My parents fight all the time and this is becoming embarrassing. I cannot invite my friends to my house when my parents are around because it really bothers me that something can break out between them and you can imagine my shame. Why is my own case different? I visit my friends at their homes and even spends weekends with them but none of my friends can come to my place. It’s not that they don’t want but I cannot let them because my parents are always fighting. How do I stop my parents fighting?

I think a shameful thing has happened to me. I have a crush on my best friend’s brother. I’m 18 and he is in his 20s. I’ve known him and my best friend since I was 10 and I started to like him when I was 12, just because we talk to each other so much and make each other laugh. There was a time where I was at my best friend’s house and she went to have a shower and I was outside and he came outside and we talked and started laughing and playing basketball and having a good time. I just haven’t ever met a guy like him.

Like many other readers, I was curious about the story with the headline: “woman in Australia crashes her own funeral, surprising husband who paid to have her killed” on Yahoo News. The story, which originally appeared in Chicago Tribune, was about an African couple based in Australia. According to the story, the husband, Balenga Kalala, hired hit men to kill his wife, Noela Rukundo. The assasins mercifully spared her life, but told the husband the assignment had been carried out. Five days later, Kalala organized Rokundo’s funeral. It was while mourners were leaving that Rokundo came out from where she has been observing her supposed funeral and confronted her husband.

Dubai is a sight for sore eyes. It is a testimony to how vision and ingenuity can change dross to gold. The change is not only in the tall, glittering buildings or the wide, ten lane roads; neither is it in the development of a big sea-going vessel in the middle of an arid land, nor the creation of sub-zero temperatures for ice hockey within a hot, 50 degree Celsius atmosphere. The kudos really, is in the ability to manage these things and make them work. Dubai makes you think if you are from the Third World. It makes you even more pensive if you are a Nigerian because oil was discovered in Dubai about the same time as Nigeria.

It is true traditional rulers have with the time and the wind, started abandoning bitter kolas and alligator peppers and falling for ice creams and chocolates while steadily keeping up with the Kardashians. No one foresaw what time had in store for our Pentecostal churches. Patience , contentment and abstemiousness have been excommunicated. Bliss is coveted and pastors now envy the life of Hugh Hefner. Their predilection for frivolity and controversy , their allergy to rigour, painstakingness and scholarship and their love for money and life have birthed a counterfeit Christianity. Monks must see our pastors now as self-indulgent ,self-absorbed , bottle fed infants, lacking in toilet training. And they won’t be too wrong.