Babangida is talking a lot more about gas flaring these days as he did as Head of State, but he paid his own lip service and Abacha, in spite of his battles with Niger Delta Environmentalists, paid lip service to ending gas flaring.
Obasanjo in his turn, set deadlines, and so has Yar’Adua, who has more or less been neutral to virtually every issue bogging the nation.

So if we run a federal system, the number of local governments a state wants to create should be the business of that state and its people not the headache of the central government. In other words, if Lagos State wants to create a hundred local governments, that would be its business, on the other hand, if Kano or Enugu want to merge their local governments, that should be entirely their business.

Here then is a seminal doctrine of democratic change that needs to be explored further if only to understand the constipation that may be going on in PDP. The author is none other than the irrespessible Ojo Maduekwe, former Secretary of the PDP and current Foreign Affairs Minister”.

By this I mean Nigerians from the North-West and North-East of this country. What I must now call a lazy way of explaining this apparently well-organised and outer-directed violence, is to attribute it to joblessness, poverty or any of those social vices and disjunctions we are too quick to identify as being at the root of the violence. Poverty or joblessness is not peculiar to the North.

Please don’t get me wrong. The headline does not suggest that there were any serious deliberations in Lokoja. None that I knew of.