LET me wish you all a belated Happy New Year 2016. I have been on an abridged vacation and had the torment of watching so many things happen in our country and beyond without saying a word.

No one is more disenfranchised than the Nigerian woman. The worst part of this statement isn’t even the fact itself but the reality that the average woman in our society probably doesn’t realise she has allowed or even supervised and enabled her marginalisation, subjugation and virtual exclusion on all fronts.

NIGERIA is a country of the incredible. The high level of criminality that defines much of what makes ours an incredible polity is traceable to the leadership of the country. I say this in the light of the confusion that surrounded the whereabouts of both the electronic and printed copies of the 2016 Appropriation Bill. It was reported last week that copies of this Bill, as delivered to the National Assembly, could no longer be found in the Senate chamber. How this document developed the capacity for mobility is the riddle that our ever resourceful senators were at pain to resolve all through last week.

NEARLY four years ago when Donald Trump led a bitter “birther” campaign against Barack Obama who was then running for a second term of office, Republicans were his willing cheerleaders. Then, Trump tried to use the issue to launch his presidential campaign. The loquacious billionaire was all over the place, questioning Obama’s real place of birth, and coming up with bizarre theories about the president being of Kenyan origin. Trump even went as far as claiming that the birth certificate Obama put out online was fake. He promised Americans that he had set up a sort of hit-squad to produce Obama’s real birth certificate that will show that he was born in Kenya, a factor that will disqualify him from running for office.

WERE it not that I have given up on Nigeria as it is, I would have made a demand on the Minister of Power, Housing and Works (I hope that is the order), Mr. Babatunde Fashola (SAN) to throw into the dustbin most of the agenda he has been sharing. I particularly would have called on the minister to shove all he has put down on Works until he has undertaken the onerous assignment .