Don’t Let Food Poisoning Ruin Your Yuletide Celebrations!

 By Sylvester Ojenagbon

The world over, a festive season is synonymous with feasting. It is usually a time when kitchens work overtime, and tables overflow with culinary abundance. 

However, for all the joy these lavish meals bring, they also usher in a period of heightened risk for a globally common, yet utterly miserable affliction: food poisoning.

The problem of foodborne illness is common, cutting across continents and development levels.

The World Health Organisation estimates that as many as one in ten people globally fall ill each year from eating contaminated food, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, with children and those in low- and middle-income countries bearing the heaviest burden.

Nigeria Needs Safe Schools

 By Gordon Brown

Edinburgh—In the last few weeks, more than 300 children have been abducted from Nigerian schools in a new wave of kidnappings by terrorist groups hellbent on extorting money and spreading fear.

By now, the pattern is depressingly familiar. On the morning of November 17, gunmen broke into the dormitories of a girls’ secondary school in Maga, a town in the northwestern state of Kebbi, killing the vice-principal and abducting 25 students. Only days later, on November 21, assailants staged an early-morning attack on St. Mary’s, a co-ed Catholic school in Papiri, a town in the neighboring state of Niger.

It was first reported that 227 people were abducted, but that number has since risen to 303 students – between the ages of eight and 18 – and 12 teachers, surpassing the notorious mass abduction of 276 female students in Chibok in 2014.

2023: Nigeria Cannot Afford An Emperor As President

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Delivering the 2022 TheNiche Lecture titled “2023 Elections And The Future Of Nigeria’s Democracy” on September 8, the guest speaker, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, former governor of Lagos State and Minister of Works and Housing, disagreed with those who hold the view that next year’s elections will be momentous. 

*Buhari and army officers 

Though Fashola admitted that “no two elections are the same; and the intensity always varies anyway as indeed the number of voters and sometimes the number of parties; and the novelty of some candidates,” he nonetheless orated that rhetoric like “this will be a most defining election; this will be an election like no other; and so on and so forth… is common in every democracy and at the onset of a new election cycle,” and no one should be surprised hearing them.

How The Rich Deny The Poor Power To Develop

 By Bjorn Lomborg

The rich world’s fossil fuel hypocrisy is on full display in its response to the global energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the wealthy G7 countries admonish the world’s poor to use only renewables because of climate concerns, Europe and the United States are going begging for Arab nations to expand oil production. Germany is reopening coal power plants, while Spain and Italy are ramping up African gas production. So many European countries have asked Botswana to mine more coal that the country will have to triple its exports.

A single person in the rich world uses more fossil fuel energy than all the energy available to 23 poor Africans. The rich world became wealthy by massively exploiting fossil fuels, which today provide more than three-quarters of its energy. Solar and wind deliver less than three per cent of the rich world’s energy.

Yet, the rich are choking off funding for any new fossil fuels in the developing world. Most of the world’s poorest four billion people have no meaningful energy access, so the rich blithely tell them to ‘leapfrog’ from no energy to a green nirvana of solar panels and wind turbines.

Rising Incidence Of Illicit Trade In Tobacco

By Nkemdili Nwadike

There has been an explosion in global and cross border trade for some decades now. With this burst also comes the menace of illicit trade, otherwise known as the underground economy. As markets open and demand grows, people try to engage in illegitimate trade by producing, importing, exporting, purchasing or selling items without complying with relevant legislations.

Illicit trade is a massive problem for manufacturers, governments, regulators and multilateral agencies and indeed any legitimate operator in the industry value chain. It extremely undermines government’s objectives on taxes and revenues, places burdens on government’s regulatory and enforcement agencies and undercuts the potential benefits of international trade.