I went to Festac Town the other day. Founded originally as accommodation for the participants of the 1977 Black Arts Festival, it was subsequently developed to be a model town by the Gowon administration. The town that emerged after the festival was well laid out and well planned. It had churches, mosques, schools, banks, markets —whatever you needed to build a good community life. The main arteries, the avenues had four lanes with traffic signs— even at that time. Every road, every close had signs, and the numbering was done in such a way that it was difficult to get lost, even for a visitor.

A lady in a high brow catholic parish died recently. She was only 48. Yet at that relatively young age, she had put herself in different positions of service within the church that almost everybody—the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the cleric and the laity—remembered her. And like Lydia in the Holy Book, almost everybody had good things to say concerning her. As she was in the church, so she was at home and with close friends. She had made herself so relevant in people’s lives that many remembered one kind deed, one kind gesture or the other. Hers was a life that was short but impactful.

This is the stuff of fiction and I am tempted to start it with ‘once upon a time, there was this powerful king in a village….’ as most story books went in my time as a youngster. However, it is a true account of what went on in one of the biggest and oldest estates in the country. The name of the estate shall not be mentioned because of the several cases in court and because emotions are still very raw.

You have to be courageous to make predictions of any sort. Or foolhardy. I don’t consider myself to be either. But as a journalist and a Nigerian, I have seen predictions come and go. I have seen some that are very vague and ambiguous. One revered man of God once predicted ‘All is well that ends well’ at the onset of Ebola and the raging Boko Haram insurgency. Was that really a prediction or edging a bet? It reminds one of the story of a native doctor who told a pregnant woman that was brought to him that the pregnancy would produce a healthy baby.

I can’t claim to know the late Torch Taire very well. But he was very close to my Oga, Mr Sam Amuka in many ways including proximity. They lived within a walking distance of each other, and they were, like the cliché, of identical plumage and therefore tended to flock together. My knowledge of him is therefore, largely vicarious since I visit Uncle Sam’s place fairly often. Anybody who knows Uncle Sam knows he is a completely detribalised person. So was Torch Taire.