Point One

It was by all parameters a gory Friday. Seven persons, including three police officers and a lady, were killed penultimate weekend in a gun ambush on the General Overseer of Omega Fire Ministries, Apostle Johnson Suleman. The controversial cleric said it was an assassination bid against him, whereas police narrative suggested it was a kidnap attempt. Whatever it was, lives were needlessly lost. Suleiman was said to be returning from a trip to Tanzania en route to Auchi, his base in Edo State, when gunmen opened fire on his convoy and cut the victims down in cold blood. He was riding in an armoured Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), while the vehicles in which others accompanying him rode were not as protectively reinforced. They were, in effect, sitting ducks in the firestorm. Suleiman’s account was that the gunmen were after him, but he managed to beat the ambush in his bulletproof car. Those felled in the hailstorm of bullets weren’t as lucky apparently because they were not bulletproofed...

 Natural disasters are what they are: natural disasters. That is, they are mishaps caused by forces of nature beyond the remit of man to control. The best man can do is mitigate the effects through response strategies – first, to minimise the incident impact; and then, to recover in its aftermath. But some natural disasters are facilitated more by human failings than sheer tyranny of elemental forces. The floods currently ravaging many areas of Nigeria are of this kind. More than 600 persons are confirmed dead and nearly two million displaced in the flooding that has overwhelmed 33 of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). Houses and farmlands have been submerged or washed away in Abia, Adamawa, Anambra, Bayelsa, Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Delta, Ebonyi, Edo, Gombe, Imo, Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Kogi, Niger, Plateau, Sokoto, Yobe, Taraba and Zamfara states as well as the FCT, among others. Government lately put on record that more than 2.5million persons were affected ...

From being hunted by security agents few years ago, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, is today the hottest act in Nigeria’s crackdown against oil thieves and, in effect, the country’s economic survival. By reason of the Federal Government’s enlistment of a security surveillance firm to which he is linked, the ex-militant is the new czar of the war to tackle down a menace that is bringing the country close to her knees. And the country appears benefitting from the deal. Within eight weeks of being signed up by government in a multi-billion naira contract involving oil pipeline surveillance in the Niger Delta region, Tompolo’s Tantita Security Services Limited has uncovered a slew of illegal oil tapping points in Delta and Bayelsa states through which crude oil is being stolen by economic leeches. The former leader of militant Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) lately confirmed that the crackdown also unearthed a four-kilometre long illegal oil pipeline in the Forcad...

It is 138 days away from the 2023 general election and this country, understandably, is in the thick of what they call the ‘silly season’ of electioneering. The national elections into the presidency and National Assembly seats will hold on 25th February 2023, while the state elections into governorships in 28 states and house of assembly seats in all the 36 states are scheduled for 11th March, 2023. There are 18 registered political parties vying for the various offices, and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has more than 90million voters on roll who are eligible to participate in the elections that will hold in 176,846 polling units across 8,809 wards in the 774 council areas nationwide. By all accounts, we face a date with history. Campaigning in public by the political parties and their candidates formally kicked off on 28th September, with gladiators hot on the stump already in their quest for votes. And you could say they are just getting into the action. As fa...

She could well have been a new pointsperson of the antipolar themes of the 18th Century fairytale about ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ She is a scholar of high standing – a professor at that. And she is a lady, with all the delicate virtues typically associated. She is also said to be a lawyer and human rights activist. But now she stands accused of the most egregious violation of human rights, learnedness in law and scholarly enlightenment put together. She allegedly assaulted and battered to pulp a police orderly attached to her for refusing to do menial household chores meant for personal domestic staff, not assigned auxiliaries like a security orderly.  Professor Zainab Duke Abiola is presently in police custody and awaiting prosecution along with her housemaid, said to have joined her with another household staff – a male who is at large – in battering her police orderly, Inspector Teju Moses. A video clip showing the orderly in uniform, bleeding while seated on the floor and asking ...

Another pageant of sleaze has just played out on national canvass and warrants our re-interrogation of society’s morals. An adulatory crowd massed onto the grounds of Danbaba Suntai Airport in Jalingo, the Taraba State capital, penultimate Saturday to accord a hero’s welcome to their own. It didn’t matter one jot that it was an errant ‘son’ returning. They revelled as the private jet that brought him came to a halt and the gangway opened for him to confer a benevolent wave on the ecstatic kinsmen. Welcome back! Welcome back! The crowd jubilantly cheered – in effect, that is. The snow-white babanriga (flowing gown) of the returnee was a perfect dissemblance of the coal-black morality that took him away and kept him four years behind prison walls. As he alighted onto the tarmac and the crowd crushed on him, he perhaps felt invaded and craved some breathing space. But  it was an ironic charade that he couldn’t have wished otherwise in the circumstance. So, he lived it down. Enter ex-T...

 It is now definitive. Kenyan Deputy President William Samoei Ruto will in a matter of days, maybe hours, be installed the country’s fifth president. He was returned winner of the 9th August presidential election by Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati, who said he came off with 50.5 percent of votes cast. That verdict was challenged in court by runner-up opposition veteran Raila Odinga, said to have polled 48.8 percent of the votes. Now the Supreme Court has affirmed Ruto as duly elected, clearing all hurdles to his being sworn into office as president. Until the supreme court gave its verdict early last week, the international community and all Kenyans – not the least, Ruto himself – could only wait with bated breath.  That mode was dictated by experience with radical courage for which the Kenyan apex court is reputed. In 2017, the court upturned the presidential poll held on 8th August of that year, and of which incumbent ...