On December 21st, 1988, PanAm Flight 103 was just seeking its cruising height for a smooth flight to the United States when it crashed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. No less than 269 souls were lost, not counting 11 others on the ground. It was the result of an explosion caused by a bomb that had been planted by terrorists who tore through the ‘eighties with dastardly acts of mass murder in a variety of execution.

You wonder how professionally run banks could have so severely hamstrung themselves to a degree that turned around to make them, the creditors, eventually insolvent. An expert characterized most of the loans as being mismatched – that is, they were long-term propositions in a situation of short-term investments.

It is not yet up to a year since I began to feel differently. I believe I have written about that change here. It is not anything as earth-shaking as St. Paul’s conversion. It was simply a growing awareness of an inward uplifting – that is the only way I can describe it; an internal effervescence that fills you with a gripping desire to ascend to a plane of higher thoughts and nobler deeds.

My approach to the matter of Caban Bamboo is to avoid unnecessary preambles and sentiments. Right now there is a gaping hole or vacant space where Caban Bamboo once stood majestically. The fact as far as eyes can see is that the structure has been pulled down.

It could not really be that President Yar’Adua genuinely hopes for a return to the former local government structure of the State, which bestows the Federal Government with no tangible profit at all, or is in anyway detrimental to the Nigerian project.

Then followed the first physical contact made by a human being with a celestial body when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and, with his first step, made that momentous statement: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for humanity.”

And that was the way it was, until I linked up with this cherub-faced bundled of sheer music, with every fibre of him a sweet, sweet sound – Michael Jackson. I can’t remember when I first heard him, but I do remember the song – “1-2-3″, a song for the young which left the old calling for an encore. He was fronting the “Jackson Five”, and the driving seat suited him to a “t”.

Mr. Adipere is so lucid. This indeed is the period when academia should have been strutting up and down with the pride and joy of being “in government”, if not “in power”, with two members of their clan on top of the heap.

Some people now say what is going on in the Niger Delta is NOT war. They say it out, loud and clear. It sent me post haste to the meaning of war as described in the dictionary: “armed fighting between states, countries, or factions.”

So many “ministries” are caught in the groove of “prosperity” that the gospel of the naira and kobo once entirely dominated our religious horizon. Perhaps it is because the Roman Catholic priesthood is shorn of that pre-occupation that the Cardinal, as well as other clerics of the same order, has found the space to turn around to the commonplace considerations of life … and that to the benefit of the common people.