ONE wouldn’t know if the Jonathan administration has made any official pronouncement on the matter but the issue seems serious enough to warrant a response from senior members of the Obama administration.

JUNE is the month of Nigeria’s controversial election that was held in 1993, precisely on 12th, a day many Nigerians believe was specially set apart to make all that was wrong with electoral matters in Nigeria right.

ABIOLA Ajimobi, governor of Oyo State, has been in the news of late. Only weeks ago he was honoured with a chieftaincy along side his wife by the Olubadan, Oba Odulana Odugade. There has been much talk before and since then about how well the Governor has transformed Oyo State, particularly, Ibadan, the state capital, into a working city.

THIS is so because in the three periods relevant for support for The Patriots choice of the basis of sovereign representation, the sovereigns in the societies that were united to form the Nigerian Province of the British Empire were never normally and universally ethnic nationality sovereign. In the pre-colonial period, sovereignty was variously monarchical, imperial, and age groups stratified.

MERE five years separate 2008 from 2013 and that could seem a long time. In the life of a transport system that is meant to cater for millions of commuters weekly if not daily, five years is quite short.

IT’s no longer news that all hasn’t been well between Chibuike R. Amaechi, RiversState governor, and President Goodluck Jonathan.

THE brutal murder of British soldier, Lee Rigby, by two religious terrorists on May 22 is the immediate trigger for this week’s column.

NOW it looks like President Goodluck Jonathan has decided to take on the beast of religious terrorists ravaging different parts of Northern Nigeria, particularly the North-Eastern part, with his imposition of emergency rule on the three states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa last Wednesday.

AFRICAN newspapers take centre stage this week in the United Kingdom as the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, DASA, incorporating the Centre of West African Studies, CWAS, of the University of Birmingham, holds its annual Cadbury International Conference on 17th and 18th of May.

FOR at least six months before he finally passed on, President Yar’Adua was no longer in charge of himself to say nothing of the country. This made the three people who surrounded him at this time the actual leaders of the country.

IT’s exactly three years ago this week since President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died after an unhappy presidency that was from the very beginning marred by ill-health.

IT was April 8 and I was browsing the net when I came upon the news on Yahoo News: Margaret Thatcher dead. The 87 years old former British Prime Minister, the news said, had died at the Ritz in London just seven hours before.

IN its holistic appraisal of corruption in Nigeria, from the individual through family and up to different larger sectors of society, the ICPC Report conservatively estimates that between $4 billion to $8 billion is stolen from the national treasury yearly and goes on to cite the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for 2011 which ranked Nigeria 143 among 183 countries.

IN the March 20 and 27, 2013 editions of this column entitled “The ICPC/NUC report and sexual harassment in Nigerian universities”, I questioned the validity of the claim attributed to the ICPC chair, Ekpo Nta, based on a pilot study conducted by the anti-graft body and the NUC, that corruption ranked very high among corrupt practices in our universities.

Akuko gagara akuko gagara to fori apata se ’bugbe… Can things ever fall apart in the home of the teacher Chinualumogu the vaulting eagle on the riverside iroko