IT was such a horrendous scene that I couldn’t get over for some time. I left home for work that fateful day, looking forward to an eventful day.

A POPULAR Nigerian local parlance says if there are too many fragment in gari (cassava flour), the blind would get to know. This has become the lot of Nigerians with the 2016 Federal government budget brouhaha. First, Nigerians were alarmed shortly after the formal presentation of the N6.3 trillion budget by President Muhammad Buhari, then the budget was missing!

DEMOGRAPHICALLY, the Itsekiri people constitute a minute minority – a kind of microcosm in a macrocosm in the geo-political and heterogeneous nation called Nigeria. The history and origin of the Itsekiri people like other tribal groupings in the Old Western region of Nigeria, remains unambiguously lucid.

It would be recalled that in December 2015, NERC introduced the Multi-Year Tariff Order to come into effect on February 1, 2016. The tariffs are intended to be cost-reflective over a 10-year period. The new regime also removed fixed charges for all classes of electricity consumers in the country. Since the news broke on Monday, the fundamental question that industry watchers have been asking is whether the parliament has the constitutional or statutory power to direct the suspension of implementation of an order made by a statutory agency.

In many discussions, a target to create 3 million jobs was promised, to ensure the bulging youth population is engaged in productive activities. If various estimates are to be believed, approximately 5 million Nigerians come into the workforce annually, yet in the same period, the country struggles to create more than 1.5 million jobs. This is why unemployment and underemployment in Nigeria are now 9.9% and 17.4% respectively.

THE late General Murtala Mohammed was an enigma. An iconoclast: The stories of icons have no end. At every beginning, there is an end and at every end, there is a beginning. Hence every year, since the callous murder of this ebullient Nigeria’s former military ruler, the accounts of his dos and don’ts have been ceaseless.

TO the doctor who performed miracles with his hands. To the father who performed miracles with his heart and dedication. To the brother who performed miracles with his love. To the professor who performed miracles with his words. To the uncle who performed miracles with his smiles. To the survivor who showed miracles in his testimony…

This week I joined more than a dozen of the world’s sharpest minds on African agriculture in an unprecedented effort to devote an entire issue of the influential magazine Foreign Affairs to consider the future of the African farmer in our digital age. I wanted to establish one simple fact: agriculture is poised to drive […]

This is the second instalment of this piece which was first published yesterday. In that edition, the author said he was impressed by some of the landmark achievements of some of the former Boards of the NDDC.

“A group of between 5,000 and 10,000 people converged on the local police station in the township of Sharpeville, offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their passbooks. The Sharpeville police were not completely unprepared for the demonstration, as they had already been forced to drive smaller groups of more militant activists away the previous night.

SOME thirty years or so ago, Fela had a hit song titled, ‘Beast Of No Nation’ in which he sang, “I never hear that before o, make government talk o, my people are useless, my people are senseless, my people are indisciplined. Which kind talk be that o…?”

YOUR Excellency, your path to the presidency has been long with many twists and turns.

None of us can fully comprehend what you have gone through the past twelve years to reach the current exalted position of the President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Knowing what you believe and what you represent, we supporting you from the sidelines can only feel that your presidency signals an unlikely rebirth of our country. Much has transpired to create the space for this political moment in our country’s history.

WITH the urgent task of resettling the more than two million refugees, mostly women and children on his mind, and at hand, the more urgent one of rebuilding damaged infrastructure such as roads, bridges,clinics, schools as a requirement for their return to their communities, President Buhari leaves for the middle-east on a wee tour of three friendly countries.

Penultimate Monday, while receiving a delegation of the International board of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara articulated what many had long suspected to be the position of both chambers of the eighth National Assembly on the controversial Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).

“The majority of consumers do so due to economic hardship especially the youths who want to always feel high as they lack work to do.