EVERY crisis provides an opportunity for useful lessons to prevent future crises. This age-old fountain of wisdom, however, seems alien to Nigerian leaders. Nigeria is enmeshed in unending crises because we repeatedly demonstrate our incapacity to learn from our ugly historical experiences. The recent shooting to death of a newspaper vendor, Ifeanyichukwu Okereke, by a […]

WE are on the same page with President Muhammadu Buhari who, in a recent tweet, warned that the Nigerian economy is too fragile to contemplate another lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. The president had sent the tweet on October 29, 2020. The Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 led by the Secretary to the Government […]

THOUGH Nigeria has fared much better than had been predicted, the Presidential Task Force on the COVID-19 pandemic, PTF, and the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control,  NCDC, have continued to routinely warn of the possibility of another lockdown. The government of Lagos State, which has carried the main burden of the pandemic caseloads in Nigeria, […]

THE movement of petrol pump price to N170 per litre is, again, threatening to rupture our economic and industrial harmony. This followed the hike by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, of the wholesale price of PMS from N147 to N155. What it means is that between June and November this year, Nigerians have been […]

THE Kogi State Government trended in the social media recently when reports had it that Governor Yahaya Bello had imposed levies on every loaf of bread baked in the state. Many comments derided the governor, wondering if this was his own idea of “thinking out of the box” to shore up the state’s internally generated […]

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari’s directive for sale of the forfeited assets recovered from proceeds of corruption and looting of public treasuries should present an opportunity for a transparent and accountable exercise. A 22-member Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Disposal of the Federal Government of Nigeria Forfeited Assets empanelled on October 27, 2020, headed by the Solicitor General […]

WE are absolutely overjoyed at the announcement by the world’s foremost military power – the United States of America – of an offer for a coalition against terrorism in Nigeria and the West Africa sub-region. The State Department, which broke this cheery news on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, said the Global Coalition to Defeat the […]

THE recent conviction of some Nigerians living in the United Arab Emirates, UAE, for funding Boko Haram Islamist terrorism came as cheering news to well-meaning Nigerians. We are not used to achieving similar results in Nigeria since the insurgency started eleven years ago. The convicts bagged sentences ranging from life imprisonment to ten years behind […]

ON Monday, November 2, 2020,  leaders from the 19 states of the defunct Northern Region met at the Sir Kashim Ibrahim House, Kaduna, and offered their response to the recent #EndSARS protest and subsequent breakdown of law and order. The group made up of prominent political leaders, top Federal Government office-holders, governors, traditional rulers and […]

For the second time this year alone, the United States of America constituted a stumbling block to the aspirations of eminently qualified Nigerians to lead major international organisations. First, it was Dr Akinwunmi Adesina, whose second term bid as President of the African Development Bank, AfDB, was rejected by the US. America had opposed Adesina […]