Her funeral rites would have begun on Wednesday, 11th January, but were postponed because her family, along with the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), is awaiting an autopsy report. As of the time of writing, the matter had faded from the headlines and a new date for interment was yet to be announced. Obviously, the autopsy would serve the legal purpose …

As though following a notoriously familiar trajectory, it would seem like every intervention agency emplaced by the Federal Government to impact on Nigeria’s Niger Delta region intrinsically suffers some specie of leadership jinx and dysfunction. The Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), conceived by the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, and inaugurated in December 2000, has been serially plagued by leadership instability. The …

I have deliberately elected not to comment frontally on former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s New Year letter to Nigerian youth – of all segments of Nigeria’s population – because the writer behaves like Satan preaching Christ to unbelievers! I think that is why many have chosen to allude to the dichotomy between the message and the messenger or the baby and …

3rd May 2002. That was the first day I met Shina Badaru, then IT Editor of THISDAY. It was a chance meeting on a flight from Abuja to Lagos. I was returning with Simon Kolawole, then Editor of THISDAY on Saturday, and Ademola Adegbamigbe, editor of TheNEWS, when we met him on the plane and got introduced to him by …

Professor Babafemi Badejo is not a stranger to this column. Today he takes a look at the japa syndrome in Nigeria, as well as regaled us with his findings on a latest trip across the border to neighbouring Benin Republic. Are we making progress in this country or are we regressing? Read on: Mr Rufus and Mrs Esther Sami were …

My friend sent me a WhatsApp chat shortly after President Olusegun Obasanjo announced his endorsement of Mr Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party. “What does the Obasanjo endorsement mean?” he asked. I smiled to myself and replied: “It means he is bored!” Like him or hate him, Obasanjo is a headline maker any day. With him, downtimes …

I’m sure he expected the firestorm. As is his custom, he primed and released it to explode at his own time and season. If the letter by former President Olusegun Obasanjo endorsing Labour Party’s Peter Obi had gone unnoticed, uncriticised, and un-replied, then it would not have been Obasanjo’s letter. The letter had barely landed when the ruling All Progressives …

An adage says the only reward for success is a hunger for more success. Twenty years after their establishment and currently rated among the five best colleges in Nigeria, the American University of Nigeria (AUN) schools have turned this adage into a song. Recently, the management of the schools rolled out a well-thought-out strategic master plan for future reinvention that …

From time, I had never been excited about General Olusegun Obasanjo’s personality and his letters. I am very conversant with the fact that, besides training in the handling of weapons, military generals are deft contrivers of lies, propaganda, decoy and deception with which they can win wars by simply confusing and creating disaffection across lines even before firing a shot. …

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu MFR (well known as Burna Boy) took the word right out of my stinking mouth. Yes, finally somebody had to say it, look us in the korokoro eyes and tell us the damn truth. To deal with Nigerians and relate with them as the Landlord, I often time wanted to say what Burna Boy said: “GOD punish …