THE news hit like a thunderbolt; people were shell shocked. It had never happened before; that a national election that had commenced was being postponed. This is what in aviation circle could be called an air return; an aircraft that had taken off having to make a return to the airport for emergency reasons. In fact, an emergency situation was what the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) characterised the situation.

IN the primary school in the Lagos of the late 1960s, pupils were taught three key subjects; arithmetic, English language and social studies. For the third subject, we had two primer books on the lives of great people.

CONGRATULATIONS! The number of our universities has swelled to 117, no mean achievement from the pre-independence days when we had only the University College, Ibadan. The irony is that when we had a handful of universities, they were some of the best in the world, today, our tertiary institutions cannot easily be captured on the radar of universities in Africa while they are missing amongst the world’s best.

ETSUKO KOYAM lived on the third floor of an apartment building in Japan. That was until last Friday when she saw water tearing through her apartment floor. She ran for dear life holding her dear daughter’s hand.

I KNEW Frederick Chiluba when he was chair of the Zambian Congress of Trade Unions. He came out to Nigeria for African trade unions meeting, and later was in Ghana for the same purpose. I still have the group photograph we took with Jerry Rawlings at the Accra meeting.

OUR former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo claims he was tricked by Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain, Bode George to attend his grand thanksgiving service to mark his release from prison.

THESE are trying and dizzy times. They are breathless seasons when nothing seems certain. By my last count, there have been uprisings in 19 countries in the last two months. These are times that demand sacrifice, and millions of people step forward to put their lives on the line.

THE celebrations are still on in the five states where by virtue of Justice Adamu Bello’s judgement elongating the governor’s tenure, the state executives would stay in power longer than their electoral mandate. But for the Nigerian people, this is a period of mourning for the new Nigeria they have fought so tenaciously to enthrone.

MY favourite playwright and poet is Bertolt Brecht, the controversial theorist of the stage called the “Epic Theatre”. His famous plays include The Threepenny Opera, Baal, Mother Courage, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Good Woman Of Setzuan. When this German cultural giant passed away in 1956, he was sixty eight.

HOUSE of Representatives Speaker, Dimeji Bankole boasted before a visiting delegation of German parliamentarians that the mass uprisings that buried the Tunisian and Egyptian governments cannot happen in Nigeria.

A NIGERIAN soldier on international peace keeping in Haiti went out looking for food to buy. There was a riot by hungry Haitians looking for food to eat. The angry mob killed the Nigerian. Four other Haitians are killed in the riots and the government falls.

I KNOW that the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is a major problem in the country, but I confess to having a different opinion about President Goodluck Jonathan. Unlike most of the country’s past leaders, he appears to be a gentleman, level-headed, civilised and neither power conscious nor power drunk.

President Hosni Mubarak has succeeded in postponing his “Day Of Departure”. That was the day set aside by pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt for him to depart after three decades as president.

THE reaction of the Nigerian Government, as indeed many governments in Africa on the secession of Southern Sudan was muted. They did not want to be seen supporting the breakup of an African country when they themselves are also vulnerable. But the results of the independence referendum released this week should have put paid to that.