Back in January this year, as members of the National Assembly, NASS, returned to their duties, at the Three Arms Zone, I made the point that this year’s budget would be the fifteenth to be prepared for execution by elected officials. I also predicted that we would be fortunate to have a budget signed by the President by the end of April.

This week, I invite you to consider the following excerpts from Toyin Dawodu’s response to Forbes’ (a foremost international business magazine) conclusions from its interview with Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy. Dawodu is Managing Partner of Capital Investment Group in the United States, and he wrote as follows:

Bishop David Oyedepo says poverty is not of God. He insists a child of God has no business being poor and declares: “There’s a proven covenant cure for poverty.” If this were true and proven, all the world’s poor would have become rich Christians by now.

One American politician once said that every political party, sooner or later, develops its “lunatic fringe” – people who carry the advocacy for the political party to the most dangerous extremes. Nigeria has not reached there yet. But, we are getting too damn close for comfort. And two men, one belonging to the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, and the other a member of the All Progressive Congress, APC, are driving us “hell for leather” to the brink of political madness.

Last week, I received an arrogant SMS message from a certain Dr. Nelson in response to my essay entitled “The anti-intellectual character of Nigerians,” in which I lamented the overbearing anti-intellectualistic influence of religion in the consciousness of Nigerians. In the text, Dr. Nelson claimed that “Nigeria is in need of people who can give advice and solutions to its many problems.