A Nation at 51

Can Corruption Become a Way of Life?

Bankole without the White Cap

From Goodluck to Good Work

A Dictionary of Problems

CBN Cashless Society Project

I was in Seoul, South Korea, in early August 2008 for the World Philosophy Congress, after a 10 day stay in Oxford at the attendance of the Oxford Round Table conference. A colleague from my Department joined me from Dubai at the Seoul Palace Hotel, which had been booked and paid for with a UBA PLC Master Card in Nigeria. Payment for registration for the Congress was made with the same UBA Master Card. .........MORE

Jonathan’s Economic Team: Co-opting Fashola and Oshiomhole

In the March 20, 2011 edition of this column, I tried to establish a providential purpose between President Goodluck Jonathan and Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State, having predicted that they would both be returned to power on May 29, 2011; and urged that both men should collaborate as statesmen, regardless of party affiliations, to make Nigerians witness in their life time what is meant by transformative development and effective service delivery.
As an unrepentant optimist who fervently ........MORE

Jonathan’s Order on Stolen Assets Abroad

It is re-assuring to note that the President Goodluck Jonathan Administration is standing up to the fight against money laundering and sundry other forms of graft in the country. The recent repatriation of almost twenty-three million pounds sterling laundered and stashed away in the Island of New Jersey, by some criminally-minded people, is a boost in such a fight against high profile theft of public funds. Evidently, the further empowerment of anti-graft agencies namely, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent and Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), by the recent signing into law of the 2011 Money Laundering Prohibition Act and the Evidence Amendment Act 2011, has facilitated and fast-track the recovery of stolen funds from the national treasury.
And surely, the charge by Mr. President to the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, and the boss of the EFCC, Mrs. Farida Waziri, to collaborate effectively to recover other laundered monies still kept away in safe havens abroad should raise the tempo of the anti-corruption campaign of the Jonathan Government to a crescendo. Unarguably, the single most devastating indictment of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the civil regime it enthroned since ....MORE

Self-discovery: Who am I? An Ontologized Ethics of Self-mastery

Abstract. Self-discovery leads to the development of the ethics of selfmastery. Many ethical systems prescribe how the individual could attain self-mastery by means of critical self-examination or self-analysis. Once such critical self-examination or self-analysis is successfully carried out, the individual begins to use himself, his personal preferences, as the standard of what is right or wrong. This is the background to the
Confucian, Kantian and Existentialist ethics of categorical imperatives. Even in religious ethical systems that attribute the source of the moral
law to divine authority, the individual still has to take a leap of faith to discover God's purpose for his existence, which he then internalizes. In the final analysis, any ethics that truly works must issue forth from the self. Hence self-mastery is the absolutely fundamental premise upon which to erect a sound moral character. Keywords: self-discovery, self-mastery, self-analysis, categorical imperatives, essence or purpose of life, divine purpose of life.

INTRODUCTION

The question “Who am I?” invariably sets the stage for a journey to selfdiscovery.
It is not a biographical or historical question that seeks
information about a person’s origin or social status. It is an ontological and ethical question that seeks an understanding of the essence of a person’s existence and the life strategy required to attain that essence. It
is a question that seeks to understand a person’s possibilities or potentialities, which he can leverage to add value both to his existence and to the pool of mankind’s heritage. All such questions that seek to unravel the purpose, meaning and essence of human existence are fundamentally anchored to the ethics of
self-mastery. It is the ethics of self-mastery that can assist the individual .......MORE (Download material)