IT was Jon Huntsman, American billionaire businessman and entrepreneur who in his humbler days worked as special assistant to the president during the first term of the Nixon administration that wrote in his bestselling book, Winners Never Cheat: “There are no moral shortcuts in the game of life.

THE conviction and sentencing of erstwhile chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority, Chief Olabode George and five other members of the NPA board under him to two and half years in prison each, seems to have elated many Nigerians.

OF the innumerable sms messages this column receives each week in reaction, only a few stands out. The ones that do are not usually the most brilliant or profound.

By Morenike Taire ONE of the phenomena of our times that have endured much assault is the National Youth Service Corps scheme. There have been several arguments in the past in favour of its dissolution, mainly for financial and corruption reasons. The fluid of corruption that had poured upon the fabric of our nationhood from […]

Just when you think you’ve seen all there is to be seen about the strange ways of the Yar’Adua administration and some of its officials, then will the government spring yet another one on you.

LAST weekend, I had cause to sit at a roundtable of sorts with a bunch of passionate Nigerian youths. The word ‘youth’, of course, is used rather loosely here as we have the national tendency to do. We appear youthful in these parts much longer than they do in other places.

MANY times you wonder as a Nigerian if anything good can ever come out of this country. You despair over the possibility of those in positions of authority ever seeing the need to do something without an eye for some form of personal gain.

A COUPLE of weeks back, news broke of how a number of young people were caught, who had connived to kidnap some ministers and others whom they thought had the ability to cough up the tens of millions they had planned to take from stakeholders.

ONE of the most inspirational stories Hollywood has ever told is RAY, the biographical work telling of the life of legendary blind African American musician Ray Charles. It focuses on his rise from deep South racial dirt poverty as well as monumental personal and emotional loss to becoming the genius pacesetter we knew.

IT was Ryszard Kapuscinski, the late Polish journalist who lived in and wrote so extensively about Africa, who insisted: “The continent is too large to describe… Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say ‘Africa’. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist”.

This, and the pursuit of charity, is what Gani Fawehinmi lived and died for. That Gani Fawehinmi was poisoned along with others in the jailyards of our military administrators past will continue to be a rumour, just as the murder of Umaru Yar’Adua will continue to be a rumour until all who hatched and executed it are brought to book.

The poverty factor, which is supposed to have pushed women into commercial sex whether formally or informally, is responsible for the ever increasing share of women in the virus prevalence share (from 58% in 2005 to 61.5% today of women). And while the number of women using female condoms has increased significantly, it has not improved the figures any.

For sure, everything became uncertain after the crash last year of the money and capital markets in the world’s financial capitals and all dependent on them such as Nigeria, except one thing: the world is going to get far smaller than it has always been.

Babangida is talking a lot more about gas flaring these days as he did as Head of State, but he paid his own lip service and Abacha, in spite of his battles with Niger Delta Environmentalists, paid lip service to ending gas flaring.
Obasanjo in his turn, set deadlines, and so has Yar’Adua, who has more or less been neutral to virtually every issue bogging the nation.

The handlers of Information Minister Professor Akunyili, it appears, have steered her away from the “Good People, Great Nation” fixation. The result is that Dora has got back her groove, recognised her constituency and finally figured there is no dressing up the reputation of a country that is not pretty.