Point One

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is no stranger to controversy. He exudes the vibes: sometimes frontally like an army of occupation exudes aggression, at other times latently like a decaying organism exudes putrid smell. Either way, you can’t miss the vibes or keep out of its stormy orbit. You get pulled in willy-nilly by the sheer bravado of the old man’s postulations. And he seems to relish all the fuss. With his characteristic imperial temerity, you can’t help recalling that his daughter and ex-Senator of the Federal Republic, Iyabo Obasanjo, once accused him openly of behaving like he is God and owner of Nigeria. ‘Baba Obasanjo,’ as he should be rightly addressed at 86 years of age, rides controversy like a storm. Sixteen years on after he left office as two-term president of the current political republic, besides a three-year stint in the late 70s as military head of state, Obasanjo carries himself as Lord of the Manor. He dictates rules of conduct for everybody based on his pe...

If you ever have to undergo surgery at a Nigerian hospital, you may need to play safe by undertaking inventory scan of your body organs before and after the surgery, just so to be sure the organs remain intact. That is the lesson to learn from the experience of the Kamal couple in Jos, Plateau State. The couple has been in the news over alleged harvesting of one of the kidneys of the wife, Kehinde Kamal, by a neighbourhood practitioner who the victim’s husband, Busari Kamal, recently dealt out to the police. The ‘doctor’ is Noah Kekere and the ‘hospital’ is Murna Clinic and Maternity located in Yanshanu community, Jos North council area. The police in Plateau State took Kekere into custody after Busari Kamal, a businessman, reported him to the Nasarawa Gwom police division, accusing him of having removed his wife’s right kidney during a surgery in 2018. The surgery Kekere conducted on Mrs. Kamal had nothing to do with her kidneys, but he allegedly invaded that region of her body anyway...

 Another African country fell under the jackboots last Wednesday with the ouster of President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon in a coup d’état. It was the eighth coup in West and Central Africa within three years and the second in just barely above a month, coming after the Niger Republic coup on 26th July. It also marked further rollback of the influence of France on the continent, the successive coups that have taken place being in its former colonies – and that includes Gabon. Ali Bongo, 64, was sacked on the heels of being declared winner of an election conducted penultimate Saturday by the Gabonese electoral board. He was said to have won with 64.27 percent of the vote over his main challenger, Albert Ondo Ossa, a university professor, said to have secured 30.77 percent votes. That election was, however, anything but credible or transparent, and the opposition argued it was downright fraudulent. Contrary to global best practice, international observers were not allowed,  forei...