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If you are religious and you love Nigeria, one prayer you must pray for us as a people is that Almighty God should deliver us from a culture of underachievement. I once wrote on this page – I think over the Saraki issue – that we now seem to perpetually punch under our weights. For...

We are creating a future of totally disconnected Nigerians. Disconnected from the land, disconnected from themselves, disconnected from Africa, disconnected from reality. We are raising a generation of non-patriots on one hand, and those who will take revenge on the nation, for real and imagined ills, on the other. It is important for us to...

Most Nigerians would admit that life is hard. Harder than we thought it would ever be. Many are getting disillusioned, wondering when the succour will ever arrive. Others are losing jobs, livelihoods, the roof over their heads, etc. In parts of the country, people are now regularly exchanging their children for staple food in a...

In this interview, Tope Fasua, founder, Institute for Service and Good Governance (ISEGG), speaks on the challenges of service delivery in the nation’s private and public sectors and how his organisation is addressing them. PT: Please can you tell us about your NGO – the Institute for Service and Good Governance and what informs your social...

One cannot easily pass the message across that Nigerians should try and think for themselves. It is an arduous task. I’ve tried to interrogate why this is so. I can only conclude that many – if not most – Nigerians are intimidated by these matters in spite of the outward show of braggadocio. We are...

I was graciously invited by the Economics students of the great University of Ilorin for their yearly NESA week, to which other Economics students were also invited. I took the opportunity to re-familiarise myself with Ilorin, which I hadn’t been to since my friend got married over a decade ago. But more importantly, it is...

The Federal Government, after a meeting with unions, NNPC and other stakeholders, yesterday announced that it will now ‘fully deregulate’ Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) prices, because it has come to the conclusion that Nigeria cannot continue subsidising that subsector, among other reasons. This action has met with kudos from many quarters, and knocks from others....

Logic will take you from point A to point B… but Imagination will take you everywhere. – Albert Einstein.   While the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala once brought two big cakes to a budget presentation. That must have been 2014. She wanted to indicate how the ‘rebasing’ of...

I join Lawyer Femi Falana in asking the government to desist from incurring new foreign loans. This I do for several reasons. Falana listed a number of sources from which government could recover up to $200 billion in order to fund the budget and even beyond. This is valid. The president himself has on several...

As it morphs from egg, larva, pupa to imago, there comes a time when the butterfly becomes an ugly caterpillar. Call that the pupa stage. A close observer will realise that after a while, the caterpillar stops crawling all over the place and freezes up. In a week or two, a crack appears in the...