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Catch-22

Samantha has finally found a job. For more than eight years she’d been on the job market. She finished her first degree ten years ago when she was 21 years old. She did her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) assignment in Cross River State in the south-east. She was a teacher. She had requested to […]
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Tinubu’s unfinished business

After Chief C.O Adebayo and Senator Femi Okurorounmu had presented Afenifere’s position, Obasanjo cleared his throat and got up to speak. Chief Olusegun Osoba asked him to sit and address the meeting as one of his legs was hurting him but he responded, “How can I sit to address my leaders? He started off by […]
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The strange happenings around us

Sometimes life surprises us with strange happenings that bear no similarity to the everyday happenings around us, to the once-upon-a-time things starting their strangeness upon our habitation and upon the horizon of make-belief. When things happen or strange happenings take hold of our habitation, they either wow or confound us, or move us to tears […]
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‘Dollar Don Rise’

While waiting for the estate shuttle to arrive, I overheard the following conversation between two other ladies also in queue with me. What really caught my ears was when the older one said that she couldn’t understand the youth and their I-just-must-have-my-way attitude. She wished they would realise that life wasn’t all about them and […]
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IGP Arase, students and their enemies

(Columinst) Solomon Arase’s smiles writ large on the television screen as he spoke on the New Protocols that would guide officers of the Nigeria Police Force on general policing practices in a constitutional democracy. The Protocols, which cover the deployment of force, use of fire arms, management of civil disorder and abuse of power policing, […]
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Panama and other stories

“Such a small country spread on an isthmus where the sky is clearer, the sun brighter; all your music echoes within me, like the sea in the small cell of the conch”, the great Panamanian patron-poet, Ricardo Miro, wrote in his famous poem, My country. Idyllic as Panama is, it holds no fascination for poor […]
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The lion has roared

I didn’t have ample time to go through the Sunday papers. I decided to read them while eating the freejon – the Brazilian dish made of special black-eyed beans and eaten only on Good Friday in Lagos. It was introduced to Nigeria by the ex-slaves who returned in the late 19th century – kept for […]
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The Trial of Brother Fashola

(Columnist)   I saw it coming and I warned shortly after President Muhammadu Buhari assigned portfolios to Ministers and made the former Lagos governor “Oloye Meta”(triple chief). I was guest of Seun Okinbaloye on Channels TV where he asked me to x-ray the new ministers and their portfolios. I had expressed pity for Fashola instead […]
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The Children of Kirikiri

  Oscar Wilde was unsparing of the prison system of his time. Perhaps it was for good reasons he interrogated the idea of the prison. In his highly regarded poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, he launched scathing attacks on the prison regimes, exposed the pernicious and inhuman conditions of Reading Prison where he was […]
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Clinging On

I needed to pick an article for Aurora of 30 March. Myriad of ideas was floating in my head. I wouldn’t want to be too political this week – not that there was a dearth of political topics from which to choose on local and international scenes. Like the genie let loose in the United […]
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Rivers of Blood shames

The outcome of the recent re-run elections in Rivers State should be a big shame and embarrassment to us as a people if we are not totally inured from having that set yet. The gory images of severed head, rivers of blood and charred remains all bring home the beastly nature of our politics of […]
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Musa Babayo and Nigeria's Economic Diplomacy

  Nigeria’s foreign policy has evolved over the last decades into the unrecognizable relic of her foreign policy museum. In the years following her glorious contributions to the anti-imperialist struggles on the continent, there hasn’t been attempts at reinvigorating her “Africa as the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy” to meet