Point One

For 19-year-old Mmesoma Ejikeme, the claim to being the top scorer in the 2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has turned out to be a crown of nails. She has been exposed by the examination body as a fraudster, or at the least duped by a syndicate of fraudsters. But even if duped, the board says, it has been with her complicity. Mmesona claimed she scored 362 marks in the examination whereas JAMB said its own record showed she scored 249 marks. Following the controversy, the board withdrew her score and slammed her with a three-year ban. But she mounted a daring front to impugn the board’s credibility. She postured like the biblical puny David taking on the huge Goliath. Only unlike David, she didn’t off with Goliath’s head. The examination body brought the controversy into the open early last week by accusing Mmesoma of manually inflating her scores to hoodwink the public into showering her with undeserved reward...

 In his 23-year hold on power, Russian President Vladimir Putin woke up to the most rattling test of his iron clad rule penultimate weekend. He faced a day-long mutiny by forces of Wagner Group, a mercenary army led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. The mutiny not only progressed nearly unchallenged while it lasted, it was called off by Prigozhin on concessional terms extracted from Putin that were widely viewed as caging his dreaded sting. Much to the disappointment of his many foes, Putin survived in power. Only he did at the cost of coming across as demystified and vulnerable, rather than impregnable as was hitherto assumed. Effectively, the Putin mystique was dented, but it may be a long way yet from being ended. Paramilitary Wagner Group had been a major fighting force for Russia in her invasion of Ukraine that elicited worldwide condemnation and was met with robust alliance with Ukraine by the West to thwart the expansionist aggression. It may be tangential but nonetheless noteworthy tha...