Public Affairs Analyst

Introduction On Saturday, March 20, 2021, Samuel Ioraer Ortom, politician, farmer, former Minister of State for Trade and Investment and now governor of Benue escaped death by whiskers when assailants suspected to be herders waylaid him on his way back from his farm. According to Ortom, about 15 herders who were dressed in black outfits ambushed him and his security personnel. In his words “…. I went to my farm along Gboko road. And on our way back, we started hearing some gunshots and we discovered people who were dressed in black, and from experience, we now discovered that these are Fulani militias and I do not want to take things for granted because few days ago, the media were awash with statement from MACBAN who met in Yola, the same place they met in 2016 where they decided that they will take Nigeria and that every other person is a slave; that was when they started infiltrating the entire country.” According to the governor, “I appreciate the security men attached to me. T...

  The Federal Executive Council chaired by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), on Wednesday, March 17, 2021, approved the sum of $1.5bn, about N575bn, for immediate commencement of rehabilitation work on the largest refining company in the country, the 32-year-old Port Harcourt Refinery. The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva, related this to newsmen after the council meeting at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. Sylva said the contract for the rehabilitation was awarded to an Italian firm, Tecnimont SPA, and is expected to be executed in three phases. While the first phase which will take the refinery to a production of 90 per cent of its nameplate capacity is expected to be completed within a period of 18 months, the minister said the second and third phases would be completed in 24 months and 44 months respectively. He added that the funding has three components from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Internally Generated Revenue,...

    “Nigeria stands to benefit by encouraging and pushing more trade, becoming a bigger part of the multilateral trading system and to do that Nigeria has to produce more, add value to products and export more. Right now, Nigeria has 0.26 per cent of world trade and 19 per cent of African trade. You could see that as very small but you could also turn it around to see that it has a big opportunity to make use of what has happened with the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement” – Director-General of World Trade Organisation, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, on Monday, March 15, 2021. The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, is in Nigeria on her first official visit outside of Geneva where the WTO is located. She resumed duty as the seventh DG of the 26-year-old organisation on March 1, 2021. She’s the first woman and first African to occupy that exalted position. Nigeria’s brand ambassador who mostly dresses in traditional ankara fabric with ...

  “A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day. We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.”   – International Women’s Day 2021. According to the information gleaned from the Internet, the International Women’s Day has occurred for well over a century with the first gathering held in 1911. The IWD as it is commonly referred to is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. Significant activities are witnessed worldwide as groups come together to celebrate women’s achievements or rally for women’s equality.   Marked annually on March 8, the IWD is one of the mos...

“When politics is no longer a mission but a profession, politicians become more self-serving than public servants”  – Emmanuel Macron, the President of France. Last Thursday, February 25, 2021, I was one of the two panelists on Politics Nationwide, a network programme of Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria.  Mrs. Chinwe Nnorom, a director in the bureaucracy of the Peoples Democratic Party, and I were the two guests on the show. The topic of discussion was, “Regulating Defections from Political Parties”, anchored by Joy Makka.  The programme moderator revealed that Nigeria has had a history of defection of party members from one political party to another right from the colonial era. In 1951, the first celebrated cross-carpeting episode occurred in Nigeria; which consequently robbed the leader of the National Convention of Nigerians and Cameroons, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the chance to lead the government’s business of Western Nigeria. This means that the phenomenon has be...