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.