Author: Ibrahim Abusadiq

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‎Flowerbud News/ The Tinubu Media Support Group (TMSG) has acknowledged as colourful, excellent and unprecedented President Bola Tinubu’s state burial for former President Muhammadu Buhari, describing the gesture as a befitting tribute to the memory of one of Nigeria’s most charismatic leaders.
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‎In a statement signed by its Chairman Emeka Nwankpa and Secretary Dapo Okubanjo, TMSG noted that the former President deserved all the honour the President decided to accord him in death.
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‎”Like many Nigerians, we were overwhelmed by a sense of loss on the death of former President Muhammadu Buhari but we are elated that his successor, President Bola Tinubu did not hold back in honoring his memory.
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‎”This is not necessarily because they were both allies in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) but also because of the former President’s legacy of service to the nation in various leadership roles he held until 2023.
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‎”So it was not out of place that President Tinubu’s first response was to dispatch a top level government team led by Vice President Kashim Shettima to accompany the former President’s remains back to the country.
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‎”This is in addition to a seven-day national mourning period during which the flag would fly at half-staff nationwide, in honour of a man who had a deep commitment to the unity and progress of our nation.
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‎”To underline the importance the government placed on a befitting honour to Buhari’s legacy, the state funeral was anchored by  a 16-member high-powered, interministerial committee.
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‎”This paved the way for President Tinubu to pull out all the stops to ensure a befitting state burial worthy of the manner Buhari dedicated his life and times for the country, with him at the forefront as chief mourner.
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‎”Worthy of note, for us, is the way the former President’s remains, draped in our national flag, were brought back to Nigeria in full dignity. It was indeed a true mark of honour for a person of Buhari’s stature.
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‎”And lest we forget, the Tinubu administration would be holding a valedictory federal cabinet session in former President Buhari’s honour which would also afford the President and his administration ample opportunity to immortalize his predecessor.”
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‎The group urged Nigerians to emulate the former leader’s belief in Nigeria’s potential as well as his personal integrity.
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By – Lawal Sale

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a message of condolence to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu over the death of former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari.

On behalf of the Chinese government and people, Xi expressed deep condolences and extended sincere sympathy to the family of Buhari, and the Nigerian government and people.

In a report published by the Xinhua News Agency of China, President Xi noted that Buhari was an important leader of Nigeria, saying that he dedicated himself to exploring a development path suited to his country’s national conditions, made outstanding contributions to national unity and progress, and was highly respected in the international community.

According to president Xi, Buhari steadfastly upheld friendship with China, actively promoted the Nigeria-China friendship and China-Africa cooperation, adding that his passing represents a tremendous loss to the Nigerian people and the loss of a dear friend to the Chinese people.

“China highly values the development of its relations with Nigeria and is willing to work with the Nigerian side to consistently move forward the bilateral comprehensive strategic partnership”, Xi said.

— Lawal Sale is Global South Affairs Analyst.

By – Lawal Sale

The Chinese Embassy in Nigeria extended its deepest condolences to the people of Nigeria on the passing of Nigeria’s former president, Muhammadu Buhari.

The embassy in a statement said Buhari was a resolute leader whose unwavering dedication to Nigeria’s unity and progress left an enduring legacy.

The statement said Buhari’s pivotal contributions to advancing China-Nigeria relations will forever remain etched in “our shared history.”

“Our thoughts are with his family and Nigerian people,” the statement added.

During his time as President, Nigeria witnessed a massive infrastructure transformation in collaboration with Chinese companies in executing projects such as the Kaduna-Abuja, Warri-Itakpe, Lagos-Ibadan, Abuja metro standard gauge rail lines, Lekki Deep Seaport among other developmental projects.

Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari died on July 13, 2025, at the age of 82 in a London clinic, following a prolonged illness.

His death was confirmed by his spokesperson, Garba Shehu, and President Bola Tinubu, who ordered Vice President Kashim Shettima to accompany Buhari’s body back to Nigeria for burial according to Islamic rites.

Nigerian government on monday declared a public holiday on Tuesday 15th July, 2925 and three-day national mourning period, with flags to be flown at half-mast in honour of the late former president.

–Lawal Sale is Global South Affairs Analyst

By Paul Ejime

Nigeria’s northern town of Daura witnessed an unusual crowd on Tuesday, 15 July 2025, as Nigerians and members of foreign delegations paid homage to former President Muhammadu Buhari, whose remains were interred according to Muslim rites in his hometown, two days after he died in a London Clinic at age 82.

The full military honours accorded the late Nigerian leader included a 21-gun salute, a farewell march and a graveside oration read by Nigerian Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Christopher Musa.

The state funeral ceremony was televised live as Nigerians observed a public holiday and a seven-day National mourning, declared by the government of Buhari’s successor, President Ahmed Bola Tinubu.

Tinubu, the chief mourner, travelled from Abuja, the nation’s capital, to personally receive Buhari’s body, which was flown from London earlier in the day to the Umaru Musa Ya’ardua Airport, Katsina, capital of the northern state of Katsina.

The casket bearing the body was draped in Nigeria’s green-white-green colours. It was brought in a Nigerian Air Force Jet, followed by a military farewell honour for the late army general, before it was transferred into an ambulance, which was accompanied by a motorcade on a one-hour drive to Daura for the Islamic rite of passage.

Grieving former First Lady Aisha Buhari accompanied her husband’s body from London to Katsina, surrounded by family members and current First Lady Oluremi Tinubu.

Amid tight security, the rowdy airport ceremony was attended by the crème de la crème in Nigeria (top serving and former government and military officials, as well as traditional and religious leaders). Also in attendance were Guinea Bissau President Umaru Sissoko Mbalo, and an official delegation from neighbouring Niger Republic, to which Buhari traced his ancestry.

In Daura, the body was moved to the town’s prayer ground for Muslim prayers before it was commissioned to Mother Earth at exactly 5.50 pm Nigerian time in the late president’s modest compound.

The dignitaries included Africa’s richest man, business mogul Alhaji Aliko Dangote, opposition leader Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Buhari’s former deputy Yemi Osinbajo and current vice President Kashim Shettima, who led the government delegation to London for the repatriation of Buhari’s body.
Gen. Buhari first ruled Nigeria for 20 months from January 1984 to August 1985, as a military Head of State following the 31 December 1983 coup against the elected government of President Shehu Shagari. He was himself overthrown in another military coup by General Ibrahim Babangida on 27 August 1985, before he was elected President in 2015, following Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999 after long spells of military rule.

Buhari was re-elected in 2019 and served until 2023, when he handed over to incumbent President Tinubu, as the first opposition leader in Nigeria, to defeat an incumbent in power. He and Tinubu belong to the same ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

A former military governor, who fought on the side of the Federal Government during Nigeria’s civil (Biafran) war (1967-70), Buhari’s demeanour as a man of integrity contributed to his election as president of Africa’s most populous nation in 2015 after three unsuccessful attempts.

He was not a typical politician. Reticent in character, he was named an African anti-corruption champion by the African Union in 2018.

However, his critics highlight his inability to tame or control corruption among officials in his government or his close associates, with the cankerworm eating much deeper into the national fabric during his eight-year tenure.

In a tribute to his late colleague, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, another former Nigerian military head of State (1998-1999), described Buhari as “a gentle man, very quiet, and exceptionally honest.”

“When he came in as a democratically elected President, he tried his best to fight corruption. Unfortunately, (some officials), who worked with him were found wanting. …with the passing away of Gen. Buhari, politics in Nigeria will certainly change, I hope for the better,” said Gen. Abubakar, who was himself recently discharged from the same London Clinic where Buhari died.

Buhari ran election campaigns on promises to improve national security, the economy, and fight corruption, but his administration is criticized for failing to provide solutions to these persistent problems.

As an army general, there was a high expectation that Buhari would end insecurity in Nigeria, especially violent extremism and the jihadist Boko Haram menace. Yet, Nigeria, whose soldiers have successfully served in peace-keeping missions across the world, still endures embarrassingly high casualties from intermittent attacks and kidnapping for ransom by bandits and various armed groups.

According to Security Expert, Kabir Adamu, some 17,000 people have been killed in insecurity-related incidents in Nigeria since the Tinubu government succeeded the Buhari administration two years ago.

Media reports said Buhari died from cancer of the blood (leukaemia). He exhibited symptoms of ill-health and old age, especially during his first four-year term, when he spent several months in London for medical treatment amid rumours of his death in 2017. His latest medical trip to London was in April.

Buhari is the second Nigerian leader to die after treatment in a foreign hospital in under 15 years, after then-sitting President Musa Ya’ardua died in office in May 2010. Both men hailed from the Northern state of Katsina.

Following in their footsteps, Nigeria’s current President Tinubu has also been travelling abroad for medical treatment, this time to France.

This trend is seen as an indictment of successive governments in the oil-rich country, which is notorious for a poor healthcare system that encourages senior government officials and the few who can afford medical tourism, which constitutes a drain on the scarce foreign exchange revenue.

Paul Ejime is a Media/Communications Specialist and Global Affairs Analyst

By Mohammed Baba Busu

Alhaji Yahaya Abubakar, the Etsu Nupe and Chairman, Niger Council of Traditional Rulers, says the death of former President Muhammadu Buhari is a monumental loss to Nigeria.

Abubakar, said this in his condolence message to President Bola Tinubu, people and government of Katsina State as well as Buhari’ immediate family members over the saddening loss on Tuesday in Abuja.

According to the Etsu Nupe, Buhari was a hero whose sense of patriotism was unparalleled in the history of Nigeria.

Abubukar said that Buhari lived a life of absolute piety, humility and unwavering commitment to the cause of Nigeria.

Abubakar also described the former president as extremely humble, God fearing and dedicated elder statesman whose love for Nigeria and the citizens especially the masses was uncommon.

He further said that Buhari was a core nationalist whose incorruptibility was uncommon in the history of Nigeria.

Abubakar said that the death of the former statesman and President has left a wide vacuum that would be too difficult to fill.

The Etsu Nupe described Buhari’s death as a great loss to the nation, praising him as a committed technocrat, patriotic
administrator, and a detribalised Nigerian.

The traditional ruler also added that Buhari died at a time when his wise counsel was direly needed to take Nigeria to greater heights.

He prayed that the Almighty Allah grant him Aljannat Firdaus, give his family and the nation the formidable fortitude to bear the irreplaceable loss.

NAN

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“Sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Section 14(2), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 as amended.

In 2007, the contest to rule Nigeria was between two sons of Katsina State. From the Katsina Emirate, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua ran on the ticket of the then ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to succeed outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo. His elder brother, Shehu, had served as Obasanjo’s second-in-command during military rule from February 1976 to October 1979. From the Daura Emirate, also in Katsina State, Muhammadu Buhari, who also served alongside Obasanjo and Shehu Musa Yar’Adua in that military government, was the leading opposition candidate on the platform of the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP).

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as the winner, and Muhammadu Buhari lodged a petition to challenge the declaration. After a prolonged period of litigation, the Supreme Court handed down its decision on 12 December 2008 by a narrow majority dismissing Muhammadu Buhari’s petition.

Of the many things pronounced upon by the court, two stood out. One was its refusal to affirm any set of principles to govern the conduct of elections in Nigeria. The other was the formal pronouncement in the leading judgment of Niki Tobi that in elections in the country, “the judges must be the final bus-stop.”

A report on election dispute resolution in Nigeria published earlier this year by the Policy and Legislative Advocacy Centre (PLAC) reinforced this, declaring that the electoral process in Nigeria has now been formally relocated “from ballot to the courts.”

The idea of judges as the “final bus-stop” for the determination of electoral legitimacy in Nigeria sounds like a wanton departure from the clear constitutional design, which confers sovereignty upon the people “from whom government through this constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Judges may be people in the sense of human beings like every other citizen, but as a conclave of decision makers in a court, they are not the people upon whom the constitution confers the mandate to decide who rules the country.

When it comes to contests over elections in Nigeria, the Electoral Act does not provide any room for the people whose mandate is at stake to participate in disputes over the destination of their mandate or what happens to it.

It is problematic enough that judges have now overthrown popular sovereignty as the basis of the mandate to rule in Nigeria and substituted it with a grandiloquent notion of judicial sovereignty.  The case of Zamfara State Governorship election in 2019 demonstrates how dangerously self-regarding judicial sovereignty has become in Nigeria.

In that year, Mukhtar Shehu Idris, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), secured a total of 534,541 votes or 67.41% of the votes cast to win the contest for the office of governor of Zamfara State. He clearly won the vote in every of the 14 Local Government Areas of the State. In a distant second was Bello Matawalle of the PDP, who secured 189,452 votes or 23.89% of the votes cast, less than 25% of the votes cast in the state. Mattawalle also lost in every LGA in the state.

Preceding the vote, however, the contest for the ticket of the APC was the subject of competing and contradictory orders from various courts in the country, both state and federal. Nobody alleged that the result was anything other than the manifest will of the people. But in resolving the complicated pre-election litigation on 24 May 2019, the Supreme Court invalidated the APC primaries, disbarred their candidate from the contest retrospectively and pronounced that “this being so, the votes credited to the (APC candidates) in the 2019 general elections in Zamfara State are wasted votes.”

Not content with throwing the votes of more than two-thirds of the state’s voters into the dustbin, the Supreme Court went further and declared Bello Matawalle the winner, despite being beaten hopelessly into a second-place position. This was election robbery under the ruse of jurisprudence.

There was nothing inexorable about the order made by the Supreme Court in this case. The court could have invalidated the primaries of the APC. Indeed, it could still arguably have excluded the APC from the contest. But faced with the reality of excluding over two-thirds of the voters of the state from having a say in who governs them, the structure, text and spirit of both the constitution and the idea of government founded on the will of the people required the Supreme Court in that case to do only one thing  – order a re-run so that the people of Zamfara State could look at the candidate on offer and choose who to rule them. Instead, the court chose to supplant popular sovereignty with judicial sovereignty, infantilise the voters and install as governor for the people of Zamfara State a person whom they looked at and roundly rejected at the polls.

At the beginning of January 2008, Nigeria’s Supreme Court decided in the case , which ultimately handed the office of the Governor of Rivers State to Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, that under Nigeria’s constitution, it is the political party alone that contests or wins an election.

However, in a little-noticed line in that judgment, Adesola Oguntade, who delivered the judgment of the court, cautioned that the law governing political or election dispute resolution under the Nigerian constitution was “intended to ensure a smooth transition from one administration to another. It is not a provision to destroy the right of access to the court granted to a citizen under section 36 of the same Constitution.”

The basic requirement of section 36 of the Constitution is a guarantee that a person or group whose “civil rights and obligations” are liable to be determined in a court of law, “shall be entitled to a fair hearing within a reasonable time by a court or other tribunal established by law and constituted in such manner as to secure its independence and impartiality.” In a system of government founded on one person, one vote, no civil right or obligation competes for primacy on an equal footing with the right of citizens to choose who governs them or how to constitute their government.

Yet, when the Supreme Court decided in 2019 that the votes of a super-majority of the people of Zamfara State in the governorship election were “wasted”, it did not bother to hear from any of the affected voters or their legal representatives.

In Plateau State, where a judicial hit-squad from the Court of Appeal did something similar to the voters in the legislative elections in 2023, again, the people could not be represented. It is difficult to contemplate a clearer violation of section 36 of the Constitution.

In Nigeria, where the decision on whom to confer the mandate to rule has been relocated by fiat of the Supreme Court from the ballot box to the courtroom, citizens are currently denied standing to participate in disputes involving the identity or determination of the person or party on whom they have conferred that mandate. The surprise is that no one has sought to bring this to the attention of the courts as such or challenge the lawfulness or constitutionality of this fundamental flaw in Nigeria’s election petition system. The main objection to this is that it could be both confounding and inconvenient to ask potentially millions of voters to join in such proceedings. We will address this objection fully next.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

By Mohammed Baba Busu

The Emir of Zazzau in Kaduna State, Amb. Ahmed Bamalli, has called on affluent Nigerians to make investments in horse racing.

“Sports in Nigeria generally need more investments and not just by the government but by those who are wealthy.

“This is very important and we need more of such investments to take horse racing to greater heights,” he said.

Bamalli spoke to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Saturday in Kaduna on the sidelines of the grand finale of the ‘Renewed Hope International Horse Racing Derby’.

NAN also reports that it was themed, ‘Sahel Savannah Series 2025- Grand Finale’.

The epochal event was organised by the Horse Racing Federation of Nigeria (HRFN),as part of its unwavering commitment to President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda

The emir said,” Such investments can be made plausibly through Public-Private- partnership (PPP) and they always result in high turn overs in a myriad of ways.”

Bamalli said that investments in sports and particularly in horse racing would create more jobs and drastically curb the disturbing menace of youths restiveness.

He added,”This will also encourage the local breeding of horses,hence curb their massive importation from countries like Argentina and others.

“This will further help in conserving the direly needed foreign exchange and inevitably bolster the economy of the country.”

NAN