My confidence in the president’s ability to rein in impunity is unshaken. But my fears that he lacks the adroitness and the personnel to do a thorough job on a comatose economy is accentuated Ministers are now distancing themselves from the budget the president, in broad day light, presented to the senate. Chinewtalu Agu of the Nollywood fame would have ejaculated – “azuikpokpo”! Unlike those unplanned newborns abandoned in trash heaps in Onitsha, those days, by nervous teenage mothers running from shame and elusive fathers , too fickle to take responsibility, this orphaned baby was birthed in pomp and handshakes.

It is true traditional rulers have with the time and the wind, started abandoning bitter kolas and alligator peppers and falling for ice creams and chocolates while steadily keeping up with the Kardashians. No one foresaw what time had in store for our Pentecostal churches. Patience , contentment and abstemiousness have been excommunicated. Bliss is coveted and pastors now envy the life of Hugh Hefner. Their predilection for frivolity and controversy , their allergy to rigour, painstakingness and scholarship and their love for money and life have birthed a counterfeit Christianity. Monks must see our pastors now as self-indulgent ,self-absorbed , bottle fed infants, lacking in toilet training. And they won’t be too wrong.

In 1984 I visited Eyadema’s Togo. I was dumbfounded. Eyadema was after all an empty inconsequential vessel. The stark rurality and wretchedness of Lome and the cheerful naivety of its residents could only be surpassed by Gnassigbe’s megalomania. The national radio would pause and greet him almost hourly and would never forget to wish him well with his meals. His pictures which hung every where seemed to summon reverence from passersby. Policemen would line the routes he would travel and would herald his passage with their whistles which compelled everyone to stop and to join them in clapping furiously, waving frantically and smiling with a determination to please him.

By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo Igbos say tomorrow is pregnant. Amaechi means no one knows tomorrow. Fate doesn’t pretend not to be fickle. But we never learn. Not the here today , dead and rotting tomorrow scary finality of this earthly sojourn- we know that in all likelihood we will be eaten by worms or vultures. […]

At the peak of the campaigns, just before the elections, on one bright day, the OPC laid siege on Ikorodu road. They brandished their guns, their characteristic lawlessness, and their new fatness. They tried to force the people into knowing that president Jonathan enjoyed their support and therefore had the southwest. Many mouths were not left agape by the nakedness of that which was utterly sordid. Because ethnic militias now fight for their pockets while fighting for freedom. Pipeline contracts that had been awarded them were pragmatic for more than security reasons. After all billions were shared yet the pipelines received no respite.