Monday, December 1, is World AIDS Day, a day set aside since 1988 to beam the searchlight on HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

Last Monday, at least 13 PDP governorship aspirants from Rivers State were disqualified by the committee that their party appointed to screen them.

The impeachment clauses in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) are some of the powerful instruments granted the Legislature under the presidential system of government to hold the Executive Branch to account or actually remove them in extreme cases of serious misconduct. Sections 143 and 188 spell out the process in detail. The implications of this will be addressed shortly.

I arrived in London on Sat-urday after the two weeks that I spent in the United States, in California and Texas. Let me start by confessing that I love food, especially that opportunity to taste foods of the different cultures of our wonderful world.

Let us return to the countryside. Some Nigerian historians could work a bit harder. This is not intended to be a challenge but a statement of truth. They roam the streets of our cities endlessly in search of history; whereas with each passing day, our rural population is replete with history only waiting to be recorded. We look forward to such a time when students of history in our tertiary institutions would be required to do project works on their villages instead of the British Commonwealth or some abstract faraway places.

If history is any guide, it almost always starts this way. Like a sick joke or high drama without an apparent plot, full of tension that nevertheless ends in tragedy. I am here talking of the violent attempt by the police to prevent Aminu Tambuwal, Speaker of the House of Representatives, from entering the House last Thursday. The House had reconvened for an emergency session to consider the request by President Goodluck Jonathan for further six months extension of emergency rule in three North Eastern states at the epicentre of insurgent unrest. The Senate which had been in session for two days to consider the same request by President Jonathan, prior to the incident at the House of Representatives, had failed to reach any agreement. Although no less tension-filled, matters had been better managed at the Senate. It was in the House that things fell apart.

By condoning, if not authorising,serial acts of impunity, is President Goodluck Jonathan transforming democracy by redefining it as minority rule? Or simply returning us to the forgotten epoch of might is right? The most popular definition of democracy remains that proffered by Abraham Lincoln in the famous Gettysburg Address to commemorate the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. In the long closing sentence of the short 278-word speech, Lincoln uttered the words that every junior secondary school student knows by heart:”government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

By Femi Aribisala The APC did not win any seat whatsoever in the House of Representatives in the 2011 elections.  Therefore, it cannot provide the Speaker of the House. Have you ever heard the parable of a man who stole a goat and was arrested and prosecuted?  When brought before the judge, his line of […]

By Femi Aribisala Have you ever heard the parable of a man who stole a goat and was arrested and prosecuted?  When brought before the judge, his line of defense was that others had stolen goats in the past but had not been prosecuted.  How does that absolve him of guilt?  The man is a […]

APart from serial demonstrations of gross incompetence by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, under Professor Attahiru Jega, which we analysed in the first part of this article, the nation’s Chief Electoral Officer seems determined to implement a dangerous sectional agenda that will guarantee explosive outcomes starting from 2015.