Abuja – Scores of mobile phone users now head to the “Abuja GSM Village’’ for phone swap deals called “kankara’’. The deal is an exchange of phones which give the users new handsets of their choice in exchange for their old ones at little cost. The deal has become a popular trend at the market […]

Jos – Medical authorities in Plateau have confirmed an outbreak of cholera in Namu village in the Qua’pan Local Government Area of the state. Namu, a village at  the Plateau and Nasarawa States border, hosts displaced people in the violent crisis that broke out in the Obi Local Government Area of Nasarawa State. “Yes, there […]

The kidnappers of Augusta Douglas-Ayam, the sister of Oronto Douglas, Special Adviser to the President on Research and Documentation, have reduced the ransom for her release from N500m to N10m.

The Badagry bound carriageway on the Lagos-Badagry Expressway, LBE, will be closed to traffic between 7am and 12 noon today, to allow for construction of pedestrian bridge for the blue line rail project along the axis.

Three years into his education at the Baptist Boys High School in Abeokuta, his father was retired from the Nigerian Tobacco Company and couldn’t get another job because he had come of age since child-bearing didn’t happen quickly for him. This was unfortunately when he needed to see his six children through school! The second child, Kayode Soyinka, therefore decided to sacrifice his university education for his elder brother and siblings, and this soon landed him in the world of print journalism as a reporter with the defunct Daily Sketch in Ibadan at age 18 in 1976.

I was born on October 16, 1960 and consequently I celebrated my 53rd birthday last Wednesday. It was a quiet low-key affair in which, as is customary with me, I spent most of the day in fasting, prayer and sober reflection, surrounded by my loved ones, thanking the Lord for granting me yet another year of life and for delivering me from the hands of my numerous detractors and enemies.

Four years ago, Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) asked occupiers of stalls at Karu market to move out to enable it renovate the market that has unarguably fallen into disrepair , with stall owners and customers alike facing dire environmental challenges.Apart from the perennial flooding that often caused pool of stagnant and odorous water , the sanitation situation got authorities worried about a major epidemic; so, understandably, many people including shop owners and residents who patronize the Karu market, saw reason on the need to renovate the market.

And one of the inmates who made the prison to attract global attention was prisoner 466/64, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. Mandela, referred to as Madiba or Tata (Father of the nation), who was later to become President of South Africa, spent 18 of his 27- year jail term in Robben Island prison. He never gave up. The bold inscription on the walls of the docking area, THE HUMAN SPIRIT CANNOT BE MENACLED, or another, THE TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT, are testaments to the struggle and the never-say-die mentality of Mandela and his other freedom fighters during the anti-apartheid struggle. Even the very voluble and rambunctious President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, as well as the immediate past president of the same country, Thabo Mbeki’s father, served various jail terms on the island.

WITH the Sallah holiday over, feuding camps of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are expected to resume their search for peace this week.

When I was a Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos, I had a Director who was boastful. He liked to drop names. He would tell you he spent the weekend playing golf with this General, or that he had just finished talking on the phone to that Managing Director.