WHEN I was growing up in Obalende on the Lagos Island, an enlarged, glassed photograph hung majestically from the wall. It was that of a beautiful young woman who sat like Queen Elizabeth II in her official portrait.

FRANCE has been aflame for seven weeks as the President Nicolas Sarkozy government took on the people of France which elected it. The primary reason why the French are up in arms, the proposal to increase retirement age from 60 to 62 years, will shock the average Nigerian. That is putting it mildly; to many of them, the reason will appear insane.

I DO not belong to any political party or campaign organisation. But I am not apolitical. I do not know who will be president after the 2011 elections, but I do know that Nigerians will be committing political suicide if retired General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida were allowed to return to power.

LOCKING up seven young ladies and an equal number of men in a house for three months, plying them with inexhaustible amount of food, cigarettes, beer and hot drinks is like experimenting with human beings in a zoo. It is bound to bring out the worst in them. Endless quarrels, fights, drinking binges, drunkenness and open flirtation are bound to occur. This precisely is what the Big Brother Africa programme is about.

EKITI State on Friday erupted in unprecedented celebration over the Court of Appeal’s declaration of Dr Kayode Fayemi as governor.

I KEPT vigil like millions of humanity. We were breathless; will things go according to plan? It was Wednesday October 13, 2010 and Day 69 of 33 Chilean miners being trapped over 700 metres below the earth’s surface. It had been the longest case of people trapped in a mining accident being rescued.

These were relentlessly persecuted by the colonial masters, dismissed from work, their businesses wrecked and in many instances sent to jail. Amongst the latter was Osita C Agwuna who made the famous call to revolution and went to jail. He had publicly argued that “the redemption of Africa lies in the hands of Africans themselves and must be achieved by either violent revolution or by non-violent revolution”.

AS we struggle to understand our past as Africans, two veteran nationalists have dropped bombshells with the effect of category seven earthquakes over the fate of two African leaders.

AS we mark the fiftieth year of our flag independence, many Nigerians are despondent believing that our lingering problems are because we are cursed.

COLONIALISM was a vicious bandit whose primary goal was to loot and exploit the labour of the colonised peoples. There were admittedly, incidentals such as introducing Western education and building railways to cart the raw materials of the hinterland to the coastal areas.