At first, Prof. Oladapo Ashiru, an experienced endocrinologist and joint pioneer of In-vitro Fertilisation (IVF) Research in Nigeria and the entire West African region, couldn’t comprehend the statement.

On June 12 1993, millions of Nigerians voted in the election adjudged to be the best ever conducted in the history of Nigeria.

Last week’s defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan’s choice of zone from where the Speaker for the House of Representatives should emerge is just one in a long list of confrontations from the North that he had had to contend with (see the list at the end of the story) But there is a planned response from the President. This is an exclusive report of the untold history of confrontations between the North as we knew it and Jonathan.

The latest threat by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta, MEND, to resume war in the Niger-Delta is a consuming personality battle between one of its leaders and other ex-militant leaders, who faciliated the current peace programme in the region.

The Yeye Oodua, Chief H.I.D Awolowo yesterday condemned what she considered to be an attempt to demystify the Awolowo family through a publication in a national newspaper (not Vanguard) titled ‘Awo family without an Awo’.

Lamentation song, pure and simple. The meeting was called to examine the failure of the North to stop President Goodluck Jonathan. But for a better part of the over two hours spent at the meeting, it was all about lamentation, about what ought to have been done but which was not done, things not meant to be done but which were done.

Only few Nigerians would have been spectacularly positioned as Chief Nduka Irabor, the former journalist who served a prison sentence for publishing an exclusive story to champion open access to official documents.

DISTURBED by the regularity at which bomb explosions are now rocking parts of the country and the attendant loss of avoidable lives and property, some eminent Nigerians have urged President Goodluck Jonathan to find solutions to the problem if he wants socio-economic development to take root in the country.

NIGERIA’s economic potential is well known. The country’s considerable resource endowment and coastal location ordinarily should allow the emergence of a strong growth pole for sub-Saharan Africa. Over the years, Nigeria has realised very little of this potential. Instead, its history has been marked by economic stagnation and associated with declining welfare and social instability.

Undoubtedly, Governor Babatunde Fashola’s first term administration of Lagos State remains a reference point for good governance in Nigeria’s current democratic dispensation.