The Plumb Line
Nigeria’s ‘sick man’
It was Czar Nicholas 1 of Russia who, in 1853, described the crumbling Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of...
Ant and lizard
One hot, sweaty morning, I was breaking the grounds in my small home, clothed in three-quarter shorts and a singlet....
Indecent Exposure in Senate
I remember reading Tom Sharpe's satirical novel Indecent Exposure in the early 1980s. The story is set in South Africa...
IBB’s self demystification
Long ago, former President Ibrahim Babangida promised some day to tell the "whole truth and nothing but the truth" about...
For Murtala, no ‘second death’
The date of Gen. Murtala Ramat Mohammed's death and 16th American President Abraham Lincoln's birthday almost coincided. The former was...
The books are adding up but life isn’t
Nigeria's accounts appear to be adding up but the quality of life, in real terms, isn't. According to the World...
People are asking questions
The civil war or Biafra War officially ended in 1970 after Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, leader of the rebellion, fled the country...
They needn’t have died
They needed not to have died the way they did. And the fuel tanker explosion in Niger State in which...
The ballot v. gun
For a long time, the battle between the ballot and the gun in Africa was uneven, the latter almost inevitably...
The White Man’s Burden
William Easterly's masterly book The White Man's Burden brutally exposes the pain that efforts by the West to "help" Africa...