THIS was tough to write. My heart resisted it, but I yielded to my head. The petrol in my car, a 2.0-litre 2012 Tokunbo Camry, was at half-tank the day before writing.  When pump prices went from 195/litre to 617/litre between May and June 2023, I parked my Jeep and, despite being occasionally mistaken for an […]

WHEN the Israeli-Hamas war started one year ago, it didn’t look like it would last long. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to avenge the deaths of over 364 Israelis killed and dozens taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 at a music concert left little doubt it was going to be a bloody phase. But […]

SEVERAL good things happen in the bedroom, often the place of rest and renewal. Sometime in 2004, Sam Nda-Isaiah and his wife Zainab conceived the idea of a newspaper there.She told the story before of how her husband got up in the wee hours, scribbled a few things in a jotter, and asked what she thought […]

THE Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, had barely finished announcing the result of last Saturday’s Edo governorship poll when I got a call to eat the humble pie. Senator Adams Oshiomhole, the man I called a product vendor in my last article, had pulled off another big one! Why? I had no dog in the fight. […]

BY his admission, Senator Adams Oshiomhole is a lousy product vendor. In the real commercial world, his premises would have been closed and his products banned. But in politics, crime multiplies grace. Oshiomhole dragged Godwin Obaseki into the governorship race in 2016 when the odds were against him. Obaseki’s daytime job was minding his business at […]

I don’t get involved with what the security services do or how. Their ways are so complex and their motives so unsearchable that sometimes you’ll be forgiven for thinking that working from the answer to the question is the standard operating procedure. Of course, you are told that whatever happens in between is in the public […]

WHEN I was invited to Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, in June, I didn’t know what to expect. I had not visited the place since 2005. Even though I had been to nearby Rivers and Delta states several times, Bayelsa didn’t cross my mind. To make matters worse, the state was often in the news for the wrong […]

ALMOST everyone thinks they know what is wrong with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his government, except Tinubu himself. And to show that it’s not just bellyaching, there are plenty of examples to beat the president over the head. Headline inflation has risen from 22.2 percent in April 2023 to 33.7 percent one year after – […]

WE met last on April 21. I went to Asaba from Lagos to promote my new book, Writing for Media and Monetising It, at Delta State University, which, according to JAMB statistics, is one of the country’s highest subscribers to Mass Communications in 2021. Senator Ifeanyi Ubah was on the flight to Asaba that morning. I […]

AFRICA’S richest man, Aliko Dangote, is not a stranger to adversity or its more sinister cousin, sabotage. One of the bitterest battles he has fought in the last 25 years – the cement war – was against his kinsman and founder of BUA Group, Abdulsamad Rabiu. Folks close to both men have tried to patch them […]