Ideally, Malam Umaru Musa Yar’adua should have turned down former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s invitation to contest the 2007 presidential election.. Umaru knew, more than even his doctors that he was too sick to take up the most challenging job in the country. The decent thing to have done was for him to have locked himself […]
Continue reading about NAH! THAT WAS NOT UMARU (And the BBC should investigate itself)
Why is Nigeria and most of the world so unusually shocked and outraged that Faruk is a Nigerian citizen, from Katsina state in the North Western part of the country? The obvious answer, I suppose, is because the unusual always excites. But the deeper meaning of why the world reacts with such disbelief has greater […]
It’s been four weeks since this column last appeared on these pages. Four weeks of unprecedented political drama that oscillates between horror and tragedy, with occasional comic relief. The country pretty much shut down, and remains so even now, more or less.
We are in a very deep s…t and we know it; everybody knows it. That is the good news. The bad news is as follows: Thursday before last (5/11/2009) I watched a debate on the NTA on the state of the Nigerian nation. The Minority Leader of the House of Representatives Sani Sale Minjibir (ANPP, […]
Another very intriguing rumour is again circulating among Abuja civil servants; that come next week, the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation (HOCS) Mr Steve Oronsaye would bring out another explosive circular that would deal another merciless blow on civil servants. This time Mr Oronsaye is said to be contemplating reducing the retirement […]
At the weekly Federal Executive Council meeting chaired by President Umar Musa Yar’adua last Wednesday, seven new private universities were approved. This brings to 41 the number of private universities in the country. Forty of them are sited in the southern part of the country.
Continue reading about SARDAUNA FOUNDATION: IT WASN’T EVEN AMUSING
Two weeks ago, one of those politically charged but substantially hollow events recurred again in Kaduna. We woke up to read that the odd pair of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, vice president from 1999-2007; and Alhaji Attahiru Dalhatu Bafarawa, Sokoto state governor from 1999-2007 went to Kaduna where they held a closed-door meeting with Nigeria’s knottiest […]
And so Hajiya Zainab Mahmoud Kawu finally passed away on the 15th of September, 2009. I received a text message from her son, Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, at about 10.30 in the morning. It was a simple statement full of gloom and resignation. Instantly my own tragic memories came back to me. Losing your mom defines […]
Last week’s BarkByte entitled “ITS DICTATORS WORLD…” generated a number of reactions (some of which shall be published here in due course). The tone and target of the responses varied; but they all converged on one view: there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the settlement of Darul Islam was invaded, its inhabitants uprooted […]
Continue reading about Darul Islam: N77m divide by 4020 People=N19,154 Apiece!
His insatiable quest for cheap publicity must have compelled Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State to commit his biggest, ugliest and most tragic blunder yet. While the nation was still reeling from the clumsy and brutal handling of the Boko Haram violence which occurred in Bauchi, Yobe and Borno States, trying to decide who was […]