Opinion

SIR: The other day, after passion ebbed and reason emerged, I tried unsuccessfully to fight or soft pedal on the urge to write my final thought on this anti-Igbo rants by HRM, Oba Rilwan Akiolu.

WITH elections over and new leaders about to take office in Nigeria, the exemplary leadership of Lee Kuan Yew is a good template for the in-coming class. That Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew who passed on the other day was an architect and builder rolled into one is an incontrovertible fact.

IT’S been more than 365 days that over 200 innocent girls were unceremoniously kidnapped from their high school in northern Nigeria by the shadowy and ISIS-affiliated terrorist group, Boko Haram.

OTHER values they would have imbibed are cooperation, responsibility and commitment. Equipped with these constructive tools, they would be able to become productive citizens, contributing their quota to the nation’s development in the agricultural sector or agro – allied industries or if they so wish, in other sectors of the economy.

AS the electorate in Lagos prepare for the governorship election tomorrow in the state, the threat by the Oba of Lagos appears to have thrown a major spanner in the works of the APC’s candidate, Akinwunmi Ambode, as the   next governor of the state.  

THE words of Hon. David Umoru, former Special Adviser on Community Newspapers to outgoing Delta State Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan, challenging critics to come up with a better alternative if they want him to make a u-turn on his support for the state’s PDP governorship candidate for this weekend’s elections, Senator Arthur Okowa Ifeanyi, aptly capture the general mood in the state where the PDP is being hailed for recognising the right of Delta North to take the reins of government.

Now the APC slogan in Lagos State till now has been Continuity because the its candidate, Akinwunmi Ambode, is expected to succeed incumbent Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola and continue his so-called good works which have been a source of indignation amongst Lagosians who think successive governors had not delivered on campaign promises to make life better for the masses. This is, in spite, of the huge resources of the state.

SEVERAL months ago, a friend of mine was doing his best to convince me about Buhari’s candidacy. The story goes that this woman travelled to Abuja and struggled unsuccessfully to see Buhari for many days, for her husband had worked under him at some point.

THE desire expressed the other day at a Conference of Ministers in Addis Ababa by some African leaders for increased ownership of the African project and integration was quite assuring and may have presented the continent with another opportunity to break away from a seemingly incurable lethargy.

METAPHYSICS aside, there are also pragmatic and urgent reasons to prepare our youths to catapult this nation to agricultural super-stardom. In the first instance, the core character-forming values which are the bed rock of nation-building can be learned and embraced through agriculture, values and behaviours which include hard work, discipline, good judgment, investment of time and resources, responsibility, commitment, tenacity and work-based rewards, to mention a few.

Lagos is not for me; not as city or resort, not any less or more so than New York or London or Ottawa or Paris. I prize nature in all of its nakedness, its unwrappedness ...so much so ... I think little of concrete jungles or urban chaos or festinate gaits.