Point One

In just a few hours hence, it will be curtains call on the old year 2018 as the new year 2019 rolls in. This rite of passage will be attended as usual by resurgent optimism that most of humanity harbours at a time like this over a new beginning. New years typically are synonymous with new beginnings, and new beginnings for most people invariably come with a fresh burst of hope that things will get better going forward than they were in the outgoing year. Talented American singer and songwriter, Taylor Alison Swift, quite simplistically articulated this mood in one of her works when she said: “ This is a new year / A new beginning / And things will change! ” But conventional wisdom as well teaches that time is a continuum, and there really are no absolutely new beginnings. Ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, made this point more succinctly in his saying that “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Time is fundamentally a continuum, and so mood bu...

Nigerians have for long languished under debilitating incompetence of the power sector. And we are now better informed that the government should by no means be held responsible for the crisis. Rather, whiners should direct their angst at privately owned electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) and Generation Companies (GenCos) that are operators of the seemingly jinxed sector. We have no less to thank for that edifying clarification than Power, Works and Housing Minister Babatunde Fashola (SAN), who lately repudiated government liability for the astoundingly fitful but essential infrastructure. Speaking at a stakeholder dialogue in Abuja penultimate week, he reportedly acknowledged that there were truly persisting challenges in the power sector, but that the Federal Government was not to blame if Nigerians do not have electricity supply since the sector has been privatised. “If you don’t have electricity, it is not the Federal Government’s problem, take the matt...

One explosive highlight of the recently published memoir of former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, My Transition Hours , is his assertion that foreign powers meddled in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election. In the widely anticipated book, the ex-president unleashed some bile against Western actors, notably former leaders of the United States and United Kingdom, whom he blamed for interventions considered to have aided his defeat in the said poll. He accused former U.S. President Barack Obama in particular of downright bias against his candidature and hubristic condescension towards the Nigerian electorate. Jonathan writes inter alia : “On March 23, 2015, President Obama himself took the unusual step of releasing a video message directly to Nigerians, all but telling them how to vote. In that video, Obama urged Nigerians to open the ‘next chapter’ with their votes. Those who understood subliminal language deciphered that he was prodding the electorate to vote for the ...