In recent weeks, the city of Lagos has been all but taken over by water. Floods accumulated from days of rainfall have found their way into places they ought not to be- mostly inside people’s residences. Kilometers of roads have been washed away, returning the nightmares to the affected roads. Electricity supply has been cut off in several places, resulting in unforeseen human misery- a tad worse than that with which we have become familiar.

The rusty community of Amauzu Nkpoghoro village in Afikpo North Local Government Area of Ebonyi State was in the news last week for the wrong reason.

The world converged in Oslo on 24th February 2017 in solidarity with the people of the Northeast of Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin region who were, until recently, under the threat of Boko Haram annihilation. The conveners of the Oslo meeting, who put the figure of Nigerians living in the affected areas as no fewer than 26 million, underscored the gravity of the situation.

The book tour of Professor Okey Ndibe across six Nigerian cities has indeed been very engrossing – an irresistible force, more like. The personable Ndibe has on offer his second novel Foreign Gods, Inc., and his memoir Never Look an American in the Eye which bears the intriguing subtitle “Flying Turtles, Colonial Ghosts and the Making of a Nigerian American”.

Before the implementation of the Treasury Single Account policy (TSA) of the Federal Government in 2015, it was common practice for some commercial banks to use government funds in their coffers to purchase government debt instruments. By ‘ploughing back’ these funds into the short end of the government debt market, these banks made ‘quick profit’ at the expense of government.