I admire Governor Fashola of Lagos State a lot and would have volunteered to be part of his campaign team if he were to contest the 2015 Presidential elections. Recently however, one of his policies greatly upset me.

Can someone tell me the direction in which Nigeria is heading as am beginning to lose my orientation. In the last couple of weeks there have been so much going on and none of them any way to move towards the future

SUNDAY PUNCH of August 11, 2013, on pages 70 and 71 provided the names and pictures of people it called “Opposition Power brokers: The Strongmen of APC”. It reads to me like pictures of WANTED men at a Police Station. For a start, the list had no single woman – that tells us a lot about the gender discrimination in the new political organization. It is doubtful if this new “progressive” political contraption is what will take us to the promised land.

Next June, it would be exactly a quarter of a century since my graduating class left the University of Jos. We had been admitted into the University of Jos in the middle of the 1980s, just at the cusp of the end of the term of Professor Emmanuel U. Emovon as Vice-Chancellor.

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.