Mr. Muhammadu Buhari, former Major-General and Military Head of state of Nigeria (January 1984 – August 1985) is back to the hustings. Politics is in the air and so too much of its confusing doublespeak, chicanery, and contradictions.

By Oby Nwakanma The United States government was the first government in the world to respond with care and urgency to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. There is once more that example here of the United States as a force for good in the world. American health workers, in the discharge of their humanitarian […]

By OBI NWAKANMA Readers of the “Orbit” may have noticed the absence of this column in the last month. Well, I have to occasionally be on a break from this column and from the affairs of the world, whose enormity sometimes can overwhelm even the most practical and sanest of men. The columnist sometimes has […]

An Australian hostage negotiator, Dr. Stephen Davies made some startling statements last week, and it was widely reported by the on-line news magazine, Sahara Reporters. There was a certain inordinate glee in its reports, being as some of its critics now aver, that the folks at Sahara Reporters like to throw sand in the eyes of the Jonathan administration. To be fair, it is the professional duty of Sahara Reporters to throw sand in the eyes of the administration whenever it could, particularly where the administration is belligerent and hard of hearing on matters of grave national concern.

Last Tuesday, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan launched the Nigerian National Identity card to great expectations. The National Identity Card project has been long in the making. The first proposal for the National ID project was mooted in 1976, but various interests, including cultural and religious concerns, pressured the administration into abandoning the idea.

The Igbo have a rather pithy saying about fortuitous revelations. It is good, they say, that the wind blows now and then, or so that men too would know that the chicken has an anus. The chicken indeed does have an anus, and there is evidence of this in the Enugu Government House where an impeachment saga has opened up some funny chicken business.

I was on my way to Kigali in 1994, to report the brewing troubles in Rwanda, when the Ebola fever epidemic broke out in Zaire. Travelers were quarantined in the Kinshasha International Airport. All connecting flights to Kigali were cancelled. I contemplated the possibility of an Air Afrique flight to Arusha, in Tanzania, and from thence by car to Kigali.

Fifty of Africa’s Heads of states and governments arrived Washington DC, the US capital last week for a conference with the American president, Mr. Barack Obama. But the universe was indifferent – well not quite – it had a rather morbid sense of humor: Ebola was in the ai

Imagine this scenario: Boko Haram grows more sophisticated; more daring, recruits wider, establishes better training facilities, acquires deadlier arms and more potent military capacity, enough to subdue and carve out a wide swath of Nigeria from the Chad basin, to the Adamawa hills. It secures swaths of land from parts of Chad, parts of Cameroon, and parts of the Central African Republic, and it creates an effective new country in the very heart of Central West Africa. This scenario is not too far-fetched, and ought to worry Nigeria’s security analysts, because it seems to me that we have a new scale of a vast and unthinkable problem shaping from this insurgency.

I doubt very much that a majority of Nigerians are tuned in to the goings on at the National Conference. A lot of Nigerians still regard it with some distrust. For one, it was constituted without the consent or input of the voting public; the citizens of Nigeria.