MY earliest encounter with Chinua Achebe was not the usual “suspect”; his trailblazing work, Things Fall Apart. That came a bit later. I had my earliest encounter with Africa’s greatest writer, with Chike And The River. It was set in Onitsha, against the backdrop of the majestic River Niger.

OUR quotation above was taken from the impromptu speech made at the weekend, by Godswill Akpabio, the Akwa Ibom governor, during the South-South leg of the PDP’s reconciliation tour. As newspapers all reported last Monday, the six South-South PDP chairmen all chorused that they were truly “hungry”, and before anyone could spell Uyo, Akpabio gave a total of N6 million to the “hungry” chairmen for “lunch”.

AFTER running out of a stock of ridiculous excuses, President Goodluck Jonathan finally plucked the courage to visit Borno and Yobe states, last week. As if to underline the various strands of prejudice which have informed official security thinking since the commencement of the Boko Haram insurgency, three thousand policemen were deployed to secure the presidential visit, commanded by the IGP himself!

THE story broke last week that President Goodluck Jonathan will soon visit Borno state.

HE was the “most natural” choice for the position. Chief Tony Anenih, is the “new” Chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees. The old dinosaur is back to where he loves the most: as the central figure, inside the smoke-filled, inner recess of PDP politics.

LAST Sunday evening, Nigeria’s nomenclatura gathered inside the Banquet Hall of the Aso Villa, to celebrate one of the wonders of modern Nigeria; the return from death of First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan. It was a solemn spiritual event; a power show; a fashion statement extraordinaire and a political gathering, all rolled into one.

IT was no surprise to followers of Nigerian football, and the cutthroat politics underlining it, when Coach Steven Keshi announced his resignation, after becoming the second African to win the Nations Cup as player and coach.

REUBEN ABATI was at his most combative last Sunday, with his withering attack on “The Hypocrisy of Yesterday’s Men”.

THE struggle for factional hegemony within the PDP got messier last week, when Chief E.K. Clark, the grand Mandarin of Ijaw nationalism and “honorary godfather” to President Goodluck Jonathan, frontally took on the president’s most formidable ‘in-house’ opponents: The PDP governors and former president, Olusegun Obasanjo.

What Oxfam will not say, is that neoliberal capitalism has put loads of money in the pockets of the Aliko Dangotes and Femi Otedolas (with their new yachts toys), but it has pauperized the mass of Nigerians.