“I started sleeping with my 15-year-old daughter sometime in January after I lost my job.” This is part of the confession of a 41-year-old father in Vanguard, June 28, 2016. He claims frustration over the loss of his job led him to alcoholism and incest. But he was still sober enough to sleep with his daughter only after his wife has gone to work. He therefore knew full well that what he was doing was wrong.

Saturday Vanguard gathered that many Nigerians are aware of food safety, but they need more information to achieve and maintain safe food handling behaviours. Be Food Safe means preventing foodborne illness through four easy steps: Clean, Separate, Cook and Chill.

As early as 5 am every morning, Iya Lati is up for the day’s business. The business of attending to the “stomach infrastructure” of her customers by cooking of rice, beans, plantain and stew in addition to two or three other local delicacies. By 6.30 am She is ready to hit the motor park where her numerous customers are already waiting for her. Indeed, Iya Lati, is one of the hundreds of thousands of women who toil day and night to support their families by hawking foods on the streets of major cities across the country. From Lagos to Abuja, Port-Harcourt to Kaduna and Enugu to Ibadan, food vendors have taken over the streets. In fact, following the harsh economic reality that Nigerians are currently faced with, the business is booming.

Zong was in 1781. Blacks were goods. But long after, long after that practice of decanting blacks into the sea for commercial reasons, blacks are still dispensable. Disposables. Perhaps now, nuisance. The police in America are well trained . But training often polishes the brain and not the heart. Many liberal philosophers are racists. Everywhere, blacks are considered poorly endowed mentally, and prone to uncontrolled emotions. Congenitally stupid. White women have borne crushing oppression for ages. But it hasn’t rendered them insensate to racial prejudice. Black males are their peevish brutes. So white policemen can adjudge them criminal minds. And shoot them. The owners of the slave ship Zong drowned their goods.

An anonymous quote has it that self-praise is no recommendation. Once upon a time there was a character out of fable; the widely known and recognized lizard which made a spectacle of itself at the village square when by accident it came down from the heights of an iroko tree. It noticed that nobody applauded it falling from an imagined height of the 200-metre Eiffel Towers in central Paris. It nodded its head three times in self-congratulation.