When I read the first letter by a certain Sheikh Gumi to All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential hopeful, General Muhammadu Buhari, I was a bit confused. But on closer inquiry, I discovered that this was Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, not Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, the late leader of the Izalatul Bidi’a wa Ikamatul Sunnah (Izala) Islamic sect whose utterances often set Kaduna and other parts of the North on fire up till the time he died on September 11, 1992.

In Nigeria today, the 90 minutes of legal violence, which they call the game of football has come to dominate all other revenue-yielding sports. That’s Nigeria for you. The moment we discovered football, every other sporting endeavour was relegated to the background.

The original title of my last column was “As Delta State Gets Set for the Charade of Local Government Elections,” but it was published without the keyword “charade” (15 October 2014). According to the Oxford dictionary, a charade is “an absurd pretence intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance.”

AFTER more than a year since the issue became a major talking point around the country, President Goodluck Jonathan, last week, finally declared his intention to re-contest as president. The President especially, and his aides and supporters had hedged and skirted like practiced lawyers on the question of whether he would seek re-election or not. Most of the talk around Jonathan’s re-election plans was at best academic.

DR Ahmad Gummi, son of the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gummi and a leading cleric recently wrote open letters in the manner Chief Olusegun Obasanjo made public letter-writing a political art. He wrote to General Muhammadu Buhari and President Goodluck Jonathan, advising them to jettison ambitions to contest for the presidency in 2015 in the interest of peace, security and survival of the nation.

LAST week, 14-year-old Jaylen Fryberg calmly walked to his school, Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Washington State, and took out his anger on his fellow students. He was armed with a .40 caliber handgun.

It is increasingly apparent that if Jonathan is “clueless,” his “cluelessness” is the magic that Nigeria needs at this very moment in time. By the time you are reading this, by the grace of God, the 218 kidnapped Chibok school-girls may have been released. If not, their release is imminent. A ceasefire with the Boko […]

Whenever we interrogate the roles a man like General Yakubu Gowon played in the history of Nigeria, it is time to be reminded how we made our diversity to work against us rather than for us. Gowon is one of those giants of Nigeria’s history about whom you cannot discuss without reopening the unhealed sores of our past.

The report written by Sunday Aborisade exhibits the triumph of hope and self-delusion over reality and the verdicts of economic history and experience. Neither one of the two key foundations of our budget can, by any stretch of imagination, be considered reasonable – given global current situation and trends into 2015.

The feelers from snippets of information so far available from the 2014-15 budget projections clearly suggest that, inspite of dwindling revenue due to prevailing lower crude oil prices and output, Nigerians may still be compelled to dedicate almost N1500bn or over 20% of next year’s federal budget to the intangible and unsubstantiated benefit of subsidising fuel consumption nationwide.