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SATURDAY 6th March 2021 was the birthday of the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo GCFR. Emeka Ojukwu famously described him as “the best president Nigeria never had”. Indeed, former military strongman General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida described him as “the main issue in Nigerian politics”.
Awolowo’s shadow looms over our political firmament like a colossus. Had he been alive today, he would have been 112 this month. Chief Obafemi Jeremiah Oyeniyi Awolowo, made the transition into the great beyond on 9 May, 1987. He was seventy-eight. Avatar and visionary, he saw it coming and seemed to have prepared for it. During his 77th birthday, in March 1986, he told the world that he was celebrating “the imminence” of his transition to the life eternal. Only an avatar could have predicted his own death with such millennial calm.
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Experts in the oil and gas sector have countered the claim that Nigeria’s Gas Master Plan is obsolete to make the country a fully liberalised gas market.
They, however, said that there should be proper enforcement of legislation for the country to fully achieve its potential in the gas sector.
Tribune Online gathered that the Nigerian Gas Master Plan was approved on February 13, 2008 as part of Nigeria’s resolve to become a major international player in the international gas market as well as to lay a solid framework gas infrastructure expansion within the domestic market.
In a communique on Petroleum Industry Bill Education Series to Tribune Online, the Immediate past Group Executive Director– Gas & Power, at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) between 2011-2015, Dr. David Ige said the Plan came to being as a policy document to manage transition and confront future realities.
Review of Patrick M Lencioni s The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities tribuneonlineng.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tribuneonlineng.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IN June 1948, Sir Adeyemo Alakija, President of Egbe Omo Oduduwa, was in Ile Ife with other leaders to inaugurate the Egbe. At that event with the organisation’s founder, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Alakija spoke strongly to the imperative of a ‘big tomorrow’ for the Yoruba race. “This big tomorrow,” he said, “is the future of our children…How they will hold their own among other tribes in Nigeria…How the Yorubas will not be relegated to the background in the future.” Part of the broad mission of that organization was “to accelerate the emergence of a virile, modernised and efficient Yoruba state with its own individuality within the Federal State of Nigeria.” That is the philosophical foundation that birthed the obstinacy to certain principles you always see in the Yoruba of Western Nigeria. Despite the severity of today’s storm, you can see that the apple still falls not far from its tree.
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FOOD and cattle dealers in the North recently blocked food supply to the South for four days. The blockade was ostensibly a reaction to the alleged attacks on traders from the North plying their trade in the South. Food items destined for the southern markets were intercepted by some northern youths enforcing the blockade and they reportedly diverted them to neighbouring countries. While the ill-advised insistence of the leaders of Food and Cattle Dealers Association on obstructing supply to the South lasted, some elements converged on the popular North and South-West border town, Jebba, to enforce the blockade. The sheer number of food-laden trucks blocked from completing their journey to the South and the obvious lack of perfect coordination of the ‘cordon’ meant that the blockade was not born out of any consensus but was rather a creation of some ethnic/regional politicians who were out to make a political statement, and perhaps extract political capital at the expens