The superpower hiding in plain sight, by Ruth Oji
Imagine the following scenario: The conference room held two hundred people, but in that moment, it belonged to one woman. She wasn’t the most senior person there, nor was she the most qualified. But when she stood to present her team’s proposal, something happened. Her voice was steady, and her conviction was palpable. She didn’t just […]
An exemplary life; tribute to Dr Kolade
Last week, Dr Christopher Kolade, the Pro Chancellor of Pan African University, turned 80. About a month ago, I had asked him what his birthday plans were. I really was not surprised when he said he wanted to make it as low key as possible.
A new year and imperatives of a new strategy
THE impression of the year 2012 by many Nigerians is that, though the Government of President Goodluck Jonathan has tried to transform the economic and political scenes, the efforts have been less edifying. Many commentators and analysts believe that the country has got much less than it desired in the past years, considering the opportunities afforded by immense material and human resources.
Power and responsibility
I RECENTLY told you that a friend recently told me that when he attended a school reunion dinner in Lagos, 80 percent of the ex-classmates on his table said that they were so unhappy with the status quo that they would gladly flee to foreign climes if they could get their hands on foreign work permits.
Resolutions and a peek into the life process
IT is a New Year. We all renew hope and make resolutions. I have never been particularly conformist about many things in life. From childhood, I have asked uncomfortable questions and thrown pebbles at orthodoxies. The conventional wisdom has never satisfied my search for answers about our often mysterious but lovely world, either the natural world that conditions us and which we are very much part of or the social canons of existence. So resolutions at the beginning of a new year often resembled for me, an admission of human weakness. If there is a thing to change, why wait till the beginning of a new year? But just for once, I fell into line and made a resolution which I have never betrayed.
One bad turn deserves another
IS it really necessary to remind ourselves that in government, what people intend is often different from what they bring about? In trying to evaluate a governmental action, one ought to consider likely, even if unintended, consequences.
Quite often, governments do the same thing, the same old way, while expecting different results. We have been at a loss to understand why, back to Governor Peter Odili’s years in Rivers State, a large cache of sophisticated arms and ammunitions was recovered from militants of that era who were beating a retreat from militancy and the weapons were set ablaze.
