By Owei Lakemfa Martin Luther Agwai, retired General, walked briskly on the grounds of the Nigeria Defence College, NDC, like a man with a spring under his heels. At 74, he seemed ready for call up to do battle with enemies of the people. Indeed, on this Thursday, October 20, 2022 morning, he stood before […]

By Owei Lakemfa Only a quarter of the eight million Palestinian people live in the Palestine; one million in Gaza, 750,000 in the occupied West Bank and 250,000 inside Israel. The rest, or over six million, are forced to live outside with at least three million of them classified as stateless persons with no legal […]

By Owei Lakemfa The country heaved a sigh of relief on Thursday, October 13, 2022 as the eight-month strike by academics which shutdown the public universities was suspended. Days before the suspension, many Nigerians were in a jubilant mood as all indications were that the agreement midwifed by the House of Representatives was acceptable to government […]

By Owei Lakemfa SMART Europeans. After building their wealth from resources taken from the colonies, including gold, diamond, rubber, cocoa, cotton and human beings, they decreed that the only way to prosperity is through ‘market forces’. They taught gullible Africans that only the perfect market delivers, while state intervention stagnates.  They are never in short supply  […]

By Owei Lakemfa GOVERNOR David ‘Dave’ Nweze Umahi of Ebonyi State reminds me of the colonial District Officer who was a law unto himself. I know Abakaliki, the state capital, was a major centre for slave trade four centuries ago, but Umahi governs the state as if it were still a slave colony where people have […]

By Owei Lakemfa THE Confluence Hotel in Ganaja, Lokoja used to be my favourite spot whenever I visited Kogi State. Its main attraction to me was sitting down to watch the Rivers Niger and Benue warmly embrace in an eternal wedlock as their waters flow down south to the Niger Delta before emptying themselves into the […]

By Owei Lakemfa Poverty is often presented as statistics. But what the Yusufu Bala Usman Institute did on September 21, 2022 was to produce a book, The Face of Poverty in Nigeria, which focused on the faces behind the statistics. As one of the reviewers, I summarised the Nigerian situation thus: If you are poor in […]

By Owei Lakemfa His Excellency William Ruto, Kenya’s newly minted President, prides himself as the Hustler-in-Chief of the country. He says he is from the “Hustler Nation” – the informal economy where he used to sell chickens for survival. However, having a dog-eat-dog street ideology as he claims, does not preclude a sense of basic human […]

By Owei Lakemfa Once the Muhammadu Buhari government had failed to get striking lecturers in our public universities back to class, I knew it would head for the National Industrial Court, NIC, shopping for an injunction. Tragically that is what governments in the country and rich employers have turned the NIC into: a fishing pond […]

By Owei Lakemfa The world evolved at various stages of development but conflict and conquest were not usually very far. Great empires rose, but habitually at the expense of the conquered. They also fell, usually due to internal contradictions. But when two nations, Portugal and Spain, rose with the backing of the Catholic Church, it […]

By Owei Lakemfa The year 2018 was one of self-examination for Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari who flew in on the wings of change had been in power for three years and the situation had simply become far worse. The inflation rate when he came in was 9.01 per cent, shooting up to 15.68 per cent […]

By Owei Lakemfa IT was like a seamless gathering. Diplomats and academics. Practioners of two assertive professions: lawyers and journalists. Cultural ambassadors and traditional chiefs. It was evening in Abuja on Monday August 22, 2022. We were gathered for the pre-independence 60th anniversary of Trinidad and Tobago, T&T which comes up on August 31. The […]

By Owei Lakemfa THE news went round. The Federal Government and striking lecturers in the country’s public universities organised under the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, were meeting on Tuesday, August 16, 2022. Not a few hoped that the six-month strike by the lecturers would be resolved. But the outcome was as disappointing as […]

By Owei Lakemfa THE Amnesty International which is 61 years having been established in 1961 is up for lunch in angry Ukraine. If you must know, its ‘sins’ are very grave. Those who run the West assume they have Amnesty eating out of their hands. On the other hand, those outside the Western ruling class […]

LECTURERS in our public universities are so absorbed in their national strike which is in the sixth month that they have not observed the unique contributions of President Muhammadu Buhari to industrial relations practice. Ironically, it has been serving or retired generals that have made the most fundamental contributions to the practice of relations between employees and employers.