There were no dry eyes in our group when we discussed the story of 24 year old Gloria Asuquo, who was diagnosed HIV positive which she had got from blood transfusion, at the tender age of 12, and who sometime later, had thought that death would be the best option for her situation.

If the stories around a ‘certain deportation’ leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth, the division it has caused leaves a more bitter taste. Almost every account you read has some ethnic colouration. It is even worse online where the comments tend to be down right rude and abusive— and these from our young minds!

A constant reader of this column has politely asked me to point out the difference between the Transformation Agenda of President Jonathan on the economy and my own often repeated but seemingly crude phrase of commonsense economics.

Journalists are supposed to be formidably well-informed and are expected to know more than most about what is going around them, so let me hang my head in abject shame as I admit that I only recently became aware of the fact that state governments sometimes deport disabled, homeless or impoverished “non-indigenes” to their states of origin.

Chief Assam E. Assam is Nigeria’s Ambassador to the Russian Federation and Belarus.

UNDER normal circumstances, reasonable people would not expect to be pressurised to remit the money they have collected on behalf of others to their rightful owners.

The Lagos deportation saga degenerated into a free-for-all between Igbos and Yorubas. I am gratified to note that majority of the commentators on both sides have been sane, objective and committed to putting issues in their proper perspectives to minimise damage and learn useful lessons.

I THINK Femi Falana’s well-argued piece on the on-going hysteria in the face of the forced repatriation of 72 Nigerians of Anambra state origin, by the Babatunde Fashola administration in Lagos, has been the most informed analysis of the core issues so far.

SO Chief Tony Anenih, the BoT chair of the PDP, marked his eightieth birthday last week and provided President Goodluck Jonathan an opportunity he must have been craving to send some verbal missiles at those Nigerians he thought haven’t been particularly friendly to him and his administration.

In a recent interactive section with the House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Currency, the Governor of the Central Bank, Lamido Sanusi, noted that if the plan to redesign naira notes last year was successful, “it would have made it impossible for counterfeiters to cook”. He further noted that best practice currency management is that “Within a period of 5 – 8 years, you redesign the currency, after which counterfeiters tend to catch up with you”.