“You are the Lord that healeth me” is a popular Christian song. However, in singing this song, we omit the vital beginning of God’s healing process. Before the Lord heals us, He wounds us. It is the same God who heals us that wounds us. Therefore, perhaps we need to write another song that says: “You are the Lord that wounds me.” God takes full responsibility for our wounds. He says: “Now see that I, even I, am He, and there is no God besides Me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; nor is there…

Mikhail Gorbachev changed the world, without entirely meaning to. He was a younger, different kind of Soviet leader, who hadn't experienced the brutality of Stalin's regime or fought in World War Two. He'd visited Western Europe, so he knew that the propaganda about Soviet living standards being higher than in the West was nonsense. And he never forgot the stories his grandfather had told him about being tortured by Stalin's secret police. Gorbachev realised the Soviet Union had to be changed, but the way he did it ensured it would come crashing down. The Marxist-Leninist system was destroyed, the old…

If you haven’t had a good laugh, you have not been with him. And anyone who knows him knows I’m not joking. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah, has the rare gift of humour. Not the run-of-the-mill kind that forces a courteous half-smile. It’s the kind that extracts the prey while putting the cat completely at ease; it just cracks your rib. It works in good times and in bad. And just as he has done in the last nearly over two decades of being clergyman and public intellectual, Kukah deployed this gift again in a conversation about…

News concerning the purported award of pipeline contracts to some individuals and private organisations by the Federal Government has been unsettling. More disquieting is the barely disguised hostility displayed against either the idea or the actual establishment of security outfits by some state governments to fill the widening gaps in the scope of the security coverage noticeable nationally. The Federal Government, through the Office of the National Security Adviser, has been consistent in its refusal to accede to the request of some states of the federation to strengthen the complementary initiatives adopted to protect lives and property. This is done…