faulker002

By Jerome-Mario Utomi When Niccolo Machiavelli first came up with the idea that cruelty could be rightly or wrongly employed in governing a country, he may have had Nigeria in mind. According to him, ‘cruelty is used well ‘(if it is permissible to talk in this way of what is evil) when it is employed once for all, and one’s safety depends on it, and then it is not persisted in but as far as possible turned to the good of one’s subjects. *Buhari  Again, cruelty badly used is that which, although infrequent to start with, as time goes, rather than disappearing, grows in intensity’’. Unfortunately, this is where we are today. Going by the records, Nigerians in cases after case after case witnessed situations where politicians/leaders come up with policies aimed at starving hapless civil servants/pensioners to their early graves. And security agents take laws into their hands without thinking of the long and short-term damage their act of impunity has on Nigerians and the watching wor...

By Jerome-Mario Utomi Risk viewed conventionally is an observable reality that people sprint away from as it is both covertly and overtly considered an unpleasant situation. But contrary to this belief, Peter Drucker, a United States of America born management consultant in his book; Managing For Result, underscored the inescapable posture of risk-taking in human existence and essentially classified it into four categories; the risk one must accept, the risk one can afford to take, the risk one cannot afford to take, and the risk one cannot afford not to take. Indeed a virulent reality, however, from the recent/unpleasant political and socioeconomic occurrences in the country, it has become a barefaced truth that for Nigeria to accelerate economic growth and make social progress, the people must use the 2019 general elections as a vehicle to  confront/correct the ‘inbuilt’ anomalies  debilitating our nationhood. No doubt, across the country, the geographical oneness ...

By   Jerome-Mario Utomi Merit, taken objectively, is ‘something earned, something owed to a person. Taken subjectively, merit is the right of a person to his earning and is of two types- condign and congruous merits. While condign merit deals with strict justice to a reward, congruous merit is not so much a right as a claim but rests upon what is suitable or fitting in a situation’. With this words of Paul Glenn in mind, each time I am asked my opinion on the nation’s media industry in relation to free speech/freedom of expression, I usually pause to honestly look at its virtues and attributes both objectively and subjectively, and in all, one thing often stands out; the Nigerian media industry in the writer’s views neither merits nor deserves the inequitable treatments so far mated to it by the successive administrations. The reason for this position is signposted in the fact that the vast majority of the ordinances/codes made to guide the practice has never squared up or in harmo...