I stake my claim to advise my President on two things. First, I am a citizen of Nigeria, one of the 170 million souls you now lead. I don’t want to be led astray or into another nationwide conflict. Second, I belong to that group of Nigerians, called Area Boys, who live strictly on our own brand of street wisdom. In any situation, we always know when we are beaten before the fight starts and we tactically withdraw. You see, my President, there is nothing more wasteful of lives and opportunities than fighting for lost causes. You are about to get engaged in one unnecessary battle.

IT was the first time in the political history of Rivers State that the state House of Assembly would convene in Government House, Port Harcourt. Well, there is always a first time, somebody once said.
Governor Chibuike Amaechi on Tuesday presented a budget estimate of N485.5 billion before 23 lawmakers of the state House of Assembly at the old auditorium of Government House, Port Harcourt.

WHo owns Soku and Etche oil wells? Rivers, Bayelsa, or Abia State. This was the poser raised by Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi after he claimed the oil wells belonged to his state but were unjustly allocated to Bayelsa and Abia states. So easy to read politics to the Amaechi claim especially since Bayelsa is the home state of President Goodluck Jonathan against whom the Rivers governor levelled the accusation at a time Jonathan and Amaechi are at daggers drawn over issues relating to the 2015 presidential contest.

It didn’t help that I decided to work through my illness and came back home feeling like a rickety wooden bridge. If December was a person, I would conclude it hated me as no sooner did I get back that my children became ill, one by one we all took turns in hospital and the festivities passed in a sick blur. My nearest and dearest concluded I was what was wrong with me. In his words “You just don’t know when to stop; you work through everything”. Just a few days before christmas I was nursing a headache so fierce, I had to sit in the dark; my eyes just couldn’t take the light. By the time we got my doctor on the phone; all I could do was whimper and shed tears from pain that shot through every nerve; I was convinced I had done myself in!

Anyone who accepts public office does so with the clear understanding that they no longer have a private life. Their lives belong thence to the public realm and come under consistent scrutiny. Stella Oduah, Minister for Aviation, surely must know this by now, and must therefore accept as a matter of course that whatever she places in the public domain must reflect the highest, unimpeachable, and verifiable truth about her life.

It is an honour that you deemed it fit and proper to intimate me with an issue important to your mind and our party in the South-west zone. It is my wish and prayer that such cordial and positive relationship will continue between your good self; former President and former Chairman of the Board of Trustees of our great party on one hand, and my humble self, the National Chairman of our party on the other hand.

The assertion by Herzon, though made many centuries ago, bears the mark of the ‘struggle’, which our current political players in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, often claim they are playing. The party leaders at the federal, state and local government levels claim rightly that they are the custodians of the democratic principles, having founded the PDP in 1998 via the formation of the G34.

My attention has been drawn to yet another letter written by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to the National Chairman of our great party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, frowning at my allegedly being made the leader of the party in the South West. He called me “a wanted habitual criminal…for whom extradition has been requested by the US Government…”

THE Joint Health Sector Unions, JOHESU, has suspended its five-day warning strike planned for Wednesday January 15, to Tuesday January 21, 2014.

To me, the issue of coming back or not coming is premature, because the president has not said he wants to come back. But if he says he wants to come back, he is qualified. Nigerians will decide if he has done enough for them to bring him back. He has been there and naturally started on a shaky note but has gradually come to strengthen himself in office. He has done some things that ordinarily people will score him and say he has done this and that.

In a session in Lagos, Aviation Minister, Princess Stella Oduah, took us through her two-year old administration of the aviation sector. She spoke on the rot she met on her assumption of office, the reforms she introduced to make our skies safer, and the airports’ remodelling she initiated as part of the efforts to key into the Transformation Agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan.

Sarge-Arrest-the-rat

I’m happy you’ve raised the question because every Nigerian is entitled to fair hearing. Nigerians must learn to ensure that we do not convict people before they get to court. The whole scenario was such that people wanted the ICPC to step in and stamp a shield of authority to the conviction without trial, thereby jeopardizing investigations. We don’t work that way. Even when you arrest a journalist, the first thing he says is ‘fair hearing’. When you run persons or agencies down, the corrective measures are never commensurate to the initial damage done.

In democratic societies, political parties naturally evolve within a polity. Thus, when the government of President Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) decreed for Nigeria, two political parties-the Nigerian Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), in 1989, many critics faulted the move. The critics condemned such a mechanical and rigid approach to politics without recourse to what influenced Babangida to so act. Rather than spending a few minutes to reflect on the Presidential broadcast of October 7, 1989 which adduced several reasons for the action of government, everyone suspected Maradona, as IBB is generally called, to have been up to some mischief.

Senator Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja is a big name who made a fortune in business. Despite his status, the high chief of Ibadan, however, lives an incredibly simple lifestyle such that an unsuspecting onlooker would place him among peasant farmers.