Nigeria Where It No Longer Pays To Work!

 By Dele Sobowale

“How can productivity work in a place where you have ten people clustering an office, no electricity, trek to about 11-storey building. Labour punches the button to work no matter what.”     

– Dr Tommy Okon, Trade Union Congress, TUC

Dr Okon has captured only a fraction of the miseries of millions of “employed” Nigerians. Before reaching the office to start climbing the stairs, he/she might have trekked up to eight kilometres from home to get there. In reality, the relationship between employers and employees in Nigeria today is much closer to the seventeenth century slave and slave owner arrangement. After going through the hazards, including no breakfast everyday, he might still not get paid at the end of the month. Nigerian workers, at all levels in many organizations, now constitute the largest group of involuntary philanthropists in the world now.

How To Enter Sapele And Warri From Benin Now

 By Tony Afejuku

Sapele and Warri are two significantly important Nigerian cities that need no introduction, special or un-special, from the historic, realistic and imaginative imagination of this creative creator whose impression of things is often – if not always – determined by features which fit the descriptions that convey meaningfully what must be conveyed – meaningfully.

Sapele and Warri, as very many people know, are two unique cities, two uniquely nifty cities, from whichever dominant or un-dominant impressions or perspectives open to us to define the cities. Of course, the cities’ dense and denizenly denizens and brought-ups where-ever they are always have something, something beautifully beautiful, to say about them in the same way that those of Benin, the antique city, allow their imaginations and conceptions to beautify it.

Nigeria: How Long Can A Country Run On Generator?

By Amanze Obi

From 1960 (if not 1914) Nigeria has been running on generator. That’s at once an empirical, profound and unassailable statement. There’s not one sector of our national life today that would keep this country breathing one more second, if we shut off the perennial, inevitable life support. There never was, yesterday and, the way we’re going, there may never be, tomorrow.

God forbid! That’s our habitual consolatory refrain, right? Wrong. I can no longer be consoled with the silly daydream that Eldorado would fall on me, after I vehemently elected to ignore the fact that heaven had empowered me to create it. That’s the tragedy of our reality: Nigerians have what it takes to fix Nigeria but we would rather she remained on life support forever.

Nigeria: Sixteen Minus One

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is not unusual for the fierceness of the support for the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Party (APC) to find expression in the riposte that the citizens must not expect an automatic realisation of the change the party and its helmsman promised. Their expectations have often been scaled down with the reprimand that if it took the last administration 16 years to liquidate all props for corporate probity and sanity, it smacks of sheer perfidy on the part of the citizens to ask the president and his party to rebuild the nation in just one year.

But this position has turned out as a self-fulfilling prophecy since the Buhari administration is pathetically denuded of the hallmarks of stellar performance as it marks one year on Sunday. No doubt, the promise to fight corruption was irresistible. Let’s get all the money stolen from the national treasury and deploy it in the development of electricity, roads and other infrastructure.  No one really opposed fighting corruption.  Indeed, the citizens thought that fighting corruption was a grand idea and that once this was resolved, the nation would sally forth towards its destined path of greatness.

But a year after, the fight against corruption has been reduced to a part of the nation’s cocktail of chimeras. Forget about the arrests and their razzmatazz  of  media trials. The question the citizens are asking now is, how effective has the anti-corruption campaign been in the past one year? This is simply because the Buhari administration’s  prosecution of  the anti-corruption campaign  has been divorced from  the  rigorous  imagination  that would have earned it more credibility. It is convenient for the Buhari administration to engender an environment in which the focus is only on the members of the opposition whom the anti-graft agencies arrest and ask to refund the money they have stolen. But the inconvenient and a much more credible way to prosecute the anti-corruption campaign on the back of audacious imagination would have been to extend it to both foes and friends. Now, it is the people who ought to be among those being tried who are dictating the terms of the anti-corruption regime.  Let’s strip the argument that we should start from somewhere and use some people as scapegoats of all its sophistry. As long as the anti-corruption campaign has not caught up with all former leaders who made their billions simply on account of occupying public offices, and as long as it is only targeted at the members of the opposition and critics of the policies of the Buhari administration, we cannot regard it as one of the achievements of the past year.

Hired Writers Behind Purported Interview Granted By Me - Femi Falana

Press Release

My attention has just been drawn to an obnoxious publication of an interview that I never granted. In the fake interview, I was alleged to have condemned the judgment of the Court of Appeal in respect of the governorship election in Akwa Ibom State. I did not grant the interview ascribed to me by the hack writers. In fact, I could not have condemned the judgment as it is well grounded in law. The so called interview is a hatchet job in every material particular.

Those who know me will attest to the fact that I have never supported the rigging of elections in any manner whatsoever and howsoever. Hence, I have consistently supported the use of PVC and Card Readers which were strenuously opposed by election manipulators in the country. As a lawyer, I have never represented election riggers in any court or tribunal. As a public commentator, I have regularly advocated for the prosecution of election riggers in Nigeria and in other African countries.

1999-2015: Akpabio As Best Governor

By Dan Amor

One major sign of the growing sophistication of Athenian society in the Golden Age was the rise of history as a critical record of the nation's past. As myth gave way to more accurate chronicling and prose replaced verse as the medium for preserving fact, the fifth century Greeks came closer to the scientific spirit of free inquiry in modern times. In fact, it was then that Plato declared that a life not examined was a life not worth living!

Memories are made of these. Yet, nothing seems more characteristic of the present age than the homogeneity of  its world view. We may frown at its developmental smugness but we must admire its optimism, its cosmopolitanism, its intellectual refinements, its spirit of true enlightenment and the critical engagement with which it examines the world and its leaders. For, it is always instructive for the serious student of history to start by trying to determine what an age thought of itself.

Such an investigation is made the easier by studying the lives and times of the important men and women that shaped the age with their actions. In documenting the life and times of a towering personality, exciting experiences are selected, which present emotional and spiritual values, to interpret the tale as it is rehearsed in imagination or told to an admiring listener or hearer. As a faithful servant, a dedicated realist and reformer, who bridged all gulfs, leveled all mountains and put a lamp in every tunnel, as exemplified by his selfless stewardship to the people of Akwa Ibom State since the past eight years, Obong (Senator) Godswill Akpabio CON, the immediate past governor of Akwa Ibom State, has undoubtedly come to be seen as a modern day phenomenon whose corpus requires a large canvas.