I WAS home to Imo State this past May to bury my father who died on May 3 at the Federal Medical Centre in Umuahia and was buried on June 6, 2009 in his home at Mbaise. Just as an aside, I wish to thank all those who through their messages, gifts, prayers and presence supported and stood by my family throughout the period of the funeral rites.

I should concede upfront that I have personally not read this bill and cannot talk with facility or insight about its content and form, and thus particularly, its implication in the evolution of the oil industry in Nigeria.

The police alert was quite significant given that the theft of that material marked two possible scenarios: the vulnerability of Nigeria with the increase of insecurity in that region, and secondly, the fact that the loss of this material which could in fact be weaponized happened without a trace.

“The truth is” said Onyefuru, “I was his only troop!” in response to my question about the failures of troop mobilization that night. “I returned with him to the Ikeja barracks that morning. We had walked across the front of Colonel Njoku’s home.

We shall all certainly pay our debts with death, and in good time too. Onoge was 70 years. I would personally have thought that he lived beyond his mathematical years. I was a student in Jos in the years that Omafume Onoge held sway as the titan of the intellectual left in that city and in that university.

By Obi Nwakanma
DOES America’s President Barrack H. Obama’s choice of  Ghana as his first port of call to sub-Sahara Africa really matter in determining the new directions of America’s foreign policy on Africa in the coming era? Diplomatic sources on the Nigerian end seriously think so.

First, the solution to the crisis in Nigerian public education is not in
the creating of more second rate degree mills that have neither reason nor rhyme. It is in the proper funding, planning, and elevation of existing public universities. Second, it must be emphasized that not everybody currently in the university is made for university education.

In short, MEND’s demands seek plainly to revisit the national question, and this is the true olive branch that would provide grounds for disarmament. Let us, of course, not overlook the subtle threat behind the federal government’s offer of amnesty and the six-month window for disarmament.

LET us be quite upfront with truth: Some of the individuals who are the governors of Nigerian states today could not pass their basic West African Schools Certificate examinations even in more than one sitting; some could not pass the Joint Matriculation Exam when it was the gold standard for academic performance in Nigeria; as a result they did not have the kind of standard university education available to the more talented of their peers in Nigeria, many of who probably ended up in academia, the first call in those now seemingly halcyon years, for the best products of the then highly competitive Nigerian university system. Yes, indeed, the very best were immediately recruited and retained to teach in the Universities.

Though those there took the decisions they wanted to take in respect of resource control in the name of a democracy mantra that though the minority may well have their say, the majority would have their way, the people of the South-South have by and large fought for that measure of control that they believed would make for peace in the area and the country.