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Opinion

Monday, 23 May 2016 01:28

No matter how long you’ve been travelling in the wrong direction...

Jideofor Adibe There is a saying that no matter how long you have been travelling in the wrong direction, the best solution remains to turn back. This was what came to my mind when I read the story that the government had eventually decided to ‘remove’ subsidies on premium motor spirits otherwise known as petrol or fuel. By the time Buhari was sworn in as President on May 29 2015, there had been more or less a consensus that the subsidy regime was a cesspool of corruption and deserved to be done away with. The Farouk Lawan, Aig-Imoukhede and Nuhu…

Sunday, 22 May 2016 04:49

The Niger Delta Avengers

Reuben Abati Niger Delta Avengers is the name of a new group of militants in the Niger Delta who claim to be different from the former agitators and militants who operated between 2006 and 2009, largely under the umbrella of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). The title of this group may well serve as the thematic and definitive umbrella for the resurgence of low-level insurgency in the Niger Delta, for in the last month alone, more groups have joined the NDA to wage war against oil installations, the Buhari government, and the Nigerian state. These…

Saturday, 21 May 2016 01:25

Can Boko Haram be defeated?

Max Siollun Last December, Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria, declared that “technically we have won the war” against Boko Haram, the insurgent group that has been terrorizing the country for seven years. Mr. Buhari’s comments came after the military dislodged Boko Haram from territory it had seized in 2014 and 2015. But five months later, it’s clear that the president’s pronouncement of victory was premature. Today, Boko Haram is no longer occupying large parts of Nigeria. Instead, it has morphed into a group of well-organized bandits. The military’s successes changed Boko Haram’s threat, but didn’t eliminate it. In fact,…

Friday, 20 May 2016 01:55

Deregulation and the politics of public policy

Reuben Abati This thing called democracy, particularly the Nigerian brand, never ceases to throw up new and intriguing lessons about the relationship between government and the people, and the larger, complex socio-political environment. I had gone to Lagos on an assignment in the last two days of the year 2011, when around midnight I received a phone call from someone close to the corridors of power, informing me that a meeting had just been concluded in Abuja where a decision had been taken to deregulate the downstream petroleum sector, and thus, in effect remove the subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit…

Thursday, 19 May 2016 01:58

Niger Delta Avengers, defuse your dynamites

Bob MajiriOghene Etemiku I visited the website of the new agitators in town, the Niger Delta Avengers, NDA. I had to try to understand something of the body, mind and soul of the group, and why they are blowing up pipelines. Old school militants and terrorists have no time to engage you on that level. Rather they express their resentment by a deliberate shedding of human blood, kidnapping and rape as instruments of coercion and propaganda. I recall the earliest instances when Boko Haram began to fight the rest of Nigeria. All their demands were usually from the rumour mill…

Wednesday, 18 May 2016 01:45

Buhari's inconsistent management of fuel subsidies leaves loyalists confused

Frisky Larr An unnecessary own-goal indeed. Who doesn’t remember Muhammadu Buhari’s infamous interview before he became President? He talked elaborately about fuel subsidies, stressing very clearly that the measure was a fraud and that he hardly understood what it was all about. So far, so good. He went further to express his dismay, how we got to where we are, asking repeatedly who was subsidizing who. He emphasized clearly, how shortfalls in domestic supply were managed during his days as Minister of Petroleum Resources when the refineries were dysfunctional in the wake of Turn Around Maintenance. Muhammadu Buhari, the private…

Tuesday, 17 May 2016 11:20

Troubled ghosts in the soul of promise

Pat Utomi These times are times of a patriot’s nightmare in Nigeria. Conduct is zero-sum. From extreme ends, the pressure is high to smother intelligent public conversation and typecast those who dare to raise their voices. As citizenship behaviour retreats, you see threats to the promise of Nigeria. At the security level, it goes from gruesome murders by herdsmen, pipelines being blown up by militants, to the Boko Haram savaging of the North-East and kidnappings and armed robberies elsewhere. At the economic policy level, we see a worsening of the misery index as people cannot find fuel or jobs. And…

Tuesday, 17 May 2016 04:52

Nigeria: We have been fantastically deceived

Tunde Asaju A morally corrupt David Cameron goes to visit Mama Charlie and in the frontal view of television cameras, describes Naija and Afghanistan as two 'fantastically corrupt countries' he has invited to a London anti-corruption summit. Our elders say that when you want to send a message to a deaf person, you send it through her children. Some said the outburst was a gaffe but I believe it's Britain's diplomatic way of passing an insult. Mama Charlie herself has been caught on camera describing Chinese officials as very rude. Unlike hailers who descended on Cameron for adding a new,…

Monday, 16 May 2016 12:55

Lai Mohammed is a lie

There was always going to be a minister who would emerge as more intoxicated by his new station than other members of the cabinet, one who would win the shameful honor of being the first in the new administration to be outed for abuse of office, one who would generate a needless but tectonic scandal that the president has to answer with the swift rebuke of a sack –at the very least!Early in the day, Abdulrahman Dambazzau, the minister of internal affairs, came close to being that man. His outrageous indiscretion of demanding, receiving, and relishing the cleaning of his…

Monday, 16 May 2016 11:22

The price of delayed adjustment

Simon Kolawole Now that the pump price of petrol has nearly doubled, we can officially conclude that President Muhammadu Buhari has finally blinked. For a man of the masses, we can assume that this was a very difficult decision for him. The truth is: any upward adjustment in the price of petrol increases the cost of living and worsens economic hardship, even if in the short run. Transportation is a major component of the cost of living in Nigeria. It is not just about commuting; we are transporting goods and services. We are powering our homes and businesses with generators.…

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Monday, 16 May 2016 01:47

FG denial of Fulani role in massacres protects terror sponsors

Peregrino Brimah Quoting from a statement by the Federal Government of Nigeria as delivered by Minister of Agriculture, Heineken Lokpobiri on May 10th: “Available statistics to us in government show that contrary to media report that these violent herdsmen are the conventional Nigerian Fulanis, they are not, as none of those apprehended was able to speak any of the Nigerian languages. This gives strong credence to the possibility of the violent herdsmen to be another form of terrorists in the mode of Boko Haram. The problem is not Nigeria, but regional, more so, when the Nigerian Fulani man has always…

Sunday, 15 May 2016 07:39

Social media and the English language

Reuben Abati I get confused these days reading many of the posts on social media, and text messages sent through cell phones, because of the kind of new English that young people now write. The English language is without doubt quite dynamic. In the last 200 years, it has lent itself to many innovations, as cultural, religious, and situational codes have transformed the language and extended the dictionary, with new words and idioms. The kind of new English being written by twitter and what’s app users, particularly young people is however so frightening and lamentable, because it is beginning to…

Saturday, 14 May 2016 01:38

The busy person's lies

Laura Vanderkam How's life? Oh, busy. So goes the mindless modern conversation — a constant assertion of the scarcity of time. A December Gallup poll found that 61 percent of working Americans said they did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do. Some of us feel this more acutely than others: A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 9 in 10 working mothers said they felt rushed all or some of the time. In an attempt to understand this frenzy, I spent the past 12 months studying my own time during what might turn…

Friday, 13 May 2016 05:01

President Buhari, Cameron and corruption

Reuben Abati “We have got the leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain… Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world”, UK Prime Minister David Cameron was caught on tape telling the Queen ahead of the anti-corruption summit organized by the UK Government, this week, which was attended by Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari. This diplomatic gaffe rubbed many Nigerians on the wrong side, but most of the responses, coloured by overtly emotional love of country and a certain defensiveness is downright hypocritical. We all know that indeed Nigeria is “fantastically corrupt”, and that is…

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