Punch

When it was announced that an index coronavirus patient had been identified in Lagos, a cynic said he felt that Nigerians had been angling to have what you may describe as their own “equal time” victim of the disease that was first announced in China. Maybe to humour the cynic, a Nigerian national newspaper cast…

What do you make of Nigerian lawmakers, who seem to be afraid of the law?  They are inventing a law that will help them disregard the law. You would have thought that they would have been amenable to the law they make, or the law they met in the statute books. But laws are made…

An enemy within works against the interest of the group or community he belongs to. In 1982, London’s The Guardian newspaper stumbled on handwritten scribbles of former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, wherein she said that her government had fought (Argentina) the “enemy without” in the Falkland war and now had to face the enemy within. In…

In this 21st century world of globalisation, what goes round truly comes round. From region to region, country to country, industry to industry and person to person, the spiral of coronavirus is doing the morbid ‘ward round’ and taking people to heaven or hell. To date, there have been 220,877 confirmed cases of coronavirus in…

Interestingly, this outbreak of coronavirus has brought home to those who do not quite know that the rest of the world, including Nigeria, is subject to the whims of the metropolitan powers. Recall that when Ebola gripped Africa in a vice lock, the Western world neither shut down, nor raised an alarm. But when news…

Has anyone noticed that the current crop of Chief Executive Officers in most blue chip multinational corporations in Nigeria are mostly expatriates? If they are not Europeans, North Americans, or Asians, they are at best Africans, from Ghana, Kenya, or so. The era of Michael Omolayole, Christopher Abebe, Felix Ohiwerei, Christopher Kolade, respectively of Lever…

Citizens of Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta, the region that produces the petro-dollar that contributes the most to the budgets of Nigerian governments, may vehemently disagree with the opinion that Lagos is the goose that lays the country’s golden egg, and therefore deserves a special status for greater financial and infrastructural investment from the federation account….

Many argue that the preamble to Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, “We, the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria: Having firmly and solemnly resolved… Do hereby make and give to ourselves the following Constitution,” is a lie, foisted on unwary Nigerians by the military. But the bigger beef is that the constitution skews voting and revenue…

Have you come across those Nigerians who think that COVID-19 is the ultimate scam? Unimaginable! A video on the social media shows a crowd gathered in the forecourt of a house, shouting, “Babu korona,” in Hausa. A friend who speaks Hausa says they were denying the occurrence of COVID-19, even as Deputy Governor Umar Usman…

So much hysteria is strewn in the way of 5G, the fifth generation of wireless telecommunications technology. One way to understand the difference between the present, and 5G technology, is to remember, “New Improved,” the payoff line of a detergent soap advert. A childhood friend, Prof Kola Odunaike, a physicist at the Olabisi Onabanjo University,…