RANDOM THOTS

January 9 th dawned on Nigeria as a day to remember. It was the day Nigerians decided to stand up to the government of the day in move known as #Occupy Nigeria. From Lagos to Ibadan down to kogi up to Abuja, Nigeria was occupied with protest led by the organized labor and the civil society groups. This protest was an offshoot from the government’s decision to end “subsidy” on fuel on the 1 st of January, 2012, there by increasing the price of PMS to N141. This decision by the government did not go down well with the people who felt that the “subsidy” was the only dividend they enjoyed from the only natural resource in Nigeria being utilized by the government. The Governments excuse is that it is losing money daily and that the country cannot afford to continue with the business of subsidization because it has so much projects to complete in the coming months which the funds formerly used for subsidizing would be used for. There is also the issue of deregulation of the down str...

After work yesterday, I had to do some sort of sober reflection on Nigeria’s nascent democracy; I call it nascent because we are still growing and not yet close to the proverbial Promised Land. I realized that besides the fall outs from the June 12 elections, nothing has ever elicited such a collective and emphatic stance from Nigerians as the removal of fuel subsidy right from 1960 up to this moment though I stand to be corrected. So, in my own little quiet zone, being not such a great fan of Nigerian politics due to many factors that has culminated in giving me a liberal standpoint politically, I decided that for the couple of days to come, I would be taking a look at some of the issues that has led to this rather unfortunate milestone in our political journey and how such future occurrences could easily be averted, though it would not be rigidly limited to just the removal of fuel subsidy. For me, I believe it’s high time our democratic ‘rulers’ ( I call them rulers because leaders ...