Point One

 It was a brutal, though benignly couched rite of passage at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in the United States, last week. President Joe Biden was cheered off into history by an adulatory crowd at an event where he could well have delivered an oration at his own funeral. He had strongly pushed to stay on, and had the imprimatur of the party’s primary elections to lead Democrats into battle against former President Donald Trump of the Republican Party in the forthcoming national polls in that country. But his hands were forced by his party to pull his re-election bid, and he was at the convention in Chicago formally passing the torch to Vice-President Kamala Harris. Politics is glamourous, but it can also be cruel.  Until he folded his campaign about a month earlier, 81-year-old Biden was his party’s presumptive nominee and had looked forward to delivering the keynote on the final night of the 2024 convention after he would have formally accepted the presidential no...

Security operatives penultimate Wednesday, i.e. 7th August, raided Pascal Bafyau Labour House where the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has its national headquarters and secretariat in Abuja. The 10-storey building in the vicinity of the Federal Ministry of Finance, in the federal capital’s Central Business District, houses NLC’s offices on its three topmost floors with tenants occupying other spaces. It was the NLC itself that broke the news of the raid. In a late night statement on the said day, the congress made known that heavily armed security agents at about 8:30p.m. stormed its offices in a raid it suspected linked to its sympathetic disposition towards then roiling hardship protests that began across the country on 1st August. NLC spokesman, Benson Upah, said in the statement that the security squad – initially assumed to also involve Department of State Services (DSS) agents – “swooped on the 10th floor of the NLC (building) and arrested the security operative on duty and then c...

Britain was in recent weeks convulsed by violence resulting from the behaviour of protesters waging a xenophobic cause. The riots were so unhinged that the Nigerian government had to issue a travel advisory to Nigerian citizens going to, or resident in the United Kingdom – a stinging role swap with a country that has been in the habit of periodically issuing travel alerts to her own citizens about Nigeria. Over the past couple of weeks, crowds spouting anti-immigrant slogans stood up to law enforcement personnel in one of the UK’s worst violence in more than a decade, leading  to arrest of hundreds of rioters who hurled bricks and other projectiles at the police, looted shops and attacked hotels housing asylum-seekers. The unrest was allegedly instigated by far-right agitators who used the social media to spread misinformation about a knife attack that killed three girls aged between six and nine years penultimate Monday at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, a coastal ...