Happy Independence Day to Nigeria , as Nigeria marks 66 years of Independence, we must do more than celebrate. We must reflect. * Are we living the life our independence promised? * Are our families becoming more prosperous? * Are our young people getting opportunities? * Are our businesses growing? * Are our children receiving the education they deserve? * Are our communities safe? If the answer is NO, then we must have the courage to ask why. For too long, we have endured failed leadership—men without the capacity to govern, men without conscience, men without the enlightenment to understand a changing world, and men who have failed to put the interests of the people at the heart of governance. * Breaking the Cycle of Bad Governance * We cannot keep making the same mistakes. * We cannot keep voting poor leadership, incompetent people, and political structures that fail to deliver—and then expect a different result. * We cannot do the same thing over and ...
UNDERCOVER: Europe Through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea (I) Nearly every day in Agadez, a sandy, windswept town in the north of Niger Republic, West Africa, scores of trucks stuffed with African migrants barrel out of town and across the parched and cracked earth, dust swirling around their swivelling tyres, human feet dangling precariously from all sides, on a perilous multi-week journey through the inhospitable Sahara Desert into Libya in the Maghreb region of North Africa, hoping to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, particularly Italy. Investigative journalist ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO spent 47 days as one of them, journeying from Kano in Nigeria through notorious illegal migrant hubs Zinder, Agadez and Dirkou in Niger, and al Gatrun and Sabha to Tripoli in Libya. He returns to document tales of deaths, starvation, rape, dehumanisation, mental abuse, physical assault, abductions, torture, and modern-day enslavement of citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, South...