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Showing posts from May, 2022

Payback time

Even an elementary student of politics knows it is essentially a game of compromises. Many atimes, compromises are made as upfront deposits to be cashed upon at a future date, even when what has to be given up in the instance accords more with personal inclination. That must be what Canadian-American diplomat and intellectual, John Kenneth Galbraith, meant when he said: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” Where an upfront deposit of compromise made by one party is, for whatever reason, unreciprocated by the other party at due time, you could expect payback in hard-handed retaliation by the depositor. That seems the situation on hand presently in the Nigerian political space.  President Muhammadu Buhari has till date withheld assent to a hurried reworking of Section 84(8) of the Electoral (Amendment) Act 2022 by the National Assembly that would have allowed statutory delegates to vote in the primaries and convent

Misery zone

 Nigerians were a more miserable lot over the past year than the year before it, a new global research index has revealed. Hanke’s Annual Misery Index published early last week computed indicators in 156 countries and showed Nigeria dipping to the 11th spot among the world’s most miserable nations in 2021, from the 15th place where she was ranked in 2020. In other words, the level of misery worsened and pushed the country four ranks up among the world’s hellholes. The misery index is calculated on macroeconomic indicators in respective country such as the unemployment rate, cost of access to funds as reflected in the lending rate, inflationary trend indexed by spiralling cost of goods and services, and dwindling level of consumption evidenced by  low gross domestic product (GDP) rate.  According to research data published on Twitter by Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at John Hopkins University, Nigeria was the fourth most miserable country in Africa last year, trailing on

Some mothers do have ’em

“Please, I am begging Nigerians to help me because Chrisland is trying to hide this issue. They are trying to push us out of the way and my daughter is affected psychologically. Please, I need help as a mother. I am begging fellow Nigerians to help me.” Those were the inciting – yes, inciting! – words of the mother of the little girl at the centre of a sex video scandal involving pupils of Chrisland Schools, Victoria Island in Lagos, that recently rocked the airwaves . Five minors among a 76-member team that represented their school at the World School Games in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between 10th and 13th  March, 2022 got in a moral mess by way of a sex romp that was captured on video and got exposed on the internet. The sheer horror, morally speaking, moved the Lagos State Government to temporarily shut all branches of the elite group of schools in the megapolis – they have since been reopened – and left the school management in a credibility battle with the girl’s mother over