Nigeria’s Stanford warning: When institutions normalise abuse of power, by Dakuku Peterside
Sometimes, a nation confronts scandals that appear unrelated: corruption in one institution, brutality in another, and troubling questions of legality elsewhere. Yet beneath the shifting headlines, a deeper pattern may be emerging. Recent debate has involved allegations of corruption, extortion, torture, and degrading treatment in correctional centres; claims that constituency projects are distorting the federal budget; […]
Time for class action suit against NUC, CLE, NLC and JAMB (2)
JAMB lists it in its brochure without warning prospective lawyers of the status of the university. Then, totally avoidable disaster occurs. In the middle of the fourth year, the NUC asked the university to close down its law programme. Several hundred students suddenly find, to their horror, that they were never law students all along. Where does a Level-400 student start all over again? Would the university refund ALL the tuition, and other fees collected from the victims of what, in effect, was a grand scam?
Prof Odekunle’s cheap analysis
It is often said that some leaders are “good men” but that they are surrounded by “bad” advisers. If you had the privilege of listening to Professor Femi Odekunle on the Nigerian Television Authority, NTA, shortly after President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn-in last Friday, you would have gained a very educative insight to the veracity of this contention.
Coming to terms with governance
I attended Kashim Shettima’s inauguration for a second term as governor of Borno State last weekend in Maiduguri. There was colour as to be expected of Borno; but there was also a somber thread to Governor Shettima’s thought as expressed in the opening sequence of his speech.
Remaining awake through a great revolution
I often feel as if we, in Nigeria, are stuck in a debtor’s prison. Before many of us are even born, to a certain extent, we owe debts which we must repay. Our very lives and livelihoods we often owe to other people who have the unequivocal power to decide, much like gods, who will be allowed to go further, who will prosper and who won’t based on arbitrary rules. This all begins because individualism is not acceptable in the Nigerian society.
Reflections on a theme in President Buhari’s Inaugural speech
ON Friday May 29, our so-called Democracy Day (October 1 to me), I was at Tafawa Balewa Square to witness the swearing-in of Mr Akinwunmin Ambode as the 14th governor of Lagos State. I went with a sizable number of fellow old students of Federal Government College, Warri, Ambode’s alma mater, equally delighted to mark the ascension of a product of the unity schools to the governance of the most cosmopolitan and unifying city in a country cleft to the marrow by tribal sentiments and the atavistic fears they stir.
