Opinions

A few days ago (12th February 2014) in Borno state Boko Haram killed 60 innocent Nigerians and carted off 24 young girls without any trace. On January 27th 2014 no less than 70 innocent Nigerians were murdered in cold blood by Boko Haram in a series of attacks in Borno and Adamawa states.  On January […]

A rather unseen notation by one Churchill Umoren who is said to be an assistant to one of President Goodluck Jonathan’s “Otinpkus,” (Igbo word for praise singers) Dr. Doyin Okupe, was so unimportant to Nigerians that they ignored it. Many do not even know Churchill Umoren beyond the fact that he can be quite uncouth […]

When Olusegun Obasanjo wrote the 18-page epistle to President Goodluck Jonathan, many politicians who stood to score some points from the crack in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leadership- which is what it symbolized-urged Nigerians to take the message and not bother about the messenger.  Nigerians rejected this call because it was self-contradictory; no good […]

When Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was appointed the CBN Governor, he hit the ground running on a very good footing. However his recent self-righteous outrage against the NNPC in a careless and incoherent manner is beginning to raise questions about the true motive of his recent tirade. It is certainly worrying that the agency charged with […]

Given the reign of impunity unleashed on the people of Rivers State by Commissioner of Police, Mbu Joseph, his long overdue redeployment should ordinarily be a welcome development in the hope that the anarchy and campaign of terror may finally be over. The timing of Mbu’s redeployment is suspect; and it is not fallacious to […]

An unbiased examination of the 2014 budget proposal presently under consideration of the National Assembly will reveal that it is not doomed after all, as those opposing it would have us believe. From all indications, the budget has a potential to lay a great foundation for the growth of the Nigerian economy. Being one of […]

The Presidential Economic Team of 2003 to 2007 which I was privileged to be a member had a running joke – that the NNPC was an independent federal republic on its own totally separate from and way superior to the Nigeria we all worked for! This joke was our way of criticising the way and […]

The Nigerian nation never ceases to throw up interesting, sometimes absurd scenarios. The latest of these is the ongoing face-off between the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and the House of Representatives Committee  on finance, over the budget and the state of the economy. The Committee had asked […]

The 2013 External Development Report by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) that, Foreign Direct Investment (FDIs), declined over $7 billion in the third quarter of the fiscal year 2013, was certainly no complimentary news, given that Nigeria’s dream for transformation through large scale industrialization can hardly materialize without the huge capital and technological input […]

The Igbo have a saying – popularised by the acclaimed novelist, Chinua Achebe – that he who brings home ant-infested faggots should not complain if he is visited by lizards. That proverb is apt in describing the type of treatment Nigeria receives from the Western world, led by the United States of America. Last year, […]

The former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, over the weekend, again, jumped out of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) into the All Progressives Congress (APC).  There is really nothing surprising or unexpected from Atiku’s latest political peregrination.  If anything, it was a matter of when it would happen and not whether it would happen; and […]

Niccolò Machiavelli, the renowned Italian political philosopher, observed in The Prince—his treatise on realist political theory—that, “It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.” Being himself a well-read prince, albeit one with a tendency to offer precipitate views on matters within and outside his purview, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a Kano prince […]