THE Nigerian military and the security agencies would wish to forget 2014 because of the strange, nightmarish experiences they went through. It was a year things became so bad that people wondered aloud if this was the mighty military that fought the civil war, effortlessly put down other insurrections and became the reliable guard of troubled countries in the West African sub-region and beyond. In the past 50 years, our troops have been in high demand internationally and they always returned with accolades.

SEVERAL reactions have trailed the report of the PricewaterhouseCoopers forensic audit of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, which resulted from the allegation of unremitted $49.8bn that former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi made. Mallam Sanusi at various points reviewed the figure to $10.8bn, $12bn and $20bn. The Federal Government was accused of delaying the audit. Some had concluded the report would never be made public.

BY its admission, more than one million permanent voters’ cards have been stolen from the Indepen-dent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which prefaces this story with the trite line that the cards are useless since only their authentic owners could use them. INEC should get wiser as the thefts continue.

WHAT do we do when robbery suspects question society’s morality? We dismiss them as justifying their crime. We found this incident and its knocks on our laws profound. Garba Sani, 24, a private guard accused of robbery, and Okwudili Godwin, 30, said to have received the stolen goods, gave reporters a treatise on commonness of crimes in Nigeria.

Sierra Leone said on Wednesday it was seeing a spike in Ebola infections, blaming unsafe burials that threaten to undermine the recovery from the deadly epidemic.