It is therefore not surprising that a large percentage of lecturers across the universities appear incapable of examining repercussions of frequent strikes critically and comprehensively; it is as if they are stymied by marginal improvement in salaries after each strike. But as we argued last week, there is no clear evidence that such improvement has translated into enhanced quality of teaching and research

With the unveiling of her Corporate Responsibility Social Africa Award-CORSAA, Amaka Jane Anakwe, a Nigerian and an upcoming artiste who finally returned home about a couple of years ago from South Africa where she had lived and worked for several years as a local counselor, is setting the tone for the trend which she believes will help develop Africa and influence standard of living.

Human relations is at best delicate and at worst tricky. Being social creatures we thrive based on relationships, mixing views and values, rubbing minds and attributes. In my view most relationships have a life span, at least those that don’t involve blood and covenants do.

I applaud the efforts of the House of Representatives whose ad hoc committee’s recommendation on the review of the 1999 Constitution has found their approval on the floor of the house. It was a fair appraisal of the yearnings of the people for a better future for the country. However, I find one aspect of the recommendation most appalling.

A big fish was spiked out of the muddy waters of politics and government in China early this week and hung up to dry.

I KEEP asking myself how a once-civilized city like Port Harcourt gradually morphed into the kind of place in which legislators-who
are supposed to uphold the law and be shining role models and pillars of polite society – physically attack each other so savagely that some of them wind up being hospitalised.

There is little doubt that the present Nigeria owes its fragile existence to the amalgamation in 1914 of the Southern and Northern provinces by Lord F. Lugard. It appears like a miracle that of all the world‘s painfully contrived associations of multi-ethnic groups in the 20th century, Nigeria alone remains superficially united. Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and other mature societies have dissolved themselves into smaller, but independent countries.

THIS week the Kwara State House of Assembly held a public sitting on a proposal to re-name the four-year old Kwara State University, after late Dr. Abubakar Olusola Saraki, the politician that bestrode the state’s political terrain like a colossus for over three decades.

WE see aspects of misinformation, and sometimes, outright disinformation, in the Edo hanging row.

A LITTLE over six years ago, Jigawa State was rated by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, as the poorest state in Nigeria. At a public lecture in Kaduna, former Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Prof Charles Soludo, after reviewing the figures from across the North, reached the sad conclusion thus: “Poverty is still a Northern phenomenon”.