Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh is a Nigerian Social and Economic Ethicist and Philosopher. I am interested in Politics, Philosophy, Society, Ecology, Social and Economic Ethics, History, Human Development, African Issues, Global Governance and Sustainability issues, Good governance and Human Rights, Literature. He blogs at http://ogbunwezeh.blogspot.com/

Garba Deen Muhammad  is former editor of Daily Trust

The Suya Spot – featuring Iwedi Ojinmah

Levi  Obijiofor is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Journalism and Communication, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He was at various times Sub-Editor, Production Editor and Night Editor of The Guardian newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria. Between March 1995 and May 1996, he worked in the Division of Studies and Programming (BPE/BP) at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO where he edited the bulletin FUTURESCO and also coordinated the future-oriented studies program.

Levi has taught postgraduate and undergraduate classes across a range of journalism and communication courses and has successfully supervised PhD, Masters and Honours students. 

He holds a PhD and a Master’s degree in Communication from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree (BSc First Class Honours) and a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. In May 2000, he completed a Graduate Certificate in Education (Higher Education) course at the University of Queensland.

Max Siollun is a historian and commentator on Nigerian political and governmental issues, with a focus on those pertaining to Nigerian history and the Nigerian military’s participation in politics.  He has written a number of articles regarding Nigeria ’s military coups, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the origins of military engagement in Nigerian politics.  Mr Siollun welcomes reader feedback on his articles and may be contacted at maxsiollun@yahoo.com.

Ogaga Ifowodo

Ogaga Ifowodo, was born in Oleh, Delta State. Trained originally as a lawyer, he holds an MFA from Cornell University where he is currently finishing a Ph.D in English. He has published three collections of poems: Homeland and Other Poems, winner of the 1993 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) poetry prize; Madiba, winner of the 2003 ANA/Cadbury poetry prize; and The Oil Lamp, winner of the 2005 ANA/NDDC Gabriel Okara poetry prize.

Ifowodo was a frontline student leader as an undergraduate at the University of Benin. He worked for eight years with the Civil Liberties Organisation, Nigeria’s premier human rights group, and between 1997 and 1998 was held under preventive detention by the Abacha military regime; a memoir of his prison experience, excerpts from which have been featured in Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (edited by the Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje), New Writing 14 (published by Granta), Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper, and at www.africanwriting.com is in progress. His poems have been translated into German, Dutch and Romanian and have also been widely published in anthologies and magazines, including Voices from all Over: Poems with Notes and Activities released last year by Oxford University Press, Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry International, English in Africa, The Massachusetts Review, among others. Ifowodo is a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of The Guardian, Nigerian Village Square and other major Nigerian newspapers.

 Okey Ndibe is currently an associate professor of English at Simon's Rock College in Great Barrington, MA. In 2002, he won the college's New Faculty Teaching Award. During the 2001-2002 year, Ndibe was a Fulbright Lecturing/Research Scholar at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. 

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

After over ten years of managing agencies Dr Osuji decided to return to academia and secured a position at the University of Alaska. He taught Organizational Behavior (Psychology) and Political philosophy. Thereafter, Dr Osuji established Africa Institute Seattle. At the Institute they do research on African issues and conduct seminars on the same topics.

Dr Osuji has written on several topics. Some of his books are: Leadership Arts for Africa, Thoughts on Nigeria’s Constitution, Nigeria’s Political Economy etc. Dr Osuji is married and has three children (Ijeoma, Obi and Kelechi). He can be reached at: Ozodi@africainstituteseattleor ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Philip Emeagwali

Hailed as "the Bill Gates of Africa" by then-president Bill Clinton, Philip Emeagwali is a war survivor and renowned pioneer of the supercomputer and the Internet. "The Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali," observed TIME magazine. CNN has called him "a father of the Internet."

 He was born on August 23, 1954, in Nigeria. At an early age, he developed a love for mathematics and earned the nickname "Calculus." With two million others, Emeagwali fled persecution to the safety of Biafran refugee camps during Nigeria\'s 30-month civil war that began in July 1967, which killed one million people. He was conscripted into the Biafran army at age 14, won a scholarship to the United States at age 19.

 In his adopted country, Emeagwali became fascinated with what he called the "HyperBall," a theorized supercomputer equivalent to an idealized Internet. He began programming in 1974 and because he could not find a research laboratory interested in his HyperBall, he conducted research alone for 15 years, delving deeply into the deep connections between motion, calculus, and computing.

 In 1989, he shocked the computing industry by winning singlehandedly, as an unknown, the Gordon Bell Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of supercomputing." He reformulated Newton\'s Second Law of Motion as 18 "grand challenge" equations and algorithms and then re-created those as 24 million algebraic equations. By programming 65,000 processors to work as one seamless unit, he solved those 24 million equations at a speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second, setting three world records and garnering international headlines. This discovery that 65,000 processors can solve a grand challenge defined as the 20 gold-ring problems in computing, in part, inspired the reinvention of supercomputers as a union of vast numbers of processors communicating as an Internet. He is profiled in books on the history of the Internet because his discovery suggested a re-definition of the computer of the mid 21st century ­ as "a device communicating as an Internet while computing with thousands of processors," instead of one.

 By expanding the limits of computing, Emeagwali has helped to move humanity forward into the age of information, which prompted president Bill Clinton to extol him as "one of the great minds of the Information Age."

 In his native Nigeria, he is hailed as national hero, his likeness appearing on the nation's postage stamps and on the continent\'s music videos. He has been cited in numerous polls and lists of history's greatest black achievers, by publications ranging from New African to Ebony.

 Emeagwali has won city-wide tennis tournaments. He is married to Dale, a prominent molecular biologist, and they have a son, Ijeoma, who is studying computer engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He travels from Washington, D.C.

Born November 7, 1965, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Reuben Abati, chairman, editorial board of The Guardian newspapers, is a very brilliant scholar cum journalist who has contributed greatly to nation-building through his unique style of discussing topical issues in his columns.

Abati's approach of using dialogue, narrative, essay and satire to deal with serious national issues has made his columns captivating to many readers. Most of his articles are laced with humour and this makes readers to be carried along. What exactly informed his style of writing?

Abati had a First Class Honours degree in Theatre Arts at the University of Calabar and won the Vice Chancellor's prize as the overall best graduating student of the university in 1985 among several other prizes for academic excellence. At the University of Ibadan where he did his masters and Ph.D in Theatre Arts, he distinguished himself as a university scholar between 1987 and 1990. He completed his Ph.D at the age of 24 within just two years, specialising in Dramatic Literature, Theory and Criticism.

He also did a journalism programme as Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow, College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park, United States between 1996 and 1997. And in 1997, he earned an LL.B (Hons) from the Lagos State University, Ojo. The training in these three fields has immensely impacted on his writings.

As a scholar who taught a course on the aesthetics of laughter in the university, Abati finds it easy to use humour to convey his message in a dramatic and impactful manner.

As a columnist, Abati is motivated by happenings within the society and because there is never a dull moment in Nigeria, he finds the task of writing on topical issues very exciting. He is quite aware that columnists are agenda-setters who use the newspaper platform to provide leadership by assisting the public in formulating their own reaction to issues.

Over the years, Abati has won several awards for his well-informed commentaries and professional excellence both nationally and internationally. They include: The Cecil King Memorial Prize for Print Journalist of the Year, 1998; The Diamond Award for Media Excellence for Informed Commentary, 1998; Fletcher Challenge Commonwealth Prize for Opinion Writing, 2000; and Diamond Award for Media Excellence for Informed Commentary, 2000.

Abati who was a university teacher between 1985 and 1996 found it very easy to transit from the academia to journalism because both as a student and lecturer, he was consistently contributing articles to virtually all the leading Nigerian newspapers. From 1989 to 1991, he was contributing editor, Hints and Channele, both Lagos based romance magazines. He also freelanced during the period for The Guardian, Daily Sketch, Democrat, Nigerian Tribune and Daily Times. Between 1994 and 1995, he was contributing editor, Hearts, a romance magazine which he assisted in setting up. For eight months he maintained two columns under a pseudonym.

But before Abati went into journalism on a full-time basis, he was having a promising career in the academia. He was a graduate assistant, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Benin, 1985-1986 where he served as a member of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC. While pursuing higher degrees at the University of Ibadan between 1986 and 1990, he was a teaching assistant in the "Premier University." Immediately after the completion of his Ph.D in 1990, he was appointed Lecturer II at the Department of English, Ogun State University.

Rowland Adewumi is a civil engineer, an entrepreneur and presently pursues a full time doctorate degree (PhD) in Marine Technology at the University of Newcastle. He has a master’s degree (MSc) from the University of Greenwich-London in GIS/Remote Sensing and, a Bachelor of Civil Engineering (B.Eng) at Federal University of Technology, Minna in 1998. 

In a career spanning Nine years in Civil and Environmental engineering, Remote Sensing and GIS projects, he has dealt with many major multidisciplinary concept and design, engineering and GIS projects ranging from developing concept plan to execution. He has designed over 30,000 kilometres plus over 2000m of reinforced concrete bridges of Nigerian roads and highways, and has worked extensively on remote sensing and image classification projects in Nigeria.

Rowland has many interests outside of business and study such as wildlife hunting of animals, religion, African-British culture, international politics, and others. 
http://www.rowland-adewumi.com

Rufus is a Milan, Italy based businessman and social affairs commentator. He is also an astute writer whose consistent contributions in English and Italian have featured in many local and international newspapers and magazines. He is the founder and administrator of Nigeria Think Tank (http://www.facebook.com/ group.php?gid=58221486905&ref= mf), a Facebook forum to discuss issues about Nigeria. He is a 1988 B.Sc. (Hons) Accounting graduate of Ogun State University (Now Olabisi Onabanjo University) Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria'.

Terver Atsar writes with a radically different perspective on public affairs. An author and preacher, he has anchored 'Echoes'- a Special Column on NigerianNews (www.nigeriannews.com) since 2004 with prolific commentary on burning national issues.

A fearless and incisive commentator, Terver is Master of Technology(M.Tech) student of Industrial Chemistry(Akure) and holds a Degree in Chemical Engineering(Minna,1995). He is an Environmental Consultant, a Chattered Member of the Waste Management Society of Nigeria(WAMASON) and Member of the Nigerian Society Of Chemical Engineers(NSChe). His hobbies include Badminton, Chess and wildlife tourism.

Adebanwi is a Bill Gates Scholar at Cambridge University, UK.