Blog

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...

What is the world turning to? How come we are being driven by a new strain of negative feminism? With all the people that Boko Haram killed and kidnapped, it was when 200 plus girls were kidnapped that the global media descended on Nigeria in the Jonathan days. The unspoken message was passed quite eloquently;...

I didn’t support the ‘Boycott your Bank’ campaign launched by CAFON (Consumer Advocacy Forum of Nigeria) during the week because it sounded odd to me. I’ve never heard it before for customers to boycott banks. Do customers not need the banks more than the banks needed them in our kind of setting? With all the...

Already, many religious institutions in Nigeria are richer than the government, with some sitting on trillions of unencumbered Naira. A significant proportion of all earnings by most Nigerians, go to them, yet they go unregulated; even feared. Some of them are quite vicious; ready to resort to violence upon being challenged. Many of them have...

“The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” – Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani (2005) John Defterios anchored the session. On the high table as discussants were Nigeria’s Ibe Kachikwu; President Aliyev of Azerbaijan; Khalid Al Falih, the MD of Saudi Aramco; Lin...

I remember when as a young bank worker in 90s Lagos, we sewed our suits with different wannabe Nigerian ‘tailors’, with varying disastrous or comical effects. Some simply swelled around the shoulders, some developed bubbles in the front, for some the ‘stays’ fell off, making the jacket sag in different places, while some changed colours...

The Group MD of the NNPC and Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, on Christmas Day announced that the Federal Government was not ready to totally deregulate the petroleum market. He added – quite surprisingly – that the price for petrol at the pumps will be N85.00 by the January 1st, 2016. Since...

I’d never seen her before… nor heard of her. I noticed though that she wasn’t sitting very professionally when I tuned in to Channels TV to watch the presidential chat yesterday and commented about her posture. She did ramble a bit but I picked one very important question she asked the president. It was something...

(How Dasuki shared N30billion loot with Bafawara, Dokpesi, Yuguda, Obaegbena, Annenih, Kusa and others) The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has unraveled how a former National Security Adviser, retired Colonel Sambo Dasuki, allegedly shared a “loot” of N30 billion, which was delivered to him in Dollar from the Central Bank of Nigeria. The money was...

A lot of the economic problems facing Nigeria can be traced to a way of thinking. This thinking believes that markets can never be a good thing if left to their own devices and so they must be subjugated. Prices must be controlled. And so on. It affects everything from forex policy to fuel subsidy...