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Opinion

Wednesday, 17 April 2019 04:58

Tiger Woods and the game of life - Thomas L. Friedman

Golf is all about how you react when you get a bad bounce. Although my day job is writing the foreign affairs column for The New York Times — more Persian Gulf than fairway golf — thinking about golf and playing as often as I can is my all-consuming hobby. So like millions of others, I was awed by Tiger Woods’s comeback for the ages by his winning the Masters at 43 years old. What can be learned from it? It’s hard for nongolfers to appreciate the scope of Tiger’s physical and psychological achievement, after he went through four back…

Wednesday, 17 April 2019 04:56

Papering over our plight - Abiodun Komolafe

Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s ruling party. A Pan Africanist par excellence, Tinubu is one leader whose fidelity to the Nigeria project is legendary and investment in the people’s future is unimpeachable. These extraordinary features manifested again at the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium, organized as part of activities marking his 67th birthday. In his closing remarks on the occasion, the Asiwaju of Lagos and Jagaban of Borgu Kingdom advised President Muhammadu Buhari to use his second term in office to improve Nigeria’s economy, in line with the party’s ‘Next Level’ campaign slogan.…

Tuesday, 16 April 2019 04:49

The terror to come - Stuart Gottlieb

In 1999, two of the most infamous terrorists of the 1990s - one a militant jihadist, the other a violent white nationalist - found plenty to chat about in the yard of their supermax prison in Florence, Colo. Timothy McVeigh, mastermind of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 and injured hundreds more, was thrilled to discover he had "lots in common" with the equally murderous Ramzi Yousef, ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a precursor to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "I never have [known] anyone in my life who…

Monday, 15 April 2019 04:09

Why Buhari can’t and won’t solve North’s growing security crisis - Farooq Kperogi

The last few days have seen a hypocritical mass awakening to the dire existential torments the people of Nigeria’s Northwest face and a dramatic diminution of Buhari’s unearned goodwill in the region. People who had constructed Buhari as an unerring, irreproachable demigod who is worthy only of worship and unquestioned admiration have started to call him insensitive and clueless. It took the unceasing escalation of kidnappings and the deepening and widening of the oceans of blood in the Northwest for Buhari’s erstwhile unthinking worshipers to come to terms with what some of us have known and said since late 2015:…

Monday, 15 April 2019 04:06

Between moribund Nigeria Airways and domineering Ethiopian Airlines - Folu Olamiti

That Nigeria - the supposed giant of Africa - is without a national airline, befuddles right thinking Nigerians. Once buoyant Nigeria Airways came onboard in 1958 after the dissolution of West African Corporation, WAAC. It began operation on October 1, 1958, and in 1971, it was rebranded to the name it had until it ceased operations in 2003. At the peak of its life span, the airline had 44 aircraft on its fleet, and strongly showcased and flew Nigeria’s flag around the world. By the magnificence and efficiency of the airline, Nigeria became the toast of many airlines which sent…

Sunday, 14 April 2019 03:56

Why we get killed abroad and perish on the Mediterranean - Festus Adedayo

The execution of the Nigerian woman in South Africa recently, the arrest of another five for armed robbery in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa are tripodal issues that call attention of Nigerians to their worth in the outside world. Eight Nigerians were earlier executed in Saudi Arabia in recent time and twenty other Nigerians are listed today on death row in the same country while many others are in various prisons in other prisons in Saudi. These are critical social issues that should bother us as a people and which invariably…

Saturday, 13 April 2019 04:45

India will never be the next China - Morgan Stanley strategist

Reshma Kapadia Morgan Stanley strategist shares his views on India’s politics, stocks, and economy, and cautions against comparing the country to China. As a child, Ruchir Sharma spent his summers in his maternal grandparents’ small town in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest and most populous states. Although the town was about four hours from New Delhi, it was a world away from his otherwise urban life. Distractions were few so he spent his summers studying adults—and watching them “hurl their choicest insults at the TV” as they took part in India’s leading spectator sport: politics. It was an early…

Friday, 12 April 2019 04:33

Leftists on ‘tribalism’: 70 years ago - Edwin Madunagu

At the beginning it was called “tribal politics”; then it became “ethnic politics”; and, now, it is evolving into “identity politics”. But the phenomenon remains what it has always been – from colonialism to all its bourgeois successors. Sometimes it lies in low intensity – and many people forget it is there, all the time. At other times it flares up, blowing its poisonous venom everywhere, or merely raising its poisonous head-in silent warning. When the phenomenon erupted in Lagos during Elections 2019 (as it did in Elections 2015) and some Leftists vigorously confronted it in their own way and…

Friday, 12 April 2019 04:32

Do the dead really need a ‘befitting’ funeral? - Jideofor Adibe

This piece was inspired by a recent report that Anambra State House of Assembly has outlawed ‘expensive’ burial in the State. According to the story, the State House of Assembly passed a bill entitled, ‘Law to Control Burial/Funeral Ceremonial Activities’, in which it outlawed holding of a funeral for more than a day in the State. In Anambra State, and much of Igboland, funerals can last for three days or even longer, with relatives of the deceased expected to entertain/feed visitors throughout the period. The bill also made it illegal for people to deposit any corpse in a mortuary or…

Thursday, 11 April 2019 04:23

Here’s what will decide whether technology becomes a force for good, or evil - Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein

Most of us are aware of the argument that every technological advance that ought to serve the public good, and often does, can also be used malevolently. Tim Cook of Apple made this his theme — the need to blend technology with values — when he delivered the 2017 commencement speech at MIT. At the core of the issue is the belief that tech is value-neutral. When first developed, a new technology is neither infused with ethics nor bereft of them; it requires guidance. If augmented by ethical considerations, the hope is this invention will serve the public good and…

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Tuesday, 09 April 2019 04:26

How parents traffic their own children in northern Nigeria - Ismail Adamu

The man in a village at the outskirts of Tsafe in Zamfara State is just one in thousands, may be millions, of parents in Northern Nigeria, but he provides a perfect example. He produces so much more children than he can cater for. Once his male child is around age four to five, he buys a plastic bowl for him and takes him to the bus station in Tsafe and gives the driver N500 and says 'a daura min shi a injin' (let him sit at the bus engine -- behind the driver's seat) 'and please take him to Malam…

Monday, 08 April 2019 04:24

Memo to Kadaria Ahmed - Charles Ogbu

Dear Kadaria, I just watched a video clip of your #March4Zamfara. First, I must commend you for calling attention to the deteriorating security situation in Zamfara state. What is happening in that state and most states in Nigeria proves that our country is currently being led by a President and Commander-In-Chief whose rank as a General in the Army ought to be investigated. Our silence over it is nothing short of a moral tragedy. But there is a part I don't understand in that video clip of yours. And that is the part where, while being interviewed, you described the…

Sunday, 07 April 2019 04:28

Onnoghen: Killing democracy through ‘democratic means’ - Charles Ogbu

What we just witnessed in Mr Walter Onnoghen's case with President Muhammadu Buhari on one hand and National Judicial Council (NJC) on the other hand lends credence to the assertion by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt that the presence of democratic institutions does not necessarily mean that democracy is alive and well. In their book, "How Democracies Die", the above named Harvard University professors had argued that: "The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to k*ll it" Arguing further, they contended…

Sunday, 07 April 2019 04:25

Who is the leader of the Yoruba? - Festus Adedayo

While the date, September 11, is a day remembered with awe, trepidation and pain in the annals of global history as day the American Twin Towers were bombed by terrorists in 2001, it is a date the Yoruba of the South West of Nigeria hold with infectious nostalgia. On this day in 1966, thirty five years earlier, Western Leaders of Thought, an assemblage of Yoruba delegation to the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference which the then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, put together, had met in Ibadan, headquarters of the Western Region and unanimously elected 57-year old Obafemi Awolowo as…

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