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Showing posts from December, 2014

African Succession Planning

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Hello everyone, Our guest columnist today raises a pertinent issue exemplified by the rise of Boko Haram. It is summed up in the dictum that, "those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable". As someone who has traversed the corridoors of power as spokesman to the immediate past President of Nigeria and an international Harvard Scholar he knows a lot about the African power dynamics. We see this playing out in Zimbabwe where the current Vice President is being turfed out by the Presidents wife. While it is not wrong for outgoing politicians to seek to influence their choice of successors it is vital that they do this without shutting down the political space. Freedom and social justice can never be overestimated. Happy reading guys. THE VERDICT By OLUSEGUN ADENIYI; olusegun.adeniyi@thisdaylive.com At a campaign podium about three weeks ago, the otherwise urbane and very restrained Governor Ibrahim Shema of Katsina State made a ra

Doomsday Scenario or Merry Christmas in advance?

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Notes on the Coming Economic Crunch Postscript By Waziri Adio, Email: waziri.adio@thisdaylive.com Despite the spirited attempts by some officials to put a calm face on things, something is coming at us, and it is not pretty. It is a major economic crisis, fuelled by the slump in the price of crude oil. The coming crisis may be short or it may be long. But come, it will. So we need to brace up for the uncertainties of the lean time, a period that will be made even more unpleasant by the fact that we have left ourselves very little wriggle room. We need competent and clear-headed management of the economic crisis to ensure that it does not complicate existing crises on the social and security fronts. The omens have been in plain sight for a while now, with dwindling oil revenues at a time of sustained high oil prices, with persistent wrangling over allocations at the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC), with the consistent depletion of the