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.

ON Saturday, June 14, 2014, the remains of Dr Abel Kprogidi Ubeku, former Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria PLC, were returned to Mother Earth. Although better known to Nigerians, especially those for whom alcoholic beverage is synonymous with the dark stout he turned into the most popular beer in the country — “black thing good ooo!” — he was also a sound scholar and notable politician.

YOU have to hand it to the North. Knowing the extent of the Niger Delta’s sense of injustice through the unconscionable expropriation of its nature-given oil and gas wealth, and knowing that just nine years ago the South-South delegates to General Obasanjo’s constitutional conference walked out of proceedings rather than accept a derivation formula of less than 25%, the Northern delegates to President Jonathan’s National Conference insisted on not only reducing the laughable 13% already entrenched in the 1999 military constitution to 5% (that’s right, FIVE percent) but also on wiping out any other grudging concession. Mounted atop the high horse of power they know how to ride so well, they presented their Southern counterparts a choice: accept 5 % or accept a reinstatement of the onshore-offshore dichotomy in the calibration of oil output,give up the Niger Delta Development Commission, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and the amnesty programme.

As the world watched Abuba-kar Shekau’s video declaration of Allah’s instruction to him to sell the nearly 300 girls he kidnapped at midnight from their boarding school beds in Chibok, Borno State, something happened at last that had been long awaited: action, rather than platitudinous words of outrage.

AMIDST the grief and outrage that sweep the land in the aftermath of Boko Haram’s latest acts of Satanism-AbubakarShekau and his fellow psychopaths are disciples of Satan-I crave the indulgence of the reader to allow me a moment to ask the simple question: How did we get here?

I  COULDN’T help it. As soon as the new figures conjured by Dr Okonjo-Iweala out of Nigeria’s “rebased” Gross Domestic Product exercise came out, I shouted abracadabra! Then I chanted, “Come and see Ah-meri-ka wonder! Come and see Ah-meri-ka wonder!” I promptly substituted “Nigerian” for America in that spell-casting ditty of itinerant tricksters that used to haunt the busy bus terminals of our major cities. I completed the expression of my wonder by crying out loud, “The more you look, the less you see!” 

IF I were a praying man, I would be on my knees every minute of the day for the next three months. And if I could be sure not to expire from the inhuman sacrifice, I would seek to better God-the-Son by fasting for 90 days and nights, hoping that the 492 wise men and women selected to rescue Nigeria from the precipice of self-annihilation would not need a day beyond June 15, 2014 to complete their task.

THE pattern is clear. The more bloodcurdling the atrocities of Boko Haram the louder the calls for dialogue with the band of murderous psychopaths whose official name is Jama’atuAhlissunnahLidda’awatiWal-Jihad.

DELTA is a densely populated state that also happens to house a vast amount of oil and gas. The Sapele-Warri-Ughelli corridor, extending to Port Harcourt, is the industrial and commercial heartbeat of the state and has a high volume of vehicular traffic.

I HAVE known Senator Femi Ojudu for 25 years, since his days at the defunct African Concord. We were co-tenants of General Abacha’s gulag at 15A Awolowo Road and Inter Centre at Obalende, Lagos, until I was transferred to Ikoyi Prison while he remained a ward of the State Security Service (SSS). In all that time, even as a founding editor of The NEWS, I have not known him to be a man given to impulsive speech, sensationalism or self-exhibition. Thus, when he spoke recently of some curious things in the 2014 budget, I was all ears.

THE theme of the 1993 United Nations world conference on human rights in Vienna was Women’s Rights Are Human Rights. I was with the Civil Liberties Organisation then and attended the conference.