A friend of mine sent me an e-mail last week, and his question in his mail was both amusing and troubling. He asked me to confirm that “our children in America are planning to build a university in our village.” Of course, “our children in America” are planning no such thing.

If the current Senate President, Senator David Mark decides to contest the next Presidential election, he would surely be missed for his contributions to legislation in Nigeria, particularly his leadership of the National Assembly for two consecutive terms. This is thus a good junction to draw his attention to a subject which if reorganized under his watch can leave his name in gold.

A bridge by definition is a structure built to connect areas separated by uneven or unpassable terrain; bridges are built over bodies of water and they make travel by land shorter and even possible. Bridges are a necessity for travel and our cars and trains travel on them constantly.

Nigeria is surely not showing good examples as the self-acclaimed giant of Africa. From one ridiculous drama to another, Nigeria’s leadership orientation has been one that leaves many mouths gaping about our self-inflicted predicament. We preach what we do not practice.

I received a call that I was going to be on a movie set. I had not shot a film in the past one year . My script was emailed to me, I read it, studied my character, outlined my scenes and got ready to leave on March 20,2012, for my location which was in Enugu.

Once again, the National Examinations Council has had cause to bemoan the woeful results of its Senior School Certificate Examination results. The deplorable returns have been going on for some years without any sign of a change for the better. It is really an aspect of the general awful development of deterioration in our educational system. The situation in our tertiary institutions is no less appalling.

I wonder if she had any premonition of how that day was going to end for her… I’m sure her main focus was simply to get through the high profile night without any mishap. No doubt the organizers would have talked her through the process, and as her citation was being read, she must have been going through her acceptance speech through her head.

Sports minister Bolaji Abdullahi was still wallowing in his innocence when he promised to visit aggrieved members of the football family to prostrate to them and beg for peace.

LAST week, while I was discussing the ongoing quarrel between the DG of the Securities & Exchange Commission (Ms Arunma Oteh) and the Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Capital Markets (Hon. Herman Hembe), I said I was bored by the whole drama and made the following remarks:

TODAY’S piece is dedicated to Job Obanor and others like him who are physically challenged in one way or the other but who have refused to be tied down by their challenges. Obanor was a member of the defunct Bendel State House of Assembly in the Second Republic. He is now visually impaired and must be taken everywhere by a grandson.

ONCE it was public knowledge that President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had a preferred candidate for National Chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, I knew he was interested in the 2015 politics. Normally, every president in power in Nigeria would be interested even if he has exhausted his two terms. If he is not running again he will be putting someone of his own choosing as he vacates office.

IN the end, what the PDP dished was a standard menu of ‘consensus’; candidates were an outcome of a smoke-filled inner recesses horse-trading, which ensured that the power blocs in the party divided amongst themselves the spoils. President Goodluck Jonathan got his man, the venerable AlhajiBamangaTukur; just like the old despot, Obasanjo got his, a pair of them, really and the different governors.

YOU did not hear it from President Goodluck Jonathan, his deputy and the highest ranking northerner, Namadi Sambo, or any Minister, or Special Adviser, but it is now official.

ALTHOUGH right on the front page of The Punch of March 14, 2012, the image was not that visible. It was of a man perched dangerously on the mast of a telecoms company in the premises of the Federal High Court, Shehu Shagari Way, in Abuja.

IN June 2011, I started an exercise on jotting down in my diary the number of deaths as reported by the newspapers everyday. On 22 June 2011, a newspaper reported the following: Two soldiers, 18 others killed in Tiv/ Fulani clash in Beme; an undergraduate murdered by cultists in Bauchi; an ASP killed and five civilians injured in Kano; man butchers neighbour over political argument in Kaduna; bodies of two little siblings found buried under the rug in Uyo.