Hundreds of million for 90 minutes, peanuts for a lifetime of service, by Stephanie Shaakaa
*Nigeria’s Broken Scale of Value When the Super Falcons clinched their record-extending tenth Women’s Africa Cup of Nations title in July 2025, the Presidency rolled out the red carpet. The players received national honours, three-bedroom apartments in Abuja and the promise of the naira equivalent of $100,000 each. The financial rewards were eventually fulfilled in […]
Akunyili and the Nigerian Death-Rumour Syndrome
Last week, fiery former NAFDAC boss Dora Akunyili joined the list of notable Nigerians whose deaths were announced before they actually happened.
Jonathan knows Shekau’s informants
THE Chief of Defence Staff, Alex Badeh, only days ago told the world, including the insurgents that have made life impossible for his Commander-in-Chief, Goodluck Jonathan, that the military now knows where the school girls abducted from Chibok about 50 days ago are being held.
Derivation: How North bullied South to submission
YOU have to hand it to the North. Knowing the extent of the Niger Delta’s sense of injustice through the unconscionable expropriation of its nature-given oil and gas wealth, and knowing that just nine years ago the South-South delegates to General Obasanjo’s constitutional conference walked out of proceedings rather than accept a derivation formula of less than 25%, the Northern delegates to President Jonathan’s National Conference insisted on not only reducing the laughable 13% already entrenched in the 1999 military constitution to 5% (that’s right, FIVE percent) but also on wiping out any other grudging concession. Mounted atop the high horse of power they know how to ride so well, they presented their Southern counterparts a choice: accept 5 % or accept a reinstatement of the onshore-offshore dichotomy in the calibration of oil output,give up the Niger Delta Development Commission, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and the amnesty programme.
How the West beats the rest of us
THE late Guyanese scholar and political activist, Walter Rodney, years ago wrote a masterpiece titled “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Today, he might have done some re-thinking and come up with another title that could read “How African leaders further underdeveloped Africa.”
We are all Boko Haram
I WAS fifteen years old when the civil war broke out in Nigeria. Although we were living in Ibadan in the South-west at the time, my sympathies were totally and unequivocally with the Igbos. When a people have been so brutally butchered by their countrymen as happened to the Igbos, I felt they had no choice but to insist on leaving the country.
