“Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As if Nigerians need to be told that the country has slipped into recession, it has been felt many times over. The ordinary man on the street would have confirmed that many months ago. It is a fact that to many Nigerians that Nigeria has never been out of recession.

I am not in the business of “I told you so “but I told you so. Two weeks ago, in my column titled:” Paralysis by analysis, I wrote about the litany of disasters leading to the Olympics in Rio; how athletes were turning to social media to fund their training and flights, how ill-prepared the Nigerian athletes were, how unsupported and ill-equipped they were, how tightly controlled the allowance for the athletes that were as they were allocated $75 daily and told they would get the other half on their return home!

Marcus Garvey once said that: “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”