ONE of the premises on which former President Olusegun Obasanjo built his case to lead Nigeria in 1999, was that he wanted to finish his grand design for the country which handing over of power 20 years earlier, stopped him from concluding.

WHEN politicians are out for votes they can postpone problems, pretend to solve some and behave as if they no longer know what the issues are. The search for votes is too important to be left at the whims of labour, which threatened to disrupt the elections. It is time to play politics with the minimum wage.

THERE are enough reasons to be despondent if you have lived in these parts in the past 12 years. Elections have become more like circuses. They arrive and depart so quickly that we sometimes wonder whether they happened.

THE signs are more ominous particularly with the official approach of always reacting to events.THE mayhem that has laid parts of Akwa Ibom State to waste was preventable.

HOW important is competence in appointment of public officers, especially in assignments at ambassadorial levels? The Senate, the confirming authority for ambassadorial appointments, thinks competence belongs elsewhere.

JAPAN is not new to tsunamis. The first recorded one occurred on 28 November 684. The number of tsunamis in Japan totalled 195 over a 1,313-year period (to 1997). On the average, there is a tsunami every 6.73 years, the highest rate in the world.

THE indecisiveness of the Independent Electoral Commission, INEC, has ensured that two weeks to the elections, the list of candidates remains a conjecture. INEC Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega has admitted that a syndicate in INEC was fiddling with the list, he promised to handle the matter.

ARE we to take the Senate serious when it claimed while passing the Freedom of Information Bill, it was providing surplusage of freedom? The mere suggestion that there could be too much freedom and access to information is that the type of thinking that quickly tells us why the country will not make much progress soon.

THE scandal in whatever transpired between the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole and former US Ambassador to Nigeria, Ms Robin Sanders, is as much in what was reported as in the silence that has greeted the revelation.

TO be a billionaire in most of the world’s currencies, except those that are valueless, is a feat. When the figures are reckoned in dollars, they set the individuals apart and present for them challenges that are no longer ordinary.

WHAT will Nigeria make of the opportunities the crisis in the judiciary presents? It will be too presumptuous to think that the departure of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Aloysius Katsina-Alu and President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Salami will cure the judiciary of the allegations of corruption but it will be a good start.

CONTEMPT for the Code of Conduct which the political parties were supposed to sign, began with the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, releasing the document so late that it is irrelevant to the elections.

OUR leaders swear to protect our lives and property but like most of their promises, they fail at the critical moments. When there are crises, the weaknesses of our security and emergency structures are obvious.

NOBODY expects matters of security to be discussed in the open. When security is about elections in Nigeria, the need for secrecy is more. There are too many people interested in compromising security around the elections.

IT is so easy to condemn the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for celebrating the return from prison of Chief Olabode George, a former naval officer, on whom the PDP has hung its ambitious electoral plans for the South West, especially Lagos.