Wednesday’s raid of the Nation newspaper, and the arrest of six of the paper’s editors by the Nigerian Police brings back haunting memories of the military in Nigeria’s body politics.

In March 1964 (not 1947), Mallam Bashari Umaru introduced a bill in the Northern House to “revoke forthwith all certificates of occupancy in the hands of the Ibos resident in the North” to which the Northern Minister for Lands and Survey, Mr. Ibrahim Musa Dagash responded:“I would like to assure members that having heard their demands about Ibos holding land in Northern Nigeria, my ministry will do all it can to see that the demands of members are met. How to do it, when to do it, all this should not be disclosed.”

I’ll begin with a response to the Orbit online by a reader of this column last week who went by the name “Oladeji Y.” I’m far less troubled by the grammatical infelicities of his response as by his distortions and ignorance of historic facts. It reflects the quality of our education that at this level, awareness of Nigerian history is scandalously low among Nigerians. As a result, national discourse frequently slips into extremely vacuous ethnic and polemical diatribe. Oladeji Y rapidly makes the discussion of the “nationality” question his own comeuppance on the Igbo.

President Goodluck Jonathan did say he would not preside over a disintegrating nation. This was in an interview granted recently to a national newspaper which had broached the question of the possibility of a dismembered Nigeria.

Many years ago, when Public Radio was well run, there was a program on the old Imo Broadcasting Service – the IBS – called “Chi boo Anu Ozo.” Literally, it means, another day brings strange stories. The programme had a satirical twist that highlighted the absurdities of daily life and in its own ways mocked the irrational and the immoderate acts of men.

Mbonu Ojike’s book, I have two countries (1946), is a classic text of transnationalism and transnational identity. It registers the dual conundrum – the doubleness, or betterstill, the “Janus-faced” condition of existing in two places at the same time. One place claims your body, the other, your soul. It manifests the situation of the “double-gaze” and the “double-tongued” all clearly symptomatic of the ambiguity, and perhaps in fact, the ambivalence of double self-referentiality.

On Thursday, a friend of mine called to verify that I was in Enugu for the South-East Economic Summit. I had been billed on a panel with Dr. Okey Ndibe on the “Diaspora.” He saw this on the website of the planning committee for the summit. He wanted to be certain that I was there. First, it was news to me. I was neither aware, nor had I been contacted about the summit.

If there is still any lingering unbelief that Nigeria has been very unlucky to be saddled with third-rate minds as leaders, the verbal scud missiles (some call it mutual pinging) which former military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, and military dictator-turned civilian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, launched at each other must dispel such doubt.

History compels us to bear this witness: that the NATO-led overthrow of the government of Colonel Moumar Gadhafi is an international coup d’état. It is the longest coup in human history, lasting all of six months and backed by the arsenal of a coalition of the most powerful nations on earth.

Wall Street took a shellacking last week. Shares fell and rose like the yo-yo. It was the uncertainty that could nearly kill the faint-hearted. But of course, the bold trader, the true gamblers – for all that betting on stocks and currency and futures is gambling – staked his lot. Much loss happened last week. The pit of the trading floors be it at the commodity exchange or the stock exchange was bloody.

Three matters deserve our urgent attention this week. I will address them in an omnibus way, and hopefully amplify the cautionary tale and circumstance for readers of the orbit who may have read of the appointments made by Imo State governor Rochas Okorocha of his coterie of advisers and special assistants.

Writing is an intensely political act. From immemorial time, the foundation of all civilisation has always rested all the memory of the land preserved by those who constitute the moral imagination of the world. It is the power of the script over the ephemeral. Why do we write? This is the question that many of us have struggled to answer over the years. The questions come in moments of despair, when we feel that gnawing futility of our words, and the limits of our writerly convictions.