COMMERCIAL activities were paralysed yesterday in Port Harcourt, as commercial bus drivers took to the streets protesting Sunday’s killing of their colleague by a yet-to-be identified soldier at Rumuokoro roadabout over alleged traffic offence.

THE two leading political parties in Bayelsa State, the All Progressives Congress, APC, and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, yesterday, traded words over claims of demolition and defacing of campaign bill boards and posters of their flag bearers.

We all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas. Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalisation and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated.

Stakeholders in the oil industry said that the total installed capacity of the lube plants in Nigeria currently operating at about 40 percent can meet the local consumption, with the potential to export and earn foreign exchange for the country.

LAST Thursday was a day most of us wished was not a day. By “us” I mean the community of people of African origin in the small university town of Carbondale, Illinois.