Politics

How would you like to be ruled by unscrupulous people who incite violence and abuse people because they stand in their way to power and corruption? - Nigeria Woman on the prospects of her country’s impending election

Will the West listen to Gorbachev now? Will it listen to his warning that the expansion of Nato makes Russia feel threatened? Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and a majority of Russians support Putin’s foreign policy? Will it share his fear that the world is on the brink of a new Cold War?

Kenyan born Ali Mazrui of the University of Binghamton in the United States of America who has died at the age of 81 was one of those academics every campus could do with. At every campus in which he taught Mazrui was the glue that held together at the level of intellect and intellectual life the diverse and divergent community typical of academia.

In the wake of Boko Harum and its campaign of violence it‘s common to hear many Nigerians speak of their country as going to the dogs. It is true that Boko Harum has inflicted an enormous damage on the national psychic, perhaps equal in scale to those inflicted by the civil war more than forty years ago.

India has a new leader: Narendra Modi the stocky 63 year old chief minister of Gujarat and leader of the nationalist rightwing Bharatiya Janata party has won a historic landslide! The self-made son of a station tea vendor has decimated the left of centre secular Congress party led by Rahul Gandhi, a prince of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has ruled India for most of its 65 years of independence.

Oil revenue provides 70 % of Nigeria's booming economy. Tax collection being notoriously poor, without oil Nigeria would be a country without much in the way of education, health services, infrastructures and urban renewal.

Before 1914 the south and the north of Nigeria were two distinct countries ruled however by the same colonial power, the British. Come 1914 Frederick Lugard the British official in charge engineered the union of the south with the north to form one Nigeria. The country we know and admire today and at times dread.  This year Nigeria clocked its first centenary as one country. To mark the historic occasion President Goodluck Jonathan laid out elaborate month long programs of celebrations.

Following the overthrow of the last emperor in 1913 throngs of Chinese headed for the polling booths. In the annals of the 2,500 years of Chinese civilization it is the only time the Chinese have voted in a national election.