The recent call on the President, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, by none other than His Eminence, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III, the Sultan of Sokoto, to grant amnesty to all the members of the Boko Haram, deserves a second look.

I often think of Nelson Mandela and Robert Mugabe when thinking of leadership and how a leader’s action or inaction can make or mar a country. Mugabe and Mandela had a similar background; they were pillars in the struggle to liberate their people and suffered untold hardships in the process.

It’s amusing how we scurry about our ‘daily grind’ planning this, scheming that, plotting the other… all legitimate of course, all seemingly ‘worthwhile’, like somebody promised you tomorrow. No one said tomorrow wouldn’t come either so hey! I guess we just carry on… .

LAST week, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III, condemned the government’s crackdown on Boko Haram and said that President Goodluck Jonathan should grant “total amnesty” to the group’s members.

The statement that Nigeria is a poor country with widespread poverty is axiomatic. It is estimated that more than 75% in the Nigerian population live in squalor and could hardly make a decent living from what they do. This situation calls into question the general assumption that a country blessed with crude oil and other mineral resources and also endowed with natural human talents would have anything to do with deepening poverty and its attendant sufferings and deprivations.

MANY commentators are not pleased with President Goodluck Jonathan over his Borno/Yobe outing last week.

AFTER running out of a stock of ridiculous excuses, President Goodluck Jonathan finally plucked the courage to visit Borno and Yobe states, last week. As if to underline the various strands of prejudice which have informed official security thinking since the commencement of the Boko Haram insurgency, three thousand policemen were deployed to secure the presidential visit, commanded by the IGP himself!

TODAY, this Column is taking time off from politics and all the associated issues of corruption, to treat our esteemed audience to the profile of a great personality who, if we were asked, would be the Column’s nominee to lead the crusade against corruption, injustice and other social vices in which Nigeria is totally immersed.

THE Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, is a piece of legislation initially intended to address endemic structural, policy and managerial issues in the Nigerian oil and gas sector. Its goals were to enhance the value of the asset for the Nigerian people by plugging loopholes in policies and management and improving transparency and efficiency of the sector.

HAD he remained in office Joseph Aloisius Ratsinger would have clocked eight full years on the throne of St. Peter as the 265th Pope of the Catholic Church in April.

DO you know why what goes for Nigerian politics is such a huge joke? We like to be taken for a ride; in fact, we crave to be duped. We dread asking hard questions or putting the politicians to task to substantiate what they tell us.

AS a republican in a Republic of Nigeria I have not harboured kind thoughts on the value of the institutions of traditional rulership. I saw their survival in an empire as a function of the strategies of pacification and policing of populations ultimately ruled by imperial force.

Lately, the Central Bank of Nigeria in a two-page Press Release, laboured to corroborate the Finance Ministry’s earlier clarifications on “the meaning, structure and management of the nation’s foreign reserves”. CBN defines external reserves, appropriately, as external assets held in foreign currencies by a country’s Central Bank for the “primary purpose of safeguarding the international value of the legal tender currency (i.e. the naira)”.

“I want to use this opportunity to say that we have heard in the news that Mr. President will be visiting Maiduguri in a couple of days. We want to use this opportunity to call on the government, especially Mr. President, to see how he can declare total amnesty to all combatants without thinking twice.

Even a fool, in Nigeria,now knows that the last thing anyone should believe is anything announced by the Federal Government of Nigeria, its Ministers, agencies and especially the President’s Special Advisers on Media and Publicity. When Abati or Okupe appear on television, people switch to other channels.