TIME was when Nigerians thought the only fake things in the country were drugs, food and cosmetics. The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, brought the dangers of fake products to national attention. For most Nigerians only these products are fake.

PRESIDENT Umaru Yar‘Adua was, yesterday, facing an uncertain fate ahead of today’s decisive debate on the report of a Senate ad-hoc committee of lawyers on the constitutionality of his continued absence from his duty post.
The report, according to Senate sources, has affirmed penultimate week’s pronouncement by a federal high court mandating the Vice-President to execute functions of the President.

FOLLOWING pressure from some segments of the Nigerian public on the armed forces to abandon their avowed commitment to remain subservient to democratic rule and intervene in governance, as a result of the continued absence of President Umaru Yar’Adua from the country, the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Paul Dike has vowed that “the Nigerian Armed Forces will never depart from its chosen path of honour” saying “instead, we must defend democracy at all cost.”

“As it is for the United States so it is for the Nigerian elite; state power security issues take precedence over intra-party and inter-party democracy and democratic government. It is important also for the difference between electoral parties and state power parties to be recognised. State power parties define the context and condition of the existence and relevance of electoral parties. The Taliban of Pakistan and Afghanistan are state power parties”.

Its ready army of recruits are to be found in many of those so-called places of religious miseducation as produce the almajiris, no different from the madrasas of Afghanistan and other centres of fundamentalist religion, now proliferating in the Moslem North. Until Nigeria rises to the challenge posed by such breeding centres of radical insurgency and cuts down on both covert and overt accommodation of criminality in the name of religion, she can’t be anything but a sponsor of terrorism.