These past weeks witnessed so many vents like no other week in recent times. While one or two of the events brought a little bit of smiles to our faces, some called out our reasoning abilities so as to reorder a few priorities around the world.

Last week Saturday, exactly a week ago, Mr Bode Fadase known to many as Barry, passed on. He was 71. The news of his death filtered into the social circuit shortly after his demise and spread like wild fire. His was a death that shocked many especially his peers who still have memories of him in his imperial element as he often was for Barry loved life. He loved to have people around him. He loved camaraderie and jokes. Simply put, he loved to hold court.

The Nigerian Diaspora is a formidable force in the development and preservation of our collective consciousness today. Of particular significance in terms of examples is the Nigerian Diasporic citizenship in North America.

Monday, December 1, is World AIDS Day, a day set aside since 1988 to beam the searchlight on HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

Last Monday, at least 13 PDP governorship aspirants from Rivers State were disqualified by the committee that their party appointed to screen them.

The impeachment clauses in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) are some of the powerful instruments granted the Legislature under the presidential system of government to hold the Executive Branch to account or actually remove them in extreme cases of serious misconduct. Sections 143 and 188 spell out the process in detail. The implications of this will be addressed shortly.

I arrived in London on Sat-urday after the two weeks that I spent in the United States, in California and Texas. Let me start by confessing that I love food, especially that opportunity to taste foods of the different cultures of our wonderful world.

Let us return to the countryside. Some Nigerian historians could work a bit harder. This is not intended to be a challenge but a statement of truth. They roam the streets of our cities endlessly in search of history; whereas with each passing day, our rural population is replete with history only waiting to be recorded. We look forward to such a time when students of history in our tertiary institutions would be required to do project works on their villages instead of the British Commonwealth or some abstract faraway places.

If history is any guide, it almost always starts this way. Like a sick joke or high drama without an apparent plot, full of tension that nevertheless ends in tragedy. I am here talking of the violent attempt by the police to prevent Aminu Tambuwal, Speaker of the House of Representatives, from entering the House last Thursday. The House had reconvened for an emergency session to consider the request by President Goodluck Jonathan for further six months extension of emergency rule in three North Eastern states at the epicentre of insurgent unrest. The Senate which had been in session for two days to consider the same request by President Jonathan, prior to the incident at the House of Representatives, had failed to reach any agreement. Although no less tension-filled, matters had been better managed at the Senate. It was in the House that things fell apart.

By condoning, if not authorising,serial acts of impunity, is President Goodluck Jonathan transforming democracy by redefining it as minority rule? Or simply returning us to the forgotten epoch of might is right? The most popular definition of democracy remains that proffered by Abraham Lincoln in the famous Gettysburg Address to commemorate the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. In the long closing sentence of the short 278-word speech, Lincoln uttered the words that every junior secondary school student knows by heart:”government of the people, by the people, for the people.”