OUR democracy is being threatened by blatant refusal of the 37 defecting members of the House of Representatives to obey the rulings of a court of competent jurisdiction. On Monday, March 31, 2014, an Abuja High Court presided over by Justice Adeniyi Ademola, ruled that the members of the House of Representatives elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, who announced their defection to the opposition All Progressives Congress, APC, should resign and stop participating in the business of the House.

IBADAN, the Oyo State capital, has of late been in the news for not very good reasons. In what could easily pass as a scene from a horror film, a slave camp was discovered in the heart of the city.

A court-verdict ordered that 50 million naira compensation should be paid to the suspended Central Bank Governor for his unlawful detention for 24 hours. How much compensation should be paid for the senseless deaths of innocent job-seekers?

ARIZONA’S Republican Senator, John McCain, is a rarity in politics. He speaks his mind, no matter who is being comforted or afflicted. With him, you do not have to fear being taken through a labyrinth of circumlocution and rhetoric on issues. So, when he castigated President Obama and called him the “most naïve president” in U.S. history on foreign policy, and more directly for not standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin on his annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, Senator McCain meant what he said and said it as he saw and understood it.

IN the Sudan, they are known as the Janjaweed, which in Arabic, is said to mean “spirits on horseback”. The dominant Arab regimes in the country responded to increasing armed struggles for self-determination by the Negroid indigenous minorities in the Darfur, western and southern Sudan by arming nomadic Arab pastoralists to attack and terrorise villages owned by farmers. The farmers and pastoralists had been historically locked in tussles over land down the ages.