In what appears to be Nigeria’s most dramatic “return on investment” complaint yet, a man on Thursday stormed the All Progressives Congress (APC) national secretariat in Abuja with a message as blunt as it was unsettling: reward me or kill me. The protest, captured in a now-viral video, shows the visibly distressed man holding a placard and demanding recognition for what he described as his personal sacrifices during the party’s 2023 campaign. According to him, loyalty was not just emotional, it was financial, physical, and, ultimately, total. In a country where political support often comes with expectations, some spoken, many implied the man’s outcry reads like a tragic audit of misplaced trust. His claim that he sold his house to fund campaign efforts has not been independently verified, but the symbolism is hard to ignore: a citizen liquidating stability in exchange for promised political dividends. Observers at the scene watched as the protester oscillated between anger and ...
A stronger-than-expected Democratic showing in the U.S. midterms has taken pressure off President Biden as his party looks to the 2024 presidential race. Republican antipathy toward Donald Trump, who intends to run for president again, has also quieted Democrats’ anxiety over Biden’s poor approval ratings. Now, as the president mulls whether to seek a second term, interviews with more than two dozen Democratic elected officials and strategists suggest that, whatever misgivings some Democrats may harbor about another Biden candidacy, his party is more inclined for now to defer to him than to try to force a frontal clash with a sitting president. Younger Democratic operatives have begun considering what a Biden re-election campaign might look like. Lawmakers have lauded the president for the party’s history-defying midterm performance, crediting him with the major legislative accomplishments they were able to run on and with pressing a message that cast Republican candidates as ext...