A NUMBER of crises that threatened the ethnic and religious cohesion of Nigerians reared their ugly heads last week.  Apart from the “blasphemy” killing of Deborah Samuel in Sokoto and the gruesome burning of David Imoh in Lekki Lagos, a clash between traders and commercial motorcyclists (Okada) led to the “indefinite” closure of the Dei-Dei […]

WE welcome the decision of the Nigerian Railways Corporation, NRC, to suspend indefinitely its reported plan  to resume services on the Abuja-Kaduna rail line while scores of passengers abducted by bandit-terrorists remain unaccounted for. The circumstances that led to the abductions smacked of the typical sloppiness of our security setup. The bandit-terrorists have been allowed […]

IT is strange that the two plaintive appeals for the sidelining of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999 As Altered) have come from respected and eminent elders who are also seasoned constitutional lawyers. On April 23, 2022, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN) called for an interim government which would be asked to give […]

WHEN Nigeria’s power sector was privatised in 2013, there were expectations that the exercise will culminate in increased generation, transmission and distribution of electricity to consumers sector-wide. The reasons were not far to seek. First, it was widely expected that private investors that inherited the assets, including the 11 Electricity Distribution Companies, DisCos, had the […]

ORDINARILY, after 61 years of independence, Nigeria should have developed to the point where any citizen, irrespective of his or her ethnic, religious, sectional or ideological background, should be free to vie for the office of President or Vice President of Nigeria. If these primordial factors no longer mattered but merit and integrity, we would […]

APART from Boko Haram and the North West “Bandits”, armed herdsmen embedded in farmlands and forests all over the North Central and Southern parts of Nigeria constitute the biggest threats to our collective safety. Herdsmen, in times past, were harmless nomads who went about tending to their livestock. But since Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association […]

A WEEK ago, Nigerians were thrown off the euphoric mode of partisan politics when a group of students of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, lynched and burnt the body of Miss Deborah Samuel over alleged “blasphemy” of Islam and Prophet Muhammad, SAW. Not only that, hoodlums in Sokoto took to the streets, burning and […]

THE Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, ended his two-day official visit to Nigeria on May 3, 2022 with a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at Aso Villa. He had visited victims of terror – the Internally-Displaced Persons, IDPs, camps in Borno State, the epicentre of the Boko Haram jihadist terrorism. Guterres expressed […]

SOMETIMES, people at the helm of affairs portray Nigeria as an unserious and funny country. How else would one describe the ongoing political and impending Turkey jamborees while our children rust away at home due to the strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU? Shockingly, ministers who should be engaged in finding a […]

Editorial WE call on the Senate to drop the Bill which seeks to criminalise the payment of ransoms by victims of kidnapping or their relations. This piece of legislation does not add much value in efforts to curb the crime. The Senate has already passed an amendment of the Terrorism (Prevention) Act, 2013 which prohibits […]

WE are compelled to revisit the issue of zoning and power rotation, hoping that our political leaders will do the needful before it is too late. It is important to remind all Nigerians that zoning is not a mere flight of fancy to pacify agitators. It is a nation-building mechanism which any diverse and heavily […]

A SECTION of the youths of Ghana has demonstrated an exemplary conduct which is worthy of emulation by their Nigerian counterparts. They rejected bags of rice sent to them by their representatives, insisting on the job they were promised during campaigns. Though the event in question happened almost a year ago, the video of it […]

THE Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, retired Brigadier-General Buba Marwa, ruffled the feathers of politicians when he wrote the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, requesting drug tests on all aspirants of the party. Although he made it clear that the tests will also […]

MAY Day had its prehistoric roots in ancient Europe when it was a festival to mark the onset of summer. Its link to the workers movement had to do with the Haymarket riot on May 4, 1886 in Chicago, USA. Workers had peacefully gathered to demand for an eight-hour working day, but some anarchists exploded […]

FRIDAY, April 24, 2022, was a black day in Imo State and the country at large due to the explosion at an illegal refinery in Abaezi Community of Ohaji-Egbema Local Government Area of Imo State which claimed over 120 lives. The scale of the tragedy became obvious when videos of charred remains of the victims […]