Opinion Corner

By Dr. Ehiogie West-Idahosa The Zamfara APC case was initiated by aggrieved members of the party pursuant to section 87(10) of the Electoral Act. By the said action members of that party challenged the competence of the process employed during the primaries for the nomination of party candidates outside the period allowed by INEC in the Federal High Court. INEC …

Niran Adedokun; (nadedokun@gmail.com) Last week in Abuja, wife of President Muhammadu Buhari, Aisha, again hit at her husband’s worn-out first term. Given that the attack, which was on the perceived ineffectiveness of the Social Investment Programme, the poster welfare programme of the administration, came on the eve of the end of its first term, there is a chance it might be …

By Louis Odion, FNGE In contemporary Nigeria, no one presents a more compelling parallel than All Progressive Congress. On the eve of its supposed hour of glory, the ruling party was in the news across the federation for the wrong reasons — troubles stirred by its own mutation of the metaphorical midnight children, increasingly constituting a nightmare to the nation …

By Louis Odion, FNGE Thanks to Omoyele Sowore, anyway, for the new interest in marijuana (a.k.a. ganja, Igbo or “wee wee”) for medical and industrial use in Nigeria. He kindled the conversation while on the hustings leading to the last presidential polls. Consistent with his advocacy for fresh idea or “disruptive thinking,” the Sahara Reporters publisher contended that the global …

By Louis Odion, FNGE Breaking a decade silence in a Punch interview at the weekend, the grandma, once glorified as the “Amazon” of the nation’s banking world, would have us believe that she fell on SLS’s sword in 2009 because the then Central Bank governor saw her as “threat” to his job. In the said interview, Madam Ibru sounded more …

By Louis Odion, FNGE Against the backcloth of the recent discovery in Nigeria of a vast tribe of mute billionaires across the country with vast fortunes locked down in bank vaults (a good number with little or no visible source of income), Galbraith’s theoretical template would then sound more like a vacuous abstraction here indeed. The shock find was enabled …

By Louis Odion, FNGE From statistics, out of over 72,000 medical doctors registered with the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria as at 2018, almost half have migrated abroad in search of better pay and working environment. What that simply means is that Nigeria today can only boast of less than 40,000 doctors to a population of 200million, a far …

As one voter was quoted as saying, Zelensky, “is a guy who is out of the system, and that’s good… He made his own money, so he doesn’t owe anyone in the current system anything.” From a global perspective, given the emphatic victory posted by a comedian in Ukraine, only time will tell if jesters and allied entertainers elsewhere will …

By Louis Odion, FNGE While Ezeani’s motive could hardly be faulted in nobility and public-spiritedness, however, considering that key provisions are framed by a thinking that tends to suggest extremism of sorts, one is persuaded to assume that not much consultation took place with the stakeholders. It is very doubtful if the vested interests in the obituary value chain would …

By Louis Odion, FNGE Taken together, if there is any lesson to be learnt from the cold statistics reeled out by Dangote it is undoubtedly another sad reminder of the curse of rent-seeking. On top of the over-abundance of natural resources, the nineteen states of the north collectively get the bigger share of the national cake monthly. But this hardly …