“I do not enjoy speaking to you this bluntly when you have been gracious enough to invite me here…” – Bill Gates. Mr. Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, friend of Nigeria and one of the richest men in the world was in Nigeria recently, but he ended up violating the official interpretation of “table manners” in Nigeria’s corridors of power. When you are a guest in people’s home, you don’t count their nine toes one by one. It is an essential part of African tradition and culture that when people host you in their homes, treat you with courtesy, open their…

After a run of nearly one thousand years, quipped the French philosopher and writer Voltaire, the fading Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Today, some two and a half centuries later, the problem, to paraphrase Voltaire, is that the fading liberal world order is neither liberal nor worldwide nor orderly. The United States, working closely with the United Kingdom and others, established the liberal world order in the wake of World War II. The goal was to ensure that the conditions that had led to two world wars in 30 years would never again arise.…

Senator Marco Rubio stood ramrod in the midst of the rancorous audience. He looked at the audience’s insolent countenance like a subpoenaed witness in a murder case. He indeed had been summoned to the CNN-organized Town Hall meeting on the United States’ Parkland shooting on February 14. A grieving father of one of the students who was killed in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting angrily confronted Marco over his insistent opposition to gun control. Another diffident student called the National Rifle Association (NRA) contributions to Rubio’s election campaign fund “blood money.” Then, one of the student survivors, 17-year…

Daily Trust reported that 5 hours before the return of the Dapchi schoolgirls, soldiers guarding the town of Dapchi were mysteriously withdrawn. Recall that the Yobe State governor had alerted the world to the fact that soldiers were also withdrawn hours before the abduction of the girls. And Amnesty International said a few days ago that Nigerian military authorities willfully ignored credible intelligence about the abduction. Add this to the recent BBC report that "orders from above" stopped foot soldiers on the front lines from capturing Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau and you will be left in no doubt that…