oja oba !!!

General Muhammed Buhari is one the few respected leaders to have presided over the affairs of a sometime promise often disappointing British contraption called Nigeria. Buhari was a member of the cohorts of idealistic middle level soldiers responsible for the third coup, and the only the second successful coup in a young, expectant and now potentially rich African nation. When Murtala Mohammed was swept into power as part of a coup that ended then General Gowon's long reign Buhari became the Governor of the then North Eastern State, and on Mohammed's assassination in another coup just 18 months into his widely acclaimed government, Buhari again ascended, this time as Federal Commissioner for Petroleum, Nigeria's black gold.

 It is amazing how we create faux outrage out of people speaking their mind, and often the truth, simply because those truths run counter to our "sheepled" view of things. It is true that vaccines, like most medical advances in the last two hundred years save lives. It is also true that vaccines, like most medications and medical procedures often come with risks, regardless of how small that risk is. People should be informed of both the benefits and risks, and the rationale for encouraging the populace to accept the risk (small in the case of vaccines as far as we know) should be made clear. Vaccines have tremendous public health outcome. It also holds small personal health risks. Chris Christy, Rand Paul, and Barack Obama, each have a point. While the two Republicans choose to highlight the personal health risk (with their own caveat), the President opted to impress the public health benefit.

 It is amazing how we create faux outrage out of people speaking their mind, and often the truth, simply because those truths run counter to our "sheepled" view of things. It is true that vaccines, like most medical advances in the last two hundred years save lives. It is also true that vaccines, like most medications and medical procedures often come with risks, regardless of how small that risk is. People should be informed of both the benefits and risks, and the rationale for encouraging the populace to accept the risk (small in the case of vaccines as far as we know) should be made clear. Vaccines have tremendous public health outcome. It also holds small personal health risks. #chrischristie   #RandPaul   and #barackobama  , each have a point. While the two Republicans choose to highlight the personal health risk (with their own caveat), the President opted to impress the public health benefit. Election 2016: Potential candidates Rand ...

"There has long been a pattern to Barack Obama’s political career on the national stage. There are moments of soaring moral clarity and inspiration; there are long periods of drift or laziness or passivity" - Huffington? The foolishness of all these so called smart political analysis, particularly ones like these that question the hardwork, gut, and leadership of this President is the assumption that all the executive orders, pronouncements, and the "Putin reeling" just happened on Christmas day! Policies usually take time to formulate and work on before they can be pronounced. As we have come to learn, the "Cuba Thaw" was more than 18 months in the making before anyone of us heard a blip about it. The sanctions on Russia started a long time ago, all the while while many in Washington where busy showing their "Putin envy", and yes, the immigration policy was held back mainly to appease a growing dissent by Democrats who were worried...

  Why is identity management at Apple so confusing and bifurcated? Despite all of Apple's success in the consumer space, enterprise grade apple offerings will continue to lag behind its peers, so long as Apple continues to require four different Apple Id to use for different Apple solutions. For example, if you need to setup an Apple for Business account, you can not use any of your other apple accounts ID. To publish to iTunesConnect, you need another Apple ID. For iCloud, well your iTune store account wont work. At least these are the responses from Apple reps when I inquire about error messages I get when trying to use one Apple ID with another Apple product. Microsoft solved this problem almost a decade ago, and completed integration, even with their recent acquisition of Skype. Now you can access all Microsoft products with one ID. You just subscribe to the service you require. Google also has this down pat. You are able to access all of your Google se...

Racism is a human condition. Or better yet, "otherness" is. The American condition is simply exacerbated by it's scope in the face of a culture that prides individual success. Everyone wants to be distinguished, feel distinguished, even if at the expense of others - particularly, at the expense of others. Race differentials makes this easier, particularly for a class that has been impressed upon as being superior, without any consequence.

It was an American politician that once said, "all politics is local". Indeed, in American today, the saying can be modified to " all politics is racial", and for the world's melting pot, this is disappointing.

Selling is an intimate act. One that speaks to who you are, and touches the essence of your belief in yourself and what it is you are attempting to sell. The first person to convince about your product or idea is yourself. You can not expect to make a good impression on others, when you have not made one on yourself.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

American government's job is to protect Americans. ISIS harmed American's and thus drew the nation's ire, and rightfully so. Assad continues to kill Syrians, but inherently, that is a duty for Syrians. If America were to attack every nation that harms or kills its own people, the US will have to invade China, Russia, and many others. So, Obama's foreign policy, while derided by some, is perhaps America's first realistic foreign policy in decades. The US cannot, and should not become the world's policeman. If Assad makes the mistake of harming Americans, then he would have rightfully deserved attack by the US government. The so called Syrian opposition that wants America to help it get rid of Assad, so that it can then "deal" with ISIS is living in lala land. The Syrian opposition remains fractious, and unsure. Like the Shia opposition against Saddam, it lacks a national structure and basis. Obama is right to avoid turning the US into Syria...

A play from Natanyahu's playbook - "when your enemies are fighting each other..." Civilized people across the globe must come together and fight the evil menaces that threaten the global order, but it is imperative that the ones who are charged to lead or who have chosen to take on leadership role remember the value of consistency. Terrorist groups, Islamic or otherwise are a threat to human civilization. They work to overturn existing orders and re-impose primitive  social and political orders. However, in fighting them, we cannot turn a blind eye to atrocities against humanity committed by our "friends" and "allies" or those committed in our backyard. President Obama's measured, calculated and deliberate approach may seem a bit "too cautious" to some, but the last time we avoided being to cautions, America and the West was led into a quagmire in Iraq whose cost to global stability, human lives and suffering, and fiscal ...

"When the only tool you have is retreat, every problem looks “manageable.” " --- Mr. Lowrey's attempt to paint the administration's foreign policy as feckless forced him to create his own axiom. But saying it doesn't make it so. The world is a complex place with various actors, each playing its own game, often to its own tune. The rise of China did not start in 2009, nor did the belligerence of Putin. Leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq would not have stemmed the rise of violence in that country, only good leadership stood a chance, and Maliki was not it. America has a choice to make in Afghanistan, but short of a coup, it was near impossible to remove Kazai outside of elections and get good governance. It is easy for McCain and his ilk to act as monday morning quarter backs, but engaging in every oversea conflict only weakens America the more. And after two expensive wars in the 2000, and soaring public debt, caution will only give America...

The boko haram group is a reflection on the distaste of a group of Nigerians to the idea that another group "runs" the country. Since The Brits "divided and ruled" the Niger area (Nigeria) since 1914, the tug of war between North and South, East and West etc have continued unabated. While Nigeria became the identity of a people, generations later, the issue of spoils continue to dodge the nation and its people. For years, it was the Ogoni's in the delta area, and then it was the Ijaws. For a while the Ijaws and the Urhobos were at each others throat, just as so many of the different groups that were clobbered into a nation state have been at each others throat at some time or the other over the last 100 years. What Nigeria, and indeed many of the states created as a result of European empires need is a rethink of what it means to be a nation state. Is there an overriding reason why oil discovered on Isoko land must be used to fund development in Ni...

The World dropped the ball! When the latest Ebola epidemic was first identified in Spring, most policy makers in the across the world must have concluded that another "African" problem should be left the "heck" alone, even as a growing number of mostly religion based western charity raced to Liberia and Sierra Leone to help the struggling people of the poverty and war ravaged region cope with another epidemic.

To many in the Republican party, making President Barack Obama fail is an all out war, even if the collateral damage is America's image abroad. In the past, as Americans wage ideological battles at home, there was always an unwritten rule that all politics must stop at the water's edge - i.e. at the nation's vast borders. However, in the last 5 years, since Republican's first announced their overriding goal of making Barack Obama a one-term President, that waters edge has broken, and US politics has spilled into Beijing, Moscow and every Capital in-between. Perhaps, this madness did not start with Republicans in 2009, but goes all the way back to the "liberal" War on Bush who many saw as an "illegitimate" usurper who was selected by five Supreme Court justices in 2000, or perhaps, this was all on show during the Vietnam War as American local opposition turned the War into a disaster for Politicians. But, driven by the internet, twenty-four hours n...

  Too often, western journalist ignore history , and the tension just below the surface in the "nations' stitched together by false threads by colonial Europe. The only thing holding many of the middle-eastern nations "together" are the dictators. And the dictators achieve the presumed piece through suppression of rights and patronage. America's failure in Iraq is not its refusal to arm "moderates", because there are no moderates in these fights, only sectarian agitators. Iraq and Syria, like Saudi Arabia have been ran by Sunnis for generations now, and the Shiites will like to change that order. President Obama must refrain from being dragged into the morass in Baghdad. If Maliki and other Iraqi politicians trully care about Iraqi as a single, united state, they must make the political accommodations and compromises necessary. The same is true for Syria (and America must be willing to give Assad a pass,  and a dignified transition). ...

The community of nations that evolved after World War II is largely a set of nations, stitched together by a false thread, woven in the image of a collection of mostly failed European empires. The Middle-East, Africa, and south Asia still bursts with amalgamated "nation states", while Europe continues to purge itself of the relics of the great Wars. In Africa, Nigeria, Sudan (now split), Zaire (Kinshasa), Cameroon, Cote D'Ivoire (to name a few) a European colonies of multiple nations, bundled together into nation states for ease of European empire-state administration. Anglo-Nigeria was so named, since it was the homogenous land claimed by Britain and all its neighbors where French colonies. Some parts of Eastern Nigeria and Western Cameroon changed hands from Germany to Britain and France after World War I. Iran, Syria, Jordan, Palestine (now Israel, West Bank and Gaza) where relics of the Ottoman Empire that fell into the hands of European conquerors from...

Another faux punditry. Cantor's loss is less of a "conservative" / tea-party win. Many of these pundits forget that Eric Cantor worked hard, at least in the last couple of weeks before his defeat. They also forget that Dave Brat got little or no support from the tea-party guards who are now claiming his "victory" as their own. The true narrative the pundits are working so hard to supress, or are two ignorant to recognize are 1) Mr. Cantor's arrogance and 2) Mr. Cantor's lack of conviction. For 5 years, he yearned to one-up Obama, and soon after the 2010 elections began to angle for the Speakership. His hubristic ambition, in many ways, paved the way for the do-nothing congress of the last 4 years - led by a spineless speaker. These are men whose interest in being "leaders" far outweighed their sense of responsibility to the nation they purport to lead. Many of the faux pundits parroting of Republicans recently found (5 years ol...

The Emir is not a Muslim leader in the same way a Pope or an Archbishop is a Christian leader, or even the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist leader. An Emir is more like a traditional leader, a King, if you may. The Emir of Kano is the traditional ruler of Kano, just the same way the Ooni of Ife is the traditional ruler of Ife. Indeed, the predominant religion in Kano has been Islam for centuries and the Emir has acted in both roles of spiritual and temporal leader. But casting the Emir as a Muslin leader understates his role as one the of the leading traditional rulers in multi-sovereign nation state called Nigeria. The Alaafin of Oyo, the Soun of Ogbomoso, the Oba of Benin, The Sultan of Sokoto, The Olu of Warri, etc are examples of the legions of traditional rulers in Nigeria, each with differing level of authority and influence - based, not on religion but on the historical power base of the region he rules over. It is true that #goodluckjonathan   is inept, and remain...