Public Affairs Analyst

  Vocabulary.com, an online dictionary, describes farming as the act or process of working the ground, planting seeds and growing edible plants. You can also describe raising animals for milk or meat as farming. However, will it be inappropriate to classify breeding children for sale as farming? Are you shocked that there are some mindless animals in human skins who, under different guises and ruses, arrange for young boys to impregnate teenage girls and then sell off those children to prospective buyers when they were born? Things are indeed happening in Nigeria. An online magazine named Wide Angle in a November 11, 2008 news report titled Nigerian Babies Bred for Sale reported thus: “police in the city of Enugu in south-eastern Nigeria raided a maternity hospital suspected to be a ‘baby farm.’ The authorities were tipped off by a pregnant teenage girl who managed to escape from the clinic, where she was being held hostage along with seven other pregnant women awaiting delivery....

  Unknown to many compatriots, Nigeria does not have 774 Local Government Areas. There are actually 768 LGAs and six area councils. This is according to the provision of section 3 (6) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended. The six area councils are listed in the First Schedule, Part II, Paragraph 2 of the constitution as Abaji, Abuja Municipal, Bwari, Gwagwalada, Kuje and Kwali with all of them retaining the names as headquarters except Abuja Municipal with headquarters at Garki. It is also important to stress that the conduct of elections into the area councils are not part of the constitutional responsibilities of the Independent National Electoral Commission as stipulated in paragraph 15 (a) of the Third Schedule of the Nigerian Constitution. However, that does not make INEC’s conduct of the area councils election illegal. Section 299 of the Constitution says the provisions of the constitution shall apply to the FCT, Abuja as if it were one of...

  Two weeks ago, precisely on January 26, 2022, I wrote on this page about Nigeria’s tearful education sector. Arising from that, I got invited by TOS Television, Abuja to discuss how to reset Nigeria’s education system. Again, last Wednesday and Thursday, I was a participant at a two-day national education summit organised by an NGO, Human Development Initiatives. Most of the participants at the national dialogue were drawn from the education sector and it was humbling and quite revealing the extent of the rot in Nigeria’s education sector and the imperative of fixing it. There is no gainsaying that education is the cornerstone of knowledge. According to a great philosopher, Aristotle, “Education is the best provision for old age” while another philosopher, Plato (428 – 348 B.C), says “The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future.”   A scholar, G.K Chesterton, opined that “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation...

  On Tuesday, January 25, 2022, Transparency International via the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre released the 2021 Corruption Perception Index. The survey shows that Nigeria scored 24 out of 100 points in the 2021 CPI, falling back one point compared to the 2020 CPI. This made Nigeria the second most corrupt country in West Africa, after Guinea. In the country comparison for the year, Nigeria ranks 154 out of 180 countries—five places down compared to the 2020 CPI results. The country’s score had dropped from 26 in 2019 to 25 in the 2020 assessment and further to 24 in the latest 2021 record. It is indeed not heartwarming news for Nigeria’s anti-corruption agencies and indeed the Federal Government whose mantra and cardinal objective is to combat corruption. Should we believe Transparency International’s CPI on Nigeria given the great job being done by frontline anti-graft agencies such as the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, and th...