Point One

It was a most practical and certainly welcome act of restitution. Rampaging militants, who had seized some students of the Government Girls Science and Technical College (GGSTC) in Dapchi, Yobe State, on February 19, swept back into the town last Wednesday, freeing their hostages following negotiations with the Federal Government. The militants, suspected to be from a faction of Boko Haram, returned to Dapchi in the same storm raider fashion they struck in February, trucking their hostages back to freedom. Reports said they came in a convoy of about nine vehicles and dropped the schoolgirls off into the custody of harried parents, having beforehand indicated they would rather not release them to security forces. Of the 110 schoolgirls seized from their hostels 30 days earlier, the militants released 104 captives along with two others said not to be of the GGSTC stock. It seems fairly obvious, sadly, that five of the Dapchi schoolgirls will never be returning, hav...

It could only happen, I dare say, under the tumultuous presidency of Donald Trump. Rex Tillerson was as at the beginning of last week strutting the African continent as United States Secretary of State on a multi-nation tour, of which Nigeria was his last whistle stop. But he might well have saved those exertions, because just hours after, he was out of office – fired by way of a presidential tweet, and from indications while he was still airborne from his African round. Tillerson was in Abuja last Monday for a couple of hours, during which he locked down with President Muhammadu Buhari and later held a media parley with his Nigerian counterpart, Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyema. He had started out that morning from Kenya, stopped over in Chad, and was only breezing through Nigeria having cut short the original schedule of his African tour to head back home same day. Still, he brought with him a bouquet of typical diplomatese. He offered his country’s sup...