In this short conversation, Artistic Director of the National Troupe of Nigeria, Martin Adaji takes a look at the dramatic and theatrical potentials of Achebe’s works and concludes that the master story teller’s deft and creative use of language accounts for the successful adaptations of his two of seminal works: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. He spoke to McPhilips Nwachukwu.

Four days of competition at the African Youth Athletics Championships comes to an end today at the Warri Township Stadium with Nigeria striving to tilt the medals table to her favour even as Egypt is looking to finish tops.

Last week, Sunday Vanguard published documented evidence as obtained from Nigeria’s Election Management Body, EMB, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, that Registration Area Officers, ROAs, would be expected to manually and comprehensively register voters from house to house. In this report, you will read details of the type of PERMANENT VOTER’S CARD that INEC has decided to use for the 2015 elections, a card that cannot satisfy the yearnings of Nigerians for a free and fair election. Yet, Professor Attahiru Jega, Chairman of INEC, is going about his job with messianic alacrity which suggests an agenda that is at once unclear to other national electoral commissioners, Resident Electoral Commissioners, RECs, as well as some very senior officials of the Commission. This report merely attempts to clear the fog of misinformation that a permanent voter’s card, especially the one INEC has awarded its contract, would solve Nigeria’s age-old problem of election rigging. The prognoses are very dangerous.

It didn’t come as much surprise the surreptitious attempts by some group to engineer confusion and derail the planned reform of the Nigeria Professional Football League which only recently emerged from years of the worst kind of self-inflicted disruption. As one who has extensive knowledge of the in-fighting that ruined the management of the league these past four years, the appointment of the 13-member Interim Management Committee was an insightful step towards resolving the league crisis.

A motley crowd of largely unruly youths carrying screaming banners hailing Governor Mukhtar Ramallan Yero of Kaduna State took over the Murtata Sqaure, Kaduna, on Tuesday, at a ceremony marking Yero’s 100 days since becoming governor of a state equally shared by the Muslim North and the Christian South.

There is the Igbo story of the wood pecker who proclaimed without doubt that he would honour his father in death by pecking down the great Iroko tree. But the day came when his father died, and the woodpecker suddenly grew a boil on its beak. I feel like the woodpecker. Chinua Achebe’s death last week left me tongue tied.

Alhaji Bamanga Tukur is the National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. He was General Manager, Nigeria Ports Authority. In 1983, he was elected governor of old Gongola State, now Adamawa and Taraba States; in 1992, he was a presidential aspirant of the National Republican Convention, NRC; and also a former Minister of Industries and President, Africa Business Roundtable. In this interview, Tukur bares his mind on the insecurity in the country, his reconciliation agenda for the PDP, and relationship with the PDP governors. Excerpts:

A 1963 Scotland-trained medical doctor, Prof.(Mrs.)Ibironke Akinsete is one of the few Nigerian women who have engraved their names on the sand of local and international medical practice. Currently the Chairman of PathCare Medical Laboratory, Prof, as she is fondly called, is a Haematologist of great repute. A former Chairperson of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS and Presidential Adviser on HIV/AIDS, she sits on the board of several organisations. Prof Akinsete who will be seventy-five in May stresses the need for preventive healthcare in this interview.

Chinua Achebe, the internationally celebrated Nigerian author, statesman and dissident who gave literary birth to modern Africa with Things Fall Apart, has died. He was 82. I was in my office when I heard of the passing of our elder, Chinua Achebe. The news shook me to the core, then I scrambled to the nearest computer pot. I was stunned there was no mistake, it was true that Chinua Achebe was no more.

Nigeria’s latest boxing pride Davidson Emenogu (aka King Davidson) has promised to lead the fight in ensuring that the boxing regained what he called its lost glory in the country.