Alaramma

It is my conviction that flood disaster management has been given a superficial approach in Nigeria, as the issue concerns less previlaged people. Specifically, the devastating effect of flooding hit mostly women and children at the lower income strata. If you look at settlement pattern of the front line States mostly hit by such disasters, you will find out that the richer communities live uphill, while poorer people tend to be pulled towards settlements at the fringes of towns where land is cheaper, and often dangerously close to riverbanks or water ways. Other factors that defines these settlement patterns also have to do with the desire of fishermen and farmers to move close to rivers and farmlands. But these strategic desires, good as they seemed, had turned into disasters. The raining season of 2012 came with countless horror of instant deaths due to drowning by flood waters, road wash always, submerged houses, crops and whole farmlands in some cases. The devastations wer...

Someone close to my mother asked me if I know Bindow Jibrilla? I said I don't, I have never seen him even on tv. That was before the 2015 gubernatorial elections. The way I campaigned, I persuaded voters, coarced and even moving far to threatened some of my dear friends was reasons why the person wanted to find out if I knew him. The truth was, being an APC candidate was enough for me to rigorously drum up support for him. But now I think am beginning to see the bigger picture. I am currently unemployed, but I some how contributed N56,700 during Bindow's election. I can proudly say that I am a pretty girl of Fulani extraction. So my cultural values to an extend frowns at girls of my age getting deeply involved in active politics or even canvassing for political support. But I did all that to the consternation of my siblings, and mum who thinks I have an attitude of a 'kado'; probably because I didn't grow up in Yola. I can boastfully say i swayed a lot of vo...

Nigerians are really feeling the crunch the unavailability of fuel is causing, this is whether any one voted for Jonathan or not. Although this is happening under PDP administration, with GEJ still presiding over the affairs of the country, everyone is suffering from the scarcity. Banks have reduced official working hours from 10 to 6 hours. Some GSM network providers also allegedly threatened to shut down some of their base stations, meaning there would be erratic and inadequate connection services on our mobile phones and other devices that run on such infrastructure. It’s no news that road transportation has been grounded since Friday, while there are numerous flight cancellations all due to scarcity of fuel to power both sectors. My sister in-law boarded a flight to Dubai this evening had to stop over in Ghana for aviation fuel. I was in metro plaza, situated in the central business district, all was quiet there. Law and accounting firms, travel agencies etc, were all hangi...

A customized gold wristwatch Sen.David Mark presented to President Goodluck

ISIS has been mounting pressure on the city of Ramadi, 70 miles West of Baghdad, several months before its final capture on Sunday. Even before that, another major town of Mosul in the Northern Iraq was captured. Elite army units like the Swat force and the Golden division suffered terrible defeat and were seen running away leaving behind heavy military equipments .These events have completely left the world gasping for an answer, for the casualties are in thousands. Mutilated bodies of women and children littered the roadsides, fleeing refugees poured out in total daze as to what has really gone wrong? The international community has allegedly denied any help from Iran and the Shia militias. The rivalry between Kurds, Shia and the Sunnis is as sinister as bloody as can be. Significant part of the human population is engrossed in one struggle or the other, staining the landscape with blood and anguish in its trail. In Nigeria, there is no official figure of people killed by the not...

‘It’s impossible to win, unless you are very lucky’, wrote Linda Tirado in an essay “Why Poor People Stay Poor” (author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America). This cannot be far from the truth, in most of the books I read about how to make money, most authors suck in inspirations from their background, the catch is most of them are either rich or making money. You hardly get a book like that from a very poor person telling you why he’s still poor. Now how can poor people, I mean real poor person, make money? Most writers agree however that people become poor because they are ‘unstable’. Tirado argued that ‘it’s assumed that we’re not unstable because we’re poor, we’re poor because we’re unstable’. Rich people can be unstable too; does that status deny them from making money? Being unstable is a form of poverty. You just wouldn’t get anything done; the constrain, inability, lack of confidence, skills, requisite knowledge, lack of focus due to hunger or happiness all these ar...

President Goodluck Jonathan's men would like us to believe that his call to Mohammadu Buhari conceding defeat has made him a hero. They tried to push up his status and launder his image to that of a super statesman. But in real terms, the actions and body-language of the President has given him away. It was obvious he had lost out in the 2015 election even before the hero-like phone call. Congratulating an opponent in a contest is a world wide practice, doing so in Nigeria should not have been a new thing unless the looser is being uncivilized. It is within President Goodluck's power to appoint and sack, but his recent sojourn and frenzy in sacking and appointing people into various positions at the tail end of his administration portrays him in a very bad light. Firstly,  it shows those men he removed from office had refused to do his bidding during the election. Secondly, it is widely believed that he is doing so to create problems for the in-coming government. But wh...