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Opinion

Friday, 19 April 2024 04:36

Is a Third World War coming? - Azu Ishiekwene

This was the question a friend of mine in his late 20s asked me when we woke up on April 14 to the news that Iran had launched over 300 drones and missiles towards Israel. Apart from video war games, the young man has not seen any wars. Nigeria’s civil war ended nearly two and a half decades before he was born. Of course, you don’t have to experience war to feel it. There’s a sense, for example, in which the more recent wars in the West African subregion or the more distant ones in Northeastern Africa or Europe tend…

Thursday, 18 April 2024 04:43

Three key stimulants for real economic development and prosperity for FG’s consideration - Justice J. Faloye

Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun's April 3rd 2024 presentation at the Lagos Business School Breakfast Club titled 'Reconstructing the economy for growth, investment and climate resilience development' focused mainly on cost cutting through removal of subsidies, extreme high interest rates to curb inflation and attract foreign exchange, and agriculture, which don't address fundamentals of real economic growth. In terms of economic empowering infrastructure, the N15 trillion Coastal Highway also reveals a lot of economic misconceptions that need to be cleared. Though it is debatable whether subsidies and floating of Naira have really been stopped,…

Tuesday, 16 April 2024 04:44

Saving economics from the Economists - Clara Mattei and Aditya Singh

When seeking empathy for their financial woes, most people know better than to talk to an economist. To understand how the field gained a reputation for not caring about social-justice issues requires tracing the origins of the intellectual paradigm that dominates academia economics and public policy today. In 1921, Maffeo Pantaleoni, widely recognized as one of the architects of today’s mainstream economic framework and a close collaborator of Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, expressed his disdain for the working class. “It is disgusting,” he wrote, “to witness the masses of workers that are drunk in all our cities.” The…

Monday, 15 April 2024 04:47

Needed: One standard hospital per state (1) - Hassan Gimba

I never thought I could attend the Eid prayer held on 10th April, a day after I clocked the definitive age of 60: I have now joined the senior citizens' rank. Not being confident I could attend the Eid prayer seems an understatement; for actually, in February, the way I was feeling within me, it was looking to me that I would not witness Ramadan, not to talk of participating in the Eid marking its end. I easily get exhausted from the littlest of tasks, making me always gasping for air to fill my lungs. It reached a stage where…

Sunday, 14 April 2024 04:43

The Lagos Boy’s coastal highway - Festus Adedayo

Whether real or imagined, none of the metonyms for “Lagos boy” is complimentary. The “Lagos boy” moniker once came up in the late 1980s. Olabode George, then Military Governor of Ondo State, had just been removed from office after spending two years. The African Concord magazine then did a post-mortem of his turbulent rule. Newly purchased boats for the coastal part of the state were alleged to be second-hand. By then, for analysts writing about the George years, rigor-mortis hadn’t set on another uproarious component of his time in office. It was his wife, Feyi George’s “Queendom.” So she came…

Sunday, 14 April 2024 04:41

Neutralizing satanic activities by the armour of Light - Taiwo Akinola

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light ~ Genesis 1:3. Introduction: Darkness is not just the opposite of light; in reality, it is the absence of light. Even then, darkness creates a dense evil atmosphere, breeds diseases, arrests developments, occasions premature death and other vile demonic activities. Activities of darkness abound everywhere – maiming, manipulating, eliminating, confusing, misleading, pauperizing, swallowing hope, etcetera (Psalm 74:20). These activities of demons are purposely run to oppose starry men and women on assignment. Albeit, to mitigate or forestall them, we need to equip ourselves with a better understanding of their…

Sunday, 14 April 2024 04:39

Article of Faith: God does not recognise easter - Femi Aribisala

Easter is not one of God’s holy days. The word Easter is not even scriptural; it does not exist in true translations of the bible. Easter was smuggled into the King James Bible in Acts 12:4, where it was substituted for the original word; “Passover:” “When (Herod) had apprehended (Peter), he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.” As a matter of fact, the word Easter only appears in the King James Version of English Bible translations. It does not exist in…

Friday, 12 April 2024 04:46

Faye and France: The tyre meets the road - Azu Ishiekwene

The words of President Bassirou Diomaye Faye were honey to taste. Following the bitter ending of the 12-year rule of Macky Sall, highlighted by the widespread belief that France is at the heart of Senegal’s misery, a forlorn country enthusiastically lapped up Faye’s promise of a future untainted by French shenanigans. At a stage, it was not clear who was the public enemy #1: Sall or France? Sall started well. He came to office in 2012 with solid credentials, looking every inch like what Senegal needed to break away from the incompetence and cronyism of Abdoulaye Wade under whom the…

Thursday, 11 April 2024 04:43

Adelabu and power management - Abimbola Adelakun

Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, must have smarted from the embarrassing fallout his comments about Nigerians and their habits of energy efficiency generated. While addressing the public last Thursday, he noted how Nigerians waste energy by keeping their freezers and air conditioners running even when not at home. He said the habit of energy preservation eludes us because energy is too cheap in our part of the world. The media quotes him as saying, “A lot of people will come back from work, they want to have dinner, or they want to see their colleagues down the road, they switch…

Wednesday, 10 April 2024 04:46

My pilgrim’s progress - Folu Olamiti

In the course of my journalism odyssey and service to my Fatherland, I have been honoured countless times with awards headlining my modest contribution to country and humanity. But none came close to the one I received on 7 February 2024 at the Standing Committee of the Church of Nigeria Anglican Communion at Ika in Delta State. This particular one was an epoch that set me on an emotional introspection followed by profuse praise for God’s matchless grace upon my life. There I stood facing the leadership of the Church of Nigeria Anglican Communion: the Primate of all Nigeria, Henry…

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Wednesday, 10 April 2024 04:45

New electricity tariffs: deepening inequity and economic woes - Austin Tam-George

According to a new power distribution plan approved by the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), certain segments of the Nigerian population will henceforth have regular electricity and pay more, while the rest of society will see far less electricity supply and pay lower tariffs. If this Orwellian electricity plan is followed through, the Nigerian middle class, as well as the urban and rural poor, who constitute the majority of the country, will most likely retreat into medieval darkness. From a policy standpoint, below are three downsides of the new electricity plan: 1. It Promotes Social Inequity Electricity is much more…

Tuesday, 09 April 2024 04:53

When public agencies go rogue - Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In January 2014, a coalition of advocates, including Femi Falana, Jiti Ogunye and Tokunbo Mumuni, both senior lawyers; and I wrote to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), inviting it to “to investigate the allegations of fraud detailed by the two committees set up by President Goodluck Jonathan in the wake of the 2012 fuel subsidy crisis.” It failed to do so. 10 years later, the EFCC is now preoccupied with chasing after cross-dressers. How it got so derailed bears attention. At the beginning of this past week, Nigerians woke up to the story that a demographic of energy…

Monday, 08 April 2024 04:46

El-Rufai and the short trek to posterity - Hassan Gimba

The chickens, the saying goes, always come home to roost. But some people would prefer to be Shakespearean by quoting the insightful words uttered by Marc Antony in William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, “the evil that men do lives after them while the good is oft interred with their bones.” The first is a long-established English idiom that was used as early as 1390 AD in Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale. It means that wicked deeds or words return to trouble their originator. In the second, spoken at Julius Caesar’s funeral, Mark Antony, referring to Brutus, Caesar’s murderer, was saying that…

Sunday, 07 April 2024 04:48

Tinubu’s anti-people, reverse Robin Hoodist “courage” - Farooq A. Kperogi

President Bola Tinubu is so inordinately inebriated by his IMF-motivated decision to remove subsidies on petrol that at every opportunity he has he brags about it in giddily superlative terms. For example, during a meeting with the Nigerian community in France on June 24, 2023, he couched his decision to impose the Tinubu fuel tax (to borrow from his 2012 characterization of Goodluck Jonathan’s subsidy removal) on Nigerians in epiphanic, providential, and inspirational terms. He told Nigerians in France that during his inaugural speech on May 29, 2023, he was suddenly overcome by a mysterious force of unusual courage, which…

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