Foolhardy, and perpetually risking his own personal interests, friendships, personal safety, etc, his courage to stand by the truth , and prophesy for his community are the intellectual arsenal disposed to him as he restlessly forages his environment, patiently creating new possibilities, seeking for new alliances, shifting and striving for new paradigms.

The eze ndi Igbo institution has not solved the problem it set out to do. Rather, it has become a source of further division as anybody who has the means and supporters can announce himself as one in any city. And this is causing irritation among the owners of the land where these “foreign”, artificial monarchs are engaged in chieftaincy tussles. Some are afraid that some day, these upstart “traditional rulers” might start laying claim to things to which they are not entitled, as experience has shown.

Babangida is talking a lot more about gas flaring these days as he did as Head of State, but he paid his own lip service and Abacha, in spite of his battles with Niger Delta Environmentalists, paid lip service to ending gas flaring.
Obasanjo in his turn, set deadlines, and so has Yar’Adua, who has more or less been neutral to virtually every issue bogging the nation.

So if we run a federal system, the number of local governments a state wants to create should be the business of that state and its people not the headache of the central government. In other words, if Lagos State wants to create a hundred local governments, that would be its business, on the other hand, if Kano or Enugu want to merge their local governments, that should be entirely their business.

Here then is a seminal doctrine of democratic change that needs to be explored further if only to understand the constipation that may be going on in PDP. The author is none other than the irrespessible Ojo Maduekwe, former Secretary of the PDP and current Foreign Affairs Minister”.

By this I mean Nigerians from the North-West and North-East of this country. What I must now call a lazy way of explaining this apparently well-organised and outer-directed violence, is to attribute it to joblessness, poverty or any of those social vices and disjunctions we are too quick to identify as being at the root of the violence. Poverty or joblessness is not peculiar to the North.

Please don’t get me wrong. The headline does not suggest that there were any serious deliberations in Lokoja. None that I knew of.

Our public institutions have now become so adept at soothing our anxieties and our pains while they are busy deliberately inflicting untold hardship on our people. For example, the availability of public power supply has remained illusory in spite of trillions of naira voted for this sector over the years, but our leaders continue to proclaim their ‘sincere’ commitment and endlessly encourage us to be patient!

By Ochereome Nnanna I AM amazed. I am disgusted. Somebody get me a bowl. I want to throw up. A group of Nigerians, under the pretext of propagating their own brand of the well respected religion of Islam, went on a killing spree without apparent provocation. They attacked police stations and slaughtered policemen on lawful […]

The police alert was quite significant given that the theft of that material marked two possible scenarios: the vulnerability of Nigeria with the increase of insecurity in that region, and secondly, the fact that the loss of this material which could in fact be weaponized happened without a trace.

I strongly suspect that the former would be higher, since the “pigs” have the financial power to pay tuition fees and other “incidentals” required for university education in foreign institutions. Because top government officials benefit from the skewed emolument system in Nigeria , they do not really appreciate the daunting sacrifices lowly paid Nigerians, including lecturers make daily to keep things going.

The precondition for the military to take part in quelling internal unrest seems now to be hidden and unannounced. But that is what is happening, and has been happening and will continue to happen if we refuse to see the Boko Haram sect as the harbinger it is of a reaping we are entitled to for the total negligence of the duty imposed on government to ensure the security and welfare of the citizens.

From information reaching us, she is at daggers drawn with her Minister of State. She joined the “Honourable” Minister of Education to dance the night away while all Nigerian universities closed down and now she is proposing to spend N8.2 billion to retool where less than N6 billion will do to purchase “tear rubber” equipment. Madam has suddenly become the spokeswoman for people of questionable characters.

The politicians are fooling around again like they did in previous “republics”. They should be called to order before we are all consumed by the disorder which this tomfoolery is most certainly going to result in, as our past history so tragically depicts. My only fear is that we might not be as lucky as in previous situations where we emerged from it all in one piece. We will be over stretching our luck if we keep that hope alive.

My approach to the matter of Caban Bamboo is to avoid unnecessary preambles and sentiments. Right now there is a gaping hole or vacant space where Caban Bamboo once stood majestically. The fact as far as eyes can see is that the structure has been pulled down.