Nigeria, history and the present danger

These are perturbing times. On the eve of what promises to be Nigeria’s fiercest election, one that has set the country on edge, it is important that we sound the alarm bells.

Even though we have seen it all before – whether we are talking about the 1964/65 elections (postponed for several weeks due to disagreements over the voter list) that precipitated the first military coup in January 1966 and the civil war the year after, or the June 12, 1993 debacle and the Interim National Government contraption that followed – Nigeria today is in uncharted waters. We haven’t had an election this close with war raging in a part of the country.

Is Jonathan pushing his good luck?

Political party stakeholders and supporters must have gone into spending overkill, bank loans must have been accessed and properties sold off with proceeds expended on supporting candidates running for office. A thick stratum of emotion and piles of mental strain must have been infused into the electioneering, and the cost of preparation for the adjourned democratic process earlier scheduled for Saturday, February 14, must have been more than an arm-and-a-leg.

NLC delegates trade punches, destroy ballot boxes

The National Delegates Conference of the Nigeria Labour Congress ended in crisis on Thursday as participants failed to elect   a new president to succeed Abdulwahed Omar.

The election was progressing smoothly until some discrepancies were observed in the ballot papers.

The discovery led to allegations   that culminated in fisticuffs and throwing of chairs at each other by some of the delegates at the International Conference Centre, the venue of the conference in Abuja.

One of our correspondents gathered that some of the   delegates felt that the ballot papers were deliberately printed to facilitate the rigging of the election in favour of one of the candidates.

CBN under pressure to devalue naira again

DEVELOPMENTS in the foreign exchange market are putting the Central Bank of Nigeria under intense pressure to further devalue the naira.

The currency has been experiencing free fall since November 25, 2014 when the          CBN Monetary Policy Committee devalued it by eight per cent from 155 to 168 against the United States dollar.

Following Saturday’s announcement of the postponement of the general elections by six weeks, the naira on Monday plunged from 188 to 200 against the dollar.

Tinubu, Saraki, Amaechi’s phones have been bugged —APC

The All Progressives Congress says Federal Government’s security agencies have bugged the mobile phones of a former Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu; Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State and Senator Bukola Saraki.

The party added that the telephones of its National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun and its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, had also been bugged by the Peoples Democratic Party-led Federal Government.

The APC said this in a statement by Mohammed on Thursday.