I exaggerate, of course. All the languages of the world will have died before English dies in Nigeria. And of all the languages threatened by extinction, English is hardly one, many thanks to the extraordinary success of England in colonising nearly two-thirds of the world before the sun did finally set on the great British Empire on which the sun was never to set.

The original title of my last column was “As Delta State Gets Set for the Charade of Local Government Elections,” but it was published without the keyword “charade” (15 October 2014). According to the Oxford dictionary, a charade is “an absurd pretence intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance.”

When announcing the date oflong-overdue local government elections in Delta State, the chairman of the state’s independent electoral commission, Mr Moses Ogbe, said, in that grating grandiloquence bordering on bombast that Nigerian public servants love so much, as follows: “Having regard to the desire of Deltans for the conduct of a smooth and hitch-free Local Government Election in the state, the commission has resolved that the elections will hold on Saturday, 25th October, 2014.”

Ekiti State, the self-styled “Land of Honour,” can’t seem to do anything honourable in recent times. “Ile iyi, ile eye” or “Land of honour, land of integrity,” its moto boasts.

IN my last column entitled “Jonathan’s Hostage Negotiator Puts Him in a Tight Corner” (3 September 2014), I argued that Australian hostage negotiator Dr. Stephen Davis did Nigeria a favour by daring to call by name two persons alleged to be sponsors of Boko Haram, and by pointing to an unnamed person alleged to be the evil sect’s banker ensconced in our Central Bank in Abuja.

PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan’s hostage negotiator, Dr Stephen Davis, has done Nigerians a great favour and put his employer in a tight corner. Davis has broken the official taboo against naming names of persons behind Boko Haram, those who fund the ceaseless bloodbaths, abduction of adolescent girls as sexual slaves, arson and more.

BY all sober reckoning, Professor Attahiru Jega has done quite well in his last two outings as Nigeria’s chief electoral officer and, so, democracy’s chief midwife in our turbulent country. If Ekiti broke the hearts of progressives, of those who believe that “man does not live alone by bread” — in other words, that the gospel of “Man shall live alone for his stomach,” according to Saints Adedibu and Fayose, is perversion itself — Osun offered them consolation. With the hard-fought but clear victory of Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola in the August 9 election, Jega gave hope to a nation pining, panting even, for a sign of change in the still uninspiring effort of governing ourselves sensibly. If against the seemingly unstoppable electoral machine of the ruling party, oiled by its ability to dispense power and privilege, a harried governor from a new collation party still getting to know all of its new members could win re-election, then 2015 might not be all the predicted gloom and doom. Electorally speaking, only, I must be quick to add, for the forces that tear at corporate Nigeria are legion!

He was not a poet, and I doubt that he ever knew of a Welshman by the name of Dylan Thomas who famously enjoined his dying father not to “go gentle into that goodnight” but to “rage, rage against the darkness and the dying of the light.” Physics educationist by first training, lawyer after, and crusader for democracy and justice, he was inclined to think in more prosaic terms.

The Vanguard of Monday, July 14, 2014 carried three full page advertorials on one issue: the impasse at the National Conference over a proper derivation formula. The Committee on Devolution of Powers, whose report was the last to be debated at plenary, had recommended retaining the 13% in General Abacha’s 1999 Constitution against the Northern delegates’ insistence on reducing it to 5%.

Not that when Lamidi Adedibu lived he lacked honour and veneration but that it was tainted adulation. Only his kind, those who do not subscribe to any code of civilised behaviour, could sing his praises as the godfather of “amala politics.”He had only one goal in politics: to take, by crook or hook, fire or thunder as much of what belonged to the public as he wanted.