THE Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis, CSM, season is here again. The hot season is a period to be apprehensive because this disease claims many lives almost every year. For instance, between December 2016 when that season’s outbreak started and May 2017, 1,166 deaths were recorded, mostly in the North.

ON Sunday, November  18, 2018, the campaigns for the 2019 general elections began in line with the guidelines and timetable issued by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

STEPS to end the obnoxious Osu caste system in Igboland appear to be gathering steam in a way never seen before. In September this year during the 1019th celebration of the New Yam Festival of Nri Kingdom (believed to be the birthplace of most Igbo groups), Eze Nri Enweleana II, Obidiegwu Onyesoh, abolished the system in his community. In July this year, it was abolished in Irete in Owerri, Imo State.

IN June 2019, the unconditional amnesty granted the ex-militants of the Niger Delta will be ten years old. The late President Umaru Yar’ Adua had in June 2009, listened to wise counsel and made this offer to the agitators destroying our economic assets in the Niger Delta in exchange for peace and their rehabilitation. This measure became so effective and popular that successive regimes continued to adopt it

ORGANISED Labour – the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC, led by Comrade Ayuba Wabba, and Comrade Joe Ajaero’s United Labour Congress, ULC – are floating on the euphoria of a historic achievement. They squeezed out a new National Minimum Wage of N30,000 without actually embarking on indefinite strike, burning down the economy and subjecting the people to untold hardship.

FOR once in a long while some diplomatic efforts to alleviate the sufferings of Nigerians living in foreign lands appear to be recording a heart-warming breakthrough. Shops and small businesses belonging to Nigerians – about 400 in all – shut by the Ghanaian authorities are gradually being reopened.

IN June this year the Federal Government announced its intention to introduce the “Trader Moni” scheme as part of its Social Investment Project, SIP.

ONE of the most frustrating attributes of the public service in Nigeria is the typical perfunctory attitude of officers to their jobs and lack of regard to the very members of the public they are employed to serve. This has again reared its head in the touted intention of the Federal Government to start implementing the mandatory use of the National Identification Number, NIN, as from January 1, 2019, less than 60 days away.

FOR the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU and other unions in the Nigerian tertiary education system, strikes have become almost annual rituals and culture since the end of the 1970s. Everybody who has gone through our public-funded university system suffered varying degrees of academic disruptions that negatively affected life during and after school.

THERE is a need for politicians holding high positions of public trust to think through their policies and programmes before making them public. Otherwise, the good intentions behind such policies could turn around and breed nightmares which will be difficult, if not impossible, to handle.

BY recovering the remains of the late retired Major General Idris Alkali in Lafande community in Jos, Plateau State, the Nigerian Army successfully carried out a grim mission to find one of its officers who disappeared on September 3, 2018, on his way from Abuja to Bauchi through Jos.

ABUJA residents woke up Monday, October  29, 2018, to scenes of utter chaos and pandemonium, as the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, IMN, or the Shi’ites and the Nigerian Army engaged in a bloody face-off in Karu and other suburbs of the Federal Capital Territory.

NOW, it is certain that of the nearly 100 political parties asking Nigerians to vote for them in 2019, two are in the forefront: the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, governing at the centre and in some states, and Peoples Democratic Party, PDP,  in opposition at the national level but in administration in some states.

NIGERIANS are getting sick and tired of the petty politics being played by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) over the execution of projects that have existed through the regimes controlled by both political parties.

NIGERIA’S longest-serving military ruler, General Yakubu Gowon, has aptly added his voice to the need for aspirants to political offices in 2019 (especially the presidential candidates of the two main parties – the All Progressives Congress, APC, and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP) – to accept the result irrespective of the outcome.