Azu Ishiekwene

a split image of a capsized boat on the sea with migrants trying to survive and an image of the oceangate titan submarine inside water on it's way to the titanic

Titan and Migrants: Two Tragedies, Different Stories

From the way the networks covered the two accidents, you would be forgiven to think that they had weighed both and concluded that the lives of the 750 migrants mattered less, if they mattered at all. It was not an issue that the number of migrants who died in the Mediterranean on June 14 was over one-third of the fatality when RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912

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a mammy wagon with the inscription saying no condition is permanent

Buhari’s Legacy Puts Tinubu in Tight Spot

We may be looking at over 3,000 fired, that is, assuming each of the roughly 570 affected establishments has a board of at least six members. Often, the figure is higher. Regardless, every job loss is different in its own way, both in how it affects those directly involved and those who depend on them. Each political appointee has a personal story not conveyed in the usual press headlines of how many have been beheaded, politically, and how many more heads may roll. Like sharks, the press loves the smell of blood, as long as it is not their own

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a man feeding a baby and a woman on her ipad seated on a couch

What Does It Mean to Be A Father Today?

My father would not be surprised, for example, that I didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had to write something. I got that from asking several sources I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember, I never could ask him his age. What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable. Mucking about asking him about his age would have been crossing a line

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Four presiding officers in the National Assembly - Ahmed Lawan, Ovie Omo-Agege, Femi Gbajabiamila, Idris Wase; and two silhouette images, one Senate and the second Reps beside the photos

What Should Tinubu Do About the Assembly?

Obasanjo being Obasanjo, he did not mind imitating a low-grade version of Otto von Bismarck’s philosophy, that the business of Nigeria’s redemption at the time – restructuring, corruption and a pariah economy – required bloody noses and a hand of iron. By the time Buhari was elected eight years later, the landscape had changed somewhat. Yet, Buhari’s hands-off approach was dictated just as much by the relatively mature political landscape as by his complicatedly insular, almost abdicatory political style. Tinubu is a different matter altogether

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Alhaji Aliko Dangote and the Dangote Refinery

Dangote Refinery Challenges Global Narrative

Aliko Dangote was dealt a bad hand in a failed transaction. Later, he vowed revenge. Not in a pound of flesh, but by venturing to make his own success where he had been ambushed. At issue was the decision of the government of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2007 to reverse the sale of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna Refineries (two of Nigeria’s moribund refineries) to Blue Star, the Dangote-led consortium. Blue Star had paid about $670 million for the plants in the twilight of the Obasanjo administration and gone away thinking it was a done deal. It wasn’t.

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A bunch of crowded people with a magnifying glass over the few.

The Fowl of Mecca and Nigeria’s Census Palaver

The real elephant in the room is that the NPC knows the Bola Ahmed Tinubu government would reject the outcome of a census rammed down the country’s throat with only days before President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration leaves. They’re dealing with a familiar customer. It was Lagos State, under Tinubu, that dragged the Federal Government to the tribunal over the 2006 census, on grounds that the state’s population had been underreported by nearly half its size

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