WHY THE O.K. TICKET IS NOT OKAY Ali Abubakar Sadiq  The recent permutations in the polity are not by accident but by design. Let's look back a little. In 2019, under the PDP, Atiku Abubakar picked Peter Obi as his running mate. They challenged the then popular Muhammad Buhari and failed, after a good fight. Fast forward 2023, Buhari at the end of his second term must give room for someone from the South (the unwritten political constitution of zoning). Tinubu, despite Buhari and his collaborators in the APC, bamboozled everyone to clinched the ticket.  The most surprising thing was Obi declaring to run on his own ticket in 2023, and Atiku was naive enough to let him go. That was the single stroke that crumbled the opposition. But whose idea is it in the first place? One can n easily trace it to the pathological hatred of Obasanjo towards an Atiku presidency. With nostalgia, some of us could remember how such pathological hatred among elites led to the civil war in ...

One of the trending issues on the table recently in the North is the political aspiration of the Cleric-turn-politician, in his quest to become the next Governor of Gombe state come 2027. I am not going to support Jafar Jafar's dismissive article of Pantami's unrealistic effort to juggle the moral compass of his clerical uprightness against the immoral stance of Nigeria politics which thrives mostly on corruption and deciet. Nor am I going to agree with Professor Abba Aji's rejoinder to Jafar Jafar, seemingly endorsing Pantami's ability to eat his cake and have it, as he maintains the dual role of Cleric-Politician. What I am going to do is simply remind us of the antecedents and precedents of Pantami's role in the last two decades, from both the religious and political spaces he traverses.  In a viral video in recent years, we have seen the skinny, vocal and passionate Pantami castigating, condemning and distancing himself from politics and politicians....