WHEN the news came that the newbie US President, Donald Trump, would call his ailing Nigerian counterpart, President Muhammadu Buhari, at exactly 3.45pm on Monday 13th February 2017, I was very expectant for several reasons.

I SAID when I wrote ‘Now that Yar’adua is back’ (02/26/10) that “Nigeria has become one huge Elizabethan theatre where clowns, harlequins and pantomimes now prowl the stage in an unending melodrama –sometimes more comic than Shakespeare’s ‘Comedy of Errors‘. And in this unfortunate milieu it seems we are no longer divided over issues. We are rather titillated by personalities.

Popular culture in Nigeria has ironically helped to enshrine many of our societal ills by converting them into norms and values. The lyrics of many artists today celebrate the “fast money lifestyle” which is symptomatic of a fundamentally corrupt society and glamourises disenfranchising behaviours which ordinarily, in other climes, social critics and the public themselves would have decried.

LAST week I referred to the book titled “State of Africa” written by Martin Meredith to highlight the fact that Nigeria is not alone in Africa as far as diversity of its citizens is concerned and that other African Countries with whom Nigeria shares a common colonial history have the same features.

THE pocket of protests organised across a couple of places by civil society organisations have since come and gone. The protests, of modest outcome, were to show the disenchantment of Nigerians against rising costs of goods and services and the generally poor economic policies of the Mohammadu Buhari administration.