IT is with great regret and sadness that we pay our humble tribute to a media colossus, astute businessman, industrialist, administrator, suave member of the power elite and highly esteemed friend of the Vanguard family, the late Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua. Funtua’s sudden passage on Monday, July 20, 2020, aged 78, came as a painful […]

WITH the advent of the coronavirus pandemic which occasioned over six weeks of near-total lockdown of Nigeria, the citizenry was forced to turn to mobile data as a means of coping with the outbreak and advancing their economic and social livelihoods behind closed doors. Nigerians, like their peers in other parts of the world, adopted […]

IT is hardly surprising that some highly-placed individuals have reportedly been disregarding protocols deployed by the Ministry of Aviation to ensure safe air travel in Nigeria amidst the still burgeoning coronavirus pandemic. The reopening was considered necessary in order to resuscitate the economy. Three major such incidents have been reported in the Abuja, Port Harcourt […]

ON Monday, July 20, 2020,  Olubunmi Tunji Ojo, the former Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee probing the alleged financial malfeasance in the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, set what should be the gold standard in all cases of alleged involvement in misconducts involving public finance. At the venue of the probe, Ojo was […]

PERHAPS the most ambitious mass-employment programme in the history of this country has just kicked off. The tweet by the Federal Government on Tuesday, July 14, 2020 that the programme had started effectively overrode the earlier purported suspension of the Special Public Works, SPW, which the Joint Committee of the National Assembly on Labour had […]

IT is cheering news that the hundreds of Nigerian-owned businesses earlier shut in Ghana are being reopened after over six months of closure. This might be part of a gradual easing of months-long tensions between the two West African Anglophone countries over trade disputes and a diplomatic spat, with Ghana more on the offensive. These […]

WE stand firmly on the same page with the Federal Government that schools should not be reopened for now. Reopening schools at this juncture of the coronavirus pandemic is a romance with disaster. After a recent meeting of the Federal Executive Council, the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, announced that it was suspending plans […]

WE are mollified by the steps the Republic of Ghana has so far taken to vitiate the latest act of diplomatic hostility towards Nigeria through the demolition of buildings in the compound of the Nigerian High Commission in Accra. Some weeks ago, an agent of the Osu Traditional Council in Accra went to Nigeria’s diplomatic […]

NIGERIA’s latest broadcasting regulatory framework, which the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission, NBC, released to the industry and general public on May 27, 2020, is a mish-mash of defective thinking, with a potential to leave the industry and the wider economy worse off. Prefaced with the rote claim of a desire to make the industry more robust […]

THE Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, this week renewed its call for the reopening of worship centres in Lagos and Ogun states which remained shut on the orders of the state governors despite the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19’s earlier easing of the closure. The two states are among the highest-risk areas in the federation. […]