THE  harmattan was biting. The television camera brought worrying images of one of the twenty two Internally Displaced Persons, IDP, camps in Benue State. A mother has only a small wrapper to cover her baby and herself. It was a losing battle. The type that the about half a million IDPs in the state have had to fight in the last few years against starvation, cholera, measles, general  insecurity and death

A NUMBER of countries including Turkey and Russia, this week tried  to put out the flames engulfing Libya by convening a peace meeting in Moscow, with the likelihood of another in Germany on Sunday. In France, President Emmanuel Macron, like a head master, summoned the presidents of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mauritania to Pau, Southern France to explain why there are rising anti-French sentiments in Africa. He threatened to pull out the 4,500 French troops allegedly fighting terrorists in Africa.

MANY Nigerians want to leave. That is why a citizen would gather a lot of money and pay a human trafficker to be taken through the horrors of the desert with the possibility of dying of thirst, arriving in unfriendly countries where he can be enslaved and then making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean Sea where many have found watery graves. All these just to end up in Europe with no welcome, no shelter, no warm clothes, no job and no guarantee of food or the future.

This is the situation Iran finds itself following last Friday’s murder of its envoy, General Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad Airport by the United States of America, USA.

I WAS one of the Nigerians stunned on New Year Day 2020 when our quite busy President Muhammadu Buhari wrote us a letter. Yes, Nigerians, high and low, the powerful and the commoner, received a letter from their President and Commander-in-Chief.