Mary Onyali and I have always had long chats. Sometimes, when it’s on phone, they are longer than an hour .

The “festive season” is not festive for everyone; and I’ve been thinking about Vanguard readers who didn’t have merry Christmases.

It is happy news that the New Year 2014 has brought its freshness into an atmosphere contaminated by the foul saga of letter-writing that pervaded the last few weeks of last year, 2013.

A rather tongue-in-cheek observation was posted on a closed internet site last week. In response to the letters that have held Nigerians in thrall these past few weeks, a perceptive observer said unwittingly, in an age of obsession with FDI, Nigeria might have stumbled upon a new export: letter writing! We will export to the ECOWAS region the art of letter writing.

WE wonder for how long our governance will be left at the level of comic relief. In most of the plays of Shakespeare, there are serious acts and scenes. In-between, there are breaks during which jesters are brought on stage to make people laugh and to lighten eyes that are already heavy.

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.