I had planned to use today’s column to share with my readers my experiences in Angola. Concrete experiences that is. While I was in Angola, I could not write freely on hard news and some experiences that had to do with the teams, especially the Super Eagles.

NIGERIA has gone into another political impasse. An impasse is a situation in which things neither move forward nor backward. It is a time when a major political issue freezes the nation to a spot, and nobody has time anymore to discuss core issues of development. It is like when a major calamity befalls a family.

How can finite and fallible creatures like us ever learn to see things sub specie aeternitatis? No human being, including Spinoza himself, can achieve that impossible feat. Gottfried Leibniz, a German thinker, says that there are three types of evil, viz, metaphysical evil, physical evil and moral evil. Metaphysical is integral to the finitude or imperfections of creatures.

Indeed what went wrong, as the text message asked? Interestingly, that text message represents perhaps the mildest form of dishonour attaching to the person of Yar’Adua that I have heard people voice across the land since the man and his wife departed to Saudi 69 days ago today Sunday, January 31, 2010. Many of the other insults that have been hauled in the direction of the presidency are totally unprintable.

I am used to reading about history being made when there are a hundred or thousand steps and each step is counted as a building block that led to the hall of fame where the records are stored. So there is this painstaking build-up, and accumulation of positive acts of the ones who were part of the history that was made.