DURING this season of goodwill, let those of us who are luckier than most remember the millions in Nigeria and across the globe who will suffer or die during this festive season and won’t enjoy special meals or receive nice Christmas gifts.

THE world woke up on Friday December 18 to the calamity that is the proxy war in Syria. The war began four years ago. Over 250,000 killed. Cities destroyed, 7.6 million, internally displaced. Over four million are refugees with an increasing number pushing into Europe. Most of the refugees are children; too young to have started the bloody conflict, but not too young to be victims of the senseless war.THE world woke up on Friday December 18 to the calamity that is the proxy war in Syria. The war began four years ago. Over 250,000 killed. Cities destroyed, 7.6 million, internally displaced. Over four million are refugees with an increasing number pushing into Europe. Most of the refugees are children; too young to have started the bloody conflict, but not too young to be victims of the senseless war.

I MADE a tremendous effort last Friday, to get out of bed as early as possible in the morning. I arrived in Ilorin last Sunday, and had read that the state House of Assembly was to hold a public hearing on a N20 billion bond that the Kwara state government was proposing to access from the capital market. Loans and bonds have almost become synonymous with Kwara State, since Bukola Saraki became governor in 2003; and the jury is out on the usages of those loans. I was determined to watch the legislators interrogate the proposed bond, especially because there were reports that the legislature had previously refused to endorse the plan twice, and had insisted on knowing how previous loans and bonds were expended. It didn’t appear typical of the Kwara House of Assembly! The information I read had stated that the public hearing was to commence by 8am. I arrived at the House of Assembly by seven thirty, but there was no indication that a public hearing was about to take place there.

WE have maintained that if all a man has is the hammer, everything he sees will look like a nail. For too long, the press has been gagged by various governments.

That explains the mutual suspicion existing between the press and the government, to the extent that any move by the legislature is quickly seen as another attempt to gag the press.

IT is not a plus for his democratic credentials, that President Muhammadu Buhari has not thought it fit to comment on the issue, weeks after personnel of the Nigeria Police were reported to have killed several members of the so-called Indigenous Peoples of Biafra and scores more were mauled down of followers of the misguided Shiite cleric, Ibrahim El Zakzaky, by soldiers of the Nigerian Army.