Fifty years ago, on a Friday night at the Western Nigerian Governor’s lodge in Ibadan, a group of soldiers led by Major Theophilus Danjuma committed a terrible act of treason. They accosted their Commander-in-chief, Major-General Johnson Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Military Head of state of Nigeria only six months in the making, stripped him of his epaulettes and his swagger stick shaped in the form of the Crocodile, and proceeded to arrest him and his host, the Military Governor of the West, Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi. These soldiers, some of them far too drug-addled, did not stop there.

Izuchukwu Ezema, 23, says he was branded an armed robber and severely beaten for passing through a road allegedly reserved for the “free- born” at his home town in Alor Uno, Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu State.

Everywhere you look in Calabar, Cross River State capital, you find estates which have been abandoned due to squabbles over the sharing of inheritance. The squabbles are sometimes so fierce that machetes and dreaded charm, ekpetiaba (kills within five days), are used by desperate members of families to eliminate or subdue siblings in order to take ownership or the lion share of estates.

IT was a good feeling when Ikechukwu Ofoje introduced me as a guy he played with in Nigeria and ovation followed. But it felt better to see for myself the progress this wonderful Nigerian is making in the United States of America. Ofoje made name as the youngest captain of Enugu Rangers when the Nigerian league could compare with what we have in Europe now in terms of followership and glamour at least among Nigerians. He was a strong defender, who sometimes was thrown into the attack. He never disappointed on those occasions. He packed bullets on both legs but his right was deadlier.

In this climate of change, or the clamour for it, two words often come up to describe aspects of the desired new order. They are restructuring and diversification. They are no doubt different in their meaning, although an overlap may occur in their execution.