IF I say I was not petrified travelling through that 135km of road to Gwoza, I would be lying because that road had been designated a no-go area for about two months now due to incessant attacks and killings that occur there. But leadership requires courage and sacrifice. Courage, I believe is not the absence of fear but the belief that there is something greater than that fear”- Kashim Shettima, Borno state Governor

Saint Thomas: Occupy till I come.

Decampees: OK Boss but you must continue to do all the collateral damage from within so that the party shall be totally decapitated by the time you leave.

Last week, fiery former NAFDAC boss Dora Akunyili joined the list of notable Nigerians whose deaths were announced before they actually happened.

THE Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh, only days ago told the world, including the insurgents that have made life impossible for his Commander-in-Chief, Goodluck Jonathan, that the military now knows where the school girls abducted from Chibok about 50 days ago are being held.

YOU have to hand it to the North. Knowing the extent of the Niger Delta’s sense of injustice through the unconscionable expropriation of its nature-given oil and gas wealth, and knowing that just nine years ago the South-South delegates to General Obasanjo’s constitutional conference walked out of proceedings rather than accept a derivation formula of less than 25%, the Northern delegates to President Jonathan’s National Conference insisted on not only reducing the laughable 13% already entrenched in the 1999 military constitution to 5% (that’s right, FIVE percent) but also on wiping out any other grudging concession. Mounted atop the high horse of power they know how to ride so well, they presented their Southern counterparts a choice: accept 5 % or accept a reinstatement of the onshore-offshore dichotomy in the calibration of oil output,give up the Niger Delta Development Commission, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and the amnesty programme.

THE late Guyanese scholar and political activist, Walter Rodney, years ago wrote a masterpiece titled “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Today, he might have done some re-thinking and come up with another title that could read “How African leaders further underdeveloped Africa.”

I WAS fifteen years old when the civil war broke out in Nigeria. Although we were living in Ibadan in the South-west at the time, my sympathies were totally and unequivocally with the Igbos. When a people have been so brutally butchered by their countrymen as happened to the Igbos, I felt they had no choice but to insist on leaving the country.

“Looking from the fact that the funds from the Federation Account are not judiciously utilised by the states and they are not accountable to the people and the state legislature, our concern is that even if they get money from bonds and it is not invested, the state will be left with a huge debt burden which will hurt in the long term.” Dr Usman Muttaka, Head of Department of Economics, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

In last week’s article, we identified the advantages of a stronger naira exchange rate to include much lower inflation and interest rates, increasing industrial expansion, with rapidly rising employment opportunities. We also explained how a stronger naira will eliminate fuel subsidy and also reduce the size and cost of our national debt

So much has been written on the Nigeria-Scotland match that I rather move on.
The plans to write on Coach Keshi’s final list of 23 was not helped by the fact that by the time this column was sent in, the list had not left the coach’s head.