By Eric Nnaji [update] FILE PHOTO: Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen on the field before Super Bowl XLVIII against the Denver Broncos at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S., February 2, 2014. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas/File Photo. Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen, the man who persuaded school-friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start what became the world’s biggest software company, died on Monday at the age of 65, his family said. Allen left Microsoft in 1983, before the company became a corporate juggernaut, following a dispute with Gates, but his share of their original partnership allowed him to spend the rest of his life and billions of dollars on yachts, art, rock music, sports teams, brain research and real estate. Allen died from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, the Allen family said in a statement. In early October, Allen had revealed he was being treated for the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ...
Published April
20, 2018
Bukola Ajisola,
Victoria Island, Lagos State, bukymany@yahoo.com: The National Assembly
comprising the Senate and the House of Representatives, constitutionally
empowered to make laws and perform oversight functions, is gradually morphing
into a dictatorial Frankenstein where members are gagged on rhetorical and
omnibus House Rules.
While no one should
begrudge the two chambers for enforcing rules to guide parliamentary ethics in
legislative business, the bias and tendentious application of such rules to
members as the nation has witnessed lately is not only reprehensible but also
exposes the underbelly of the heads of the two chambers as emperors with
primordial missions to accomplish outside the extant legislative templates.
This skewed legislative
praxis is more pronounced in the Senate where the chamber has been partitioned
into either pro-Saraki or pro-Buhari elements.
Any infraction from the
pro-Saraki bloc seems to be approached with perfume whilst any from the
pro-Buhari camp is awarded the most severe sanctions.
The danger in this
unfortunate praxis is that the fear of being unjustly sanctioned would prevent
robust debate predicated on alternative views and opinions that should underpin
legislative decisions.
The victim of this
dictatorial tendency is not only the suspended senator but the entire
constituency he represents.
Senator Ovie Omo-Agege
for instance is suspended for 90 legislative days despite tendering apologies
while Senato Shehu Sani did the most unthinkable to the Senate’s guided ethics
by revealing the allowances of members on national television, overreaching the
spokesman for the chambers.
Sani has not been
sanctioned because of his membership of the Senate oligarchy.
The public cannot
forget in a hurry Senator Dino Melaye’s clownish show of unrestrained passion
in what he debut as “Ajekun Iya.”
Could any member of USA
Congress dance on the CNN in celebration of inanity without being recalled? Is
the show of shame not an embarrassment to the Senate?
It is gratifying that
Omo-Agege has gone to court to seek redress but the outcome of such a judicial
intervention remains a matter of conjectures because of the doctrine of
separation of powers.
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