IT was a little incident, but it opened the floodgate of nostalgia, I’d arrived late at a wedding reception and was ushered to what looked like the high table. The groom’s mother is a close friend. I sensed rather than saw this look of disapproval burning into my scalp. I turned, and there she was – Dolapo’s wife. I held her gaze and gave as much hostility as she emitted. She promptly looked away. How long ago was it? Over 20 years at least. I’d met Dolapo on a flight from abroad when he wangled his way to the empty seat by my side in first class. Those were the good old days!

Where are your manners?” said the mother of a young boy coming out of the supermarket. This is a question on all our lips as parents, when it comes to the behavioural mannerism of the young children today. It appears like manners, politeness, respect, kindness and consideration have been thrown out of the window.

An unusual picture came into my phone from one of the news blogs on Tuesday morning. It was that of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi at a Muslim prayer ground in Ife. He was hardly distinguishable—in posture and dressing—from any of the Muslim faithful around him. It was a poignant, meaningful picture because as far as I know, the Ooni is a devout Christian; it was also a calming picture because Osun State had been at a tipping point of religious tension in recent times due to an unfortunate directive that tended to accentuate rather than blur the differences between Christianity and Islam.

When others, constrained by scruples, could only whisper their conspiracy theories , ‘the mother of the nation’ asked for cameras. What followed was even by her standards an epic. In that melodrama, she reveled all her parts – warmth, emotionality, irreverent spontaneity, crudity, daring aggression. She wouldn’t join her dithering husband in skirting around, she dived headlong and wallowed in it . In being more simple and less sophisticated, a certain license to disregard the bounds of propriety is assumed. Artlessness becomes sincerity. And peevishness can become virtuous unpretentiousness. Loyalty was being redefined as worship. Dame was an emerging political Juggernaut

One Swahili proverb says that forgetting is the cure for suffering. Nigerians must have accepted the case of our refineries that are in limbowithout being unduly upset. The rest is silence as we acquiescently resigned to fate that we have no solution to petroleum products import. But it is not the best way to survive the Nigeria’s recession.