Ikpeazu, the Ambode of Abia. Sprang from nowhere, chosen by the gods. The deity that decreed him can no longer summon the winds. So he has been left like a tailless cow to suffer the menace of flies. It must be harrowing. These implacable flies dancing harmlessly like butterflies but stinging like charmed bees. Uche Ogah, the quiet and unassuming dove. Now reeling out dance steps dictated by a practiced but invisible drummer. The mastery of the ability to stampede federal bureaucracy. Frightened Ikpeazu has learnt to fly frantically, without perching. Abia, a hive of determination and industry, forced into a week long sleep .

Walter Bigelow Wriston (1919-2005) a U.S. banker, former chairman and CEO of Citicorp said that ‘’when a system of national currencies run by central banks is transformed into a global electronic marketplace driven by currency traders, power changes hands”. This quote was on Monday, 27th June, 2016 portrayed in President Muhammadu Buhari’s mien in expressing the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN ruthless and rudderless Naira devaluation.

You know the story. The account is rendered in the Holy Bible of how Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (605-562) had a dream, the details of which he could not readily recall. He was troubled. So he called for all his wise men and sorcerers and magicians, Chaldeans all who were reputed to tell the meanings of dreams, to give him the interpretation of the dream. It would have been a fairly routine matter, but for one snag: the king could not remember the dream. All the same, he demanded the meaning of, it to the consternation of his “technocrats” of the esoteric.

Monday, July 11, is World Population Day, a day set aside by the United Nations Development Programme since 1989 to focus on the urgency and importance of population issues globally. In the last 300 years, especially, the world’s population has exploded. According to available records, the world’s population hit the one billion mark for the first time in 1804. It took about 123 years for the world to double its population to two billion. By 1959, however, it increased to three billion, four billion 1974, five billion 1987, six billion 1999 and it hit seven billion by October 2011. It is expected to hit eight billion by 2025.

I had brunch with a small but select group some two weeks ago after the Sunday service. Good conversation flowed with the food and wine as the day’s dailies passed from hand to hand. It was inevitable that the issue of the Niger-Delta activists would come up especially since the papers had carried their latest acts of pipeline vandalisation. Two of the guests included a retired NNPC Chief Executive and his lovely wife who made it very clear that her view on the activities of the Avengers was different from the general view at the table. Many of those at the brunch table had posited that the group was cutting its nose to spite its face.