IT was the ambition of Senator Liyel Imoke on Assumption of office to make Calabar, capital of Cross River State, one of the five leading destinations for meetings, conferences and conventions in the country. However, few months before his exit from office, his success in that regard would be measured by the fact that Calabar is today only third after Abuja and Lagos for MCCs in the country. That landmark is complemented by the fact that Calabar, the capital of Cross River is about the country’s number one destination for holidays and tourism.

Facts emerged, yesterday, suggesting that Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was grappling with problems which may have compelled it to postpone the February 14, 2015, presidential election, had the National Security Adviser, NSA, Colonel Sambo Dasuki, not publicly called on the electoral body to consider the option of postponement.

The travails of Nigerian born Secretary General of Organisation of African Trade Unions Unity, OATUU, Comrade Owei Lakemfa, have been ascribed to international conspiracy.

In 2009, a Canadian man in a well celebrated scam lost $150,000 to Nigerian Lottery Scam. John Rempel of Leamington, Ontario, got an email way back in July, 2007 from someone claiming to be a lawyer with a client named David Rempel who died in a 2005 bomb attack in London, England, and left behind $12.8 million dollars.

This chronic health worker shortage that has prevailed in public hospitals over the years in Lagos and Nigeria as a whole has steadily gone from bad to worse.

The last appears not to have been heard over the Enugu Catholic Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka’s new year message that President Goodluck Jonathan should forget re-election for lack of performance.

As the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) began the distribution of Permanent Voter Cards (PVC) preparatory to the February 14 general elections in Borno State, there has been an increase in the spate of bomb blasts and deadly attacks by insurgents.

Despite Nigeria’s efforts, the schemes have reached “epidemic proportions. A publication by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said the agency received more than fifty-five thousand complaints about them last year, nearly six times as many as in 2001. The increase is due in part to the Internet, which makes it easy for scammers to reach potential marks in wealthier countries. “If we educate the public to the point where nobody falls for it, then they’ll go out of business,” Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, the lead U.S. agency in investigating advance-fee frauds, says.

Based on the deep thinking by Professor Bolaji Akinyemi on the need for the presidential candidates to sign a pact for a violence free election, anyone who witnessed the orgy of violence and destruction that trailed the 2011 general elections in Nigeria would not hesitate to sign off on the Abuja Peace Accord sealed on Wednesday by 14 presidential candidates in the February elections.

Mr. Bharadia, after several complaints and directives to him to stop work, was said to have got top officials at the Army Barrack in Ikorodu, Nigerian soldiers and mobile Policemen and stationed them at the construction site, while he personally supervised the erection of the high tension wire. Staff of Isocare West Africa who attempted to take pictures of the erection of the high tension wire over Isocare were reportedly brutalized by mobile policemen.