Clay Richie

  On 28th October 2019, Pastor Tunde Bakare said the following, "Tinubu will give account for all his deeds. He should not be seen as a generous man, he is an integral part of the rot in Nigeria". 

  My favourite end-of-the-year quote, which I have shared with many others, is the following passage from Chapter 3 of the inimitable Chinua Achebe’s Things Falls Apart, a novel of monumental, evergreen relevance, translated into over 50 languages, a product of pure genius, a milestone in world literature. Achebe wrote:

  After what seemed like eternity, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) called off its nine-month old strike. At a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday December 23, 2020, Biodun Ogunyemi, President of ASUU, announced a “conditional suspension” of the strike. Nine months is a long time for students to be at home doing nothing – it is the equivalent of a full academic session and a baby can be born after nine months from conception. This is not the first time ASUU will embark on a long industrial action. In 1988 when the body was 10 years old, ASUU declared a nationwide strike that lasted for about 21 months which led to its proscription on August 7 that year by the military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida. Two years later, ASUU bounced back but another strike was again banned on August 23, 1992.

  Before 2015 like many Nigerians if someone walked up to me and said that Nigeria under the tenure of a President Buhari would experience the kind of desperate situation we are now in, I would consider the person a Looney and proceed promptly to give him a verbal roasting. And if another were to tell me that Nigerians would come to get so fed up with President Buhari as to call stridently for his resignation, I would probably be moved to deliver a solid straightforward answer to the bridge of his nose.

Governments spend money on acquiring goods and providing services for the public. The spending is usually planned in an annual budget which is signed into law. However, there might be some off-budget spending that requires no legislative approvals. Such expenditures, known as public sector spending, can include education, healthcare, social protection, and defence.

  Some of the reactions to Senator Kashim Shettima’s recent explosive interview on Arise TV, which have been trending on social media, betray the authors’ faded memories of the former Governor of Borno state. At the time an echo chamber was built by the Jonathan administration to isolate the government from public opinion, Shettima’s was the voice that rippled through. He called attention to the costs of that dereliction of duty, which enabled persistent cycle of explosions in urban centres, indiscriminate and targeted killings, and loss of vast territories to the Boko Haram, as the decision-makers weaponized pedestrian conspiracy theories to polarize the citizens left for death. 

  What a year. WhatAyear. What. A. Year. Muddled and fragmented. Masked up and washed up. It was a tasteless year, the year we could barely smell the coffee, the year humanity was severely fatigued. It was the year that soaked our hands in an ocean of sanitizers and distanced us from each other. It was the year that mercilessly coughed up the sick and the elderly, raising their temperature and taking their breath away. We cannot even cough in peace; we will start suspecting we have caught the virus. Someone, or some people, ate bat in Wuhan, China, and the rest of us — who did not as much as have a bite of the weird mammal — started washing our hands all over the world.