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Ten days after Nigerian leader Muhammadu Buhari left the country for England to seek medical attention for his deteriorating health, an information war appears to have broken out between those who want him dead and those striving to counter that narrative with their own propaganda. On the first hand are those using various clones of international news websites to spread rumors that the president is dead. One of those phony websites last weekend made a parody of CNN, but while CNN has a .com domain, the fake website appeared with a .tv web address.  On the other hand of the battle are those trying to counter the rumors by spreading an old picture of a considerably-healthier President Buhari and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The picture was actually taken when Mr. Buhari visited...

I don’t know if protocol will permit it. But it would not be a bad idea for British Prime Minister Theresa May to visit President Muhammadu Buhari at the London hospital where the Nigerian president is being treated. She has a story to share. Three years before May unexpectedly became prime minister, she got a surprise. Theresa May was not feeling well and after weeks of assuming it may well be part of the misery of politics, she decided to do a medical test. She was misdiagnosed at first, with the result showing that she had Type 2 diabetes. It wasn’t Type 2 diabetes, but the result of the second test was even more difficult to believe: she had Type 1 diabetes. She received the news with shock, doubt and confusion. Why was it difficult to believe? Type 1 diabetes, also described as “juvenile diabetes,” is common among much younger people (some say 40 and below), especially children. She was 57 and thought it improbable that she would have a medical condition associated with j...

The National Assembly has passed the 2017 Appropriations Bill, raising the budget from N7.28 billion earlier proposed by President Muhammadu Buhari in December last year, to N7.44 trillion. The Appropriations Committees of the Senate and the House of Representatives separately presented their harmonised reports of the budget for consideration and subsequent passage on Thursday. According to the report, N434.4 billion was appropriated for statutory transfers to the National Judicial Council (N100 billion); Niger Delta Development Commission (N64.02 billion); Universal Basic Education (N95.2 billion); National Assembly (N125 billion); Public Complaints Commission (N4 billion); INEC (N45 billion); and National Human Rights Commission (N1.2 billion). The seven establishments are to get allocations on first line charge. In practice, the spending details of these offices are not made public. But the spokesperson for the Senate, Aliyu Abdullahi, told Journalists details of the Nation...