The Match Coordination Meeting (MCM) of Group C that will be held today before tomorrow’s matches, the contents of CHAN Regulations Article 74 will be presented and explained to the teams by the General Coordinator. Article 74 is that Almighty Article that has to do with the separation of teams at the end of Group matches in case of a tie. During the Nations Cup in Equatorial Guinea, Mali and Guinea had to go through the infamous coin toss to separate the two teams.

BEFORE Nigeria became independent, the British colonial masters organised a series of conferences in Ibadan and London to enable the elites of the various regions and socio-cultural divides to negotiate and agree on the terms of their future cohabitation. Since independence in 1960, there have been series of conferences, some of which ended with new constitutional proposals or documents.

Historically, the CBN has compulsively devalued the Naira to bridge increasingly widening gaps between official and parallel exchange rates, even when these gaps were caused by the obtusely contrived monopolistic market dynamics of demand and supply. It would undoubtedly create much discomfort for CBN Management if unrestrained dollar demand further pushes parallel market rates well above N300=$1; in such event, CBN may again unwittingly, jerk up the official rate above N300 and remove the embedded ‘subsidy’ from the official Naira exchange rate so as to raise the dollar price and discourage demand and hopefully also minimise the inherent rent seeking market opportunities.

It is like a marriage made in Heaven which invariably produces great results. When Governor of Taraba State told me in November last year that his state capital, Jalingo, will in about three weeks, enjoy direct flight from Lagos, through Abuja, it sounded like one of those political promises “made to be broken” (apologies to Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745). Given the short period he had been in office, in one of the poorest states in the nation, and being distracted by his political adversaries, it would appear that sealing a deal with an airline to start operating a flight to Jalingo would be almost impossible.

ELDER Statesman, Chief Bisi Akande was Executive Governor of Osun State for four years from 1999 during which he led his colleagues who were unwilling to pay workers the National Minimum Wage. I was then in the Nigeria Labour Congress, and we went to appeal to him to change his mind.