Police brutality: He-of-the-springy-steps
By CHETA NWANZE Two events I came across yesterday captured the state of Nigeria’s police-public relations with unsettling clarity. In Port Harcourt, angry youths blocked Agip Road to protest the killing of Anthony Obodo, a 22-year-old University of Port Harcourt graduate murdered by a police officer. The youths’ anger is not hard to understand. The […]
Tinubu’s canvass for subsidy removal
THAT was one of the stanzas of Sir Walter Raleigh’s final poems some times titled “The Lie”. It was written on realising his impending death and that life is vanity and falsity in 1592. The satirical poem loaded with irony and metaphor threw up so much that was hidden in the political protests of January 2012 against the removal of fuel subsidy by the PDP led Federal Government.
Of minty notes and waste culture
WE are in the season of festivity. In fact, this year is significant because the Christians and Muslims are celebrating at the same time. We must maximise this beyond the coincidence of dates. I had mentioned in a previous piece that the challenges of the Nigerian nation are multi-dimensional, that you cannot get the expected change result if we view it from a very narrow prism. Our challenge is embedded in our culture, our attitude, our way of life; of nonchalance, of no care for the consequences of the whole as long as our individual or narrow interests are protected. If the people are not getting it, if the messages are not being absorbed and internalised by those at the bottom rung of the ladder, there is no way we can make progress.
Stop playing politics with war against terror, Fani-Kayode writes Buhari
Mr. President, as one of your most loyal and faithful subjects who has nothing but the utmost respect for your person and your office I am constrained to write you this open letter.
The United State of Nigeria; Plea of a Nigerian youth
For a cause that has thrived through the vicissitudes of fate; a cause that has withstood for decades, the compulsory test of time; a cause for which those whose lives have been claimed are proclaimed ‘martyrs’, then, it is suffice to say that the ideology behind such a cause is vividly a force with which to reckon.
Running the economy without oil wealth
THERE were two major national problems our military rulers managed poorly. First was the enormous wealth that came our way in the oil boom of the early 70s. One martial ruler said his headache wasn’t money: It was how to spend it. Whereupon the country under him took upon itself the Father Christmas role. We gave and gave to African countries that were not as oily endowed as we were. When we could no longer locate the needy in Africa we turned to shores outside the continent.
