For the past couple of weeks, this column has contained criticisms of Mr President’s handling of various leadership challenges.

Last week, I wrote about conflicts (legal and otherwise) between my Governor, Chibuike Amaechi, and his opponents in Rivers State and the Presidency (the former insist that they are operating independently and are not being backed by the latter. But many onlookers are finding it hard to take this denial seriously).

Uche Igwe is a doctoral researcher at Sussex University in the UK. He is attached to the university’s Centre For The Study Of Corruption and has just sent me an article that he recently wrote, partly as a response to the Presidency’s claim that widespread speculations about Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s 2015 plans are not only riddled with falsehoods but are unnecessary distractions.

Last week, I complained about the fact that Glo did not honour a “special offer” that was conveyed to me via a text message a couple of weeks ago.

SINCE Independence, most Nigerian politicians and government appointees have been woeful disappointments who have been either unwilling or unable to perform adequately.

Since my last column appeared, the world has lost two Women Of Substance. On Saturday April 6: Mrs Funmilayo Olayinka, the beautiful, intelligent, principled, hard-working and kind-hearted Deputy Governor of Ekiti State.

I HAVE just read a book called An Illustrated History Of The Jewish People. It was written by my dear friend, Lawrence Joffe; and it moved me to tears.

PRESIDENT Jonathan has attracted near-universal condemnation, both in Nigeria and internationally, for pardoning Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the former Governor of Bayelsa State, under whom he once served as a Deputy.

LAST week, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III, condemned the government’s crackdown on Boko Haram and said that President Goodluck Jonathan should grant “total amnesty” to the group’s members.

David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, recently revealed that his wife, Samantha, regularly berates him for not having enough women in his Cabinet.

LAST week, I told you that my ex-husband and I want Oliver, our teenage son, to go to a British university for financial, familial and cultural reasons and that Oliver is saying that he doesn’t like the UK much and that if we aren’t willing or able to send him to university in America, he will not go to university at all and will apply for a job when he leaves secondary school later on this year.

MY 17-year-old son, Oliver, warned me to never, ever write about him again nearly two years ago.

THE main Opposition parties – ACN, ANPP, CPC and APGA – recently merged to form a new political entity that will be known as the All Progressives Congress.

RELIABLE sources tell me that President Goodluck Jonathan is becoming increasingly allergic to the advice to which he is subjected on a minute-by-minute basis.

LAST week, Elder Godsday Orubebe, the “Honourable” Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, decided to launch an attack on Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi – who heads the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) as well as Rivers State.

LAST week, I told you about the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study – which was published in the Washington Post. Having analysed the Quality Of Life in 80 different countries, it concluded that Nigeria is the worst place to be born in.

ACCORDING to a report that was recently published in the Washington Post newspaper, Nigeria is the worst country in the entire world to be born in.

I RECENTLY told you that a friend recently told me that when he attended a school reunion dinner in Lagos, 80 percent of the ex-classmates on his table said that they were so unhappy with the status quo that they would gladly flee to foreign climes if they could get their hands on foreign work permits.

IT is customary for columists to be especially reflective about the past, present and future at this significant annual turning point when old years are about to give way to new years. And I thought that it would be interesting to look back at some of the observations I made at the tail ends of 2010 and 2011…with a view to discovering whether anything has changed for the better or worse.

AS regular readers of this page will know, I rarely find anything good to say about the state of our nation. And, sure, there are people who accuse me of being unpatriotic. But this viewpoint is not the norm, in my experience. Most of the Nigerians with whom I’ve communicated in the past few years have encouraged me to keep criticising our leaders and complaining about multiple systems failures that have not only lumbered us with security problems and a high unemployment rate but deprived us of benefits such as round-the-clock electricity, a well-managed oil industry and decent hospitals, schools, roads, etc.

(ifekaokonkwo@yahoo.com) is the most vociferous reader of this column. Highly opinionated, unrepentantly blunt and almost gleefully unsychophantic, he takes his democratic and human rights very seriously indeed and flatly refuses to be as bovinely philosophical as most of us are about the multiple disappointments that the average Nigerian faces.

It has to be said that Nigerian oil barons are not famed for passionately campaigning for the victims of oil exploration.