Ns-Opinion

Opinion

Sunday, 21 May 2023 03:29

Lamidi Apapa’s missing cap - Festus Adedayo

Turbulent anger of Obidients landed on Lamidi Apapa last week. By the time their anger petered out, Apapa had lost his cap to a God-knows-who. Esu Elegbara, the trickster deity of the Yoruba people, it will seem, lives in caps. Though most of the exploits of Esu exist in myths, Yoruba constructed a pantheon of beliefs that implicate the Esu as divisive and full of tricks. One of such, sauced in mythology, was translated into a very sobering track by ace Yoruba Awurebe musician, Dauda Akanmu Adeeyo, popularly known as Dauda Epo Akara. Famous for his anecdotal offerings affixed to…

Sunday, 21 May 2023 03:28

Fulfilling destiny together in godly marital unions - Taiwo Akinola

Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war ~ Proverbs 20:18. Introduction Starting right, going great and finishing excellently is God’s plan for every marital union. Nevertheless, the holy union can be fulfilling only when and where God's purposes are fully tracked, clearly understood and lovingly embraced. Every marital union established on earth is assigned to a clear agenda from heaven, and in order to excel in it, couples must choose never to settle for ordinary relationships, but rather strive to glorify God through a kingdom-focused togetherness, till the end of time. In normal godly Christian…

Sunday, 21 May 2023 03:27

Article of faith: Do you want to go to heaven? - Femi Aribisala

As a young believer, the Holy Spirit told me something that shattered me. He said heaven is not for me. “There is no food in heaven. There is no sex in heaven. None of the material possessions you crave is in heaven. What would you want to do in such a boring place?” He asked. The truth of the matter is that Christians are not interested in heaven. The earth is where all our treasures are in. Jesus asked a man sick for 38 years if he would like to be made whole. Would you believe the man did not…

Saturday, 20 May 2023 04:18

The flaws of perfection - Warren Zanes

I was in the car with my sons, listening to the Beach Boys. I picked some of my favorite songs: “Wendy,” “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” “Let Him Run Wild.” But when I played another track I love, “Wild Honey,” the boys cocked their heads. “Why did they put that out?” one of them asked. The lead vocal sounded wrong to him. Fair enough. Something was off. Carl Wilson’s performance on that song is not a typical Beach Boys lead vocal. You can hear him reaching for notes, at times barely getting there. There’s vocal strain, unmistakable pitch imperfections. But the…

Friday, 19 May 2023 04:58

What should Tinubu do about the Assembly? - Azu Ishiekwene

Two presidents in the last 24 years provide interesting examples of how to relate with the National Assembly. And between the two, the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, can decide how to model his relationship with the 10th National Assembly. The first example is President Olusegun Obasanjo. He was not only head of the executive branch, he was leader of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the de facto head of its Board of Trustees. But it didn’t end there. Obasanjo was also, in a manner of speaking, head of the legislature. That may sound like a misnomer in…

Thursday, 18 May 2023 04:08

Seun Kuti should have listened to his father - Abimbola Adelakun

Fela Kuti’s 1976 album, Ikoyi Blindness, featured a track documenting an encounter within Nigerian social context where violence is trite. The song, Gba mi leti ki n dolowo (slap me make I get money), is an encounter between an “Oga,” the quintessential big man who personifies the impunity of power, and an unnamed person who represents the disempowered masses. In the song, Oga reaches out to slap the Unnamed’s face. Rather than quake before Oga’s almighty power, Unnamed stands up to him. He taunts Oga to hit him saying the “systems of government in Africa” would arise on his behalf…

Wednesday, 17 May 2023 04:30

ChatGPT’s lessons for economic development - Ricardo Haussmann

Spoiler alert: I am not going to talk about how ChatGPT responds when prompted about economic-development strategies. It basically regurgitates reasonable, but mediocre ideas that it has seen in its training set. But ChatGPT’s design, which has given it far greater capabilities than its creators anticipated, offers a valuable lesson for tackling the complexities of economic development. For more than a decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have outperformed all other artificial-intelligence technologies, driving significant advances in computer vision, speech recognition, and translation. The emergence of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT continue this trend. To learn, AI algorithms require training, which…

Monday, 15 May 2023 03:58

Change must begin with the leader - Hassan Gimba

This writing was first published on 6 July 2020. With changes of leadership soon at the federal and state levels, I see it as relevant. The first part in particular. However, do we forget the lessons in the second part? The world is changed by your example not by your opinion – Paulo Coelho, Brazilian Lyricist and author of The Alchemist. Allah (SWT) said in the Qur’an that He does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in their hearts. It is a verse widely quoted out of context by people wanting to give their…

Sunday, 14 May 2023 03:30

Will north, the Shrew, bite the APC’s nose? - Festus Adedayo

The ongoing fight-to-finish for principal officers’ positions in the 10th National Assembly by the All Progressives Congress (APC) has only one fitting corollary: It is the famous mythic, destructive squabble between the Shrew, Squirrel and a seemingly impartial arbiter, the Tortoise. Unless carefully resolved, what appears to be a fancy of conquest by the APC, leading to the party magisterially pronouncing who would be its legislative Man Fridays, seems to have boomeranged full throttle at its teething stage. Only last week, the party’s National Working Committee, (NWC) in a peremptory, you-may-go-jump-inside-the-lagoon manner, announced its choice of former Minister of Niger…

Sunday, 14 May 2023 03:29

Finding the right partner for marital success - Taiwo Akinola

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her … She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life ~ Proverbs 31:10-12. Introduction: The family unit is the basic building block of the human society. When it flounders, every other thing follows that pattern. No wonder, the state of happiness that a group of people, a nation or even a Church community enjoys is determined by the degree of harmony in the individual homes that make it up. Many people today…

More...

Sunday, 14 May 2023 03:27

Article of Faith: Sin and sickness - Femi Aribisala

Jesus went to a hospital, saw a man who had been sick for 38 years, and asked him if he would like to get well. The man might have answered sarcastically: “No, I love being sick” “If I don’t want to get well what would I be doing in a hospital?” But is it really an offensive question? Let me present this as a parable. A university professor asks one of his students in the Department of Architecture: “Do you want to be an Architect?” Why would he ask him such a question? Why would he be studying Architecture if…

Friday, 12 May 2023 04:13

Dangote refinery challenges global narrative - Azu Ishiekwene

It started like a grudge match. Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, was dealt a bad hand in a failed transaction. Later, he vowed revenge. Not in a pound of flesh, but by venturing to make his own success where he had been ambushed. At issue was the decision of the government of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2007 to reverse the sale of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna Refineries (two of Nigeria’s moribund refineries) to Blue Star, the Dangote-led consortium. Blue Star had paid about $670million for the plants in the twilight of the Obasanjo administration, and gone away thinking it…

Thursday, 11 May 2023 04:26

Khalifa Sheikh Isyaku Rabiu: Five years on - Abdul Samad Rabiu

As I reflect on the fifth anniversary of the passing of my father, Khalifa Sheikh Isyaku Rabiu (Khadimul Quran), I am filled with both sadness and gratitude. While it is difficult to believe that five years have already passed since he left us, I am grateful for the time that we had with him and the legacy that he left behind. Khalifa was a man of great faith and determination. He was a devout Muslim who dedicated his life to serving Allah and spreading the teachings of Islam. He was also a successful businessman who built a global empire through…

Thursday, 11 May 2023 04:25

Ekweremadu: The man who ‘loved’ Nigeria - Abimbola Adelakun

In the opening pages of his book, Who Will Love My Country: Ideas for Building the Nigeria of Our Dreams, Ike Ekweremadu unapologetically declared his love for Nigeria saying, “I love Nigeria and will forever love it.” The book contents, the regular sweet nothings Nigerian leaders preachify but which they cannot stretch themselves to live by, now take a new meaning in the light of his fall from the grace of deputy Senate presidency to a convicted prisoner. When you consider the past 11 months when he and his wife, Beatrice, were tried in a London court for organ trafficking,…

Page 60 of 146

Opinion

More...

Search

Most Read

Editorial

News

Business

Politics

Opinion

Features

Strangely

Crime

Wars

SCIENCE & TECH

SPECIAL REPORTS

Sports

VIDEOS