SERIOUS diplomacy has this Easter Season, given way to the farcical drama of European countries expelling diplomats of their Russian brothers with the later retaliating. This  week, 25 countries including non-European allies like the United States, Australia and Canada, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, had knocked out 158 Russian diplomats  with Russia absorbing the punches and throwing its own. There is the joke that American  President, Donald Trump was watching the CBS 60 Minutes programme when he was asked how many Russian diplomats should  be expelled, he looked at the screen, saw 60 Minutes and decided that 60 Russians should be expelled

Nigeria did not know corruption in its present form until British colonialists introduced it; part of the colonial policy was to corrupt the emergent elite as a way of compromising them

THE 69-year-old Venezuelan internationalist, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, rechristened ‘Carlos the Jackal’ by the media, was in the French courts last week to challenge his conviction for life. The case he appealed against was a 1974 one  in which a grenade tossed in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Pres, (Champs Elysee Avenue) killed  two persons at the Drugstore Publicis while 36 were injured. His  conviction on this charge, is lacking in hard evidence including fingerprints and DNA. Rather, it is  driven more by circumstantial evidence and supposition.

The PDP is like a person accused of being a thief, found cuddling another man’s calf in her bosom; in a decent society, or in a decent organisation, Secondus would have resigned or be forced to quit

REX Wayne Tillerson  visited Africa this week; it was not just a jinxed visit, but also his first and last as the American Secretary of State. He had proclaimed: “The purpose of my trip is to listen to what the priorities of the countries here on the continent are and see where there is good alignment.” In reality, he did most of the talking, and his visit had a hidden agenda.