THIS column last week was about Chinua Achebe, his works and his legacies. I knew that there will be a backlash, and had even attributed some of it to the legacies the late legend left behind.

THE dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilise its assets.

Something is seriously wrong at the highest decision-making levels of President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. A number of elementary but expensive errors of judgement are being made which, cumulatively, will cost the nation very dearly.

THE Petroleum Industry Bill, PIB, is a piece of legislation initially intended to address endemic structural, policy and managerial issues in the Nigerian oil and gas sector. Its goals were to enhance the value of the asset for the Nigerian people by plugging loopholes in policies and management and improving transparency and efficiency of the sector.

IT will be difficult to find enthusiastic, independent support for the continued existence of State Electoral Commissions. But they will continue to exist because they serve very powerful interests that have nothing to do with the growth and development of the democratic system.

THE way our President, Governors of the PDP, major opposition parties, eminent, perennial actors and fixers in the political system are running around in pursuit of 2015, you would think our democratic process is all about elections.

THE charade around the conduct and fate of an Assistant Director in the Federal Civil Service who exercises responsibility as Chairman of the Pension Reform Task Team, Abdurrasheed Maina appears set to continue.

THE planned merger of three or four parties is a major development in the nation’s current political disposition. Whether it lives up to its billing as the most significant development since 1999, or it falls flat on its face in the next few weeks will be determined by many issues and challenges.

PEOPLE who have taken ringside seats in the on-going bruising fight between President Goodluck Jonathan and President Olusegun Obasanjo must have been jolted when news filtered out that the two had attended a church service at the Presidential Villa, last Sunday and had a private lunch afterwards.

DO State governors deserve the approbium directed at them from all informed sections of the polity? What does it feel like to be a governor and exercise the type of powers that make you at once a major source of power and patronage, and an albatross around the neck of our democracy?