Since he became the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi has ruffled a few feathers. He has attracted controversy the way sugar attracts ants over some of CBN’s policies. The most recent controversy concerns the currency restructuring exercise codenamed “Project CURE”.

Reading Dr. Jide Oluwajuyitan’s column in The Nation newspaper of September 13, 2012 aroused again in me an idea I have been nursing for a long time now.

A FEW years ago Nigerians were voted the happiest people on earth. We did not reject the Award which lumped all of us, happy and unhappy ones, together. However, that is no longer true today.

This title is actually a tinkering of the title of a paper delivered by Chief Phillip C Asiodu at a forum recently. The paper was titled: “Is There Any Hope For Nigeria?” (The Nation, 3 September 2012, page 21).

LAST week, while addressing the 52nd Annual General Meeting of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, President Goodluck Jonathan expressed his opposition to State Police. The President, like every Nigerian, is entitled to his opinion. But in this matter, he is like the chairman of a meeting.

Apart from the arm-twisting tactics of the sadistic proxies of the thieving oil marketers and the blackmail by the National Union of Electricity Employees, whose years of corruption and incompetence kept us groping in darkness, no debate has arrested the attention of the nation like the issue of state police.

I HAVE to return to the topic of our disastrous outing in the just concluded 2012 London Olympics for two reasons. One, the culprits in this national disgrace had resorted to their trademark blame-game.

It was the 10 seconds the world awaited with a suffocating sense of expectation! It was the 10 seconds that defined the London 2012 Olympics.

WHEN last did you read about Rep. Farouk Lawan, Femi Otedola and the US$ 620,000 thriller? Where is Farouk Lawan? Where is Femi Otedola? Where is the 620,000 dollars bribe money? How did the story end?

MY caption today is borrowed form the pay off of the Pirelli tyre advertisement. I find it very profound whenever I contemplate the appeal to importance and the relish of power by people. Nigerians love their power and always like to wield it exclusively.

THE above hubristic statement was credited to His Excellency, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, Governor of Edo State, as he savoured his re-election on Saturday 14 July. Comrade Oshomhole also tried to rationalise his false alarm against INEC and the PDP. He would not admit that he was hasty in condemning INEC’s conduct of the Edo election.

LAST week, while receiving the report of the Alfa Belgore-led Presidential Committee on the Review of Outstanding Issues, President Goodluck Jonathan said: “Our enduring sense of brotherhood, unwavering desire for freedom, unique resilience and abiding faith in Nigeria, have seen us through sundry challenges over the past 52 years of nationhood.

MY people say abomination in the community is good business for the diviner. Every time there is an abomination the diviner demands consultation fee of a goat, a chicken, kola nuts and gin to propitiate the gods.

MANY times I have hinted at what I call the ambivalence of Nigerians about corruption. Indeed, what I mean is that we are all hypocritical about our concern over corruption.

SOME years back, I think around 1985-86, while we were working in the African Guardian, I noticed that for some weeks, Uzor Maxim Uzoatu, (the intifada poet!) had been waltzing in and out of the office, without anyone knowing precisely what he was onto. One day I asked him pointedly what he doing loitering about for. He said, as breezily as only Maxim could conjure, “Oga Pini, am doing a story on Fela!”

NOWADAYS, the temptation is to preoccupy oneself with the mating habit of porcupines than to follow the typical Nigerian debate. As I said here last week, every issue spawns a polyglot of pseudo-experts and professional public affairs pundits, all climbing, clobbering and falling over one another to arrest our attention.

“I boarded a Dana Airline on my way back from Abuja. First, the flight was delayed for about two hours. Passengers were frustrated. Thank God I had my laptop with me to do some work whilst waiting at the stuffy departure room. When eventually we boarded I discovered to my great surprise that the plane was a very old one.

THE Democracy Day observed last week offered many Nigerians another opportunity for a promiscuous criticism of the system. Well, what a better way to celebrate democracy than to exercise our freedom of speech? I am reminded of what an actor once said: “opinion is like an a….h; everybody has got one!”

A WEEK ago, I read a story in a newspaper that I found very interesting. Nigerian traders in Ghana were appealing to the Federal Government to intervene on their behalf over Ghana’s refusal for them to sell generators in Ghana.

A FEW years ago when I interviewed Maj-Gen. Muhammadu Buhari for the Chinua Achebe Foundation dialogue series, I discovered a man millions of Nigerians never knew.

LAST year or so, the Federal Government did the wise thing to send many so-called security agencies packing from the nation’s ports.

THERE is this story about an era in the forties when an epidemic hit my village. People were dying in great numbers. Medical science was very rudimentary and people were simply bewildered.

IT is not yet one year since President Goodluck Jonathan was sworn in as president, yet the nation is being dragged into a vulgar fight over who succeeds him in 2015! That is the nature of Nigerian politics that is very disgusting.

ONE of the reasons why Nigeria is in a state of near-anarchy today is that we hardly reckon that our actions have consequences, and the state has never been decisive in letting Nigerians know that there are consequences for their actions.

TWICE in recent times, the media have speculated that President Goodluck Jonathan was poised to reshuffle his cabinet. As usual, the reported consequence of such speculation was that ministers were feverish with anxiety. On the one hand, during such intervals of uncertainty, public officers lose the confidence to step out and do their work.

IN one of the several interviews to mark his 60th birthday, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu (BAT) was asked by the SUN editors if he was interested in becoming the president of this country. “Why not?”, he countered and went ahead to boast that he can make a better president than many of his peers. But two down the line he began to distance himself from the ambition.

IN June 2011, I started an exercise on jotting down in my diary the number of deaths as reported by the newspapers everyday. On 22 June 2011, a newspaper reported the following: Two soldiers, 18 others killed in Tiv/ Fulani clash in Beme; an undergraduate murdered by cultists in Bauchi; an ASP killed and five civilians injured in Kano; man butchers neighbour over political argument in Kaduna; bodies of two little siblings found buried under the rug in Uyo.

IN the brouhaha that followed the agitation by the Northern Governors for increased revenue allocation to their states, I was conscious of the fact that we were missing a point. The point was whether we really want to deal with poverty in the land.

ONE can rightly say that anybody who, in his or her lifetime, witnessed a blackman, Barack Obama, become the President of the United States of America and who also witnessed the glorious burial accorded Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu has had a fulfilled life.