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Showing posts from March, 2014

PARTIES BEYOND POLITICS - PAT UTOMI

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The season of politics is upon us. Should be a time to enjoy being a citizen. A time to hold people who were elected yesterday accountable and those who seek to be elected tomorrow show how their lives before desiring public office showed public spirit and service to others as well as capacity to get things done. Unfortunately, our politics does not always follow democratic expectations. While all hands need to be on deck to make that change, a few needling issues with the partnership of the moment need reflection. One of them is the limit of partisanship. The nature of traditional western Competitive partisan politics is adversarial, just like the law courts prosecutorial tradition. The sometimes unhealthy divisiveness of that tradition is the reason one argued for the one party starter in post Colonial Africa, to safeguard the unity of the colonially forged states with many centripetal forces puling at the core of its essence. All quickly found that the one-party state was an

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY? - Lauretta Onochie

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Nigeria has been seething. This is no more news. A lot has been happening and still continues to happen. The elasticity of the patience of Nigerians has been stretched beyond those of any known people on planet earth. Yes corruption and all sorts of evil have made Nigeria their abode. None of these happenings has brought joy nor reprieve from the sufferings of Nigerians in recent times. We just sit tight and take it all in our strides. We moan a little bit and then we move on to the next unwholesome news. What is wrong with us? What sort of fabric are we cut from? "What is wrong with us?", I ask again. No one can fathom what is wrong with Nigerians. The world keep wondering about us and we keep amazing them with our docility. We have gone through the fuel subsidy scam to its investigation, to the concerted effort by the Jonathan administration to discredit and kill the fuel subsidy scam report, using monarchs, government officials and PDP leaders. Nigerians reacted t