Pointless debate on Tinubu’s certificate, by Suleiman A. Suleiman
The ongoing debate about President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s educational certificates is not and should not be the defining issue in a Nigerian presidential election. We cannot always reduce serious questions of governance in a presidential election to fitful hysteria about the academic credentials of candidates. For a sitting president, the certificate controversy is not very useful […]
Obasanjo ‘development’ committee – again?
We may soon start paying a heavy price for electing a man who first ruled us 30 years ago. We may be headed for a gerontocracy; a government populated by old men and women.
The Okpekpe Marathon experience
Last Saturday, May 16, the who’s who in track and field in the land gathered at Okpekpe, a sleepy town, about 23 kilometres from Auchi for the 3rd IAAF Sanctioned Okpekpe 10 Kiliometre Marathon.
Electoral malpractices must be punished
Professor Tam David-West, nearing 80 but still going strong, and as irrepressible as ever, had made the case for those involved in electoral malpractices to be treated as armed robbers. Some have even likened it to treason – an attempt to distort the will of the people illegally. While their anger is understandable, they will not solve the immediate problem. In fact those suggestions will merely delay justice. Nigeria’s electoral laws as they stand, have never been fully tested until now. Violators have gone unpunished and we don’t know how strong a deterrent they will serve against future occurrence. At any rate we don’t have to waste time passing new laws. We should test the ones we have to the limit.
No sea shall stand on the way to ‘Promised Land’
They have been arriving in thousands. Some of them are weak, others are kept strong by hope for a better future. So many die daily, while many others are carried in body bags at the end of the journey. While the less fortunate ones are fed to the creatures under the sea. It has been dubbed the journey into the unknown, and undertaken only by the bold.
Okonjo-Iweala: Public finance and high blood pressure
Every time I see the publisher and Chairman of the Vanguard, Mr. Sam Amuka, he reminds me of what I’d like to be when I grow up. Spare and study, Uncle Sam seems built to defy time and the vagaries of aging. I have tried to find out the secret. Once at the flats, he said, “well, it’s the advantage of people like me built small.” It might well indeed be. My younger brother, Buddy, an Attorney in Owerri is also built small. I had joked with him last Christmas, that one day, people might say I’m his dad, when they look at him, and see me besides him. Small is good. Great things come in small measures. Like the Beetle, they are built to last. But there is something else to it. I have observed that Uncle Sam, at his age, swims at least ten laps most evenings. He has made it routine.
