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Opinion

Wednesday, 25 October 2017 04:38

The Maina mania - Kayode Samuel

Stranger things have been known to happen here. A man boldly resumes work in the same city where he's been declared wanted - and right under the noses of his ostensible pursuers. Not only does he resume work, he's promoted in a Ministry that supervises the nation's prisons - where many would probably say he belongs. And under the same government that says he's wanted on grave allegations of corruption. A government, by the way, that claims to be fighting the same corruption. All this, of course, to soon be defended and rationalised by people who are so concerned about…

Wednesday, 25 October 2017 04:29

How Mao shaped communism to create a new China - Roderick MacFarquhar

Toward the end of his life, dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Mao Zedong claimed two achievements: leading the Communist revolution to victory and starting the Cultural Revolution. By pinpointing these episodes, he had underlined the lifelong contradiction in his attitudes toward revolution and state power. Mao molded Communism to fit his two personas. To use Chinese parlance, he was both a tiger and a monkey king. For the Chinese, the tiger is the king of the jungle. Translated into human terms, a tiger is a high official. The agency running President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign today likes to boast when…

Tuesday, 24 October 2017 05:01

Baba, Maina, Idris and other stories - Reuben Abati

“I hear say our Sai Baba don return from Turkey”“Did you hope that he would stay there permanently? He went for the D-8 meeting, and he is bound to return.”“D-8 meeting. I have been thinking about it. We are supposed to be a secular country but internationally, we have continued to engage with Muslim countries. We belong to the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) and also the D-8. Internationally, we are effectively a Muslim country.” “I don’t think so. In international diplomacy, it is not a sin for a country to engage at all possible levels. Nigeria is the most…

Tuesday, 24 October 2017 05:00

Buhari and ‘benefit of the doubt’ - Usman Abubakar

The 2015 election was the fiercest in our generation. A one of its kind I must add, where an incumbent was soundly defeated by the help of the disgruntled masses who felt they have had enough of mediocre leadership and wanton disregard to the plights of the common man. This ouster brought President Muhammadu Buhari to the mantle of leadership amid wild jubilation and high hopes. ASSET DECLARATION:No sooner had this happened than things began to look differently, when PMB adamantly refused to declare his assets publicly as promised by his party during campaign. Not until his media team couldn't…

Monday, 23 October 2017 03:24

Interim order of forfeiture of money without BVN in all banks illegal - Adegboruwa

PRESS RELEASE I’ve received the certified true copy of the interim orders of the federal high court, coral Dimgba, J., granting various interim orders in favour of the federal government of Nigeria, against all accounts in all banks that have no BVN. The said orders were said to have been granted at the behest of Attorney-General of the Federation. I am very well concerned about how we deploy interim orders for permanent purposes, such as to forfeit valuable assets, without any or fair hearing from the person(s) concerned. I think it is improper to obtain interim orders to freeze bank…

Monday, 23 October 2017 03:16

Abati didn’t write that… - Reuben Abati

I had dedicated Saturday, October 21, to two important events: attending to family duties and participating in a farewell funeral party in Abeokuta in honour of a doughty elderly woman whose paths and mine crossed for many seasons. She was the mother of a childhood friend, who became the mother of many others because she was a dependable ally in every battle. But my day was constantly disrupted and my attention distracted by reports from known and unknown persons about a certain commentary that was purportedly going viral on social media, authored by one Reuben Abati, and affirmatively titled “Still…

Saturday, 21 October 2017 04:52

Visiting my daughter in Aso Villa is like going to jail – Soyode, father of Vice-President’s wife

Father of the wife of the Vice-President, Mrs. Dolapo Osinbajo, Mr Olutayo Soyode, says in spite of his daughter’s position and the exalted office of her husband, he dreads going to Aso Rock for a visit. He said going to the villa was like going to jail, given the way his movement would be monitored and he would need to sign various forms before he could go out, for security reasons.Speaking in an exclusive interview with Saturday PUNCH on Friday, the 74-year-old said he loved to be free and he wasn’t the type to sit in one place and be…

Saturday, 21 October 2017 04:41

Buhari: The renewed debate on underperformance - Ayo Olukotun

“On a far more serious and fateful level is the fact that the Presidency itself has turned out, mostly by acts of omission, to be a sort of refuge, a sort of protected haven for corruption. As I write these words, the case of the (former) Secretary to the Government of the Federation, is still sitting on the desk of the President awaiting action…” Harvard University Professor, Biodun Jeyifo, The Nation, October 15, 2017 As a columnist, it is part of my tour of duty to read newspapers, foreign and national, for the purpose of teasing out salient trends and…

Friday, 20 October 2017 03:50

The case against free-market capitalism - Ngaire Woods

Free-market capitalism is on trial. In the United Kingdom, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn accuses neoliberalism of increasing homelessness, throwing children into poverty, and causing wages to fall below subsistence level. For the defense, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May cites the immense potential of an open, innovative, free-market economy. Similar “proceedings” are taking place around the world.Just a quarter-century ago, the debate about economic systems – state-managed socialism or liberal democracy and capitalism – seemed to have been settled. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, the case was closed – or so it seemed. Since then, the rise of China has…

Friday, 20 October 2017 03:48

In search of the ‘detribalized’ Nigerian - Jideofor Adibe

Nigerians love buzzwords - slogans that are repeated frequently enough, (and imbued with assumed values), that they begin to sound like established facts or self-evident truths. One of the favourite mantras in Nigeria today is the notion of the ‘detribalized’ Nigerian. Depending on the context and the speaker, this could often mean anything - that the person being referred to is more Nigerian than most Nigerians or that the person is consciously and routinely unaffected by ‘tribal’ considerations in whatever decisions the person takes. It could also mean that the ‘detribalized’ person’s Nigerian identity is assumed to be the top…

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Thursday, 19 October 2017 03:38

Giving capitalism a social conscience - David Bornstein

For more than 40 years, Muhammad Yunus, Bangladeshi founder of the Grameen Bank and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, has been asserting that the most powerful way to eradicate poverty is to unleash the untapped entrepreneurial capacity of people everywhere. “Poverty is not created by poor people,” he says. “It’s created by the system we built. Poor people are like a bonsai tree. You take the best seed from the tallest tree in the forest, but if you put it in a flower pot to grow, it grows only a meter high. There’s nothing wrong with the seed.…

Thursday, 19 October 2017 03:36

How to kill a country - Dare Babarinsa

Somalia was a beautiful country. It was also supposed to be a lucky country, one of the few in Africa whose boundaries harbour predominantly one ethnic group. Only few countries are in this category in Africa; like Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Many African countries are endangered by ethnic differences and even the veneer of democracy has not totally erased the old ethnic differences. In Nigeria, we have fought a bloody Civil War caused mainly by ethnic differences. In Zimbabwe, ethnic rivalries had coloured the country’s history especially between the Shonas and the Ndebele. Rwanda was once also killed because of…

Wednesday, 18 October 2017 03:37

An incompetent and corrupt government - Businessday editorial

If there is any assumption Nigerians made in the run up to the 2015 general elections, it is that given his experience and the long years spent seeking for the office, General Buhari is uniquely placed to run, perhaps, the most competent, organised and corrupt-free administration in Nigeria’s history. However, since ascending to the presidency, President Buhari has proved Nigerians wrong by running perhaps the most lethargic, chaotic, incompetent – and as it is now increasingly becoming obvious, a corrupt administration wrought with infighting, confusing, contest for power and authority and a shocking lack of grasps of the fundamentals of…

Wednesday, 18 October 2017 03:35

Further entry in the diary of shame - Louis Odion

With the stench of the NNPC affair starring Ibe Kachikwu and Maikanti Baru still choking the air, with national dignity looking sullied by suggestion that ailing president spent his 103-day supposed medical seclusion in London mostly signing away multi-billionaire dollar oil contracts presumably over expended injection syringes, a bizarre twist yet entered Aso Rock's comedy of errors last weekend following a revelation that President Buhari had made a strange request of the World Bank boss back in 2015. While answering what would ordinarily sound an innocuous question at a press conference in Washington last week, Jim Yong Kim unwittingly exposed…

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