The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has revealed that he personally called former Kogi State governor, Yahaya Bello to his office in Abuja for an interview over the alleged N80 billion fraud but he (Bello) asked EFCC operatives to come to his village to interview him. Olukoyede disclosed that...

Former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, has described N15.6 trillion for the 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway as “wasteful and a highway to fraud.” The former Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 general election, insisted that the award of the Lagos-Calabar Highway Project did not meet the minimum threshold of due process...

Written by Jomo Kwame Sundaram (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) Wednesday, January 17, 2024 Inter Press Service World Bank aid encourages governments to enable illicit financial outflows to offshore tax havens by reducing capital controls, thus draining precious foreign exchange and government resources. Aiding elite wealth Aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in...

The AU must guard against mirroring the weaknesses of its predecessor – the Organisation of African Unity. By Martin Ewi The African Union (AU) is not living up to expectations – and member states are partly to blame, according to AU Commission (AUC) Chairperson Moussa Mahamat. He says they are using their sovereignty to avoid...

  Electoral reforms are essential for maintaining and improving the health of a democracy, ensuring that it remains responsive, representative, and accountable to its citizens’ diverse needs and interests. It plays a crucial role in strengthening and enhancing the functioning of democracy by promoting inclusivity, transparency and accountability, electoral integrity, and legitimacy. John Dewey, an...

Background A budget is a vital tool for achieving a country’s economic strategy. It is designed to shape its entire socio-economic landscape for the year and the future, with the budget allocation serving as a guide for the government’s long-term economic vision. Simply put, the budget is really about how much revenue the government collects...

The World Energy 2023 report has unearthed a staggering decline of 92% in Nigeria’s crude oil refining output over the past ten years, raising concerns about the country’s energy sector. From a robust production level of 92,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2012, the output plummeted drastically to a meagre 6,000 bpd in 2022, representing...

Corruption seemed intertwined with the evolution of Nigeria as a nation-state. It has been a malaise, a big elephant in the room, regularly talked about, loathed through synchronic rhetoric, but growing in systematic proportion, with little or no hope of redemption. The discourse of corruption looks, therefore, like an exposition of the nation’s attempt at...

By Chidi Odinkalu IN July 1977, the Organisation of African Unity adopted a Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. It offered a definition of a mercenary to include someone who “is motivated to take part in hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and in fact is promised by or on behalf...

I can only hope that this piece inspires us all to follow the lead of our esteemed ex-Excellency — Is that out of Òwu? I don’t know any equivalent in Ìbàdàn — and get on with the business not only of rethinking all the stuff that the evil Westerners have saddled us with but, more...

Written by Barr. Fidel Albert I’ll attempt a modest effort to respond to Prof. Yusuf Dankofa, a cerebral lawyer and law lecturer, who incidentally taught me Legal Methods in my first year at the Faculty of Law, ABU, Zaria. You see, the learned Professor believes I was unfairly critical of Babangida (IBB) yesterday, when I...

President Bola Tinubu has redefined the priority areas of his administration and directed the reactivation of the Presidential Delivery Tracker, to empower Nigerians to track the implementation of projects across the country in real time. A statement by the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, disclosed that the decisions were...