LAST Monday, it was my turn to respond to President Goodluck Jonathan’s address at the opening ceremony of the National Conference, 2014. As was set out by the conference leadership, every delegate was expected to say something about Jonathan’s speech. The great handicap was that each one of us was assigned just three minutes for a statement. Not enough time to open full hearts about the Nigerian condition.

OUR democracy is being threatened by blatant refusal of the 37 defecting members of the House of Representatives to obey the rulings of a court of competent jurisdiction. On Monday, March 31, 2014, an Abuja High Court presided over by Justice Adeniyi Ademola, ruled that the members of the House of Representatives elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, who announced their defection to the opposition All Progressives Congress, APC, should resign and stop participating in the business of the House.

IBADAN, the Oyo State capital, has of late been in the news for not very good reasons. In what could easily pass as a scene from a horror film, a slave camp was discovered in the heart of the city.

A court-verdict ordered that 50 million naira compensation should be paid to the suspended Central Bank Governor for his unlawful detention for 24 hours. How much compensation should be paid for the senseless deaths of innocent job-seekers?

ARIZONA’S Republican Senator, John McCain, is a rarity in politics. He speaks his mind, no matter who is being comforted or afflicted. With him, you do not have to fear being taken through a labyrinth of circumlocution and rhetoric on issues. So, when he castigated President Obama and called him the “most naïve president” in U.S. history on foreign policy, and more directly for not standing up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin on his annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, Senator McCain meant what he said and said it as he saw and understood it.

IN the Sudan, they are known as the Janjaweed, which in Arabic, is said to mean “spirits on horseback”. The dominant Arab regimes in the country responded to increasing armed struggles for self-determination by the Negroid indigenous minorities in the Darfur, western and southern Sudan by arming nomadic Arab pastoralists to attack and terrorise villages owned by farmers. The farmers and pastoralists had been historically locked in tussles over land down the ages.

There can be no end in the foreseeable future to a do-or-die fight for the presidency of our nation. The unbridled struggle for the position of top dog has generally been motivated by the attraction of the prospect of almost absolute power over our lives and our nation’s resources, particularly the proceedas from the oil wells of the Niger Delta.

A colleague brought a fourteen year-old girl to see me. Apparently, her mother’s prophet had a horrific dream about her portending great danger. His antidote was just as horrific. He told the mother that her daughter would have to bathe naked publicly at Bar Beach, Lagos or she would meet a bad end. Despite her protests, her mother put her foot down: the word of the “man-of-God” must be obeyed.

Skepticism continues to trail the on-going conference called by the President in Abuja to determine Nigeria’s future path. There questions of the legitimacy of the conference. Such a question has been raised because there is no obvious constitutional backing for the conference.

Last week, I received a text message from an anonymous critic (Mr. X for convenience) who responded to my riposte on the national conference going on in Abuja. In the text, Mr. X called me a hypocrite for criticising the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) anytime it embarks on indefinite strike to press home its demands from the federal government while at the same time complaining that lecturers are not well paid.