…How billions are spent without being accounted for
Last week would not be the first time that the Public Accounts Committee, PAC, of the Senate would unearth massive reckless spending on the part of the executive arm of government. Since 2001, that committee of the Senate had always investigated and reported that huge sums of money were being frittered away.

Obviously shaken and scared, the presidency, with an incumbent who already seemed to have burnt his fingers too early in the governing of Africa’ most populous, diverse nation, midway to the end of first tenure in 2015, he is at daggers drawn with perceived political opponents in the same party.

THE issue of fare disparity by foreign airline operating in Nigeria has once again come to the front burner as Nigerians who travelled recently on these foreign airlines complained bitterly about paying higher fares than their fellow passengers from Ghana, for instance, on the same flight.

OUR attention has been drawn to the Vanguard story of Thursday, April 25, 2012 entitled ‘Vision 20: 2020 target, not realisable – Minister’, which we view as a deliberate misrepresentation of the statement made earlier that day by the Minister of National Planning, Dr Shamsuddeen Usman, CON, while briefing the leadership of the Peoples’ Democratic Party on the 2012 achievements of his ministry.

Borno State is Nigeria’s self- acclaimed ‘Home of Peace’. That is the appellation. But you may not be wrong if you now describe it as ‘The Home of Ruins and Pieces’. The truth about the state is that it has become a theatre of a war unleashed by the Islamist group called Boko Haram. Insurgency has been the order of the day in the state, leaving in its trail bombings, shootings and deaths. When the residents are lucky, the death toll is low, but sometimes it can be high. Some analysts blame the problem on the international borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroun which they believe is porous as to allow Islamic extremists from the countries to enter the state at will.