Point One

When militants last Monday storm-trooped a girls school in Dapchi, Yobe State, displacing the students and their minders and apparently abducting some, it was a virtual reenactment of the nightmare we tangled with not too long go in Nigerian nationhood history. The militants, suspected to be Boko Haramists, struck under the cover of night at the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC) in a gang raid for which they deployed explosives and heavy weaponry mounted on trucks, some of which were said to have been camouflaged in military colours. They reportedly fired random shots as they approached the state-run boarding school that caters for girls aged from 11 years, sending students and teachers on the premises fleeing in the dark through jungle paths for safety in nearby habitations. The lucky ones brazed injuries from thistles and thorns, and reportedly in some cases from snakebites, to make it to ‘safety’ and have since returned home. Luckless ones, as it now seems obviou...

If members of the National Assembly have their way, as they seem intent on doing, presidential poll would tailguard the sequence of the Nigerian general election due next year. And if that happens, the election management body, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), would be crudely arm-twisted over the timetable it has already announced, which heads up with national elections comprising the presidential and national assembly polls. The national lawmakers dug their heels deeper into the gameplan late last week as the Senate fell into line with an alteration to Section 25 of the Electoral Act 2010, as amended, being proposed by the House of Representatives. The House had late last January altered the principal act by inserting a new sub-section 25 (1) providing that: ‘ Elections into the office of the president and vice president, the governor and deputy governor of a state, and to the membership of the Senate, the House of Representatives and House o...