By Hez Shobiye The difficulty of paying out of pockets put most Nigerians in a great deal of financial risk and restricts them from having direct access to health care when they need it. Majority are even forced to sell their assets or go into debt in order to pay for health care costs.   How is health care paid [...]

By Seyi Taylor It is this negligence of the whole picture while so much attention is given on the small one that worries me.  If the medical profession would spend as much energy fighting for their salaries as they would ensuring that the government provided 24-hour electricity in major hospitals and concentrated on giving real care to the nation; perhaps [...]

My initial response to news reports that the National Assembly was looking to rein in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), through an amendment to its enabling statute, was to wonder whether we are not about to throw the bath water away because a stroppy moppet would not take its bath. From the day he took office, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi [...]

ONE: A radio station proclaiming itself to be representing the interests of the Republic of Biafra has started airing broadcasts. Radio Biafra first hit airwaves in the course of the Nigerian civil war. The re-emergence of Radio Biafra has been met with shock, excitement and curiosity. I am personally curious about this station that broadcasts from London and is slated [...]

Issues is a new NT series in which academics and policy experts write on their areas of expertise. If you would like to contribute to the series send an email to Olumide (his email address is on the page under the link).  The columnist this week is public policy analyst Abimbola Agboluaje. I was delighted when I discovered that President Goodluck [...]

It is no longer news that in the past year or so, Nigeria has become another byword for terrorism. From the first bomb blast at the 50th independence anniversary celebrations in October 2010, we have experienced countless others, almost on a daily basis. Just over this weekend, two churches, during service, were attacked in Kano. The attacks killed at least [...]

ONE: Last week Ahmad Salkida, a reporter who works with several newspapers in Maiduguri, wrote an expose on his personal experience reporting Boko Haram’s terrorists activities aided by the help of his network of sources within the group. A few days following Salkida’s report, Boko Haram attacked several media houses include, Premium Times newspaper and ThisDay newspaper offices in Abuja [...]

A couple of weeks back, seated across the table from some bank treasurer friends of mine, the conversation invariably drifted away from how much of a commentary on the banking industry’s health the banks’ recently released year-end results represented. June was a month that that would not stay down. Like an uninvited guest, it would not depart the august gathering, [...]

Issues is a new NT series in which academics and policy experts write on their areas of expertise. If you would like to contribute to the series send an email to Olumide (his email address is on the page under the link).  The columnists this week are sociologist Ebenezer Obadare and cultural theorist Akin Adesokan Video footage of Bishop David Oyedepo, [...]

As usual with just about everything we have done in the country in the last couple of years, there was a farcical quality to Nigeria’s bid to have its coordinating minister for the economy Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, succeed to the office of president of the World Bank. Paradoxically, the main arguments in support of her candidature were flawless. Take merit. [...]