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 […]