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Kogi State Governor, Ahmed Ododo, has reaffirmed his political relationship with the member representing Ikeja Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, Hon. James Abiodun Faleke, declaring that there is no misunderstanding between them.

Ododo made the clarification over the weekend when he received members of the Faleke Political Vanguard, a youth mobilisation group with structures across the 21 local government areas of Kogi State, during a courtesy visit to the Government House, Lokoja.

The governor dismissed speculations of a disagreement between him and the federal lawmaker, describing Faleke as his political leader and partner, while assuring the group of his administration’s continued cooperation.

‘I want people to know that we are together; we don’t have differences. He is my leader and he is my partner. I have been saying it, and I owe nobody any apology,’ Ododo declared.

He explained that the demands of governance had limited his opportunities to meet regularly with members of the Vanguard, stressing that such circumstances should not be misconstrued as a breakdown in political relationships.

Ododo recalled Faleke’s support during his legal challenges, describing their relationship as one founded on loyalty, mutual understanding and shared political interests.

He added that Faleke had directed members of the Vanguard to support his administration, a responsibility he said he had gladly embraced.

The governor assured the group that his administration would continue to promote inclusive governance, particularly in youth and women empowerment, adding that political leadership should not be seen as an avenue for superiority.

‘I am not better than anybody. I have no voice, I have no power without your support. But with your support, we are willing to defend the interests of our youths and women,’ he said.

Ododo also cautioned politicians against creating divisions and exploiting young people for political violence, recalling previous experiences in the state where political disagreements reportedly generated hostility among communities and supporters.

He urged political stakeholders to embrace peaceful engagement, tolerance and mutual respect, warning that the peace and stability of Kogi State must not be sacrificed for personal or partisan interests.

The governor further challenged youths to deploy their energy, talents and organisational abilities towards productive ventures and the development of the state rather than allowing themselves to be used as instruments of political violence.

Earlier, the Coordinator of the Faleke Political Vanguard, Alamoh Kehinde Samuel, said the organisation was made up of selected youth leaders and supporters drawn from the 21 local government areas of the state.

Kehinde disclosed that many members were political followers of the late former Governor Abubakar Audu and Hon. Faleke, adding that the group was committed to strengthening grassroots political participation and supporting the Ododo administration.

He commended the governor for his support and attention to the organisation, identifying security, youth development and inclusive governance as major factors motivating members to remain politically active.

The coordinator also highlighted some of the administration’s achievements in healthcare, education, infrastructure, workers’ welfare and investment promotion.

He listed the construction and renovation of 88 primary healthcare centres, establishment of a psychiatric centre at Prince Abubakar Audu University Teaching Hospital, educational support for students, improved salary and pension payments, expansion of the state health insurance scheme and ongoing road projects.

On the organisation’s structure, Kehinde disclosed that the Vanguard had established coordination arrangements across the state’s 21 local government areas and 239 electoral wards.

He said the group was targeting 100 members in each ward, translating to a projected membership of 23,900 across the state.

According to him, the organisation would soon commence formal inaugurations at the zonal, local government and ward levels to strengthen its grassroots structures and improve coordination.

He added that the Vanguard’s political agenda included mobilising support for Governor Ododo and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu ahead of the 2027 general elections.

Also speaking, the Kogi State Chairman of the Special Advisers’ Forum, Hon. Bode Adeyemi, applauded the Vanguard for its growing mobilisation capacity and expanding grassroots network.

Adeyemi recalled that about 400 members of the organisation had previously participated in an engagement with his team, describing their involvement as evidence of their commitment to political mobilisation.

He also acknowledged the group’s participation in a solidarity walk organised in support of President Tinubu, saying the exercise demonstrated its ability to mobilise young people around common political objectives.

The Special Advisers’ Forum chairman noted that the Vanguard’s presence across the 239 wards underscored the importance of building an inclusive political structure that gives young people from different backgrounds a sense of belonging.

He expressed confidence in the leadership and organisational capacity of the group, urging members to remain disciplined, united and committed to their political objectives.

Christopher Okigbo knew the cost of truth-telling: ‘If I don’t shut my mouth, I’ll soon go to hell / I, Okigbo, town crier, together with my iron bell.’ But I am not Okigbo and I do not care in the slightest. Please take note. Truth is superior to any throne.

The Yoruba say that a man dies only once. But I do not even propose to die. A king is not just the leader of his people; he is custodian of their past, their fears, their dreams for the future. He is guide and model, a reflection of their pulse. Among the Yoruba of South-West Nigeria, a king is revered as second-in-command to the gods. There you go: he is mortal, but no ordinary mortal. He does not need to shout to make his point; his very presence makes him king. Surrounded by wealth and power, by the best of flora and fauna, the king is authority in majesty. He is the elephant who does not pass without notice, the lion who is circumciser of the forest without a blade.

He is identified by his crown, just as his chiefs are known by their beads. A king, because he occupies the place of an elder, does not dress, eat, let alone talk, like a child. He does not call a cow Brother just to eat meat. He is elevated, exalted, mounted on the horse of respect. A king is not a commoner. A king is, yes, a king.

Familiarity breeds contempt. It is ‘see-finish.’ When Adolf Hitler and other dictators made use of those they called useful idiots, it was because of ‘see-finish,’ the same affliction that cost some victims of Lisa Alujannu, an Ondo High Chief of heavy lore, their very lives. I sat with Justice Rasheed Fawehinmi, elder brother of the then recently deceased Gani Fawehinmi, in his bedroom at his Laje, Ondo, home on September 11, 2009, when he told me the story of the fiery chief. Here is an excerpt from the story titled ‘Gani was a human devil – Brother’: ‘The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi’s elder brother, Justice Rasheed Fawehinmi (rtd), has said that the late legal icon inherited his activist spirit from his grandfather, the late Lisa Alujannu of Ondo Kingdom, who died in 1908. Speaking with the Nigerian Tribune in his bedroom at his Laje, Ondo residence on Friday, the elder Fawehinmi said his brother was a revolutionary spirit. ‘Gani, if you look at him critically, was a human devil, an imp. He inherited his fiery temperament from our grandfather, Lisa Alujannu who, during his lifetime, was so powerful that he even usurped the power of the Osemawe,’ he said.’

‘Lisa Alujannu, noted for doing extraordinary things, once buried a pregnant woman alive in the height of his power. He was a no-nonsense chief who brooked no opposition. You would not call that kind of man a gentle person,’ he said. The elder Fawehinmi, who said he spent 32 years at the bar, said that anyone interested in the Gani mystique should read his book Makers of Ode Ondo, published in 1992, a copy of which he gave to the Nigerian Tribune.’

I still have and treasure the book. But the point is this: if at the mention of the name of a chief everyone paid obeisance, why should a king command no respect?

In faraway United States, a crowned head is currently cutting the king’s grass in shorts, eating beans and water. A king in this land has been caught smoking a joint, and another reported for commandeering rice meant for his people during the COVID madness. I have utmost respect for our crowned heads, but they must respect themselves. If a stranger enters a town and is not disgraced because he knows his boundaries, what about the owners of the land? And what about a king, the custodian of culture?

Now, just how can a king be everywhere, shoving his image down people’s throats every week? How can a king be common? Do people really respect someone that is always at their beck and call? In this country these days, a governor is in Aso Rock even before the president’s messenger has put down the phone, but things weren’t always like this. If Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa wanted to see Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he could only hope that the Premier would be willing to see him at the time. He wouldn’t dare call him through a messenger. It was the military that caused the present see-finish, but even then the image of governors lined up like schoolboys and seeing the President off at an airport rankles as an affliction of our modern-day governance. In the same vein, the image of a royal majesty in the news every day leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It is media prostitution. It is insulting to culture and tradition. It is a mockery of the throne. It is not right.

Again, they lie to protect Leo Messi

Football website, The Touchline (@TouchlineX), posted this statement on October 27: ‘Lionel Messi’s popularity is STILL UNMATCHED! Despite being absent from the 2026 Ballon d’Or ceremony in London, the Argentine received the LOUDEST CHEERS of any player at the London Palladium when he appeared in a video where previous Ballon d’Or winners were celebrated.’

The claim was, of course, repeated by the Messi fanboy Fabrizio Romano and many others. Now please, go to YouTube or any other website that has a video of the actual Ballon d’Or ceremony and see if this claim matches your experience. Don’t bother going to AI; it is going to repeat the lie. Watch the actual video. That’s assuming you haven’t watched it.

If you are involved with literature, you are definitely acquainted with the post-discourses (post-colonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism, etc.) which I have cheekily and quite uncharitably called ‘post-afflictions’ somewhere. The theories and theorists are so heavily nuanced, so complicated, so celebrated, but also so tiring that sometimes you just want to go back to the text – just the text, unmediated and unencumbered by theory. That’s partly why I have just enjoined you in this case: watch the actual video. This is why I will always opt for the people’s King, the imperfect but honest and clean athlete from Madeira. Viva, CR7, on the BOAT they diminished because it didn’t go according to plan.

My wife once bought me a pair of sneakers after seeing them in a boutique. Before the day ended, advertisements for the same product began appearing on my Facebook timeline. I had not searched for the sneakers online or discussed them in any online conversation. Yet there they were, as though someone had been watching.

A friend described a similar experience. He had been discussing a particular brand with someone in a car. Later, when he visited a website, Google AdSense began displaying advertisements for the product.

Such experiences raise an unsettling question: how much do the technologies surrounding us know about our interests, habits and intentions, and how much can they infer without our conscious participation?

There are conventional explanations for targeted advertising, including browsing behaviour, location data, tracking technologies and information collected from connected devices. An advertisement appearing after a conversation does not, by itself, prove that a phone was listening. Nor does an eerily accurate recommendation mean that artificial intelligence can read minds.

But technology no longer needs to know everything about us to make remarkably accurate predictions about what we might want, believe or do next.

That possibility brings to mind George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the 1949 novel in which a totalitarian state watches its citizens, controls information and punishes independent thought. Its enduring symbol is Big Brother, the authority whose power rests partly on the knowledge that people may be watched at any time.

Orwell’s imagined year was 1984. What might his warning look like in 2084, when artificial intelligence could be far more powerful than the systems we use today?

The danger may not be a machine independently taking control of society. It could be the concentration of technological power in the hands of governments, corporations and political actors able to collect information, interpret human behaviour and influence the choices people make. AI would be the instrument; the people directing it would determine how that power was used.

Nigeria has already encountered an early version of this problem through political campaigning.

Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy notorious for its use of personal data, worked for Goodluck Jonathan’s 2015 re-election campaign against Muhammadu Buhari. Reporting on the campaign described efforts to obtain information about Buhari.

Buhari won the election. Cambridge Analytica did not determine the outcome. But the controversy exposed a serious concern. Personal information and targeted messages could be used to influence voters in ways that the wider electorate might never see.

Artificial intelligence could take this approach much further.

An AI-powered operation could generate thousands of campaign messages tailored to individual fears and concerns. One voter might receive material designed to amplify anxiety about insecurity; another might see messages intended to deepen distrust of a political opponent. Deepfake videos, cloned voices and automated accounts could spread falsehoods at speed, damaging reputations and eroding confidence in elections before the truth catches up.

The danger is not that technology will decide every election. It is that those who control it could gain powerful new ways to influence what people believe, often without their realising how precisely a message was designed for them.

But what happens when technology moves beyond studying our online behaviour to interpreting signals from inside the human brain?

The prospect sounds like science fiction, yet researchers have demonstrated that AI can reconstruct aspects of language from brain activity. The potential is both hopeful and unsettling.

Consider someone who has lost the ability to speak following a serious illness or injury. The thoughts are still there, but communicating them may be painfully difficult or impossible. A brain-computer interface that translates neural signals into words could allow that person to speak to family, express preferences and make decisions independently.

Now imagine information derived from brain activity being sought for a very different purpose. What if an employer, insurer or government wanted access to information a person had never chosen to disclose? The technology that might restore someone’s voice could also raise difficult questions about who gets access to the most intimate information about them.

These are not equivalent uses, and current technology cannot freely extract anyone’s thoughts. But the contrast shows why the direction of this research matters as much as its scientific achievements.

In a 2023 study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers described a non-invasive semantic decoder that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and AI to reconstruct sequences of words capturing the meaning of stories participants heard or imagined. The system could also interpret aspects of silent videos. It did not produce a perfect transcript of private thoughts, and participants had to cooperate both to train and to use the decoder.

The experiment required specialised scanning equipment and extensive individual training. It was not a machine capable of secretly reading a stranger’s mind. Nevertheless, it demonstrated that AI could recover aspects of language and meaning from brain activity, including when participants imagined a story rather than listened to one.

As Saturnin Pugnet explores in Phase Lock, advances in this field invite us to consider a future in which the boundary between private thought and information accessible to technology may become harder to defend.

The link to political manipulation is clear. Campaigns already use personal data to predict which messages might change voters’ opinions. Brain-computer interfaces raise the possibility of accessing some information generated by neural activity. In both cases, the central concern is who controls the information and what they are permitted to do with it.

The benefits of AI and brain-computer interfaces should not be dismissed. These technologies could transform medical treatment and help people with disabilities communicate and gain greater independence. The challenge is to protect those benefits while preventing coercive data collection, misuse of sensitive information and decisions made without meaningful consent.

Governments must set enforceable limits on how personal and neural information can be collected and used. Political campaigns must be held accountable for deceptive uses of personal data and AI-generated material. People must retain meaningful control over whether sensitive information about them is gathered and shared.

Orwell’s warning remains relevant because control does not always announce itself. It can grow through systems people accept for convenience, institutions they trust and technologies whose consequences become clear only after they are embedded in daily life.

Twenty Eighty-Four is not a prediction that AI will take control of humanity by 2084. It is a warning about what can happen when those who wield technological power gain the ability to monitor, influence and manipulate others faster than society can establish safeguards against abuse.

Big Brother may never need to issue commands or demand obedience. The greater danger is that governments, corporations or political actors could use AI to shape what we see, what we believe and the choices we make, until their influence becomes almost impossible to recognise.

The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has described the Federal Government’s N50,000 monthly cash relief as an election gimmick, saying it reflects desperation by President Bola Tinubu’s administration.

Reacting on Saturday through its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC said the timing of the announcement raised questions about the government’s motives, claiming the intervention was a panic reaction to the opposition party’s promise to reduce the cost of living.

‘President Tinubu is in full panic mode now. Since ADC and our Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar, have made affordability and reducing the cost of living cardinal focuses of our campaign, the government has been announcing one desperate intervention or another. In August, they announced a $1 billion so-called ‘Renewed Hope Social Intervention Fund’. But it was only an announcement, nothing more. Then, they announced a 30-day fuel discount, which made no sense. Then they announced so-called cheaper transportation by October 1 across states. Again, nothing happened. They have also announced a N70,000 transportation allowance for workers. Now, it is N50,000 for everyone. They are just thrashing around, hoping that something would stick,’ Abdullahi said.

The party questioned what meaningful relief N50,000 could provide to the average Nigerian household under prevailing economic conditions.

‘What exactly is N50,000 supposed to buy in Tinubu’s Nigeria today? How much food can a family purchase with that amount? How much transport can it cover? And for how long? Petrol prices have risen roughly sevenfold. Food and transportation costs have followed, not to talk of the cost of basic drugs. It is just a desperate and cynical attempt to buy back the goodwill of the people. But it is too little, too late,’ the party said.

The ADC said the Tinubu administration had an opportunity to address the underlying causes of poverty but failed to do so.

‘They mismanaged their own economic reforms. Everyone warned them that what they were doing and how they were doing it would only make life difficult for people. Their only reaction for three years was to tell people to continue to endure. If they could give N50,000 to vulnerable Nigerians, why didn’t they factor it into reform plans from day one rather than make it an election-season handout? It’s either they didn’t think of it, which makes them dangerously incompetent, or they simply chose to leave people to suffer and wait for the election to throw them crumbs, which makes them dangerously wicked,’ it said.

The party warned that programmes such as the announced intervention fund had been characterised by a lack of accountability, posing a risk of diversion of public funds. It recalled a recent report by the Auditor-General that raised questions about similar funds under the Tinubu administration.

‘What has happened to the findings of the Auditor-General concerning billions of naira in previous cash transfers that could not be properly accounted for? Have those responsible been held accountable? How can a government that has failed to explain what happened to its previous intervention funds expect Nigerians to trust it with another programme involving billions of naira?’ the ADC asked.

It said that, given the history of social intervention programmes under the administration, the latest initiative raised concerns about transparency and the possible diversion of public resources for partisan purposes.

‘At best, this is an election gimmick designed to deceive Nigerians into believing that a government which has neglected them for more than three years suddenly cares about their welfare. At worst, it could become another scheme to siphon public funds under the convenient cover of poverty alleviation,’ the party said.

The ADC maintained that the solution to the cost-of-living crisis lay in restoring purchasing power and reducing the cost of food, energy and transportation.