By Adekunle Adekoya Fellow Nigerians are currently writhing in agony as they battle to make the best of two self-inflicted crises — petrol scarcity, and an unusual scarcity of banknotes. These two crises , in unison, have stretched human endurance beyond elastic limits in our country. First, the crisis associated with petrol scarcity. For more […]

By Adekunle Adekoya THE last edition of this column for the year 2022 dwelt on carnage on our roads, in which I wondered whether all the uniformed services emplaced by federal and state governments to ensure safety in our transportation system have abdicated. That edition was prompted by several accidents, especially those where containers fell […]

By Adekunle Adekoya DESPONDENT. That word pretty much describes the state of my mind for weeks now, given the prevailing situation in our country. There is scarcity of petrol, which has endured for more than two months now, causing a massive upsurge in the prices of goods and services. Transport fares had tripled in many […]

By Adekunle Adekoya MR Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party is the latest aspirant for our nation’s highest office to go to Chatham House, England, to give a talk. He had been preceded by the APC candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu in the Chatham House run. In 2015, incumbent president, Muhammadu Buhari was also […]

By Adekunle Adekoya WE should be very worried at the unending spate of kidnappings, mostly for ransom. When it started, we treated  it, as usual, with kid gloves, instead of dealing with the malaise with the seriousness it deserved and still deserves. First, militants of the Niger Delta started by kidnapping foreigners working on oil […]

By Adekunle Adekoya FOR the umpteenth time, the Federal Government, currently led by President Muhammadu Buhari has committed yet another infraction against the law. Last Wednesday, the President caused the inauguration of the board of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC. No problem with that, inaugurations of such nature are routine government events. What is […]

By Adekunle Adekoya THURSDAY December 22, 2022 was a black day in Lagos. So also were May 11, 2022; September 19, 2021; November 10, 2021; and August 21, 2020, to mention a few that could be easily recalled. What blackened these days were the tragedies that occurred — containers falling off trucks onto other vehicles, […]

By Adekunle Adekoya THREE years ago, on December 20, 2019, to be exact, Dr. Olorunnimbe Mamora, Minister of State for Health, had reason to leave Lagos on January 20, 2019, to deliver a lecture at an event in Abeokuta. According to him, he got trapped in a traffic jam on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, and ended […]

By Adekunle Adekoya When we talk of poverty, we think of it as the inability of a person, group of persons, or a social collective to meet basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica describes poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or […]

By Adekunle Adekoya I don’t know whether you see it from my perspective, but it seems to me that an unusual kind of war is going on. I am speaking of the attacks on state governors by the federal executive led by President Muhammadu Buhari. First, it was the Minister of State for Budget & […]

By Adekunle Adekoya ON Wednesday and yesterday, President Muhammadu Buhari pleasantly surprised me. On Wednesday, the Federal Executive Council meeting over which he presided approved mother tongue instruction in the first six years of schooling. Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu told State House Correspondents at the end of the meeting that: “A memo on national […]

By Adekunle Adekoya I WAS thrown off my feet earlier in the week when a former Commissioner for Justice and Attorney-General in Oyo State, Mutalubi  Adebayo, faulted the clamour for local government autonomy by many sections of the Nigerian polity, adding that it simply shows that the people do not understand the concept of federalism. Adebayo […]

By Adekunle Adekoya YESTERDAY, the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, released the result of a survey which it conducted, with the result that no less than 63 percent of Nigerians are poor as at 2022. Using a population figure of 200 million, that is about 126 million of our fellow compatriots statistically determined to be […]

By Adekunle Adekoya I AM afraid that if action is by unflinchingly patriotic Nigerians, our country might have been unwittingly transformed into the reverse of a rentier state.  A rentier state is one which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from rent paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments, and at […]

By Adekunle Adekoya ONCE again, I have to use this medium to address an issue that I’m sure is of paramount importance to a lot of people, especially those who have reason to come into Lagos for one thing or the other and return to base. Needless to say, those who live and work in […]