Journalists say a thing they know isn’t true in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough, it will be true —Julien Benda, 1857-1952

And I must say very strongly as a senior Nigerian here in the UN Secretariat that there was a greatly missed opportunity that our head of state was not advised properly to come to this assembly…Nigeria missed an opportunity to really register its own views on the world, register its credentials as an African leader.

0805-851-8305: Dele, Dele, Dele, how many times did I call your name? Devote your time, energy, and column to ASUU impasse! Let’s save our education now! — Olu

Nigeria needs N24 tn to meet MDG target in 2015. Nigeria needs to spend N24trn in the next six years to realize the Millennium Development Goals target by 2015. —Senior Special Adviser Assistant to the Presdient on MDGs, Mrs Fatima Ibrahim, disclosed this to journalists after presenting the second and third quarter reports to President Umaru Yar’Adua in Abuja on Thursday… An average annual requirement of N4trn till 2015 is needed in order to reach the MDGs.

One thing I learnt from my detour into semantics was the fact that the person who writes a lot or delivers many speeches runs the risk of being misunderstood, even by those who are well educated and also articulate.

The second group “discovered” that I am a tribalist for not endorsing the re-appointment of Soludo and for welcoming Sanusi. Today, as we all start understanding how the banking sector had been thrown into a turmoil in the last four years, and feeling the lash, it will not matter if you are Igbo, Efik, Birom, Yoruba, or Nupe, you will be involved in this calamity.

FORGIVE me for quoting myself but it is merely designed to remind our readers of the fears that were expressed immediately after the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN announced the new strategic alliance for the naira on Tuesday, August 14, 2007.

What experience and history teach people is that people and governments never have learnt anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it —George Hegel, 1770-1831, Vanguard Book of Quotations p. 92

From information reaching us, she is at daggers drawn with her Minister of State. She joined the “Honourable” Minister of Education to dance the night away while all Nigerian universities closed down and now she is proposing to spend N8.2 billion to retool where less than N6 billion will do to purchase “tear rubber” equipment. Madam has suddenly become the spokeswoman for people of questionable characters.

IN the first part of this series, I have pointed out that the disagreement between Attah and Akpabio is mostly technical and quite a great deal of it can be verified. Let me start with the 2009 Democracy Day broadcast by Governor Akpabio, in which, among others, he made the claim above.