MY presidential ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian.”So said President Goodluck Jonathan before the 2011 presidential ballot. To this day, he has continued to reiterate his pacifist message.

TO the memories of our founding fathers and the visionary leadership of Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, February 17, 1966 remains a landmark date for all of us.

LAST week, all the Local Government Areas chairmen and chairwomen celebrated their first 100days in office, the first of the kind for Delta State under Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan’s eight years on the saddle.

NIGERIANS are found all over the world. We must be one of the greatest migratory people on planet earth. Added to this is our acclaimed intelligence in almost every field of human endeavour; for there is always a Nigerian ranking very high up in one field or the other somewhere in the world. Unfortunately,inspite of this truth, the perception is that we have used our intelligence more on the negative than the positive.

NIGERIA’S body-politick is currently befuddled by a cacophonous preponderance of Boko Haram’s insurgency, Niger Delta militancy, politicians’ s kullduggery, psychotically corrupt leadership, hate speeches, military interlopers, economic bastardisation, INEC’s tergiversation, grandiloquent poverty and Buhariánd Jonathans ventriloquism. Can any nation remain as one united sovereign and indivisible body with these kinds of protean contretemps? NO!

ONE would naturally feel proud to share the same Alma Matar with the All Progressives Congress (APC) gubernatorial candidate for Lagos State, Akinwunmi Akinbode. It is even double in our case because we were not only school mates at the Federal Government College, Warri but also at the University of Lagos, where he was my senior.

I HAVE taken time to read several times over the reported apology tendered to the people of Edo state by Pastor OsagieIze-Iyamu, a defected member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Edo state, for allegedly being in the vanguard which drafted Comrade Adams Oshiomhole into the gubernatorial race under the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in the state in 2007.

IT is deeply disappointing to see what has become of Turkey in the last few years. Not long ago, it was the envy of Muslim-majority countries: a viable candidate for the European Union on its path to becoming a functioning democracy that upholds universal human rights, gender equality, the rule of law and the rights of Kurdish and non-Muslim citizens.

Finally, the PricewaterhouseCoopers Forensic Audit Report draws the curtains on the fifteen-month drama in which the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was docked in the court of public opinion.

NIGERIA’S 2015 Presidential election campaigns are getting murkier and murkier by the day and indeed disappointingly personal and vain. There is too much mudslinging and little or no enlightenment. Currently, loud and mischievous questions are being raised by the ruling party and its agents about Buhari’s qualification to lead the country. If they are not saying that he is too old for the job, they are telling us that Buhari cannot possibly be healthy enough for the task.

IF any one prophesied to APC kingpins of ‘Change’ this time last December, that they would still be involved in planning to win the 2015 elections,by end of February this year, they would have responded with ‘get thee behind me Satan’ to such a prophecy. But as we say in typical pidgin English: ‘cunning man die, cunning man buri am’. The Igbos say that you cannot be taller than me and the same time shorter than me.

AFTER reading the interview of Francis Ehwerido in the Vanguard of ThursdayFebruary 19 2015 on the unending controversy surrounding the Uvwiamughe Declaration (Delta: Where the UPU erred), I could not but conclude that the Delta State governorship race has inadvertently been reduced to a one-horse race, instead of the three-horse race it is expected to be.

THE recent happenings in the Ebonyi State House of Assembly needs to be examined critically because of its political and constitutional implication and the danger it poses to the principles of separation of power as contained in the 1999 constitution as amended under our nascent democratic dispensation.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way”.– John C. Maxwell DELTA STATE has been described as a mini-Nigeria. This assertion stems from the fact that she is endowed with five major ethnic groups with divergent nationalities but similar culture and traditions. The Aniomas are mostly Ibo- speaking […]

SOMEONE recently placed on the table an impossible proposition. She said to do a comparative analysis of President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari! Among her interlocutors, the suggestion instantly elicited an argument. How does one compare day and night? Is not the former resplendent light and the latter pitch darkness?