FIVE thousand, five hundred angry marchers tramped through the streets of Brussels on Sunday protesting against the United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.  Their claims include  that the Pact would encourage migration and criminality. They also claim that the Pact blurs   the distinction between legal and illegal migration.  For them, it is time Belgium shuts its borders against migration of any kind.

THE  Nigerian elite leading the country to the February, 2019 general elections have reduced the contest essentially to personal squabbles and a contest of insults rather than ideas. This is not unexpected as in almost all cases, the colonialists created for us, zombies as elite.  An elite class incapable of basic reflection, one that accepts foreign dictation and is alienated from the people it leads. In turn, the people are alienated from the state; they do not have  the same attachment or loyalty they had  to  their pre-colonial societies. So a corrupted culture has developed in which people see the elite from their communities who loot the national treasury, as heroes bringing back their  share of the ‘national cake’. In many cases, the thieves are given chieftaincy titles, turbaned or knighted.

IF the famous Williams Shakespeare had written his 1596-99 play, Merchant of Venice in this generation, he would have been accused of hate speech, condemned, sidelined and declared a racist. That is because the play centred on a greedy and conscienceless Jewish money lender, Shylock, who insisted on slicing a pound of flesh from a debtor despite offers to pay him double the money he had advanced.

HE National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas  Workers, NUPENG, one of the most militant unions in African labour history, last week marked its fortieth anniversary. Back in 1994 when the military held Nigeria in vile grip, NUPENG sent out a call for the unions to rescue the country. The regime of General Sani Abacha was particularly brutish, nasty and bloody. It was a dictatorship that had no rules, respected none and included the bombing of buses especially those conveying soldiers, as part of governance. Not surprisingly, other unions including the central labour organisation, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, chickened out.

AN uprising against the anti-poor policies of 41-year old French President, Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron, had been long expected before it broke out about three weeks ago. What was not clear before then, was what would trigger it after he had assumed victory over pensioners, railway workers and the labour unions.