Charles Awurum is one of the highly rated comic-actors in Nigeria any mother would want for a son-in-law. But this was not to be as the mother of his ex-girlfriend rejected him after he proposed to her daughter and went ahead to fix a date for their traditional wedding. Feeling rejected and heartbroken, Awurum later found his wife in a church, and, today, he’s better off for it. Ten years down the line, and with three big boys to show for the success of his marriage, Awurum can only be grateful to his maker for turning his Creator into dancing. He recounts his story in this encounter.

Virtually all the communities in Benue State have become theaters of war, no thanks to the activities of suspected herdsmen who, in the last few years, have been killing, raping, stealing and occupyings part of the vast land that makes up the agrarian state. The invasion has continued despite the outcry by the locals. Today, majority of the inhabitants of the affected communities have become refugees in their own land, thus abandoning their farming activities.

It depends. If Nigerians want restructuring, I have no problems with that. But it can’t be one part of the country, it must be holistic. Then, there must be a proposal, there must be constitutional amendment, there is referendum to be held before we can be talking of restructuring. Recently, Britain exited from the European Union, EU, the people didn’t fight. There was no life lost in the whole drama. Again, I don’t think we should be dwelling too much on oil. The so-called oil is gradually becoming non-fashionable. Other sources of energy are emerging everyday. Time would come when nobody would be talking about oil anymore. Meanwhile, find out the quantity of the reserves of oil in the North,you will be shocked at what we have. It is much more than what you can imagine.

I think people just try to rationalise corruption but we all know what corruption is. If you are driving on the road and you pay a policeman money to avoid prosecution, that is petty corruption. If you are in public office and you use that office for private gain, we know that is corruption. So, it is in an attempt to give a veneer of legality to corruption that we pretend we do not know what corruption is but we do. We know the people who are thieves even in our traditional societies, and we also know that those people who are taking things that dosn’t belong to them are engaging in corruption.

Amid the official pronouncement that Nigeria’s economy is in recession and increase in Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) from 12 percent to 14 percent by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), an economist is calling for increase in local production of goods as one of the ways to force down per unit cost, for the country to recover from recession and high inflation rate of 16.5 percent.