For those who have often found it comfortable to seek cover from serious discourse behind the mantra of, “Don’t heat up the polity”, the time is up! Election time is here, and the criss-crossing of political animals over party lines for the purpose of seeking comfort zones for themselves, has created a friction that is generating a rising heat allover the land.

You must have heard the cliché at least once: “Love is blind.” What does it really mean and just how blind should love be? I decided to investigate. I suspected that responses will be varied and I was not disappointed. My finding is that the phrase is amoebic; it means different things to different people, though with some common denominators.

Last week, I congratulated President Goodluck Jonathan for managing the Ebola problem well; but I also expressed disappointment in his overall performance and said that I used to support him because he is a fellow Niger Deltan but now believe that it’s wrong to base electoral choices on ethnic or regional considerations.

LAST week, the Senate removed wages from the Exclusive Legislative List and placed it in the Concurrent List, as part of the Constitution amendment process. Stripped of legislative language, it means there will no longer be a National Minimum Wage in Nigeria and each state can pay whatever it deemed fit.

When I read the first letter by a certain Sheikh Gumi to All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential hopeful, General Muhammadu Buhari, I was a bit confused. But on closer inquiry, I discovered that this was Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, not Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, the late leader of the Izalatul Bidi’a wa Ikamatul Sunnah (Izala) Islamic sect whose utterances often set Kaduna and other parts of the North on fire up till the time he died on September 11, 1992.

In Nigeria today, the 90 minutes of legal violence, which they call the game of football has come to dominate all other revenue-yielding sports. That’s Nigeria for you. The moment we discovered football, every other sporting endeavour was relegated to the background.

The original title of my last column was “As Delta State Gets Set for the Charade of Local Government Elections,” but it was published without the keyword “charade” (15 October 2014). According to the Oxford dictionary, a charade is “an absurd pretence intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance.”

AFTER more than a year since the issue became a major talking point around the country, President Goodluck Jonathan, last week, finally declared his intention to re-contest as president. The President especially, and his aides and supporters had hedged and skirted like practiced lawyers on the question of whether he would seek re-election or not. Most of the talk around Jonathan’s re-election plans was at best academic.

DR Ahmad Gummi, son of the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gummi and a leading cleric recently wrote open letters in the manner Chief Olusegun Obasanjo made public letter-writing a political art. He wrote to General Muhammadu Buhari and President Goodluck Jonathan, advising them to jettison ambitions to contest for the presidency in 2015 in the interest of peace, security and survival of the nation.

LAST week, 14-year-old Jaylen Fryberg calmly walked to his school, Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Washington State, and took out his anger on his fellow students. He was armed with a .40 caliber handgun.