I don’t trust these people, whichever way you serve them up to the public,” observed a friend when I asked her opinion of the Acting President’s nominees for ministerial appointments.

PRESIDENTIAL QUALITIES
“Men of ordinary physique and discretion cannot be Presidents and live, if the strains be not somehow relieved. We shall be obliged always to be picking our chief magistrates [presidents] from among wise and prudent athletes – a small class”.
President Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, pp 79-80.

Far more incisive things have been said by those who knew Dr. Stanley N. Macebuh far more closely than I. I should in fact rather say that I did not work with Dr. Macebuh; I came into journalism at the moment of his dramatic ouster. I met only his tails at the door. By the time I arrived the Guardian as a cub, a sea-change had occurred; Macebuh and the great denizens with whom he made the paper tick had exited.

My point of departure today is the Niger State Governor, Dr. Muazu Babangida Aliyu. He is at present the Chairman of the 19-member Northern Governors’ Forum. I am relieved at his concern for the falling status of our country in the direction of failed states.

From all indications what we fear most is what our eventual reality is. My closest friend and I share one thing in common and it is the realisation that most of our fears have all become reality; in the process of disappointments, failures and countless heartbreak, we both agree that we seem to have inadvertently attracted all that we dreaded.