IT is a New Year. We all renew hope and make resolutions. I have never been particularly conformist about many things in life. From childhood, I have asked uncomfortable questions and thrown pebbles at orthodoxies. The conventional wisdom has never satisfied my search for answers about our often mysterious but lovely world, either the natural world that conditions us and which we are very much part of or the social canons of existence. So resolutions at the beginning of a new year often resembled for me, an admission of human weakness. If there is a thing to change, why wait till the beginning of a new year? But just for once, I fell into line and made a resolution which I have never betrayed.

Former Nigerian winger, Waidi Akanni is worried that Super Eagles are experimenting less than 16 days to the kickoff of the 2013 AFCON in South Africa.

Oil producing communities in six states of the country have called for physical allocations and statutory disbursement audit of the extractive industry from 2007 to 2011 by the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI). They said this would enable the auditors have firsthand knowledge of what is on ground in the communities.

IS it really necessary to remind ourselves that in government, what people intend is often different from what they bring about? In trying to evaluate a governmental action, one ought to consider likely, even if unintended, consequences.

Quite often, governments do the same thing, the same old way, while expecting different results. We have been at a loss to understand why, back to Governor Peter Odili’s years in Rivers State, a large cache of sophisticated arms and ammunitions was recovered from militants of that era who were beating a retreat from militancy and the weapons were set ablaze.

At the beginning of 2012, it would have taken an entire team of the most brilliant professors in the nation’s education sector to predict the twists and turns that the sector would face. Even then, most events that graced the headlines of education newspapers would have taken such a team by surprise.