SOCIAL scientists determine ethnicity to be an artificial construct based on shared beliefs of identity created over time. Groups (and their leaders) create certain beliefs in order to implement political strategies and control their followers. Ethnicity is thus a construct based more on power and status than on any real, intrinsic feeling.

ACTUALLY, it is a bit unfair to single out Mr Ayodele Fayose, the alleged rigged – into – office governor of Ekiti State( just listen to the hottest audio record in Nigeria, the Ekiti Election Rigging Tape) as the one, within the ruling party’s crowded barracoon of desperate power-mongers, whose recklessness is fast approaching a suicide bomber’s. Who, I ask you, plays second fiddle to another among these intrepid contestants for the prize of Enemy of Democracy Number One : Fayose; or Call-Me-a-Bastard-if-APC-Survives Doyin Okupe, aka Dr. Attack Lion; or Femi Fani-Kayode, whose congenital case of logorrhoea, “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness,” is his only stock-in-trade; or AIG Joseph Mbu, non-card carrying member of the PDP; or Mujahedeen Asari Dokubo who threatens war if Jonathan loses the election; or National Security Adviser Dasuki, the de facto INEC Chairman; or Mrs. Patience Jonathan, who doesn’t need change because she is not a bus conductor and who knows a thing or two about “brain dead” people; or President Goodluck Jonathan himself, whose refusal to curb the excesses of his troops and corresponding eagerness to reward high crimes (as in nominating the prime suspect in the criminal subversion of democracy in Ekiti for ministerial reappointment), betrays a clear preference, his public utterances notwithstanding, for a hand-picked interim government over a democratically elected one?

IN all my years of studying elections, I have never seen a campaign as bogus as that of Muhammadu Buhari. It is amazing that, for a man who is running for election as president for a marathon fourth time, Buhari is so bereft of ideas as to how he would do anything if he were to become president. Campaigning in 35 states, Buhari has spoken for a total of less than 60 minutes in all. Surely, he wants to be president; but he clearly has no presidential agenda.

BARACK Obama was just about three years old when the police in Selma, Alabama, unleashed unprecedented brutality on a group of “Negroes” marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, to assert their rights as human beings and demanded to be treated as full American citizens.

Certainly, the Naira will continue its free fall unless the market supply equilibrium between Naira supply and the dollar is redressed in favor of the Naira. If however, excess Naira supply continues to be driven by CBN’s substitution of Naira allocations for dollar derived revenue, then a Naira rate of N300/$ would soon evolve to drive fuel prices well above N200/litre with disastrous consequences for inflation and consumer demand, and ultimately on manufacturing capacity and employment opportunities.