We shall be very liberal with the use of names in this essay, except in the very rare case where anonymity would save the subject some embarrassment.

Last week, the Kano State Coordinator of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, Mr. Sanusi AbdulRasheed, lamented that 89% of corps members in the country, could neither write a good letter of application nor communicate effectively in the English language. According to AbdulRasheed, “the NYSC researched into what (the corps members) were writing in the form of applications for one thing or the other.

EXPECTEDLY, Dr. Femi Okurounmu, chairman of the 13-person Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, was especially effusive about the committee’s assignment.

Nigeria’s sundry ‘tribes’ of agitators, fromcivilsociety activists through to gerontocratic “have-beens” and ethnic entrepreneurs, finally scored a notable victory on Independence Day, when President Goodluck Jonathan appointed an AFENIFERE chieftain, Dr. Femi Okurounmu, to chair an Advisory Committee to work out modalities for a national conference.

WHEN news broke last weekend of the killing of nine individuals by the State Security Service, Marilyn Ogar, the Deputy Director, Information, DSS, carefully couched her narrative in classic anti-terrorist speak. Ogar, very much like a disciple of Joseph Goebbels, the notorious propaganda chief of Hitler’s Third Reich, told how two alleged Boko Haram “elements”, Kamal Abdullahi and Mohammed Adamu, earlier arrested “for terrorist activities”, led security operatives to uncompleted buildings, “where arms were purported to have been buried underground”.

WHEN the two sides of the raging PDP battle for supremacy addressed the press together on Sunday night, vowing to muster efforts to end the rift within the ruling party, they moved closer to a closure.

LAST Sunday, I drove my children back to resume the new school term. The night before, I held a discussion with them about the responsibility of being educated, as a holistic pursuit of the life process.

If we attempt a post-humous reading of his fertile imagination, the earth-shaking event of last weekend, with the walk out of seven governors, and former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, from the PDP convention in Abuja, would certainly have elicited an absolutely quotable line for posterity!

I RETURNED to Abuja on an afternoon flight from Asaba, the Delta State capital, last Sunday. We had been attending the 9th Nigerian Editors’ Conference; an occasion which climaxed with a gala night of music, featuring D’Banj; Omawumi; the Delta State cultural troupe and some of the leading comedians that made Delta the capital of Nigerian stand up comedy.

LAST week, former President, Olusegun Obasanjo was keynote speaker at the fourth annual Ibadan Sustainable Development Summit, organised by the University of Ibadan. Against the backdrop of heightening political tension in the country, he surveyed the landscape and delivered what the French call a coup-de-poing, against the “younger” generation of political leaders, especially those who emerged as the crop of leaders from 1999.

I THINK Femi Falana’s well-argued piece on the on-going hysteria in the face of the forced repatriation of 72 Nigerians of Anambra state origin, by the Babatunde Fashola administration in Lagos, has been the most informed analysis of the core issues so far.

EARLY this week, reports emerged that Vice President Namadi Sambo, on behalf of the Federal Government, had “sought the support of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) for the provision of about $450M to expand the power transmission system to wheel up to 20, 000 megawatts of electricity”.

A WEEK can be a very long time in politics. This is even truer within the pressure cooker ambience of Nigerian politics. Two events this week, underline the central place of power and the incredible struggle to retain it, by the denizens of the PDP.

THE late Chief Mobolaji Bank-Anthony must be turning in his grave! It was on Igbosere Road in Lagos, if I recall properly, that he established his undertaking business in old Lagos. It was appropriately named “THE SYMPATHETIC UNDERTAKERS”.

“The PDP appears to have added public brawling to its list of accomplishments. The self-proclaimed largest party in Africa has turned into a fight club that employs the police as ushers for its matches…When the interest of the nation is subjugated so that the narrow, parochial interest of a clique in power is served events like we see unfold in Rivers will soon become common place.