Author: Martins Oloja

OUR great country generally believed to be on the last lap of journey through the wilderness to get to the promised land, needs to benefit from some lessons of history as a news item. Yes there comes a time when history is worth treating as it were a breaking news item. And here is the thing, our political leaders and their followers who are becoming increasingly careless and reckless in their political speeches and actions should learn from this part of history of consequences of political blunders in global context. It is now a small world of unlearning and relearning…

Young Citizens Need Education, Not Lamentation… The young unemployed graduates need to know that poor and clueless political leadership that enhances poverty in the land begins with election processes. And the only specific exercise that can change that is participation in the same processes that brought them: elections. Lamentation isn’t a strategy; participation is it! They also need to know that the powers that have held Nigeria down, stunted our growth would not want to encourage them to vote. They know how they have been winning elections without votes. That is why they don’t want BVAS and its concomitant gains.…

TO the electorate, young and old… To the voters for participatory democracy, your PVC is your weapon and here is why: You possess enormous power of that small voter card called PVC. In the end, we will certainly face the consequences of our electoral choices. After the election, we may return to reading from another book of lamentation. We may have been complaining about the 26 years that the locusts ate through the PDP from 1999-2015. We may still be lamenting that the last eight years under the ruling APC have been unspeakably harrowing. We may still be saying that…

WHILE it is fitting to praise the effort of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in celebrating the courage of those he remembered on June 12, 2025 as ‘Heroes of Nigerian Democracy’, it is also important to bring to his notice that there are some other ‘heroes of democracy’ the chroniclers in the presidency forgot. And so as one of those who have institutional memories of the perilous times in our history I would like to plead that those forgotten heroes should be remembered in the next celebration of democracy. It is gratifying to note that the president’s preface to the honorees’…

… I REGARD Local Government election as a significant process because it should ordinarily be the most critical election to the people. The reason isn’t far-fetched: It is the closest level of government to the people. That is where destiny of the real constituents who employ our leaders begin to be shaped. We can’t easily have dialogue with the Governors and even Commissioners. But we should be able to have direct access to the Council Chairman and Councilors at any time. They most times don’t live in GRAs. They should live among the people. I call the new Chairman of…

INSTEAD of deconstructing the second year of the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu today, I would like to celebrate one of our own on a thankless and dangerous beat that harbours what even the World Bank Institute once celebrated in a publication as ‘the best profession in the world: Journalism. I would like join others who are currently wrapping their hands around the shoulders of Akogun Tola Adeniyi who arrived on the 8th Floor on Thursday May 29, 2025. I was there when family members, friends, young and old including former Governors Olusegun Mimiko, Rauf Aregbesola, Professor Femi Osofisan,…

AS a reporter, writer, editorialist and columnist, I love good books and I have invested in a lot of them. So, when I see good books on any subjects, I buy anywhere I go. I have bought a lot through big brothers abroad and now the Amazon. That is how so many bookstores including ‘Glendora’ ‘Readers Are Leaders’ bookshops have somewhat made me ‘richer’, anyway. I will collect my long- patronage discount from them anytime soon. And so I have just looked into the seeds of our times and I have seen another good book in the works by one…

(Concluding Remark on World Press Freedom Day when the Editors and SERAP celebrated it on March 3, 2025) AS I was saying, the market-driven journalism genre that has long been with us is now a he challenge. That is why modern researchers on media management such as Dennis Herrick, the author of the groundbreaking “Media management in the age of the GIANTS” are now focusing on the business dynamics of journalism, which is threatening press freedom in our country that unfortunately cannot boast of a robust private sector. Undoubtedly, in this age when citizen journalism practice, which tends to empower…

SATURDAY was yet another World Press Freedom Day 2025. The organic theme for this year is ‘Time to put AI on the social agenda’. On this World Press Freedom Day 2025, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the global voice for journalists, is calling for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be at the top of the agenda in the social dialogue between journalists’ unions and media. Meanwhile, in line with UNESCO’s theme for this year, ‘Reporting in the Brave New World – The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Press Freedom’, the IFJ urges journalists, unions, and media organisations to engage in…

AT this perilous time when most of our political leaders and their allies in politics are working hard to give our country a bad name through political banditry, national greed that depletes national grid, unbridled corrupt practices that can’t be contained even within anti-corruption agencies, let’s this week celebrate the architecture we have noticed in our ruins! Let’s begin to celebrate the Nigeria’s real brand ambassadors who are raising some glimmer of hope that Nigeria can actually rise to be the authentic tower of strength and pride of Africa and the black people of the world. Interestingly, the political economy…

The “Daily Graphic” Success Story: AS I was saying, the “Daily Graphic” is a Ghanaian state-owned daily newspaper published in Accra Ghana. The newspaper was established along with the Sunday Mirror in 1950, by Cecil King of the London Mirror Group. With a circulation of more than 150,000 copies daily, the “Daily Graphic” is the most widely read newspaper in Ghana till the present. In 1979, the newspaper was renamed the “People’s Daily Graphic” under Jerry Rawlings for a few years to “remind the people that it belongs to them”. The newspaper also publishes two weekly entertainment newspapers, namely “The…

A SIMPLE birthday celebration of one of the organic “Daily Times” icons who arrived on the 7th floor this week, Mr. Ndubuisi James Ugbede and the Minister of Information Alhaji Idris Mohammed Malagi’s remark in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, where he is attending the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2025, provoked a revisit of two old commentaries on this column in 2018 and 2023. On Thursday this week, (April 10, 2025) at the Lagos Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Iyalla Street, Alausa Ikeja, a remarkable colleague Mr Lekan Otufodunrin and I were guest speakers at…

I WAS having some introspection on the state of the nation this weekend when a ‘small still voice’ nudged me on and the implications of the demise of these two great Nigerians, Ambassador Isaac Aluko-Olokun and Pastor Gbolabo Ogunsanwo hit me like a thunderbolt. I remember their impact on my career progression. They were significant to me. I always remember them at such a time like this. I haven’t deleted their names and telephone numbers from my contact list. I have always forgotten that they are no longer on this side of eternity. I always remember how I used to…

AS we celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor Anthony Olusegun Adegbulugbe on Wednesday April 2, 2025, we need to note that we are honouring a remarkable individual who has left an indelible mark in the academia and industry. Not many scholars have successfully migrated from the classroom to the boardroom as an investor, like Adegbulugbe. He has curiously done so in the likeness of the iconic Jim Simons – (James Harris Simons (April 25,1938 – May 10, 2024), an American mathematician who did well as a hedge fund manager, investor and philanthropist. The Cambridge Massachusetts born investor, Simons did his…

There is fire on the mountain And nobody seems to be on the run Oh, there is fire on the mountain top And no one is a-running I wake up in the morning Tell you what I see on my TV screen I see the blood of an innocent child and everybody’s watching Now I’m looking out my window And what do I see? I see an army of a soldier man marching across the street, hey Hey, Mr. Soldier man Tomorrow is the day you go to war But you are fighting for another man’s cause and you don’t…

…I HAVE been talking to the ideals on how to get to where we need to be in 21st century where education is fast changing the dynamics of development. The policy experts and scholars here and all of us need to understand that founding and funding a university isn’t for the fainthearted. Visitors who hold the fort for public universities constantly claim that they don’t have enough to fund education the way we want it in this same 21st century. In other words, if we look into the seeds of our education development times, what we will see now is…

WHO should we hold responsible for demonisation of democracy the iconic Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, once called ‘dem don crazy’, ‘demonstation of craze…’ in this country? It’s a time to speak truth not only to power that the majesty of democracy has been defiled. And so it is a time to ask whether democracy can be sustained to deliver the much-needed development to the most populous black nation on earth. Yes, it is a time to evaluate democracy we have been monitoring for 25 years because the main strength of its majesty, the rule of law, has become the rule of man,…

THE latest autobiography in town: Babangida: A Journey in Service “is an important book in many respects” according to the reviewer, Yemi Osinbajo, a professor and former Vice President. Accordingly, it is not just a story of the remarkable journey of former military President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida from childhood to the highest levels of public service, it is an account of a “journey of our Nation Nigeria, the Nigerian story, complex, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes stranger than fiction, but always fascinating”. Many of the key characters in the book who shaped the history of our country were there on Thursday, “demonstrating…

I WOULD like to kill two birds with only one stone today. In the last two weeks I wrote two inconclusive pieces on “federal universities without national character” and “Why Uni-Abuja needs more than firing VC”. And so I would like to round off the two related pieces without equivocations on the challenges since the Visitor to the federal universities has decisively intervened, especially through the one I have tagged our “federation university” (University of Abuja). I claimed here then that the University of Abuja is too important to be left to provincial irredentists who threatened to diminish its stature…

PRESIDENT Donlad Trump is yet to spend one month in office as the 47th President of the United States of America but his actions and pronouncements are being felt in all corners of the globe. From neigbouring Canada to Mexico, to Panama, Brazil, and even Africa, the last two weeks have not been the best for many world leaders who are still trying to work out how to deal with the man inside the White House. Many are afraid of him, some feel intimidated, and few are bewildered and flabbergasted. If there is one president that is set to impact…