After three years on the saddle, Governor Ibikunle Amosun recently went on a circuit of the 20 local government areas of the state. It was couched as an assessment tour, but given the resonance of politics in the polity it was not surprising that many stakeholders took the tour to be a political venture aimed at shoring support for the governor’s re-election bid.

THERE is understandable concern in the country about the drop in crude oil prices over the last several weeks. From a figure of $104 per barrel on August 1, 2014, the OPEC basket of prices collapsed to about $82 per barrel on October 28, 2014. The basket of prices used by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is the average price of all the varieties of crude sold in the international market.

Activities of operators of illegal refineries have been blamed for the drastic drop in crude oil production. Illegal refining and crude theft have grown beyond the Niger Delta. To stop the trend, several billions of Naira has been expended to secure pipelines and fight oil bunkerers.

Suffering, indeed, is an equalizer in the human experience. It knows neither rich nor poor, religion nor ethnicity.

In what now appears to be an ego problem for Professor Atahiru Jega, National Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, his messianic pursuit of the lopsided allocation of 30,000 Polling Units, PUs, fresh strong signals suggest that his ability to deliver on successful general elections next year may be suffering a massive discount on account of the many deceptive postulations that he recently made on the matter.