Making Nigeria Work Again

 By DAN AMOR

There is a lamentable and disturbing magnitude of violence in Nigeria. So is crime. The country is constantly on the boil. The atmosphere in the country has been nothing but a tawny volcano. The situation conveys at once the chief features of the Nigerian spirit: it is vertical, spontaneous, immaterial, upward. It is ardent. And even as tongues of fire do, it turns into fire everything it touches. What we are experiencing today is induced by poverty, hunger, frustration, apathy and desperation. 

                                                                  *Buhari 

There is no more thermometer to measure the degree of frustration and desperation in the land than the long closure of our tertiary institutions, especially our universities due to strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) since the past eight months. 

When States (Nations) Fail

By Hope Eghagha

The high command of Nigeria Army and Nigeria Police must be or should be in deep embarrassment about the whole incident. The Federal Government also ought to be worried by the incident because it is one too many in our recent history. No credible steps have been taken so far to reassure the nation of order across.

There is an increased disrespect for law, order, codes of social behaviour and engagement. Perhaps the government and its institutions are overwhelmed by the depth and scope of atrophy which the nation currently battles with. Which itself is frightening. Whether by default or design there is a script for doomsday being acted out. Are the actors aware of the enormity of the challenge that we face? Is the nation going for broke?

Nigeria Is Under Attack!

By Anthony Cardinal Okogie

On a Monday in September 2015, former finance minister, Chief Olu Falae was on his farm in Ilado near Akure when some armed men came looking for him. At gunpoint, they abducted him and held him until the following Thursday. At the age of 77, he was made to walk several kilometres. He was made to sleep in the rain. According to his own account published in some national dailies, every half an hour, his armed abductors threatened: “Baba, we are going to kill you.  If you don’t give us money we are going to kill you.”

*Cardinal Okogie

By 2018, herdsmen were wreaking havoc in the states of the middle belt of Nigeria. Then, a retired Chief of Army Staff, a veteran of military intervention in Nigerian politics, General Theophilus Danjuma, warned that there was ethnic cleansing in the middle belt. Having lost confidence in the government’s willingness or ability to deal with the situation, General Danjuma called on the people of the middle belt to take responsibility for their own security. The reaction of aides to the President of the Federal Republic was to insult him and call him names he did not deserve to bear.

The Real Enemies Of Nigeria

By Ochereome Nnanna

Last week Wednesday, the President of the Senate, Dr. Bukola Saraki, was forced, on behalf of his colleagues, to pronounce the Inspector-General of Police, Alhaji Ibrahim Idris as an “enemy of our democracy.” 

He declared him a persona non-grata and unfit to hold public office both within and outside Nigeria. This was after Idris refused on three occasions to honour the lawmakers’ summonses to answer critical questions bordering on the nation’s security challenges and the treatment the Police meted to one of their colleagues, Senator Dino Melaye.

*President Buhari 

 As often pointed out in this column, the National Assembly is not about the specific individuals elected into it or occupying its high offices at any given time. It is about an institution that represents the people of Nigeria who elected them to be in government on their behalf. They are there to make laws, supervise the ways the funds of the federation are spent, perform oversight functions on the ways the government is implementing the budget and the laws of the country and act as effective checks to ensure the Executive does not drag us back to dictatorship and impunity.