chop their own; they chop our own. They even put jara.