I was the first to find my tongue, and so I told him it would depend on him and the company. So, he said he has discovered a way to help him make up his mind. That he would need us to help him out. Since whoever gets the job depends on him, and both of us were qualified, the one willing to sleep with him will get the job!

NIGERIA is a unitary system with a federal constitution. That is why the race to control the centre, and thereby, the country’s resources is so intense that the political elites are ready to employ any means necessary to get to power or cling to it even on their death bed. Lots of calculations and progressions are made not for the country or good governance, but how to attain and retain power.

IT took 13 years before the army produced its first statesman. The man, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, successfully ended military adventurism into Nigerian politics (for a while) in 1979 when he handed over power to a civilian regime. He thereafter retired to a farm at Ota, but what a farm it turned out to be!

This is the task for President Goodluck Jonathan who is well-advised to resist the attempt in certain quarters to see him as the candidate of the Niger-Delta. No, Jonathan is not and cannot be the ‘messiah’ of the Niger-Delta. Neither time nor history will favour such impertinence on his part.

THE importance of this issue will now be apparent as in retrospect we appreciate the fact of one party rule in Africa’s first two decades of independence. Similar conditions produce the supplanting of these one-party rule systems by military rule.