In 2000 Naomi Klein, an award-winning American journalist published a 490-page ‘anti-corporate branding’ book titled ‘No Logo’ in which she exposed a global underworld of a new crop of corporate predators who…

Before he was made Minister –or ‘Secretary’ as the novelty then was-, in the post-June Twelve contraption that had also in it Shonekan answering to HOG or Head of Government, Comrade Uche Chukwumerije, the now bellicose, warmongering, two-time Senator from Abia, was a ‘comrade’ in the frugal sense of the word: famished-looking, austerely-dressed and definitely seeming unable to wait for the littlest nourishment to recant old, non-provident ideologies.

I was still mentally rummaging for a subject to write about when I saw Disu Kamor’s ‘Palestine statehood: Significance of Nigeria’s vote’ (‘Peoples Daily’, Monday, Oct 3, 2011). It made more than ‘interesting reading’, and I thought it deserves a place on my page this week.

Rousseau -although a proponent of legislative supremacy- seems to be on the same page with Musdapher: ‘the people’s obligation to obey the law depends upon their ‘freely’ CONSENTING to it’! Meaning although ‘who’ writes the law may smell like the ‘Sovereign’; or ‘who’ interprets ‘it’ may seem like the ‘The Law-giver’; it is who CONSENTS to the law that is ‘the law’!

Of the many jurisprudential issues raised last Monday by Richard Akinjide at the Special Session of the Supreme Court marking the commencement of a new legal year, was the United States’ near-Constitutional crises of 2000. That year, U S electorates were in a quandary; and the ‘democratic’ world itself was ‘curiously transfixed’ –by the G.W. Bush-Al Gore Presidential Election debacle.

I had asked myself intuitively what else was there to write about the ethno-religious- bloody-letting on Jos (Plateau) that had not been written before. Or that I have not written about before now!? Is it the virtually ‘do-nothing-say-nothing’ attitude of the clueless, near-complicit Jonathan administration on the Jos massacres, or is it the notorious failure, usually, of our ‘un-intelligent’-or maybe ‘over-intelligent’- ‘Intelligence’ organisations; or better still the subtle, guile-and sometimes barefaced complot- of our compromised kind of journalism practice?

Part two of the series ‘Now that we have moved forward’, is a rehash of a previous piece on this column, titled ‘Distilling Jonathan’s Wiki leaks’ It is apt and auspicious for the subject matter:“The Wikileaks report on Nigeria (during Ambassador Sanders’ tenure) quoted Jonathan as claiming he was his ‘own man’.

It all began with a ‘dutiful’, uncharacteristically impatient Goodluck Ebele Jonathan; then only a harmless Vice-President of necessity; his terminally-ill principal, President Umaru Yar’Adua, bedded in far-away Saudi Arabia, a subject of needless ethno-regional controversy; and himself Ebele ‘luck-dependent’ as ever, and now virtually at the apogee of his most valuable political ‘manna’ yet from heaven, was –quite pardonably you might say- ‘covetously’ beside himself: enthusiasm-filled and waiting to grab the chisel to hew the very hedgy polity that he was, by the way, constitutionally heir to and about which Yar’Adua was raring to depart intestate!

Magnus Kpakol, as Chief Economic Adviser to President Obasanjo, once explained ‘economic growth’ in the sense I discerned to mean a most ludicrous paradox. Like: ‘progressing on the path of retrogression’, or maybe ‘gaining in the direction of losses’; or yet ‘improving on the path of depletion’; or better still ‘growing from the rump of decay’.

The truth is America’s claim to being ’God’s Own Country’ is logically in conflict with her being ’secular’ for the simple reason that we have been told to be ‘secular’ is to be ’concerned’ with the ‘profane’ in disregard of the ‘sacred’?

Aforetime, ‘Christian Democratic’ parties have emerged in many European countries, notably Germany, Italy and especially those of Eastern Europe; and these are seldom ever perceived as politically ‘Christian’ let alone be accused of using politics to purvey ‘religion’. Nor has this incidence of coupling religion with politics’ ever provided the basis for assailing the claims of these nations to being ‘secular’.

If we go strictly by the English dictionary definition of the term ‘secular’ to mean concern ‘with temporal, worldly matters’ to the exclusion of ‘religion’, many of the ‘apparently-secular’ Scandinavian countries especially of Sweden, Norway and Denmark which have state-established Lutheran Churches –and most of whose Ministers are said to be drawn virtually from the civil service-, would unquestionably be ‘non-secular’.

Not a few Muslims have been railroaded into ‘accepting’ what most of our Christian brothers are only too happy to ‘believe’, namely that Nigeria is a ‘secular state’. ‘Secular’ as in Webster’s Dictionary’s definition means: ‘concerned with temporal, worldly matters’ to the exclusion of ‘religion’; or ‘the profane’ in disregard of ‘the sacred’. And especially in circumstances such as we have now, with Islamic banking needlessly on the Bunsen burner, many are wont to assert that ‘secularity’ even with contemporaneous denial of the country’s ‘multi-religious’ status.

Poor Bankole. Victim or villain, scapegoat or sacrificial lamb, it does not matter anymore! He is already in the blender! Just don’t ask, ‘when will they blend him?’ Putting ‘accused’ persons in the ‘blender’ is about the worst our anti-corruption agencies have done! -they raise all hues and cries; they conjure the planetary winds and just when all the necessary tempests have been properly invoked, the ‘eagle’ descends from the troubled skies, and with its powerful tendons lift the prey.