The Connect Nigeria Top 100 Emerging SMEs has reached its final stages as voting by members of the public commences today the 25 th  of May. The exercise, the first-ever of its kind, was flagged off on February 12 th  2018 with the opening of the  www.connectnigeria.com/top100  for nominations of deserving businesses by members of the public. Nominations were sent in on the basis of set out criteria on the website.

If the land of Plateau could speak, it would be telling the Federal Government of Nigeria that it is tired of being forced to suck innocent blood. The tragedy at Plateau State has reached a monstrous level, leaving the poor tribesmen in fear of terrorists and marauders who masquerade as herdsmen. A couple of weeks ago, a group of traders returning from a village market were summarily executed by these criminals. To many Nigerians, these are not ordinary criminals, because if they were, we would have seen efforts from the state to apprehend them.  The killing in the Plateau is more of an organized crime, almost coming to the level of ethnic cleansing. There is no reason why a particular tribe in the Plateau would be targeted by these men of the underworld without a strong response from the state.

Obinna Edeh © Nigeria’s print and electronic media are currently awash with the news of another leaked presidential memo. The gist is that a couple of days ago, the President directed the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation  to respond to a query explaining the circumstances in which the sacked pension boss, Abdulrasheed Maina was reinstated into the civil service. The query further instructed the Head of Service to send in a reply through the office of the Chief of Staff before the close of work. However, few days after the query and response was dispatched, Nigerians woke up to see the leaked version of the letter to the President awash in the dailies. The news paper (that broke the news) explained that her correspondent sighted the letter and since it was a hot gist, they actually rushed to publish without due diligence.

By Obinna Edeh © There is a growing pattern with Nigeria’s anti corruption war. It is the fact that noise follows action. In other words, the mode of fighting corruption in Nigeria is that, even before a petition is investigated, the infraction is leaked to the media. Thereafter, a lot of sensation builds up in the social and electronic media across the nation. The people gather in newspaper stands to debate on the issues and criticize the government. The electronic media runs an interview session on the subject for almost several weeks. In this time, they invite almost all the social critics they can reach without inviting the critical persons whose duty it is to respond to such allegations. On the other hand, the spokespersons of the government would invade every available media to extricate their bosses and justify the silence of the state. Such pattern continues for weeks (and sometimes) for months across these media until silence returns; Nigerians move on, the governme...