Point One

Beginning from today, 12th December, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will be making Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) of registrants available at its 774 local government area offices for collection. By Section 47(1) of the Electoral (Amendment) Act 2022, a person who intends to vote in any Nigerian election “shall present himself with his voter’s card to a Presiding Officer for accreditation at the polling unit in the constituency in which his name is registered.” That is to say, you must get your PVC ready if your intend / desire to vote in the imminent 2023 general election comprising the national elections into the Presidency and National Assembly seats on 25th February, 2023, and state elections into the governorships and houses of assembly on 11th March, 2023. The first of those elections is just 74 days away, and anyone yet to collect his/her PVC has no time to lose doing so. Many of the PVCs, according to INEC, are for persons who registered or transferred their...

Freshly-installed Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke took the reins early last week in a gale of controversy. The new ‘sheriff’, who emerged through the 16th July governorship poll on Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket, stepped in with a bullish swagger to reset all settings by his predecessor, former Governor Gboyega Oyetola of All Progressives Congress (APC). There had been no love lost between them. So, it was expected to be a rocky takeover and it proved to be one.  At his inauguration on Sunday, 27th November, Adeleke froze all Osun accounts in banks and financial institutions. That was anticipated as a standard tack of any incoming administration to forestall a run on state funds by persons taking advantage of momentary flux in leadership, and it would indeed have been curious if not applied. The new governor also reverted the name of the state from ‘State of Osun’ adopted by preceding administrations to ‘Osun State’ as cited in the Nigerian Constitution, and its appellat...

French President Emmanuel Macron is fast becoming a customer of a peculiar form of protest under the democratic setting. He was again treated to an ambush smack in the face – physically speaking – by an apparent protester among a crowd of constituents with whom he was having in-contact chitchat at a location in France. The incident was said to have happened penultimate Sunday, 20th November, 2022. In a video footage that lately went viral on social media, Macron was hit in the face by a woman in an olive green t-shirt as he walked by in front of a crowd. The president’s security details moved swiftly in and tackled down the woman, while pulling Macron away. Expectedly, being a presidential outing, the whole incident played out before media cameras. Neither the identity nor motive of the female assaulter was clear as at the time of the incident. That wasn’t the first time the French president was being subjected to physical assault by an apparently angry constituent. In June 2021, a you...

They come in different shades, but to the same negative effect. They are merchants of electoral violence, and their ultimate objective is to obstruct free expression of the voters’ will through the ballot box. And they aren’t just enemies of free democratic expression, but also of the good of the Nigerian state. With the 2023 general election under 100 days away – the national elections into the Presidency and National Assembly chambers on 25th February, 2023 and the state elections into the governorships and houses of assembly on 11th March – they constitute a pressing danger the country must earnestly deal with. It was violence at its crudest wrought against the ballot box with the arson attacks, penultimate Thursday, on offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Ogun and Osun states. Arsonists lit into the commission’s Abeokuta South council area office in the Ogun capital at about 1:15am on 10th November and incinerated the premises and movable assets on sit...

It was by all parameters a gory Friday. Seven persons, including three police officers and a lady, were killed penultimate weekend in a gun ambush on the General Overseer of Omega Fire Ministries, Apostle Johnson Suleman. The controversial cleric said it was an assassination bid against him, whereas police narrative suggested it was a kidnap attempt. Whatever it was, lives were needlessly lost. Suleiman was said to be returning from a trip to Tanzania en route to Auchi, his base in Edo State, when gunmen opened fire on his convoy and cut the victims down in cold blood. He was riding in an armoured Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), while the vehicles in which others accompanying him rode were not as protectively reinforced. They were, in effect, sitting ducks in the firestorm. Suleiman’s account was that the gunmen were after him, but he managed to beat the ambush in his bulletproof car. Those felled in the hailstorm of bullets weren’t as lucky apparently because they were not bulletproofed...

 Natural disasters are what they are: natural disasters. That is, they are mishaps caused by forces of nature beyond the remit of man to control. The best man can do is mitigate the effects through response strategies – first, to minimise the incident impact; and then, to recover in its aftermath. But some natural disasters are facilitated more by human failings than sheer tyranny of elemental forces. The floods currently ravaging many areas of Nigeria are of this kind. More than 600 persons are confirmed dead and nearly two million displaced in the flooding that has overwhelmed 33 of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Houses and farmlands have been submerged or washed away in Abia, Adamawa, Anambra, Bayelsa, Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Kogi, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Yobe, Taraba and Zamfara states as well as the FCT, among others. Government lately put on record that more than 2.5million persons were affected ...

From being hunted by security agents few years ago, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, is today the hottest act in Nigeria’s crackdown against oil thieves and, in effect, the country’s economic survival. By reason of the Federal Government’s enlistment of a security surveillance firm to which he is linked, the ex-militant is the new czar of the war to tackle down a menace that is bringing the country close to her knees. And the country appears benefitting from the deal. Within eight weeks of being signed up by government in a multi-billion naira contract involving oil pipeline surveillance in the Niger Delta region, Tompolo’s Tantita Security Services Limited has uncovered a slew of illegal oil tapping points in Delta and Bayelsa states through which crude oil is being stolen by economic leeches. The former leader of militant Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) lately confirmed that the crackdown also unearthed a four-kilometre long illegal oil pipeline in the Forcad...