WHEN we were young (many moons ago!), I shared a flat in London with a clever, vivacious and beautiful fellow journalist called Aminatta Forna. Her mother was Scottish. Her father, Mohammed Forna, a highly principled native of Sierra Leone, had started his career as a medical doctor, then branched into politics.

GOVERNMENTS have become too reactionary perhaps as a result of their ignorance of the enormous power of the press.

TO suggest that the Attorney General instituting criminal proceedings against the Senate leadership bears the imprimatur of the Executive arm undermining the principles of separation of powers, or that it constitutes a coup of one arm against another, is most uncharitable, to say the least…. The theoretical notion of the ‘independence’ of the arms of government is a misnomer. What exists in practice is functional ‘inter-dependence’.

THERE is an old adage that says: “when the cat’s away, the rats play”. Whenever you hear stories of cabals developing around a leader or powerful offices such as our Presidency, there is a power vacuum. Nature – and politics – abhor vacuum.

“The picture of agriculture with which many Nigerian youths including university graduates are familiar is that of the subsistence farmer toiling away with a hoe and a cutlass on his farmland. Without a doubt this is surely not a scenario or position to which most youths, least of all, university graduates will aspire.”