That piece of advice for people all the way down in the value chain of the poultry industry was prelude to the modern management principle of always having Plan B. It was a lesson I learnt in 1970, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, immediately after securing a loan to purchase a house for my family. My former wife, like all the others, had depended on one plumber, admittedly the best in the County, to fix our pipes. The problem was that, this “genius of a plumber” was also everybody’s favourite fixer.

Nothing is more pathetic that when a contestant, out of hubris, and refusal to listen to all sides, loses a contest he should have won easily. President Goodluck Jonathan had just handed over Akwa Ibom State to the All Progressive Congress – on a silver platter.

Blessed are politicians when out of power. They reveal all the things which those in power labor to hide from us. Since December 2013, I had warned My Fellow Nigerians, about the inevitable collapse of crude oil prices and its consequences. Obviously, nobody listened. In May 2014, out of sheer frustration, associated with talking to the deaf, I wrote a column titled SO YOU WANT TO BE GOVERNOR IN 2015.

In that now forgotten long poem, which we memorized in our secondary school days, Kipling listed several instances of forbearance which would, in the end, qualify anyone to be called “a Man, my son”. But Rudyard lived in a different age than our own – which is increasingly becoming the Age of Uncertainties.

“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher [PHD holder]. A society which scorns excellence in plumbing, because it is humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy, because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.