On Tuesday 15th May, Nigeria witnessed its first mass wedding in the Northern city of Kano when 100 couples were married off by the Kano state government under a programme to address the high rate of divorces in the state. Mass weddings around the world are nothing new; with the earliest recorded in 324 BC during Alexander the Great’s wedding to [...]

I have always heard that Nigeria’s borders are porous, but I never quite grasped the magnitude of the “porousness” until I received these pictures below of the Nigeria-Niger border at Birnin Kuka. I kept thinking afterwards, of a word synonymous with, yet which would signify an extreme form of “porousness”, combined with the words ”Useless” “farce” “joke” and “ridiculous”  to capture this [...]

At around 01.30 am in the wee hours of Tuesday 13th March, while checking local Nigerian and global news as I usually do before heading to bed, I came across an article on the British daily’s website The Independent, titled “On the Trail of Boko Haram” by Andrew Stroehlein, the Communications Director of the International Crisis Group. Thinking it was one of those [...]

Allegations of bribery and corruption made on live television at a legislative committee show some of the problems with our democracy that needs urgent fixing.

…of all the bad things that can happen to a Nigerian motorist, from experience, I am positive that having it conk out on the road has to be the worst.

One case of a death from FGM and the fact that it is still prevalent calls for action against the perpetrators in the main but if the activity cannot be outlawed it must only be done under medical supervision.

We need to tackle an emergency that has our children live like dogs in the name of some higher but unconscionable goal.

I spent the weekend working on an alternative measure of economic activity for Nigeria. Something different from the regular run of the mill GDP. One new option is to measure economic activity by monitoring night lights from space. The basic idea is areas with more illumination at night are assumed to have more economic activity than areas with less illumination. [...]

It is said that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In the era of new media and youtube videos though, one could well say a video clip is worth a thousand photo albums, a few seconds of which could tell a compelling story better than any book, verbal explanation or detailed written analysis. This is very evident in the [...]

One thing I noticed during the fuel subsidy saga earlier in the year was the demonization of most of the people somehow connected with the oil industry. The oil marketers are wicked and evil, the NNPC staff are wicked and evil, the PPRA guys are wicked and evil, how could anyone with a conscience do all that, and so on. [...]