Baba Aye's

As 2025 ended and 2026 began, how would you describe Nigerians’ lives in the outgone year? Last year was a terrible year for poor working people in Nigeria. For the few that were still lucky to have salaried work, their wages could hardly take them home. House rents shot through the sky. For many people, their rents doubled between 2024 and 2025. Insecurity made travelling and even living in people’s homes a challenge of survival. While the economy did grow, it was only to the benefit of the few rich and powerful people, who became richer while the poor became poorer.  Would you say there are signs that the New Year will be better for the Nigerians? There are signs for sure that this year will be better for rich people. In the second week of the year, the news filtered in that the NGX, which is the Nigerian Stock Exchange, crossed the centi-trillion naira mark for the first time. While this hides the impact of things like the devaluation of the naira, regarding actual value, ...

What is your take on Donald Trump's declaration of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) over alleged killing of Christians? Donald Trump is playing a political card laced in hypocrisy, deceit, arrogance and imperialist interests. One cannot but laugh when he talks of wanting to come to the aid of “cherished Christians”. Three percent of the Christians in Gaza are amongst the sixty-nine thousand people that were killed in that strip in the course of two years of Israel’s genocidal campaign. But he has not only not been concerned about them, he has stood firmly against calling the war on Gaza the genocide it is. Trump and other politicians like Ted Cruz and Riley are just playing politics with this matter. On one hand, they are appealing to their white evangelical base. On the other hand Trump and indeed the American state as a whole are playing a card that Western imperialism has played time and again for centuries now, under the guise of what the British poet Rudyard ...

November unfolded with threats from Donald Trump to invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” in defence of “cherished Christians” whom he claimed were facing a genocide in the country. This immediately sparked discussions across the country and beyond. The story made the headlines of all major newspapers on Monday, November 3, all except one  — the Nation, owned by President Bola Tinubu. By the end of the week, Trump reiterated not only his insidious threats; he put Nigeria on the United States (of parts of North) America’s list of countries of particular concern (CPC) for the second time. Senator Ted Cruz, who boasts that he has “fought for years to counter the slaughter and persecution of Christians in Nigeria,” introduced a bill for religious freedom and accountability in Nigeria two months earlier. According to him, jihadists have murdered 52,000 Nigerian Christians and destroyed 20,000 churches and institutions since 2009, the year the Boko Haram Salafi-Jihadist group took up arms a...