IT came as cheering news when the Minister of Environment, Mrs Laurentia Mallam, announced the Federal Government’s N19 billion funding for the control of erosion under the Nigerian Erosion and Watershed Management Project (NEWMAP).

THE initial announcement by the Minister of Education, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau that all schools nationwide should resume on October 13th 2014 over the Ebola Viral Disease outbreak had sparked off a wave of reactions, with stakeholders in the private schools sector coming out heavily against it.

THE recent decision by the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) to increase the number of polling units across the country was conveyed as an attempt to ease the voting procedure. It was aimed to shorten the queue of voters during accreditation and voting on election days.

WHEN President Goodluck Jonathan pledged to elevate the Dr. Akanu Ibiam Airport, Enugu and the Dr. Sam Mbakwe Airport, Owerri international cargo airports, the people of the South East Zone were overjoyed.

IT has become abundantly clear that the best way to approach the curtailment of the Ebola Viral Disease (EVD) outbreak is to organise a combined regional effort against it. It is time that an emergency session of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in tandem with other vulnerable countries in the Central Africa zone, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and our immediate eastern neighbour, Cameroon, is held.

IT took a long time, but at last, the Lagos State Government has taken an active interest in the long standing neglect of the rail network in the Apapa axis, the nation’s number one economic gateway. Governor Raji Fashola went with a high powered delegation of his cabinet to inspect the abandoned work yard of the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) at Marine Beach, Apapa recently.

Just when we were bracing up to shout: Hurrah, that we, as a nation, have been able to contain the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak, the Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, made the heart-dampening announcement, last Thursday, that another Ebola death had occurred in Port Harcourt, the Rivers state capital.

IT is more than eight months since four reportorial staff members of popular Middle-East based Al Jazeera Network were arrested, detained, tried and jailed by the authorities in Egypt for allegedly broadcasting false news and conspiring with the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

TODAY and the whole of this weekend will witness the funeral obsequies of a great Nigerian, an amazon and uncommon public servant, whose exploits in the past fourteen years were unlike any other ever witnessed in our shores.

AFTER five hectic months, the 492-member National Conference set up by President Goodluck Jonathan, completed their assignment with the submission of a 22-volume report consisting of 10,335 pages and 600 resolutions to the president.

THE declaration of an Islamic Caliphate by Abubakar Shekau’s Boko Haram over the town of Gwoza in southern Borno State and other areas it is currently occupying in the North East is a clarion call for decisive action by the government and people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

WE wish to add our voice to the growing clamour for the honouring of the late medical staff of First Consultants Medical Centre, Lagos, who paid the supreme prize after treating the Liberian-American, Patrick Sawyer, the man who deliberately brought the Ebola Viral Disease (EVD) to Nigeria.

THE greatest threat facing the nation’s war against the Boko Haram and other Islamist insurgents has to do with the unprecedented acts of sabotage that the national assignment is facing. Never at any other time in the history of Nigeria had the army been so bedeviled by internal and external undermining of efforts to rid the country of terrorists and other enemies of her unity and progress.

THE decision by the federal government to terminate the appointment of striking doctors in its employ following their obduracy not to end the strike they started since July 1, 2014, is as condemnable as the strike itself.

NIGHT travels have been with us since economic activities and exchanges between one part of the country and the other evolved. It intensified in the 1990’s and well into the new millennium when luxury buses became truly more luxurious enough to attract members of the middle class, who felt safer travelling on land than by air.