President Bola Tinubu’s self-serving speech--which basically sang his own praises, said he'd heard the people's anguished cries but won't do anything about the cries and then threatened that the people shouldn't cry for much longer or they'd be crushed-- signposts the making of an unfeeling tyrant. If the people close to him don't stop him and the masses of the people let him get away with it, he'll transmogrify into a terrifyingly ruthless monster that may end Nigeria as we know it. A famous Arabic proverb goes: "They asked the Pharoah, 'What made you a tyrant?' He said, 'No one…

115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing incompatible with the character of the Yoruba people, and (which) has no place in their constitution…. Hyper-sensitive officials may come tomorrow who will see sedition in every criticism and crime in every mass meeting.” Sapara Williams was Nigeria’s first articulate defender…