Retired public servants as distinct from political office holders in Nigeria live in penury. The value of their pensions is not only too little for survival, disbursements are never regular leading to huge arrears of the otherwise meagre entitlements of retirees. At the beginning of a new administration at federal and subnational levels in Nigeria in […]

She stays in the marriage but leaves in spirit. And then, without realizing it, she chooses a new partner. Her son

Most men I know would rather set themselves on fire than forgive a cheating wife. Most women I know have forgiven or are actively forgiving a cheating husband

When a country rewards each Super Falcons player with N150m and house for a 90-minute football, yet sends police and military pensioners who served 35 years home with N2m, no housing, no healthcare, and a pension too small to feed

When I was growing up, The Madness of Didi was my favorite book title. I carelessly applied it to both the sane and the insane. Every outburst of irrationality was the madness of Didi. In Obi Egbuna’s The Madness of Didi, Didi spends 30 years in England, enduring racism and oppression. After killing six policemen, […]

Ever since the Ibrahim Babangida administration established the National Orientation Agency, NOA, in its last days, perhaps to reorient the narrative of its tragic decision to annul the June 12 election of 1993, the agency has gone through various administrations. Perhaps none of the heads of the agency may have succeeded as the present administration, shepherded […]

One Urhobo leader of his town’s union sometimes exclaims when things get heated up with his people, “Urhobo be suoor” (Urhobo people are difficult to lead!). I would burst out into uncontrollable laughter. What do you expect from people who are republican by nature, where virtually everybody, trained and untrained, is a lawyer, where a poor person […]

The ways of our politicians are confounding sometimes. The constitution is the document that binds people of diverse backgrounds and nationalities together and therefore must be seen to be truly representative. Unfortunately, it is not often available. It is also often worded in a legal and technical manner that makes it difficult for an average person to […]

The regime in the United States, US, led by Mr Donald John Trump has in the past seven months, introduced  many alien relations into international relations. But when many thought it cannot get worse, the American regime is taking  decisions that do not appear to be the product of a sound thought process. Perhaps the main […]

A cursory perusal of the state of affairs in Nigeria today and how things are managed by the politicians in charge led me to one conclusion — we, the people of Nigeria, do not matter a jot to the politicians managing our affairs. In addition, the laws that we have in place to regulate our daily […]

In his seminal offering last Sunday titled, “Whose president is Tinubu, anyway?” TheNiche columnist, Dr. Chidi Amuta, concluded in a rather cautionary note: “Tinubu’s current quandary as to his real national constituency may end in greater confusion unless he is ready to rediscover the source of his original sin and redress it. That original sin is […]

The past two weeks have been remarkable for sports women internationally. Women’s national sports teams were victorious in major international tournaments and attracted differing responses from their governments. In Britain, England’s women’s national football team, the Lionesses, beat their Spanish counterpart to win the 2025 UEFA Women’s Championships. In Nigeria, the Super Falcons, this country’s […]

You’ve probably heard the joke about the panda who “eats, shoots and leaves” versus one who “eats shoots and leaves.” One comma changes a violent panda into a vegetarian one. Funny? Yes. But in the real world, punctuation mistakes can cost you credibility, opportunities, and even relationships. Good punctuation can go a long way when it […]

A Yoruba saying has it that when siblings leave a family gathering smiling, they have obviously not spoken the truth to one another. We are in such times of a family indaba and some truths, no matter how inconvenient, are in order. It was just last week that Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Bianca […]

“For let the truth be spoken“-  Joseph Conrad In my piece titled “The Lethargy of the Oppressed”, previously published in this column, I reflected on the character of our citizens that have proved detrimental and even injurious to the construction of a progressive and respectable nation. I discussed the pitfalls of our character as a nation […]