THE Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria entitles the president to run for a term of four years renewable for another four.

Regressive alliance: Rather than being a progressive party, the APC is regressive. Indeed, it is a cruel joke to describe it as progressive. A party led by a former military dictator and a civilian dictator cannot be progressive. Can any right-thinking person actually mistake Buhari for a progressive? Would a progressive truncate a democratic government? Would a progressive muzzle the press? Would a progressive arrest and jail people without trial? Would a progressive call for rioting and bloodletting if he loses an election? Certainly not!

A court-verdict ordered that 50 million naira compensation should be paid to the suspended Central Bank Governor for his unlawful detention for 24 hours. How much compensation should be paid for the senseless deaths of innocent job-seekers?

THE sudden decision to merge the PDP and the APC has caught everyone by surprise. When the announcement first came up last night, I thought it was a big joke. But then I saw it on BBC and CNN and quickly had a rethink. When I also heard it announced by Reuters, I concluded that what we are experiencing in Nigeria is nothing short of a miracle. Just when you think they are going to drag the country into the ditch, Nigerian politicians pull back from the brink and come up with the most unexpected solutions.

AS the crème de la crème of the Nigerian intelligentsia are currently gathered in Abuja to craft a new roadmap for the country’s political future, there is a very popular option for solving the country’s problem that you can be sure they will not be discussing because many of them are politicians. That option regularly comes up in discussions about how to address the malaise of corruption in Nigeria.

NIGERIANS are so overwhelmed by the inadequacies of Nigeria; we easily ignore its strengths. I am not talking here about Nigeria’s potentials; I am talking about Nigeria’s current actual status in the world economy. I am talking about Nigeria as a country with the biggest consumer market in Africa. Just think about it: the entire economy of Kenya is only equal in size to that of Lagos State in Nigeria.

IN 2005, Goldman Sachs Investment Bank forecast that Nigeria will be the 20th largest economy in the world by 2025 and the 12th largest by 2050; ahead of Italy, Canada and South Korea.

AMONG the different ethnic groups in Nigeria, the Igbo are without a doubt, one of the most remarkable. So remarkable, indeed, that some have even traced their ancestry to biblical Israel, as the far-flung descendants of Jacob, the Jewish patriarch. Gad, Jacob’s seventh son, is said to have had three sons who settled in South-eastern Nigeria.

ONE of the more annoying things about Nigeria is that our thieves are bad thieves. Conventionally, thieves operate at the night, out of respect for the homeowner and law-enforcement agencies. Not in Nigeria: thieves operate here in broad daylight in absolute contempt of everybody.

IN its days of arrogance, when some of its members boasted they would rule Nigeria for a proverbial thousand years, the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party of Nigeria) proclaimed itself the largest political party in Africa. Today, the party is afraid that the rival APC (All Progressives Congress) would declare far larger membership strength than the PDP as a result of its recent membership-registration drive. What a difference a day makes in Nigerian politics.

WHILE speaking recently on a current affairs programme on Liberty Radio, Kaduna, General Muhammadu Buhari boasted that the APC (All Progressives Congress) will wipe out the insecurity bedeviling Nigeria. The General conveniently forgot to tell us how he intends to do this. Since even the Americans with their military might and sophisticated intelligence outfits have not succeeded in wiping out Al Qaeda in over 25 years, one may well wonder how Buhari proposes to work his magic and wipe out the Boko Haram in Nigeria within four years.

THERE are an estimated 170 million Nigerians. The overwhelming proportion of these will live and die unknown and unsung. Airports will not be named after them. Neither will universities be established in their honour. A hundred years from now, people will not even remember they ever existed, except that they might have some children and grandchildren hanging around.

OVER the past few years, Bola Tinubu has made himself something of a colossus of South-Western politics in Nigeria. Against the onslaught of vociferous PDP electoral manipulations in 2003, Tinubu drew the line in the sand and held on to the biggest prize: Lagos. He became, in effect, the lone survivor of his party in the South-West. By 2007, using just Lagos State as his stronghold, he fought back to wrest ACN control back in all but one of the South-western states. By 2011, he had consolidated his hold in the region. With 2015 looming, it would appear to be high time for Tinubu to unfold a national, as opposed to a merely regional, agenda.

ON Friday, 23rd August, 1985, the military government of Major-General Mohammadu Buhari decided to place me under arrest. My crime was that I wrote, among others, an article entitled: “Counter-trading Nigeria’s Future” in the National Concord, exposing the government’s scam of diverting public funds into private coffers through barter-trade with Brazil. A man by the name of Benson Norman was sent from the State Security Services (SSS) to my office to get me. Not finding me, he left a note that I must present myself unfailingly at the SSS office at 15 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi Lagos the next Monday morning.

I HAVE never voted in a Nigerian election. I have only ever voted once, but it was in Britain and not in Nigeria. As a Commonwealth student in England in the 1970s, I was allowed to vote for the re-election of Harold Wilson’s Labour party. However, I am seriously thinking of casting my vote, for whatever it is worth, in Nigeria’s forthcoming elections in 2015. There is only one reason for this. I am determined that a “Northerner” must not be the next president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.