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Opinion

Tuesday, 17 October 2017 04:13

Okorocha and Jacob Zuma’s statue - Reuben Abati

What is it about South African President Jacob Zuma and statues? Two statues in one month- generating controversy from the streets of Pretoria to the streets of Owerri in Nigeria. In the first week of October, a 30-feet monument was unveiled in honour of President Zuma in the North West region of his country. South Africans had opposed the idea of the statue since it was first proposed in February 2017. When it was eventually unveiled, and labeled a monument, the attendant outrage was bitter and loud because it was actually a glorification of Zuma, disguised as a tourist project…

Tuesday, 17 October 2017 04:11

Buhari's tent of glass - Lasisi Olagunju

The Muhammadu Buhari government is housed in a glass tent. It is a big tent regime of scented defecators. Living in a glass house makes you very vulnerable. And this is not just about not throwing stones. It is also about your nakedness. Transparent glasses hide little of beauty and of ugliness. It bares all. The Buhari government is like a lady in a skimpy skirt. It struts the landscape and leaves nothing to the imagination. We have a government that is opposition unto itself, rolling from one self-induced controversy to another. Geoffrey Chaucer warns that if your wall is…

Tuesday, 17 October 2017 04:10

Buhari: When silence means contempt - Sam Omatseye

The president has always seen silence as a mark of dignity in a time of crisis. When he opens his mouth eventually, he spews out venom that neither gives him nor the office he occupies any form of dignity.Tall, gaunt, lean of face with a straight stare and loping strides, his smile comes across more like a lickspittle than a royal. Yet, behind that simpering exterior is a granite heart. However, little cunning or high thinking dresses up his hearty resolves. So, in the final analysis, what we have is not the Buhari of nobility but a pretension to the…

Sunday, 15 October 2017 04:13

Weep not for Kachikwu - Onyeka Ibe

When some time in 2016 APC leader Mr Bola Tinubu released an article in which he upbraided Mr Ibe Kachikwu, Minister of state for petroleum resources, for his haughty and arrogant reply to a journalist's question on solutions to the then persistent petrol scarcity in Nigeria, many people rose up in defence of Kachikwu. I even penned an article, in which in glorious terms, I described Kachikwu as a man of integrity, "Mr due process" etc. I must confess that I didn't really know the man, only that we grew up in my local government with the story of his…

Saturday, 14 October 2017 04:13

JAMB, our ‘mumu don do’! - Niran Olatona

On page 12 of the Punch Newspaper of October 13, it was reported that Registrar of JAMB, Mr Ishaq Oloyede said “Reduction of examination fee is one of the options but it is not as attractive to me as it was at the beginning”. Why this change? His view changed because some parents thought to be poor were found to have spent millions of Naira to cut corners as regards the last UTME examinations. While I see no point disagreeing with him that agencies like JAMB should not be funded by the government, I see a lot of wrong in…

Friday, 13 October 2017 03:37

NNPC’s nine trillion Naira - The Nation editorial

The nation did not expect that, under the Muhammadu Buhari administration, a whiff of scandal could ever come near the austere man who has risen in the esteem of many as the image of rectitude in a world of suffocating filth. The minister of state for petroleum, Mr Ibe Kachikwu, stunned us with his epistolary tirade about what he described as the shady doings of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). We must say that, as a newspaper, we are disappointed that up till the time of writing this piece, the president has not voiced a word to the Nigerian…

Friday, 13 October 2017 03:28

Mikhail Gorbachev: My plea to the presidents of Russia and the United States

This December will mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the treaty between the Soviet Union and United States on the elimination of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles. This was the start of the process of radically cutting back nuclear arsenals, which was continued with the 1991 and 2010 strategic arms reduction treaties and the agreements reducing tactical nuclear weapons. The scale of the process launched in 1987 is evidenced by the fact that, as Russia and the United States reported to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2015, 80 percent of the nuclear weapons accumulated during the Cold War…

Thursday, 12 October 2017 03:56

Ajasin and our duty to remember - Dare Babarinsa

Chief Michael Adekunle Ajasin, first elected governor of old Ondo State, was the moving spirit of the Free Education Programme of the defunct Western Region when Chief Obafemi Awolowo ruled the roost. Last week, many leaders and Ajasin’s old comrades gathered at the University of Ibadan to mark the 20th anniversary of this titan’s departure from Mother Earth. Though he later played several roles, Ajasin’s place in history is secured by his pivotal role as the original thinker of the Free Education Programme of the defunct Action Group. As it was in those days, the nascent Action Group party had…

Thursday, 12 October 2017 03:54

PDP and Fayose’s bid for the presidency - Jideofor Adibe

That the whistle for 2019 has long been blown is not in doubt. While many of the people in the (now rejuvenated?) PDP with rumoured presidential ambitions seem too scared to throw their hats into the ring, Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose took the bull by the horns despite knowing that his party has zoned that office to the Northern part of the country. In this piece I will try to build scenarios of Fayose’s possible presidential candidacy. In doing this, I am assuming that Fayose’s declaration of interest in the presidency is for real and not just another of…

Wednesday, 11 October 2017 04:19

The Masari and Mangal political coup against Buhari - Muhammad Galadanchi

The very fragile relationship between President Muhammadu Buhari and Aminu Masari, the Governor of his home state, Katsina, is about to be further fractured. The relationship between both men has been held together more by political expediency, than any shared world vision and values. Both men are strange bed fellows, and have remained so apart, despite great efforts to mask those obvious differences, that are like day and night. While Masari has politically been associated with the defunct conservative National Republican Convention (NRC), and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Buhari has always pitched his tent with the progressives, from the…

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Tuesday, 10 October 2017 04:42

A Presidency being defined by corruption - BusinessDay editorial

Perhaps, President Muhammadu Buhari's only selling point in the run up to the 2015 election was his trumpeted integrity, incorruptibility and anti-corruption credentials. Consequently, upon ascending the president, Buhari set the war against corruption as its core mission in government. Rightly, during the President's inauguration, the President declared that if Nigeria does not kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria. He even went ahead to set up a Presidential Advisory Council on Corruption, headed by an eminent lawyer and professor to help with studies of the nature of corruption and advise the administration how best to tackle the scourge. Of course,…

Tuesday, 10 October 2017 04:40

Kachikwu, Baru and the NNPC debacle - Reuben Abati

The current NNPC debacle is probably the most embarrassing, even if mercifully, eye-opening crisis in the history of that nationally strategic institution since its creation in 1977. I seek in the following commentary to offer a number of observations that would probably throw some light on the muck and confusion running riot out there on the matter. In my view, it was an error to have paired the Group Managing Director of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr Maikanti Baru, with Dr. Ibe Kachikwu. I say this for two reasons. When Dr. Ibe Kachikwu was appointed the GMD in…

Tuesday, 10 October 2017 04:39

Senator Misau Vs IGP Idris: The urgency of police reform - NIG

In the second week of August, 2017, National Bureau of Statistics released a report which described the Nigeria Police Force as the most corrupt public institution. Same day, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNDOC) released a similar report that put the police on top of the corruption index in the country. Police top hierarchy attempted to dispute the report, in an effort that seemed to have achieved little, if anything. The public appears to have gotten to a cynical, though dangerous point of seeing the police and corruption as synonyms. That perhaps explains the indifference that has trailed…

Monday, 09 October 2017 03:41

Ibe Kachukwu and parable of the woodpecker - Festus Adedayo

The leaked letter of last week, written by the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachukwu, to President Muhammadu Buhari which he entitled Re – Matters of Insubordination and unapproved award of $25 billion contracts, may ultimately be the woodpecker boring a hole in the Buhari government’s canoe. The canoe is right now cruising on the high sea. A woodpecker, with its longish beak, is a species of birds which is chiefly known for its characteristic behavior of foraging for insect prey inside trunks and branches of trees. It often communicates to its kin by drumming with its beak…

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