TODAY, January 15, 2019, is Nigerian Armed Forces Remembrance Day. It is a special day set aside for sober reflections on the significance of the Armed Forces to Nigeria.

The resurgence of Boko Haram in the North-East is, indeed, an insidious threat to the territorial integrity of Nigeria. For the past three years, the All Progressives Congress, APC-led Federal Government, the Borno State Government and the Nigerian Army, had insisted that Boko Haram no longer occupied territory in Nigeria.

The convention in the past was for the INEC Chairman to come from a region other than that of the incumbent president. With Yakubu and a close relation of the President, Zakari, calling the shots within the Commission, the independence of INEC under the Buhari dispensation came into serious question.

The Nigerian Army’s brief siege to the premises of the Media Trust Newspapers in Abuja and Maiduguri on Sunday January 6, 2019, was another worrisome show of increased martial visibility in the nation’s normal daily lives in a democratic environment.

THE states of the North-East and North-West geopolitical zones are among the poorest in the Federation, with the lowest profiles in education and human development indices. The 2018 National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, indicates that eight out of the top ten poorest states are from there: Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Katsina, Adamawa, Jigawa, Gombe and Bauchi States.