From the same poem that gave Chinua Achebe the title of the work that immortalised him, Things Fall Apart, comes this more foreboding sentence: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

“Does a man not know if he has pepper in his eyes? If we forget today, how shall we remember tomorrow?” Nigerian Proverb.

IT’S the first day of January and it’s only proper to wish Nigerians a happy New Year with hopes and prayers that 2014 ends on a note of great joy and prosperity for us all. We pray it is a year in which the Nigerian Dream takes on the colour of reality. But the Goodluck Jonathan government ended 2013 with its ill-digested approach to revenue generation and overall development of the country.

I have decided to write you this 18-page letter BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. If I don’t write it now, people may start considering you as a good president; forgetting that I am the only good president Nigeria has ever had. There is no one like me. As far as Nigeria is concerned, I am the Baba of the Babas. I am the president of the presidents. Before me, Nigeria had no president. After me, there will be no other president.

Influenza, we know, is a terrible health hazard. “Afluenza,” we might not have heard, is a malignant social disease that assaults the conscience of mankind. Here is a glimpse into how “Afluenza” gobbles up America.

The management of Federal, as well as states funds, since 1999 had been one great swindle perpetrated by all the governments without exception. But, I had long restricted myself to the Federal government because the unitary constitution handed to us by General Abdusalami Abubakar, on his way out of office, gave so much power to the Federal government.

Lamido Sanusi, the CBN Governor, has since withdrawn his earlier allegation that NNPC did not repatriate the sum of $49.8bn revenue from crude oil sales into the federation account. Subsequently, in contrast to the Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s figure of $10.8, Sanusi later insisted that $12bn of crude revenues still remain unaccounted for!

If you are a member of the sports fraternity, occupying one post or the other, you must have been approached by the media, whose interest is stereotype, has been predictably stereotype at a time like this.

The end to the last long drawn-out university teachers’ strike means that students are set to return to school. On the basis of their experiences during the strike, they are likely to once again, face the reality of a wide gap between theory and practice. In the area of mass communication for instance, many students may have to grapple with the real meaning and nature of communication. Having learnt that written communication is generally superior to other forms such as oral communication and body language, they would not easily comprehend why the choice of writing as a channel of communication by former President Olusegun Obasanjo (Obj) with President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) elicited so much anger from some people. Did the many angry commentators read Obj’s letter about which they made pedestrian comments?

In-between are the complex cultural practices associated with religious worship. Of course, human beings exist, but the question concerning the existence of a supernatural being called God is yet to be settled finally one way or the other since no definitive proof is available on each side of the debate. Therefore, acceptance of the reality of God is a matter of belief and faith, leaving open the tantalising possibility that the supreme object of religious worship might be imaginary, although I think that the reasons for rejecting the existence of the God of religion are far stronger than arguments for belief. Before the advent of Christianity and Islam into the various indigenous communities that eventually became Nigeria, the various peoples had evolved what is generally referred to as African Traditional Religion (ATR).