On Wednesday, 21st May 2008, 46 soldiers from the 234 Battalion of the Nigerian Army, Monguno, Borno State, who were involved in an auto crash in Siminti village along Bauchi and Yobe states border, were burnt to death when their vehicle collided with a petrol tanker.
The victims were so much charred that it was not possible to identify them individually. Hence the Federal Government decided to bury them in the National Cemetery, Abuja rather than their respective hometowns, a decision that did not go down well with the then government and some of the family members of the deceased.
The greatest respect a nation can accord her soldier, who die in active battle, is to recover his remains, identify him, take the remains to his land of birth and give him 21 gun shots at his burial ground, saluting his courage and patriotism for his nation.
It is against this background that the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) decided to establish a DNA Banking and Analysis Centre called the “Defence Identification Centre (DIC)”. The DIC leverages a state-of-the-art and unique technology for DNA storage at room temperature.
Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, while inaugurating the centre, located in the sprawling Mogadishu Cantonment, said it was a giant stride toward identification of personnel when the need arises. He stated that the event also marks a significant milestone in the on-going efforts of the Armed Forces to balance its pursuit of professionalism with emphasis on human capital development.
The minister noted that the application of DNA technology, as a valuable investigative tool to improve military identification capabilities, has led to the development of a global approach to medical preparedness in major incident management and support. He pointed out that. Armed Forces worldwide are keying into the trend.
“It is heart-warming to note that the Nigerian Armed Forces are also in the forefront of this lofty achievement.” Chukwu said.
“ The attendant destruction of modern warfare and the imperatives of burying fallen heroes in marked graves call for the most effective and technologically sophisticated approach (in identifying their bodies). Just as it is necessary to identify members of Armed Forces for administrative purposes or identify casualties before burial in civilian air crashes and terrorists attack leading to mass civilian casualty.”
Chukwu further noted that, Part of the problem in situations of civilian casualties was giving the bodies back to the families and for documentation purposes. He called for collaboration with the Armed Forces not only for routine purposes but also during disasters, adding that, now that the Armed Forces is going into high tech molecular diagnosis, it will be important in the context of the recent challenges of Ebola outbreak to extend the new equipments to other diagnostic facilities.
In his remarks, the Minister of Defence, Lt.-Gen. Aliyu Gusau (Rtd), said the establishment of the centre marks a significant milestone in the military’s effort in ascertaining the true identity of all its personnel as it will help in restoring the dignity of the fallen heroes even in death.
According to Gusau, the ability to correctly identify our deceased personnel in all circumstances is a responsibility which we owe them and their families. He said it will facilitate identification of the deceased so they could be appropriately recognised and honoured in accordance with their religious beliefs, the wish of the bereaved families and the will of the deceased.
He emphasised that the centre is also essential for the living personnel in establishing the true paternity of civilians and other relationship when the need arises. General Gusau also said that the centre would save the federal government and families of deceased personnel time and resources involved in sending samples abroad for DNA test.
Speaking at the event, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, explained the importance of the DNA centre, saying: "On few occasions when multiple fatalities were recorded and individual corpses could not be identified, mass burials were resorted to. Such mass burials deny such heroes the privilege of being buried properly while robbing the bereaved families the honour and satisfaction of seeing their loved ones being accorded befitting burials."
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President Bola Tinubu has assured that all victims abducted during the attack on schools in Oyo State will be rescued, while condemning the reported killing of one of the kidnapped teachers.
This was contained in a statement issued on Monday by his Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga.
Bandits invaded the Esiele community in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State last Friday, abducting staff, students and pupils of Community Grammar School, Baptist Nursery and Primary School, and L.A. Primary School.
According to the statement, security operatives are working round the clock to rescue the victims and apprehend the bandits and their collaborators within the community.
Tinubu described the reported killing of one of the abducted teachers as barbaric and sympathised with Governor Seyi Makinde, the government and the people of Oyo State over the incident.
“I am saddened by the reported killing of one of the teachers kidnapped by the gunmen who invaded the community. I sympathise with Governor Seyi Makinde and commend the steps he has taken on the matter. I sympathise with the families of the kidnapped victims.
“The Federal Government is working with the Oyo State government to rescue all the victims. I commend the Inspector-General of Police and the Commissioners of Police in Oyo and Kwara States for their quick intervention and the deployment of a tactical and the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) team to rescue the victims.
“The IGP, following my instructions, is personally leading the tech-driven operation. We expect a breakthrough soon. The bandits and all their local collaborators will be fished out and made to face the full wrath of the law.
“Cases of kidnapping further make imperative the establishment of state police to man some of our underserved areas. The National Assembly should accelerate the enactment of the law creating state police,” the President said.
Governor Makinde, on Sunday, confirmed the killing of one of the teachers abducted alongside other victims and pledged that the government would continue efforts to rescue the remaining abductees.
He said that seven teachers and an as-yet-unconfirmed number of pupils were abducted.
The governor said one of the abducted teachers, believed to be a Mathematics teacher, was killed by the terrorists.
“What we know right now is that seven teachers were abducted. Unfortunately, we received a video this morning indicating that one of the teachers, understood to be the Mathematics teacher, was killed by the terrorists. Our prayers are with the family,” Makinde said.
Teachers protesting the abduction, killing of their colleagues in Oyo State.
Meanwhile, teachers on Monday shut down classroom activities in Ogbomoso and staged a peaceful protest to the TESCOM office in the town over the kidnapping of students and teachers, which resulted in killing of one teacher.
The protesters marched with placards bearing various inscriptions, calling on governments at all levels to intensify efforts toward securing the release of those currently being held captive by kidnappers.
The teachers also demanded improved security around schools and safer learning environments for both staff and students.
News
For years, the obituary of the African bank has been drafted with almost theatrical confidence. Fintech firms, armed with sleek apps, venture capital and evangelical jargon about “disruption”, were supposed to reduce traditional lenders to the financial equivalent of rotary telephones. Nigeria, with its youthful population and chronic distrust of institutions, looked especially ripe for such a revolution. Yet the latest numbers from the country’s biggest lenders suggest that reports of the banks’ demise were, to borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, greatly exaggerated. In 2025 four of Nigeria’s largest banks - Zenith Bank, United Bank for Africa, GTCO and First Holdco -processed a combined N570.17trn in electronic transactions, nearly 20% higher than the N477trn recorded in 2024. Electronic banking income climbed to N468.9bn. In a country where fintech firms have spent the better part of a decade declaring war on incumbents, the incumbents appear not merely alive, but flourishing.
The story is not that fintech failed. Quite the contrary. Nigerian fintech firms have transformed consumer expectations. They normalized instant transfers, simplified payments and exposed the lumbering inefficiencies of old banking halls where queues moved with the urgency of geological change. Companies such as Flutterwave, OPay and Moniepoint forced banks to innovate or perish. What is striking, however, is how effectively the banks adapted. Rather than resist digitization, Nigeria’s major lenders absorbed it into their existing advantages: enormous customer bases, regulatory familiarity, deep balance sheets and national reach. The result is that the country’s banking giants now look less like endangered dinosaurs than heavily armed mammals that evolved before the meteor landed.
Consider Zenith Bank. The lender processed N225.3trn in electronic transactions in 2025, up more than 32% year-on-year. Mobile banking transactions alone surged by over 80%, while internet banking rose nearly 50%. Those are not the numbers of an institution struggling to remain relevant. They are the numbers of a bank aggressively colonizing digital territory. UBA tells a similar story, though on an even broader continental scale. With operations spanning more than 20 African countries, the bank has quietly positioned itself as a pan-African payments platform disguised as a traditional lender. Its chatbot, Leo, now integrates cross-border payments through the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), an innovation aimed at easing intra-African commerce. In effect, UBA is attempting to solve one of Africa’s most persistent absurdities: the difficulty Africans face paying one another across borders without routing transactions through Europe, Asia or America.
GTCO, meanwhile, demonstrated how quickly consumer behavior can shift when convenience triumphs over habit. Its “Pay With Transfer” product exploded from relative obscurity into one of the country’s fastest-growing payment channels. The over 7,800% increase is the sort of statistic usually associated with cryptocurrency evangelists or miracle-weight-loss advertisements. Yet it reflects something more mundane and more important: Nigerians increasingly prefer frictionless banking. The implications are larger than quarterly earnings.
Nigeria’s banks are proving that incumbents can survive technological disruption if they possess three things fintech firms often underestimate: scale, trust and regulatory endurance. Banking, after all, is not merely about innovation. It is also about surviving crises, managing liquidity, navigating regulators and persuading customers that their money will still exist tomorrow morning. That matters enormously in an economy repeatedly buffeted by inflation, currency instability and policy volatility. Fintech firms excel at convenience; banks still dominate confidence. There is another irony here. Much of fintech’s early success depended on exploiting weaknesses in traditional banking infrastructure. Yet once banks modernized their systems, fintech firms found themselves competing not against complacent bureaucracies, but against institutions with decades of capital accumulation and millions of customers. The disruptors disrupted the banks into becoming better banks.
Nor is this simply a Nigerian phenomenon. Across Africa, a more mature relationship is emerging between fintech firms and traditional lenders. The early rhetoric of total displacement is giving way to partnerships, acquisitions and hybrid models. Many fintech companies now rely on banking licenses, banking infrastructure or direct collaboration with banks themselves. The revolution, in other words, is becoming institutionalized. This does not mean Nigeria’s banks are beyond criticism. Customers still complain about outages, failed transfers and fees that reproduce themselves with the fertility of rabbits. Regulatory uncertainty remains a permanent feature of the financial landscape. Cybersecurity threats are rising. Financial inclusion, though improved, remains uneven.
Nor should the banks become complacent. African consumers are famously impatient with institutions that mistake temporary dominance for permanent immunity. The same technology that empowered the banks can rapidly empower their competitors again. Still, the latest figures mark an important moment in the evolution of African finance. They suggest that digital transformation need not destroy incumbents; it can strengthen them. Nigeria’s biggest banks have managed something rare in corporate history: they allowed themselves to be disrupted without allowing themselves to be displaced.
The more profound lesson is about African capitalism itself. Too often, discussions about innovation on the continent are framed as a binary contest between nimble start-ups and obsolete institutions. Reality is proving more complicated. The strongest firms are increasingly those capable of combining technological agility with institutional heft. That combination may prove decisive as Africa’s financial systems deepen. The continent’s future banking champions are unlikely to be purely traditional banks or purely fintech insurgents. They will be institutions capable of behaving like both. For now, Nigeria’s banks can savor a quiet triumph. The fintech invasion arrived exactly as predicted. The old giants simply learned how to fight back.
Business
In The Spotlight
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) achieved something remarkable in Edo State: it conducted one primary election and produced two winners, two vote tallies, two returning officers and, judging by the arithmetic involved, perhaps two entirely separate realities. In one universe, Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama won comfortably with 27,154 votes. In another, Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu triumphed magnificently with 33,399 votes. Somewhere between those parallel dimensions lies the actual election, presumably wandering around Edo South looking for a credible collation centre. The Edo debacle is not an isolated embarrassment. It is merely the latest episode in the APC’s long-running national theatre of factional warfare, institutional indiscipline and administrative incoherence. For students of Nigerian politics, this was less a surprise than a ritual.
The Edo fiasco, however, was merely the latest instalment in the APC’s national anthology of disorder. In Ondo, the party transformed a House of Representatives primary into something approximating an evacuation exercise. Suspected political thugs stormed the APC secretariat in Akure while results were being announced, sending party officials, journalists and loyalists scrambling for exits. According to witnesses, the confusion began when a telephone instruction allegedly arrived ordering the process halted midway. The spectacle deteriorated further when committee members reportedly vanished altogether, including the secretary of the primary committee, leaving results hanging in bureaucratic limbo. A governing party had effectively misplaced its own electoral officials. Nigeria, sadly, has become so accustomed to administrative absurdity that such developments barely qualify as shocking anymore.
Elsewhere in Cross River State, one defeated aspirant felt compelled to issue a public sermon urging party members not to “burn down the house” over the outcome of primaries. The mere fact that this now passes for statesmanship tells its own story. In functioning political systems, losers concede because rules are accepted as legitimate. In the APC, aspirants increasingly appeal for calm the way flight attendants prepare passengers for turbulence: with forced optimism masking institutional anxiety. This is not accidental disorder. It is structural. The APC has evolved into that most dangerous of political organisms: a governing party incapable of governing itself, yet entrusted with governing 220 million people. It now treats internal democracy as a chaotic experiment. The comedy would be entertaining were the implications not so serious. Political parties are meant to serve as rehearsal rooms for governance. If a party cannot organize a primary election without producing rival winners like a malfunctioning photocopier, one begins to wonder how exactly it intends to organize a country.
This is, after all, the same party whose congresses and primaries have repeatedly resembled civil disturbances interrupted only briefly by accreditation. In Kano, factions have spent years behaving less like political colleagues than rival claimants to a disputed oil well. In Rivers, the party practically dissolved itself into legal confusion so severe that it became electorally invisible. In Zamfara, internal disputes once became so catastrophic that courts barred the APC from fielding candidates altogether, handing victory to opponents without them needing the inconvenience of campaigning. In Ogun, Osun and Imo, parallel executives and competing party structures became so common that one required a flowchart merely to identify the authentic faction of the authentic faction.
Even the APC’s national conventions often carry the atmosphere of an aristocratic family fracas conducted with microphones. Governors routinely fight ministers. Ministers undermine party chairmen. Chairmen are removed with the speed and discretion of Soviet officials disappearing from photographs. One APC national chairman after another has entered office proclaiming unity before exiting amid intrigue, rebellion or humiliation. The party changes its leadership with the nervous frequency of a company hiding accounting irregularities. And yet the APC insists on presenting itself as the custodian of national stability.
The deeper problem is philosophical. The party increasingly operates not as an institution bound by rules, but as a coalition of ambitions temporarily sharing office space. Ideology is absent. Procedure is negotiable. Loyalty lasts precisely until the next ticket allocation. Primaries therefore become less democratic exercises than exercises in managed hostility, where every aspirant arrives already convinced the process will be rigged unless rigged in his favor. The result is the political equivalent of organized confusion. Electoral officials announce contradictory results with straight faces. Aggrieved aspirants rush to television studios carrying documents thicker than doctoral theses. Party headquarters issues statements “reviewing the situation.” Courts prepare for another harvest season of injunctions. Meanwhile, ordinary Nigerians watch the spectacle with the exhausted resignation of people observing a generator that sparks every evening but somehow remains in use.
What makes the APC’s disorder particularly alarming is that it mirrors the wider condition of the Nigerian state under its stewardship. A government unable to coordinate fuel policy now struggles to coordinate candidate lists. A party presiding over chronic electricity failures cannot keep the lights on inside its own internal processes. The confusion at the primaries is merely governance in miniature.
Consider the broader landscape. Inflation ravages households while government officials argue publicly over economic direction. Security agencies contradict one another on terrorism statistics. The naira behaves like a currency undergoing emotional distress. Ministries announce policies only for other ministries to deny them hours later. Even basic governance increasingly resembles a relay race in which participants disagree on the direction of the track. In that sense, the Edo primary was not an aberration.
One must also admire, in a grimly academic way, the APC’s commitment to numerical creativity. In Nigerian party primaries, voter turnout often acquires supernatural qualities. Entire wards suddenly produce Soviet-style participation figures. Aspirants who cannot attract ten people to a policy lecture somehow accumulate thirty thousand votes before lunchtime. Democracy, in these settings, becomes less a counting exercise than a literary genre. Naturally, party loyalists will insist these crises merely reflect the vibrancy of internal democracy. This is akin to describing a building collapse as evidence of architectural creativity. Genuine democratic competition requires credible rules accepted by participants before the contest begins.
There is also something profoundly revealing about a ruling party perpetually consumed by itself. At a time when Nigeria faces economic hardship, insecurity and social strain, the APC remains trapped in endless internal combat over offices, tickets and patronage. It governs like a corporation whose executives spend more time fighting over boardroom seating arrangements than addressing impending bankruptcy. The tragedy is that this confusion gradually normalizes institutional decay. Citizens become accustomed to absurdity. Parallel primaries become ordinary. Contradictory officials become expected. Governance by confusion becomes culturally familiar. A country repeatedly exposed to administrative farce eventually loses its capacity for outrage.
And so, the APC continues: announcing unity while manufacturing division, proclaiming order while institutionalizing chaos, presenting itself as the guardian of democracy while struggling to count its own votes coherently. The Edo South primary was therefore more than a local dispute. It was a concise summary of contemporary Nigerian governance: two truths, competing authorities, procedural confusion and a system functioning just well enough to avoid collapse while failing spectacularly at credibility. A party that cannot govern its primaries now governs the republic. Nigeria, unfortunately, is living with the consequences.
Opinions
In The Spotlight
It is time to talk about Big Money!
President Tinubu signed the 2026 Appropriation Act of a massive N68.32 trillion on April 17.
Remember: Between presidential submission and National Assembly passage, the budget value jumped by a whopping 9 per cent, from N58.18 trillion. There was no public scrutiny as to what was added, by whom, or why.
This we do know: Tinubu allocated over N1.01 trillion to INEC for the 2027 election. He also provided the astonishing sum of N135bn not to enhance the quality of the elections, but for election lawsuits: the way you budget well ahead for disease and surgery rather than for healthy habits.
The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre cried “Bigger Figures, Familiar Failures.” The IMF cited budget execution gaps.
The government continued to keep the detailed budget under wraps, leading to the Centre for Social Justice demanding that the Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, either publish the document immediately or resign.
The government had chosen to break Nigeria’s fiscal law rather than publish budget reports in three consecutive quarters, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism affirmed.
Despite all of that and much more, the budget had not been published as of the end of last week.
Big Money: In January, SERAP sued INEC for failing to account for “the missing or diverted N55.9 billion” concerning the 2019 general elections, following the 2022 Auditor-General’s report issued last September.
INEC issues in that report include:
Award of Contracts Without Due Process (over N41.3bn)
Irregular Payment for Smart Card Readers (over N5.31bn)
Procurement with Contradictory Supporting Documents (over N331m)
Payments without a voucher or evidence of supply (N3.485)
Payments without deducting the mandatory 1% stamp duty (over N2.19 billion)
Irregular Award of Contract for four Toyota Land Cruisers (over N297m)
This is fascinating given that months after the Auditor-General’s report emerged, INEC bragged about savings of N1.1 trillion from “procurement reforms.”
Reflect, for a moment, on that report alongside INEC’s procurement sainthood, in the same sentence.
Big Money: Former Power minister Saleh Mamman, found guilty of 12 counts, including using private firms to funnel money linked to government-funded power plants, has been sentenced to 75 years in prison for laundering N33.8bn.
Knowing how unusual this is in Nigeria, I would have said, “Greed, served!” But Mamman is missing (wink-wink).
He was not in court to be sentenced: another reminder that when you are a Big Man with Big Money, you can determine your own justice.
This is why tenure-limited governors sprint to Abuja from their states as soon as someone else takes their job, heading for the best hiding place in the land: the Senate!
We cannot celebrate “Greed, served!” when over 60 per cent of corruption cases against public officials partying in public remain unresolved after over a decade, with credible data shamelessly showing that only 144 of 393 cases reached final judgment between 2013 and 2026.
Which reminds me: the March 2026 OECD Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook 2026 found a 26-percentage-point gap between integrity regulation and implementation. This is particularly interesting because, in Nigeria, integrity is perhaps the most loathed term in the corridors of power. We don’t say it and don’t spell it.
More big money issues last week emerged in a bombshell report concerning the misappropriation of over N800 billion allegedly diverted from federal allocations by APC governors to fund President Tinubu’s re-election campaign.
If true, those would be state funds being illegally emptied into the president’s personal pockets. The government swiftly denied the allegations.
As in the case of the World Bank report, the African Democratic Party has demanded that the matter be investigated.
Finally, if you have not, you should read the World Bank’s April 2026 Development Update titled, “Nigeria’s Tomorrow Must Start Today: The Case for Early Childhood Development.”
It labels the Nigerian economy as fragile, noting that inflation is punishing households. It also pointed out that FAAC gross revenues rose from N17.1 trillion in 2024 to N37.4 trillion in 2025, increasing from 7.9 per cent to 9.5 per cent of GDP, but flags 5,000 TSA gaps.
It further projected that the number of poor Nigerians rose from about 40 million in 2019 to over 60 million during the Bola Tinubu years.
The Bank acknowledges some reform progress but calls for far more: stronger monetary implementation, increased organic FX flows, electricity sector reform, lower cost of governance, higher non-oil revenue, improved fiscal governance, clearance of audit backlogs, monthly reconciled fiscal data, and more credible budgets.
At the upper echelons of Nigerian governance, they must have winked at one another and guffawed: “More ke? Make we do more?”
But the most important element of the report is the alarm it raises about Nigerian children, with the Bank defining Early Childhood Development as an economic priority.
The World Bank’s figures:
Nigeria has about 7 million births every year
Over 110 children per 1,000 die before age five.
Over 40 per cent of children are stunted.
Over 52 per cent are not developmentally on track.
Only 30 per cent of children aged 3–5 can identify five letters, and 34 per cent can recognise numbers from 1 to 5.
The report notes that children who are not stunted are 1.6 times more likely to complete primary school and more than twice as likely to complete secondary school. It also points out that Nigeria’s under-five mortality and stunting rates are significantly worse than those of countries with similar income levels.
Meaning: The poverty capital of the world has another serious human capital problem that might make no sense in the Renewed Hope calculus or understanding: early deprivation becomes school failure, then weak labour-market participation, and ultimately low national productivity.
Keep in mind: this is in a country in which, seven years ago, the ruling APC pledged that it would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
But this is not a promise that APC is proud of, because in its tender care, Nigeria is travelling more deeply into poverty. As its chieftains borrow and spend, travelling in the executive jet and bulletproof SUVs, the party neither mention the pledge nor offers any apologies.
APC has a serious character problem, which is why it recognises neither its official manifesto, nor even Jagaban’s remodelled, or Renewed Hope. Each is loaded with promises that nobody honours or even remembers.
So, who is going to tell APC to save the Nigerian child?
This is exactly why Nigeria has become a land of smoke and hot air in which neither Nigeria nor Nigerians matter. Because while you can take what you don’t own, you can’t give what you don’t have.