Pat Utomi narrated the thoughts, the people and the circumstances that persuaded him to run for the Delta State governorship election under the platform of All Peoples Congress, APC. Utomi was rightly warned by his friend, Dr. Asoluka, who prophetically described APC as a political party with “a flock of scoundrels.”

The old adage is that   “nothing is small or big otherwise by comparison.”

Indeed, time it was when: .Our Naira was stronger than the Dollar. At some point in the past it was 95k (less than N1) to $1, but now it is N365 to $1.

Introduction : In 2008, Mr. Klaus P. Wachsmuth, the German Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nestle Nigeria Plc told me and Ikechukwu Eze, two BusinessDay Senior Correspondents then, in an exclusive interview that “nobody has the right to treat his country the way Nigerians treat their country.” Mr. Wachsmuth later sought to keep that statement out of what was going to be published, probably because he felt he shouldn’t have interfered in the internal affairs of his host country.  But Mr. Wachsmuth was absolutely right.

THE major difference between 1993 and 2018 is that we have a generation that has lost its sense of outrage. Whereas in 1993, I, as the top executive of a multinational, felt personally insulted by the annulment and wrote an op-ed piece in The Guardian titled We Must Say Never Again which forced middle-class professionals to rally and we founded the Concerned Professionals that mounted opposition to military rule; today’s people of my equivalence in 1993 are on Twitter and Facebook making jokes about happenings guaranteed to ensure that they and their children will have a more miserable experience of a future foretold.

Unemployment rate in Nigeria has grown from 17.5 per cent at the onset of democracy in 1999 to 23.1 per cent in 2018.

As the orgy of violence and insecurity continues to sweep through most of the states in the North-West, different measures have been put in place in order to curtail the menace of kidnapping, banditry, rustling and marauding.

On Monday, May 6, Nigeria took a step further to polish its anti-money laundering reputation before the global community when the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) issued ‘Guidelines to Reduce Vulnerabilities Created by Cash Withdrawals from LG Funds throughout Nigeria’.

Mother of the three children abducted by bandits who raided Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School Moriki, Zamfara State, on May 2, yesterday, accused the state government of failing to intervene in payment of  the N1.5m ransom demanded by the kidnappers.

Everything went into it. Emotions, lobbying and ultimately politics. Those played a key role in the passage of the South East Development Commission Bill, SEDC to second reading at the House of Representatives Thursday.

The second key factor of the project is the scope of its beauty and modernity. The sheer joy of watching, before our very eyes, Chinese and Nigerian engineers ploughing through thick and swampy equatorial forests, cutting down giant vegetation, and painstakingly laying state-of-the-art rail sleepers with skill and dexterity, and then proceeding to roll out air-conditioned passenger coaches in a record two year time was a sight to behold.

I do not profess to have superior knowledge of issues involved in the management of business in Nigeria, but as a businessman, I will make effort to share practical insights from my experience of managing a business in our dear country in the past decades. I expect that through that, we shall see some of the challenges of doing business in Nigeria and at the same time, appreciate the prospects that they provide for us.

The direct impulse to the writing of this piece came from six separate inspections trips of the new 158.5km, double-track Standard Gauge railway line from Ibadan to Lagos which is about to be flagged off for use in May.

When Mr. Godwin Emefiele was appointed Governor of the Central bank of Nigeria (CBN), five years ago, he assumed office with a focus- to run “a people oriented CBN.” 

I have read the interview granted by the Chief Executive Officer and Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, which was given a copious mention in the May 6, 2019 edition of The Nation.

With respect to the presidential electoral campaigns, ethnic associations vociferously expressed support for their preferred candidates.  However, the support of the associations featured contradictory positions taken by either factions within some ethnic associations or by competing associations in the name of the same ethnic group. Thus, for example, in the South-west (predominantly Yoruba), Afenifere (“authentic”) supported Atiku while the branches of the association in Lagos and Ekiti states supported Buhari. Similarly, in the South-east (predominantly Igbo), the national executive of Ohaneze Ndigbo supported Atiku while the national secretary of the association and some prominent members supported Buhar