Where is God when bad things happen? The psalmist says: “Our God is in heaven.” (Psalm 115:3). He has always been in heaven and he will always be in heaven. Solomon says: “God is in heaven, and you on earth.” (Ecclesiastes 5:2).

When President Goodluck Jonathan observed not long ago that members of a dreaded insurgent group had infiltrated his own government, some people thought it was politics. From the look of things, it is becoming difficult to doubt the assertion.

Expectedly the President’s declaration of emergency has provoked harsh criticism from the usual opposition groups – particularly the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN. As someone born and bred in progressive politics, I had spent all my life in the same camp as the progressives – even if, lately, the Awoists and progressives have started to resemble, increasingly, like the conservatives they want to replace at the centre.

Indigenous Nigerian cultures, Christianity, and Islam recommend marriage for everyone. For instance, Christianity teaches that he who finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favour from God (assuming that such a being exists). Because The Holy Bible appears to have been written from a fundamentally masculine perspective, there is no mention of a wife finding a good thing if she gets a husband. Islam also encourages marriage, while according to native customs and traditions, an unmarried state for both men and women is an abomination.

Considering the spate of unemployment amongst secondary and tertiary school leavers across the country today, what programmes do you have in place to encourage self-employment and address unemployment?

Popularity must be fun; popular people seem to have a natural flair for getting liked. People want to be around them, things seem to come easily to them and it can look like they have a charmed life. Now we shouldn’t compare being known or even famous to being popular; one is just recognizability while the other combines recognizability with affection and even common affinity.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people” – Martin Luther king, Jnr.

Thanks to those experts on healthy-eating, who are constantly telling us what is right/wrong for us to feed our system with, many people in most parts of the world are now cautious about what they eat and drink. You can’t help but join in, if you want your body to hold together, so that you can be healthy, active, and hopefully, live long.

The most important intervention in empowering people with disability is the provision of appropriate mobility aids and appliances.

Are we then at war? Can we admit it at last? The proclamation that slapped a state of emergency on three States —Yobe, Adamawa and Bornu — would seem to suggest that much especially from the ‘launching of all-out hostilities on certain areas of the region.