IF we could call their brand of rulership governance, elected officials in Nigeria have just over four more weeks to do that. Thereafter they will give up the pretence that they are still interested in fulfilling their electoral promises and bringing the ‘dividends of democracy’ to the people.

As a way out governments at all levels must follow the example of the Governor of Kaduna State by paying close attention to the decline in the standard of teaching. Government must also adopt policies which will aide teachers to better perform

This is a difficult topic to write about. What I am about to describe is a cautionary tale, one at the intersection of a number of issues arising from the toxicity of the Nigerian society, an environment where money, power and greed on both the public and private stage constantly result in death and unhappiness. We have not yet begun to publish statistics of the number of murders which occur in Nigeria annually (or even state by state for that matter) and how many are “crimes of passion” linked to the peculiarities of a system that objectifies women, makes them believe that outside of marriage they are worthless and moreover, emphasises marriage as an economic opportunity alone.

I HAVE always been partial towards Russia. Perhaps it’s on account of its writers who have been the passion of my youth: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam.

THE introduction of Biometric identification was to stop different kinds of fraud. There were too many fictitious bank accounts; inactive bank accounts are raided by the employees. To stop this, the bank instituted a regime of dormant accounts.