Humanity is still intimidated by fears it inherited from prehistoric humans, as well as fears that are products of the technological advancement of civilization, including the fear of nuclear annihilation. Collective fear engenders herd instinct, and tends to encourage aggressively towards strangers. As I suggested a moment ago, fear stimulates cruel impulses, and hence promotes superstitious beliefs which appear to justify cruelty.

We shall all certainly pay our debts with death, and in good time too. Onoge was 70 years. I would personally have thought that he lived beyond his mathematical years. I was a student in Jos in the years that Omafume Onoge held sway as the titan of the intellectual left in that city and in that university.

WHEN we started this journey on the democracy highway in 1999 and I began to monitor how we were doing, I sang the praises of the new deal, the joy of return to due process, to the orderly and ordered ways of doing things.

Thank God, it has not taken the government long to realize the futility of the military solution. The consequences of military intervention are now staring us in the face because the action preceded thinking. Now Yar’Adua is waving the flag of surrender in the form of amnesty and only minor war lords are responding.

Then followed the first physical contact made by a human being with a celestial body when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon and, with his first step, made that momentous statement: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for humanity.”