FG and Umahi’s roads to hell – 2
By Dele Sobowale The Benin-Agbor-Asaba highway to sudden death symbolizes everything wrong with how the Federal Government and Minister David Umahi have been managing Nigerian roads. The horrors of that road are being replicated everywhere – as will be demonstrated shortly. Umahi obviously is the wrong man for one of the most important assignments. Nigeria’s […]
Budget 2025 political not economic document
Why Nigerian budgets often fail “Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle; every prayer reduces itself to this; Great God, grant that twice two be not four.” Ivan Turgenev, 1818-1883 VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, VBQ p 198. No Federal or, as far as I know, state budget since 1999 has been successfully implemented as […]
We must save Dangote Refinery at all costs
By Dele Sobowale “Our refinery has recorded 22 incidents of sabotage” — Dangote Nigerian history, since my return from the US in 1974, has always made me to thank God, that I not only read History as an elective subject as an undergraduate in the US; but, that the interest remains abiding. In fact, if I […]
Dangote versus others, time for FG mediators
By Dele Sobowale “Sacked workers: PENGASSAN threatens to picket Dangote Refinery” – Report, September 29, 2025 When Alhaji Dangote embarked on establishing the largest single train refinery in the world in Lagos, his intentions could not possibly have included fomenting trouble. He had more exalted aims like ending Nigeria’s perennial and intractable fuel scarcity; saving Nigeria […]
Two metaphors on public waste: Flyovers and tractors
By Dele Sobowale “Nothing is more wasteful than doing with great efficiency that which should not be done.” Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1993. For five years, after being confined to a wheelchair, I now feel strong enough to travel around Nigeria more often. Thus, in August, I was able to touch eight states. What I […]
Rice red alert before crisis consumes us
By Dele Sobowale “The time is a quarter to midnight” — Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009 Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution and Nobel Prize Winner in Agriculture in 1970 opened his address while receiving the prestigious award with those words. It catalyzed governments globally to take the issue of food security seriously. Nigeria briefly embraced it […]
