IT was bound to come to this. The moment our “zero tolerance for corruption” president decided to fight tooth and nail against the public declaration of his assets, the moment he chose to declare instead “I don’t give a damn!” about any such nonsense as probity and leading by example, you knew the day was just around the corner when a ministercould import bullet-proof luxury cars as personal gifts to herself.

AND just like that, President Goodluck Jonathan took the wind out of his own sails! With his Independence Day announcement, and subsequent empanelling of a National Conference Advisory Committee, his floundering presidential ship of state seemed set to sail out of troubled waters. I was, and remain, cautiously optimistic about his decision to convene a national conference.

Over lunch at the Ocean View restaurant on a humidJuly afternoon in Lagos, my good friend YinkaOdumakinsought to add a little spice to our dismal discussion of “Project Nigeria”: he had it on good authority, he said, that President Goodluck Jonathan would soon surprise and confound the forces arrayed against him by acceding to the call for a national conference.

What does the storm fomented entirely out of a “born again” king’s tea cup tell us about our rulers, “spiritual” or “temporal?” By a proclamation, the Olu of Warri, Ogiamen Atuwatse II, sought to abrogate the ancestral title of Ogiamen on the ground that it implied worship of a false god, Umalokun the Itsekiri deity of the sea. It was an attempt to rewrite Itsekiri history and folklore according to the Pentateuch. Yet there had been no conflict between the personal beliefs of Itsekiri monarchs and the tenets of their monarchy, as he was promptly informed by his outraged “subjects.”

A YEAR to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the benediction of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America reached for a brush, dipped it in white paint and freshened the racial colour line of which King’s predecessor, W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke so eloquently 60 years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk.

I HAVE taken extreme liberties with the anguished cry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrator in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for good reason.

The cry of a colossal central government that has arrogated unto itself every important executive and legislative power and reduced the states to mere administrative appendages in our false federal republic can be heard from all corners of the country.

The ugly spectacle of the “street fight” that broke out in the Rivers State House of Assembly on July 9 gives further and better particulars of our determination to forever make nonsense of representative governance and a fool of ourselves.

IT took Egypt only two years after its first taste of democracy to give the latest demonstration of Africa’s abiding paradox: every flower of hope is turned sooner, rather than later, into the weed of despair.

SOON after his election, President Goodluck Jonathan proposed his panacea for the political troubles of Nigeria: a single six-year term.