By Bayo Onanuga/ THE NEWS Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram leader chose the most important day in President Buhari’s life, his birthday, to literally mock him, by releasing the video of captured schoolboys of Kankara Government Science Secondary School. The video did not just confirm that the insurgents were the masterminds of the abduction last week Friday. It was also a confirmation that the terrorists thought to have been contained on the fringes of Lake Chad, have opened another flank in…

By Samuel Oamen/ THE NATION Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has carpeted those who criticised the Christmas Day speech of Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese, Rev. Fr. Matthew Kukah. The playwright said he had studied the transcript as reported in the media and found nothing in it that denigrated Islam. He, however, noted he was not among the most religion besotted inhabitants of the globe. Kukah, in the speech, summed up the country’s challenges ranging from insecurity, poverty to frustration under President Muhammadu Buhari. Soyinka spoke in a statement on Monday titled, “The Kukah offence and ongoing offensives.” He said: “One of the ironic features of religionists is, one is forced to conclude, a need to be offended. It is as if religion cannot exist unless it is nourished with the broth of offence. This may be due to inbuilt insecurity, a fear that even the ascribed absolutes of faith may be founded on nothing more than idealistic human projections, not grounded in anything durable or immutable. Hence the over prickliness, aggressiveness, sometimes even bullying tendencies and imperious posturing. This leads to finding enemies where there are none. In certain social climates, it degenerates into inventing enmities in order to…