We urge President Bola Tinubu to favourably consider the calls from various quarters for the release of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu without further delay. In recent weeks, the clamour for Kanu’s freedom has come from several sources. Ijaw leader and Chairman of the Pan Niger Delta Forum, […]

Minister of the Interior, Olubunmi Tunji Ojo, in a recent duty round, told reporters that the Federal Government was considering removing the Ikoyi Prisons and others like it located deeply in populated urban areas to new locations. This has sparked heated debates on the social media. Critics feel that government wants to move these correctional […]

Unless wise counsel prevails, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, may begin its threatened nationwide enforcement of its ban of sachet alcohol. This will be in total negation of the compromise brokered by the House of Representatives between the Agency and industry stakeholders in February 2024, whereby a five-year moratorium […]

Over the past one year, the Nigerian Customs Service, NCS, has quietly been undergoing radical changes, pushing close to the perfect picture of the Customs needed for the actualisation of the economic reform visions of the President Ahmed Bola Tinubu administration. In June 2023, Tinubu appointed Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, a former Spokesman of the Customs, […]

Chairman of the Dangote Refinery, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, recently disclosed how offshore “oil mafia” nearly grounded his effort to build the largest single-train refinery in Nigeria. According to him, these faceless groups strived to push his company into debt default which could have reduced the venture to the situation of Ajaokuta Steel, but for the […]

THE latest cholera outbreak in Nigeria erupted about a fortnight ago in several states of the Federation. These include Lagos, Cross River, Delta, Abia, Katsina, Imo, Nasarawa, Ogun, Oyo, and Zamfara and 20 other states. Earlier this week the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, reported 1,141 cases nationwide, with Bayelsa and Lagos states recording […]

In February this year, heads of relevant federal agencies such as the Ministry of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Nigerian Meteorological Agency, NIMET, and the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, gathered in Abuja and issued the Season Climate Prediction, SCP, or weather outlook for the year and their possible implications for agriculture, flooding, aviation and disaster […]

The only item of public interest in President Bola Tinubu’s Democracy Day 2024 speech was the steady move towards enacting a new national minimum wage law. The rest was mere run-of-the-mill. It contained very little of the challenges that our democracy faces and efforts to tackle them. The most outstanding of these is the controversy […]

Today, June 17, 2024, is Desertification and Drought Day, an international day set aside by the United Nations to draw attention to desertification and drought, two of the most threatening geographical situations which breed misery among the world’s populations. The day serves as a reminder for individuals, communities and governments to take action in order […]

Zamfara State remains the hotbed of bandit terrorism in Northern Nigeria. It was from here that bandits, consisting mainly of Fulani nomadic herdsmen who turned to crime, spread to nearby states such as Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger and the fringes of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Governor of the state, Dauda Lawal, was recently […]

WHAT do we do with our nomads and pastoralists, some of whom have become major perpetrators of insecurity in Nigeria? Some among the once peaceful occupational group has become armed and violent; massacring people, displacing communities all over Nigeria and seizing the lands of indigenous people who had allowed them to graze their livestock when […]

FOR the first time in Nigeria’s history, we have practised unbroken democracy for a quarter of a century. Since the movement of the seat of the Federal Government to Abuja in December 1991 by the military government of General Ibrahim Babangida, democracy has been given an uncommon impetus to flourish and bear the fruits romantically […]

Nigeria’s music sensation, Patrick Okorie, popularly known in the Afrobeat world as Patoranking, last week announced with justifiable glee, his graduation from the Harvard Business School, which is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts in the United State of America. He shared photos of himself posing with Professor Anita Elberse, a lecturer who received a special mention […]

Nigeria’s failure status is manifest in every direction. State failure simply means the inability of a country to maintain law and order, develop properly, protect its people and defend its territorial integrity. The strength of the armed forces, police, security and paramilitary organisations is not in their ability to harass and intimidate innocent and law-abiding […]

The Nigerian Judiciary is in a bad shape. This is not surprising, since the Judiciary is also a part of our terribly malfunctioning system. To identify where to start the reform of the Nigerian society from, we must return to the mantra the late former Justice of the Supreme Court, Anthony Aniagolu, always trumpeted: “To […]