I WATCHED, the town hall meeting organised by the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria to debate the planned removal of fuel subsidy, on television. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala, Minister for Finance, presented government’s position on the need to remove the subsidy. Her scholarly and studious visage conveyed the aura of expertise and credibility.

The draft 2012 budget presented to the Osun State House of Assembly by the Ogbeni Governor is the first to be presented, conceptualized and formulated by the Action Congress of Nigeria government in the state. Fiscal discipline and performance planning represent a central thrust in the conceptualization of the budget.

Every year, Nigeria budgets billions of Naira to finance all round national development, especially in the economic, political and social spheres. In this year’s budget, the Federal Government has proposed to spend N4.749 trillion. Whether this will translate to significant development, at the end of the day, is another kettle of fish, as implementation has always been a big problem.

For a wide majority of Nigerians, the subject matter of corruption has been the bane of development in the country. It is also true that almost every government in the country, especially since the return of democratic rule in 1999, has been mouthing anti-corruption initiatives as a policy of government.

The present arguments being canvassed by antagonists of the transformation in the petroleum sector is premised among other things, on the fact that many African countries subsidise petrol for their citizens. At the risk of sounding harsh, I dare say that this argument is a classic case of half truth.

.AT the formation of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in1998, only few pundits gave the party a chance at sustaining the emerging democratic culture in Nigeria. Twelve years later the nation is set on the longest and most stable era of her democratic history. Most of the credit for this goes to the PDP

ON September 15, 1963, during the American civil rights movement, the American terrorist group Ku Klux Klan, which uses twisted Christian language to support its racist ideology, set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where civil rights activists often congregated. The bomb killed four little girls coming out of their Sunday school class and wounded 22 other people.

FIVE years ago, the CIA predicted that in about 10 years ,Nigeria would cease to be a united country, or that it might simply become a “failed state.” Back then, many of us dismissed the prediction as conjecture, mere Western opinion. We even went as far as calling it a form of prejudice against Nigeria.

BRING them Home -Nigerian Knowledge Workers (NKW) – Worldwide! For more than 7 decades, they have been lining up for travel and immigrant Visa at the dead of the Night. In their millions, they travel by Air, sea and land through the deadliest Deserts of the world.

INTERESTINGLY, Government will continue to cater for the schools’ staff salaries, while the Missions will be in charge of general administration.

THERE are three levels of high fraud that the removal of subsidy will tackle. The first is fraudulent payment on phoney import of PMS. The product is fraudulently certified as imported into Nigeria but is actually diverted to other countries in West Africa.

It is a novel initiative; a multi-sectoral model predicated on the internationally-acclaimed Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] of Eradication of Extreme Poverty & Hunger, Gender Equality & Women Empowerment, Reduction of Child Mortality, Boost to Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other Diseases, Environmental Sustainability and Global Partnership in Development.

Heroes are sometimes helped by the mood of their age. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, emerged on the national scene at a time Nigerians thought they were long past the era when a few politicians thought the voice of the people did not matter with regard to who their leaders should be.

DEMOCRACY guarantees freedom of expression to the individual. On that score it is impossible, when the going is tough for the nation, to ask any blabber to shut up. We may, therefore, not request that Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, an erstwhile Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, should stop ventilating his ill-digested and inchoate viewpoint on the currently challenging issue of the removal of oil subsidy.

“The newest member of the UN family was born today,” Mr. Ban told the Assembly after it passed the resolution setting up the new UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. “This is truly a watershed day,” he declared.