"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation."
Lagos – Troops, yesterday, moved into Yola, Adamawa State capital and Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, barely 24 hours after President Goodluck Jonathan declared a State of Emergency in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states in response to Boko Haram insurgency which has claimed several lives and destroyed many property.
These days, I find myself very much interested in matters relating to the Nigerian/African middle class. I’m not alone, journalists and academics and investment bankers and DFIs are all quite obsessed with it as well, if the number of articles and reports daily emerging is anything to go by.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s special adviser on political matters, Ahmed Gulak, leads a growing list of Nigerian business and political elites who ran or still run secret offshore companies and accounts where they either hide their wealth to evade taxes, launder money or commit fraud, according to a cache of documents reviewed by PREMIUM TIMES and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ.
Whatever Jay-Z and Beyonce were expecting when they went to Nigeria in 2006, they can’t have seen this one coming. If the document New York-based muckrakers Sahara Reporters have published is authentic, then they have just scooped one of the news stories of the decade. No doubt about it.
Six of my children are injured, but I had a premonition —Kyauta Auta, mother of 8-year old Elvis Auta, who lay critically hurt: “I was away in Abuja worshiping in a Church. Somehow tears started flowing from my eyes. There was no reason for it. After a while, the tears would flow again. Then when I turned, I noticed that my husband had slipped away…
Barely two days after sanity returned to Mali as the coup leaders who seized power in that country gave way for an interim president, soldiers in the West African country of Guinea-Bissau overthrew the country’s Interim Government.
Ory Okolloh, the Executive Director of Ushahidi , is from Kenya but currently lives in Johannesburg. Her blog is "outlet for her opinions. While it is primarily focused on Kenya, she reserves to write about whatever she wants."
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian social justice activist living in Spain, with a background in technology, gender issues and human rights. She is interested in creating a community of grassroots African bloggers as a way for Africans to exchange ideas, share experiences and tell their own stories in our own words.
Native of Cape Town, Sean Jacobs lives in Brooklyn, New York and teaches in Manhattan. He obsesses about the relationship between politics and popular culture, but the main rationale for his blog is to comment on what passes for media coverage of the African continent.
Rosebelle Kagumire is an experienced Ugandan Journalist. She won the best Journalist blogger English category at the Panos hosted competition in 2009. Currently she is a student of MA. Media, Conflict and Peace studies at University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
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