Nigeria is one of the countries in the world where maternal and infant mortality are quite high. You don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to attribute this sad state of affairs to the zero healthcare provision that has been our lot in this country for so long.

The real truth was, President Jonathan was lured to Oyo State to attend the 60th birthday anniversary of the Governor of Oyo state. Akala stood proudly between a former and an incumbent president and the result was a photograph to frame for life by the Governor. It is quite possible that it finally dawned on the President of Nigeria that he was wasting precious national time on frivolity of the worst kind at a time the nation still did not have a budget for 2010 and he has not given the nation an idea of how he intends to lead.

In the Warri area of the country, it is common to here inhabitants say ‘Wafi no dey carry last’, meaning Warri and its habitants cannot be found on the last rung of the ladder when it comes to goals pursuit and attainment. Whether it is always rightly applied or not is a matter for debate .

There appears to be little sense of urgency driving the political advance to 2011. I am beginning to be afraid that we will miss the mark unless we accelerate our pace of work towards conducting a credible, free and fair election that will meet international standards, and ensure local satisfaction. We have only eight months to go before the election in February at the latest, and the only positive thing we have on ground is the appointment of INEC’s chairman with his commissioners.

BELGIUM is by contemporary standards, a blessed country. An international capital; it is the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the International Trade Unions Confederation (ITUC) and the European Union (EU). In fact, it is assuming the presidency of the EU on July 1. Historically, it was a colonial power with the Congo as its most prized possession.

WHEN I first moved to Abuja a decade ago, having spent all of my formative years in the UK, I was a naive Oyinbo Girl. I totally trusted everyone who approached me for friendship.

UNLESS sanity prevails, come Tuesday June 22, 2010, we might be treated to another round of attempts to change the leadership of the House of Representatives when the Green Chamber returns from its annual recess.

He knows the laws he is contributing in making in the National Assembly are secular ones; so how does he teach the Zamfara child how to obey laws when he himself will not? Again, we have the challenge of men who are bent on dragging us back to the era of anarchy. I wonder how our senators can claim to be Distinguished if they agree to sit in the same chambers with people like Yerima.

FOLLOWING calls for the application of appropriate sanction on Oba Oluwadare Adesina Adepoju, the dethroned Deji of Akure, who had led a lynch squad to the house of his estranged wife, Bolanle, only to find himself in an unseemly street melee, a roforofo fight in which he was reportedly flung into a gutter, traditional beads and all, by his own ‘subjects’ who came to the rescue of the woman, Segun Mimiko, the Governor of Ondo State, had warned that he would not be stampeded into deposing the Kabiyesi.

AMIN, a Uganda soldier became President of Uganda for eight years (1971-1979). He came from the Kakwa people of the West Nile area, in the far north of Uganda near the DRC and Sudan borders. For several decades many Kakwas and various other Sudanese peoples (together called “Nubis”) served in the British colonial army.