Many career public servants will be cursing Steve Oransaye under their breath for somewhat suggesting that many of them should be let go, through the rationalisation, meaning hiving off of most of their jobs, that actually don’t add much to the business of governance. In 2011, The Presidential Committee on Reform of Government Agencies, set…
Maybe you can make sense of the following excerpt from a statement credited to Abdulkadir Saidu, Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency, on government’s position on the removal, or retention, of subsidy in the downstream oil sector of Nigeria. The confusing text has understandably led to contradictory headlines and interpretations by newspaper…
On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Department of Police in America’s State of Minnesota, knelt on the neck of African-American George Floyd, who died after nine long minutes. Despite Floyd’s repeated pleas of, “I can’t breathe,” Chauvin maintained this suffocating position, while his colleague officers, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and “chinko,”…
It looks like the fury of those who detest the literal kneeling on the neck of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin, and the metaphorical kneeling of whites on the neck of Black people through slavery, in the past, and neocolonialism in modern days, won’t abate very soon. And the white supremacist system, which rastafarians…
When the late pop musician, Michael Jackson, sang the worrisome sentiment, “All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us,” nearly everyone thought he meant that, no matter their public posturing, white folks care very little about Black people. They may well be right, considering. But the phrase is also applicable to…
Though Bola Tinubu, former Governor of Lagos State and National Leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress, denies intention to run for President in 2023, there is everything in his body language that suggests otherwise. After grandly declaring, “I have no decision regarding 2023,” he threw a curve, “2023 will answer its own question in…
After listening to the story narrated by Isaac Ighure, former General Secretary of Nigeria Guild of Editors, on the agony he went through, when trying to fulfil a statutory obligation to renew the annual registration of his car in Lagos State, the question that came to mind was, “Is this somebody’s idea of fiscal federalism?…
COVID-19 is real. I am one of the 1,897 patients discharged in Lagos State after treatment, as of Sunday, July 19, 2020. If my understanding that by going through this, I have immunity – can neither be infected, nor infect others – I am going to the bank with the assurances. After feeling feverish, I…
Possible indication that COVID-19 has entered the community transmission mode in Nigeria is in the following statement credited to Gbenga Omotoso, Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy: “The number of tests being conducted presently when compared to what we did in the early stages of the (COVID-19) pandemic, has shown incredibly significant growth. Alongside…
As a columnist, when many people, most of whom you don’t know, send you messages on the same theme, two things usually come to mind. Is this is an orchestrated public relations stratagem hatched by a pressure group? These days, news content is created and choreographed by professional publicists. Or you wonder if there might…