It was from a friend who called me last week that I first heard the pleasant news of the end to the fuel subsidy imbroglio. The call would have ended within a minute if not for his rather curious comment that there was ‘no victor no vanquished’.

The concept of fair trade is a direct response to business practises that exploited the most disadvantaged people of the world while making the rich even richer. It was a more sophisticated version of the slave trade and it involved keeping people in sustained poverty while using them for cheap labour.

Nigerians would do anything to attract votes- including selling their mothers. And I am surprised that Babatunde was surprised. Most Nigerians politician would do the same.

I welcome you to a highly profitable time as you read my article today. From the beginning of this month, I started to help you set the pace for a business breakthrough and wonderful family life this year, by sharing with you the fact that you can use your thoughts or imagination to paint a glorious picture for your business, career or home.

To this Barbara Tuchmann, the leading authority on thirteenth and fourteenth century Europe had added: “History does not repeat itself; man does”. President Goodluck Jonathan and his government on one side and the Nigerian Labor movement as well as civil society groups had just taken the entire country through the same rigmarole we have experienced before each time a government had increased the price of petrol.

It is silly season again in Nigeria when make-believe prophets put on their most expensive sheep’s clothing to make state-of-the-nation proclamations. Every January, cacophonies of timber-and-calibre pastors broadcast their prophecies for the coming year. We look into our cry-stal balls and declare to lesser mere mortals God’s mind.

One has seen, over the years, many unpopular government decisions/their fall-outs in this country, but the recent fuel subsidy removal, effective on the first day of the new year, takes the biscuit for being the most baffling, insensitive and reckless, so far.

When in November 2011 the Senate passed a bill prohibiting same sex marriage, slamming it with a 14-year jail term as punishment, international communities who considered the law an abuse on the emotional rights of homosexuals, threatened to put an end to all grants and aids given to Nigeria unless the law was abolished. Here, acclaimed singles and married counselor, Pastor(Mrs.)Ruth Nick-Essien, Founder/Presiding Pastor of Exodus Evangelical Ministry in Lagos, reveals her views on the issue.

A great and impenetrable pall has fallen of Nigeria. It is the pall of violence and division. Nigerians have known for a long time that its soul is broken into many disparate fragments; as many in fact as the number of ethnicities in this country.

ASUU strike is like a cycle in the country. There is hardly any year since 1996 that lecturers had not gone on strike. Sometimes, they tagged it warning strike, indefinite, etc. At the moment they have been on strike since December last year and they code named it Indefinite and Total strike.