THE Bank Verification Number, BVN, is an-other important step the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, is using to strengthen the security of banking transactions and to ensure that fraudulent transactions are minimised, if not totally eliminated. The campaign is on, but the public may not realise its importance until it closes in June 2015.

WE expect the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria, FAAN, should know the importance of its business of managing airports. Why is it unconcerned over incidents that make airports unavailable for use because either its workers are on strike, or they are taking the laws into their hands by stopping airlines from operating?

TWO ignored factors that emphasise governments’ insensitivity to Nigerians – overwhelmingly unacceptable sanitary conditions and the abysmally low levels of access to medical services – have helped in the ricocheting cholera outbreaks.

MORE than two years of legislative work, expectations of millions of Nigerians and the new directions of democratic growth that the proposed constitutional amendment would have produced are about to be wasted.

THE world watched in horror at the violence in South Africa, targeted at foreigners in several cities. Gangs of weapons-wielding youth descended on hapless foreigners, killing, maiming and destroying their property. Shops and restaurants were looted, and in most cases, these went on with law enforcement agents seeming to derive some pleasure from watching.

THE impeachment saga in Ekiti State is a political culture that escalated during the eight year reign of General Olusegun Obasanjo that might as well have been an extension of military rule.

TAMUNOEMI Sokari David-West’s fame as Professor of Virology at the University tends to obscure his involvement in politics where his services as Commissioner for Education (Rivers State), Minister of Petroleum, and Minister of Mines, Power and Steel, all under military regimes, are well known. He is one of those tipped for cabinet membership in the in-coming government.

NIGERIANS and their democracy are unique. If elsewhere people delight in the capacities of their government to deepen their liberties, broaden opportunities, our democracy is delivered as structures, visible and tangible. We call them dividends of democracy.

NOW that the 2015 general elections have gone, save for the few States where the results were declared “inconclusive”, it is appropriate to assess the performance of the electoral regulator and umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which Professor Attahiru Jega heads.

AS dates go, 10 November 2012 may not have a place in our political history, but it was the day the House of Representatives held simultaneous peoples’ public sessions in Nigeria’s 360 federal constituencies – they all started at 10am.

POLITICIANS live for themselves. Conviction is not a value to associate with people, whose professed ambition is to access power, and its expansive opportunities, minding neither costs nor consequences. Nothing is new in the speed with which politicians change camp in their search for relevance in the new governments that would be formed.

IF you passed the Oshodi-Apapa Expressway in the last two weeks, you would recognise it. The tankers were gone, the beauty of the repaired road was visible and a trip to Apapa and parts thereof, did not take eternity.

THE mounting excitement about the results of the 2015 elections hardly leave room to consider any encumbrances to the change that has been promised since the herald of that buzz that at the beginning seemed like one of those slogans that manage to exist till the end of the campaign

THE change Nigerians need in their politics has started under out-going President Goodluck Jonathan. In an unprecedented but highly commendable spirit of sportsmanship and patriotism, he called the winner of the presidential election, Maj-Gen Muhammadu Buhari, admitted defeat, and congratulated him, more than eight hours before the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced the official result.

WE are in the final hurdles of the 2015 elections. They are, however, as important as the presidential and National Assembly polls held on March 28. Elections to offices in the States affect our people more, but the skewed politics of looking up to Abuja for everything, sometimes tend to de-emphasise the importance of the States.