Tacking poverty in Nigeria: Onus on crony billionaires, not self-made musicians! By Olu Fasan
Senator Oluremi Tinubu, Nigeria’s irrepressible first lady, recently made two controversial interventions on the country’s socio-economic situation. First, she told the jobless to start selling akara, roasted corn or kuli-kuli to eke out a living. Then, she admonished rich young musicians to help the poor. She received a torrent of criticism for the comments. Yet they […]
Spellbinders
After reading the letters of both Obasanjo and his beloved daughter Iyabo, I fell in love with the Obasanjo family all over again.
My encounter with Madiba
The year was 1990. I had just emerged from the cavernous bunkers that serve as Unilag’s Engineering Faculty, still dazed from the mauling I had received from the vengeful Thermodynamics exam I had just written. As I blinked in the mid-afternoon sunshine, I suddenly observed what I had desperately hoped not to see.
My most memorable Christmas
The Christmas season is special though it means different things to different people. My interests as a growing little boy were to eat rice and chicken, wear new clothes and move around town. Now my interests are in the importance of the commemoration and lessons I can draw from it: One, God the Father’s unparalleled and unassailable selfless and unconditional love.
This week’s caustic correspondence
On Wednesday, this newspaper announced that it had exclusively obtained an “open letter” in which Iyabo Obasanjo, the ex-President’s eldest daughter and a former senator, bitterly accused her father of being a liar who treated his family shabbily, described his recent criticisms of President Jonathan as hypocritical and told the world that she wanted no further contact with him.
The art and act of solving Nigeria’s problems
As repeated in this column many times, the country‘s problems are many, varied, complex and fundamental. And like the United States of America‘s balance of payments, would always end in fundamental disequilibrium. The main reason is that as a watchdog of the world, its foreign exchange expenditure is always more than the surplus on its balance of trade.
