HOW time flies! Three years ago, precisely on the 30th of June 2013, Delta State and the entire nation lost to the world beyond, one of the brightest, foremost and accomplished politician in the person of Senator Akporokena Pius Ewherido. He was the representative of Delta Central Senatorial District in the Nigerian Senate.

A PROGRAMMEramme on Channels TV recently highlighted the awfully negative effect of vandalisation of gas pipelines, nationwide, on the poor state of electricity generation and distribution in Nigeria.

THE sordid scepter of scapegoatism is very rife in the Nigerian political landscape. Some of the symptoms of this malady include: relentlessly blowing things out of proportion, latching unto imaginary paranoia, and turning an innocuous injunction into an acrimonious debate.

WE were recently riveted by allegations of sexual misconducts levelled against three Nigerian lawmakers by the United States Ambassador to Nigeria, James Entwistle. In a letter to the Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives,

THE recent judgment of the Osun High Court that ruled in favour of the use of hijab (head scarf) by Muslim female students in the public secondary schools has brought the state under focus in the last two weeks. This judgment has attracted numerous comments, remarks, opinions and even personal biases of individuals. In nearly all of these commentaries – some informed, others partisan and jaundiced – the kernels of the point of discussion are either misunderstood or cast away by the writers.

WHEN it comes to television broadcasting, Nigeria is expected to plunge fully into the digital terrain, Digital Switch Over, by 17th June 2017; and the implications are many. First, it is going to be an entirely different reality for the television industry. Second, television broadcasting will be so much magnified that only the best can survive.

WHY did our Honourable Minister for Power, Works and Housing agree to take up that portfolio when it ought to have been obvious to him that the job would be too onerous for any one individual, given our present realities?

FOR those schooled in the art of faith, nothing is impossible. We have seen desert lands turned to lush vegetable lands in the states of Israel and Lebanon. We have seen Singapore with no visible mineral resource become a first world country and there are many examples. Why are we finding it difficult to turn our negative situations into positives?

JUST before mass ended on Sunday at an outpost of St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Eziowelle, the hometown of Francis Cardinal Arinze, the priest invited a young man to make an announcement. The fellow said he had come from the Justice Development and Peace Commission, JDPC, to propagate the corporal works of the Year of Mercy.

The issue, I understand, is the flaunting of religious markers in public educational institutions. Let me begin by confessing that I envy the French to whom those choices have only been recently thrust to the fore – they have always been with us in Nigeria.