So it’s 56 years since independence. Who knows where they imagined we would be? Yes, Hebert Macaulay and co-dreamers. Perhaps in the neighbourhood of Indonesia. Fate can be treacherous and life cruel, but many disasters are self inflicted.

She is neither. Rigour has become outdated, noisy charlatanism reigns. Howlers are everywhere. So Kemi Adeosun scampered to safety. She left her case. The accusation of blasphemy by Nigeria’s ‘Almajiris’ , religious or political, is not fought with reasons and arguments. A minister of finance has a duty to be honest and compassionate, and a compelling duty to prevent and stem panic. The proposed emergency economic bill is evidence of direness and government’s appreciation of it. It’s incontrovertible that sufficient urgency and dexterity haven’t been marshaled against our predicament. But it isn’t because Adeosun is ignorant or callous.

When others, constrained by scruples, could only whisper their conspiracy theories , ‘the mother of the nation’ asked for cameras. What followed was even by her standards an epic. In that melodrama, she reveled all her parts – warmth, emotionality, irreverent spontaneity, crudity, daring aggression. She wouldn’t join her dithering husband in skirting around, she dived headlong and wallowed in it . In being more simple and less sophisticated, a certain license to disregard the bounds of propriety is assumed. Artlessness becomes sincerity. And peevishness can become virtuous unpretentiousness. Loyalty was being redefined as worship. Dame was an emerging political Juggernaut

The Niger Delta militants were not cowards. They operated clandestinely but didn’t need masks. The morality of their enterprise before amnesty was their pride. But the Avengers are ghosts. Troubled by the glare of the unrighteousness of their present endeavor , they took to the protective shield of anonymity . Anonymity, paints the picture of cowardice.

You would think that an EFCC that has just come out of slumber would be helped to stay awake and alert. That its new found vigour would gladden even hearts worried about neutrality and due process lapses. Because some lofty aspirations are only desirable as superstructures on a foundation of firm deterrence. Only an agency inflicting some determined damage on impunity has the chance of being polished beyond vindictiveness and de-wormed of political bias. The EFCC has sloughed off lukewarmness.