Like we all know, one of the functions of the National Assembly include the making of laws, the controlling of the finances of the State, and also a critical role to check the actions of government. However, as it stands, history will judge you leaders and members for not being proactive in directing our economy towards enhancing its innate capacity of attaining self-sufficiency, the ultimate safety valve for debt dependence. So, Mr. Senate President and...
All Nigerians should be vexed about the killings that have befallen the northeastern region of Nigeria and which have also penetrated other areas of the Nigerian federation. In a series of papers presented at the NISEC Homeland Security Conference 2014, I discussed my ideas on how to combat terrorism in Nigeria. Israeli experts and other scholars and security specialists also enunciated their own counter-terrorism initiatives in Abuja. On this subject, today, the data—as depicted by...
Changing “Democracy Day” from May 29 to June 12 is of little significance if Nigerians are unsafe, taunted by government agents and by criminals. As Nigeria marks its twenty-one years of unbroken democracy, a closer look at specifics has become altogether unavoidable. In the light of Nigeria’s penchant for wild claims and increasing proclivity for self-congratulation even for doing nothing except maintain status quo, it has become imperative that the country’s democratic experiment over these...
“You kept your knee on our neck. We had creative skills, but we couldn’t get your knee off our neck. It’s time for us in George’s name to stand up and say, ‘Get your knee off our necks.’” – Rev. Al Sharpton Even the dead knows what is going on right now, that the world has been busy, taking the knee for George Floyd. From the streets, states, and counties, to nation-states, and at the...
I took to remembering Candace Owens, the activist, on this period of our present time that would be recalled infamously until the end of days. Madam Candace, as I have chosen to call her, walked into my dream brandishing a six-foot long two-by-four, staring at me through a pair of red listless eyes, because her lower face was under the cover of a covid-19 mask of a she-tiger brand. Her intention was clearly understood; she...
May 30, 2019 marks the 53rd anniversary of the declaration of the Republic of Biafra. For the sake of a younger generation that has not been taught Nigerian history, it is important to put some context to the emergence of Biafra. It may all have started from the political crisis of 1964 which culminated in the coups of January 15, and July 29, 1966. What is clear is that the declaration of Biafra followed a...
In a 2000 paper published in the International Journal of African Studies, I presented a case for local police devolutions in Nigeria that will bring the police closer to the people. The article argued that a colossal policing command headquartered in Abuja, Nigeria could not possibly provide adequate policing functions to the security trepidations of the citizens. That proposition was deduced before the mayhem of the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeastern part of Nigeria...
I am the mother of a Black Man (there are many of us), I am traumatized by the death of George Floyd. His mother, just like me, was a mother of a Black Man. I am a traumatized mother of a Black Man and I’m telling you that this isn’t about politics, this is about human rights and as human beings we are better than this, we have to do better than this. Our sons...
Yet, here I am still standing, pledging allegiance to NIGERIA with all sense of patriotism—a nation still being governed by some of the leaders that masterminded the devastating genocide I survived 53 years ago. Evacuating a large family from the village, Achala, to remote farmland called Eziobibi, almost twenty miles away on foot, and through near inaccessible road-paths, and under severe weather conditions was not a joke. I was seven at the time, and I...
In the days following the stroke which would eventually take his life, one issue weighed heavily on Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu’s mind. That ‘issue’ was the immortalization of Bruce Mayrock, the 20 year old who set himself ablaze in front of the UN Building in New York on this day (29th Of May) in 1969 to draw attention to the plight of the Biafran people (a people whom he had never met, and whom he believed...
