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OPINION:Nigeria Hosts Nyerere’s One-party Ghost

Published

4 months ago

April 27, 2025

By Festus Adedayo

It was almost impossible not to be infected by the joy writ large on the face of the One-party state Villa-fawning group this past week. It was akin to winning a tombola. The Mauritanian-Nigerian ex-spokesperson for the Arewa Elders Forum and until of recent, Special Adviser on Political Matters to the President, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, would not allow these elated countrymen the benefit of a hard-earned Saturnalia. Momentarily, he made sitting comfy on a stool a punishing exercise for the group. As he tendered his letter of resignation from government, fire billowed from Baba-Ahmed’s mouth like Sango, the Yoruba god of fire. In a viral video interview, the Mauritanian – beg your pardon – the Nigerian, reached for his ancient Arewa pouch and brought out an insinuation of the North’s oft-mesmerizing demographic talisman.

If the North’s foe in Aso Rock Villa was gloating about a power of incumbency, he should remember that the North is a behemoth that anyone could ignore only at their peril, he reminded the president, until of recent his boss. “No politician can become president without northern support, making the region’s stance crucial to any aspirant’s success,” he warned, garnishing it with the usual obstinate northern threat, “If they plan to rig the election, they should be careful. It won’t be good for Nigeria.” As if the north had always been a saint when it comes to rigging. How come this same north closed its eyes when the ruinous Muhammadu Buhari almost ran Nigeria aground in eight years?

So, last week, an ignited political bomb exploded. Governor of Delta State, Sheriff Oborevwori and his EFCC-harangued predecessor, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) vice presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, Ifeanyi Okowa, shamelessly decamped from the PDP to the All Progressives Congress (APC). An equally shameless Akwa-Ibom State governor gave indication that he would stay within the PDP and rock its boat. Both moves were replicas of same act some 2000 years ago by that notorious man who asked for a shekel to betray our Lord Jesus Christ. Political watchers say this political Iscariotism is a tip of the iceberg. More opposition party governors, they said, many of whom are first-termers, are having their buttocks placed on scalding-hot pressure cooker in the bid to make them leave their parties for the president’s. Chief among these, they say, are governors of Kano, Osun, Plateau, Rivers, Taraba, Akwa Ibom and Zamfara states.

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The gleeful repertoire of conquest narratives from the presidency and the Villa-fawning group fill the stratosphere. The glee was so thick you could cut a handful and swallow it. The epithets showered on the man who is considered to have broken the spinal cord of Nigeria’s opposition in such magisterial manner range from, “the enigmatic Master Strategist has struck again!”, to “The man who pocketed Lagos State in the last 25 years has added Nigeria to his state-pocketing craft.”

For the Yoruba, their naughty son with amoeba-shaped buttocks, who deserves their waist-beads and not an outsider – an “at’ohunrinwa” – the celebration is even more infectious. From their proverbs pouch, the Yoruba pulled out an ancient saying to justify and enable the perceived routing political craftiness of their son. To them, the rout is a perfect reply to the Mauritanian boaster. So, they say, “as it is on the day set for cultivation of a large farmland that the urgency to own a sharp cutlass becomes imperative, so is it gladsome to have a belligerent child when there is a declaration of war” (ijo a ba pa’juba laa wa ada, ijo ogun ba le laa niran omo t’o le). Only the man who is ensuring that opposition governors decamp to the APC can vanquish their centuries-old northern political foes who, at every drop of a hat, flaunt nebulous demographics as political weapon in electoral contest. The North’s snake has met its waterloo in its bid to swallow the Yoruba shrew.

For me, however, an eerie feeling of foreboding has since last week enveloped my reading of the projected epidemic of decamping opposition politicians. My mind immediately dashed down to eponymous Yoruba thespian, Alagba Adebayo Faleti and his sagely takes on Pyrrhic celebrations, the type that Aso Rock and its fawners are currently taking to the bank. With songs, sang in the cadences of an elderly’s, Faleti drilled down the surface of today’s clanking of champagne glass and saw a melancholic tomorrow. His cameo role in Saworoide, a satiric brainchild film of unarguably one of Nigeria’s most talented cinematographers, Tunde Kelani, provided Faleti an opportunity to penetrate this dense outer surface. Acting the role of Baba Opalaba, (a piercing broken bottle) an elderly palace staff, Faleti deployed music as tool to foretell, reprimand and correct. While the chiefs became a combine of evil, fascinated about immediate riches in a new king, and plotting against the tomorrow of the people, Baba Opalaba warned, singing, “Yes, they are unaware of their action’s repercussion/Tomorrow, they will” (Ko iye won/Yio ye won l’ola).

In another of his warnings, Faleti deployed a proverb to foretell doom: “The wretched wearing torn clothes dances like a king at nocturne, as if unaware that daybreak is nigh (Alakisa n jo l’oru/Bo pe, ile a mo l’ola). If only the Aso Rock/APC celebratory crew was aware of the wiles of their Mephistopheles, they would see what happened last week and what is projected to happen, as moments to, like biblical Israelites did when there was doom, decorate themselves in ashes and soberly mourn what lies ahead. The doom is also popularized by the song of Yoruba Sakara music great, Yusuff Olatunji. He sang of a hawk playing with the pigeon and the pigeon is filled with excitement, unbeknown to it that death lurks in the horizon (Asa n b’eyele se’re/Eyele n yoo/Eyele nfi’ku se’re).

One-party state regimes emerged in Africa during the decolonization period. They thereafter began to spread, with many of them adopting it as a means of consolidating power and, in their claim, promoting national unity.

Our African nationalist forefathers sold this system of governance to Africa as holding hope. Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, Mali, Senegal, Burkina-Fasso and Tanzania were some of the countries that first adopted the one-party system. While foisting one-party rule on Tanzania in 1965, Julius Nyerere lauded it thus: “where there is one-party state and that party is identified with the nation as a whole, the foundations of democracy are firmer than they can ever be (in a situation where) you have two or more parties each representing only a section of the community.”

Kenya under successive one-party governments, not long after, degenerated into authoritarianism. The economic development which the likes of Jomo Kenyatta and Arap Moi envisaged became a mirage. Not long after, this one-party state morphed into a bud of corruption, disregard for merit and a system where loyalty to the Fuhrer was rewarded. Those who did not pledge full loyalty to the party and the president were hounded.

Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, which began the one-party system in 1964, became a dictatorial and authoritarian government. It repressed voices of dissent under the facade of maintaining unity.

One unique feature of the one-party states in all the above-named countries is that, as butterflies are attracted to nectar, those states always attracted military putsches. One by one, all the one-party system countries were dismantled by violent military takeovers. This is due to resistance and rebellion against their authoritarian rules.

So, for the celebrating Villa-fawning group that is shuffling its feet in acrobatic dance to the Bata drum as the group careens Nigeria towards a one-party state, the above examples are my own re-calibration of another of Baba Opalanba’s song. The sage sang: “The bird doesn’t just perch on the patio, it has ears and hears.” He rendered this thus, “Oro l’eye ngbo, eye o dede ba l’orule o, oro l’eye ngbo.”

For us as a collective, this gale of defection is more than a political chess-game. It is ominous. For those who know, it has high flavour of despotism, which is a by-word for the Fuhrer’s brand of politicking. Many one-party states’ helmsmen eventually morph into life presidents of the Gnasingbe Eyadema hue. While many see a mild, Cockney English accent-flavoured-speaking Villa boss, beyond this veneer is a totalitarian for whom “No” can never be an answer. Many of the first-term governors are currently being held on tenterhooks, their second term used as bait by Aso Rock. A case is a governor whose godfather was manifesting traits of dissent. Suspecting that the governor might go the way of his godfather, Aso Rock immediately began to sponsor a SWAGA Lord as countervailing force to run against him in the soon-to-be-held gubernatorial election. A few days ago, both the governor and his godfather addressed a press conference announcing their support for Aso Rock 2027!

There is the tendency for anyone to see an impending one-party state in Nigeria as too remote. There is also the tendency to say, all that is foul is fair in politics. Or that, others before the current occupiers of the Villa did worse. In the allegory of the hawk and the pigeon, it was only when the pigeon landed inside the hawk’s abdomen, with its entrails as gourmet meal, that the warning made sense.

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Scientists Find Proof That Breast Cancer Recurrence Can Be Eliminated

Published

2 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Editor

In a medical breakthrough that could transform breast cancer care, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have shown it’s possible to detect and destroy the “sleeper” cells that cause the disease to return years after treatment.

In a landmark clinical trial, researchers used existing, repurposed drugs to eliminate these hidden cells in most breast cancer survivors, pushing survival rates above 90 per cent. The findings, published in Nature Medicine, offer the strongest proof yet that breast cancer recurrence may no longer be inevitable.

The principal investigator, Dr Angela DeMichele of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, said, “The lingering fear of cancer returning is something that haunts many breast cancer survivors. Our study shows that by targeting dormant tumour cells, we can prevent recurrence—and give survivors a real chance at a lasting cure.

“This changes the game. We finally have a proactive strategy—not just waiting for cancer to come back, but stopping it before it does,” DeMichele said.

The trial, known as CLEVER, enrolled 51 breast cancer survivors who had completed treatment but still harboured microscopic traces of dormant tumour cells, also called minimal residual disease (MRD). Standard scans cannot detect these cells, which can “wake up” years later and fuel incurable metastatic cancer.

Patients received either one or two study drugs, both already FDA-approved for other conditions. The results stunned researchers. Dormant tumour cells were cleared in 80 per cent of participants, and the three-year survival without recurrence exceeded 90 per cent for patients on single therapy and reached 100 per cent for those on combination therapy.

Further, only two patients have relapsed after more than three years of follow-up.

“This sleeper phase is the window where cancer is most vulnerable. explained senior author Dr Lewis Chodosh, chair of Cancer Biology at Penn. Surprisingly, drugs that don’t work against active tumours can be highly effective against dormant cells. That’s the key—we’re hitting cancer while it’s asleep,” explained senior author Dr Lewis Chodosh, chair of Cancer Biology at Penn. The trial builds on decades of Penn research uncovering how dormant breast cancer cells survive in the body, sometimes for decades, and what biological pathways sustain them. By targeting autophagy and mTOR signalling—mechanisms that help the sleeper cells persist—the researchers found a way to wipe them out before they reactivate.

The implications are profound. Until now, breast cancer survivors at risk of recurrence had little more than “watch and wait”. For the 30 per cent of patients whose cancer returns, the disease has been incurable.

The Penn team is now preparing larger clinical trials to confirm the results and explore whether this approach can be applied to other cancers with similar dormant-cell behaviour.

For millions of breast cancer survivors worldwide, the research opens the door to a future where remission means freedom—not fear.

Delayed breakfast linked to early death for elderly

How late you eat breakfast could be more important than you think. A major new study has revealed that older adults who push their first meal of the day to later hours face a higher risk of illness and even early death.

The research, published in Communications Medicine by scientists at Mass General Brigham and collaborators in Turkey, tracked nearly 3,000 people in the UK for more than two decades. The results were clear: as people age, breakfast and dinner times creep later, but those who delay breakfast are more likely to suffer from depression, fatigue, poor sleep, and declining health, and they die sooner.

“Breakfast timing may be an easy-to-monitor marker of health in older adults,” said lead researcher Hassan Dashti, PhD, RD, of Massachusetts General Hospital.

“Our findings show that late breakfasts are tied not only to health challenges but also to higher mortality. This gives fresh meaning to the saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

The team found that people genetically inclined to be “night owls” also tended to eat later, compounding risks as they aged. Meanwhile, those who stuck to consistent and earlier meal routines showed signs of healthier ageing and greater longevity.

The findings could spark a rethink of popular diet trends such as intermittent fasting, which often encourages delaying the first meal. While the approach may benefit younger adults, the study suggests it could be harmful for seniors.

For doctors, families, and carers, the message is simple: watch the clock. A later breakfast may be more than just a habit – it could be a warning sign.
(VANGUARD)

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30-minute Exercise Slashes Cancer Cell Growth – Study

Published

2 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Editor

A new study from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has revealed that just 30 minutes of vigorous exercise—either resistance training or high-intensity interval training—can reduce cancer cell growth by up to 30 percent. The research, led by PhD candidate Francesco Bettariga, focused on myokines, proteins released by muscles during exercise that possess anti-cancer properties.

The study found that a single workout session significantly boosted myokine levels, even in breast cancer survivors whose bodies have been compromised by treatment.

Blood samples taken before, immediately after, and 30 minutes post-exercise showed a 20–30 per cent reduction in cancer cell proliferation due to the surge in myokines. While this effect has been observed in healthy individuals, Bettariga’s study is among the first to confirm similar benefits in cancer survivors.

The research also explored how consistent exercise improves body composition, reducing fat mass and increasing lean muscle – key factors in lowering inflammation, a known driver of cancer recurrence and mortality.

Fat tissue releases inflammatory markers that can fuel tumour growth and suppress immune function. Exercise, by reshaping body composition, helps neutralise this threat.

Quick fixes to reduce fat mass, such as dieting alone, would not have the same beneficial effects. Bettariga emphasised that weight loss without exercise fails to preserve muscle mass and does not stimulate the production of beneficial myokines.

This study adds to a growing body of evidence positioning exercise as medicine – not just for prevention, but as a therapeutic tool during and after cancer treatment. With implications for treatment protocols worldwide, these findings could help redefine survivorship and recovery.

You never want to reduce your weight without exercising, because you need to build or preserve muscle mass and produce these chemicals, which you can’t do through just diet alone.

Whether you’re a cancer survivor or simply health-conscious, the message is clear: 30 minutes of sweat could be a powerful shield against cancer.

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FG Move To Establish Rehabilitation Centres For Persons With Spinal Cord Injury Nationwide

Published

4 hours ago

September 6, 2025

Editor

Federal Government on Friday unveils plans to establish Medical Rehabilitation Centres for Persons with spinal cord injury across the country, with a strong focus on neuro rehabilitation.

Senior Special Assistant to the President on Special Needs and Equal Opportunities, Hon. Mohammed Abba Isa disclosed this in Abuja at the Symposium with the theme: ‘Fall prevention, Spinal Cord protection, empowering lives, enhancing opportunities’, to commemorate the 2025 world spinal cord injury day organised in collaboration with the Spinal Cord Injury Association (SCIAN) FCT Chapter And Brain and Spine Foundation Africa.

Hon. Isa who delivered the keynote address at the occasion reiterated President Bola Tinubu administration’s resolve towards advancing spinal cord health and disability inclusion in Nigeria, by ensuring that persons with disabilities, including those with spinal cord injuries, are empowered to live full, dignified, and productive lives.

He disclosed that, “President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration is fully aware of this reality and is working assiduously to improve the quality of life for Nigerians living with spinal cord injuries and other disabilities.

“Through targeted interventions, provision of assistive devices, and promotion of inclusive policies, the government is reaffirming its commitment to ensuring that no citizen is denied access to health, dignity, and opportunity.

“Partnership for Rehabilitation: Specifically, my office, the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Special Needs and Equal Opportunities has partnered with the Medical Rehabilitation Therapists (Registration) Board of Nigeria (MRTB) to establish Medical Rehabilitation Centres across the country, with a strong focus on neuro rehabilitation.

He said: “This initiative is currently at the Situation Assessment Stage carefully evaluating existing structures, identifying gaps, and laying the groundwork for the development of a National Policy on Rehabilitation and a Strategic Plan.

“When fully implemented, this framework will transform the rehabilitation landscape in Nigeria and offer renewed hope to countless individuals and families.”

In her address, Chairman, Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) FCT Chapter, Comrade Grace Ike expressed grave concern over the globally statistics which indicated that over 15 million people live with spinal cord injuries, contributing to more than 4.5 million years lived with disability.

According to the record, in 2019 alone, nearly one million new cases were recorded. Road crashes and falls account for over 700,000 of those injuries.

Comrade Ike who was the Special Guest at the 2025 World Spinal Cord Injury Day, who pledged the Union’s resolve to support for Persons with Disabilities including persons with spinal cord injury, called on Policymakers to strengthen road safety laws, workplace protections, and health systems.

“To our communities: create safer environments and raise awareness. To the Media: amplify stories that matter and keep disability at the heart of the public agenda. And to every individual: take personal responsibility—at home, at work, and on the road.”

On her part, Chairman, Spinal Cord Injury FCT chapter, Chioma Maureen Egede observed that the theme for 2025, ‘Fall Prevention, Spinal Cord Protection,’ could not be more timely or urgent.

“Falls remain one of the leading causes of spinal cord injuries globally, and here in Nigeria, the impact is felt deeply—across homes, workplaces, and public spaces. This theme challenges us to act: to educate, to innovate, and to advocate for safer environments and stronger support systems.

“As Chairman of the Abuja Chapter, I am proud of the strides we’ve made in rehabilitation, peer support, and public engagement. But today reminds us that our work is far from over. We must continue to push for inclusive infrastructure, accessible healthcare, and policies that prioritize prevention and dignity for all.

“Let us use this day to amplify voices that are often unheard. Let us celebrate the courage of those living with spinal cord injuries, and honor the tireless efforts of families, caregivers, and medical professionals who walk this journey alongside them.

“Together, we can build a future where spinal cord injuries caused by falls are not a tragic norm, but a rare exception. Let this gathering be a spark—igniting change, inspiring action, and strengthening our resolve.”