So much has been said and written about the recently held elections into the various sports associations in Nigeria.

Lately, the Federal Government’s enthusiasm for further national debt accumulation has become more strident, especially after the IMF’s suggestion that Nigeria is currently under-borrowed, and therefore recommended increasing the borrowing threshold of 20% of gross domestic product to about 56% of GDP.

My DVD player has a slow-motion application. When you press it, you see the film you are watching in slow-motion. That way, you are likely to notice things you would otherwise have overlooked. When I first met the Lord, he set my life to slow-motion for the first two to three months so I could see things I had not noticed before. Suddenly, I discovered that everything about my life followed an ordered pattern. There was discernibly a guiding hand to all the things happening around me.

NOTE: The two columns below were started on Sunday, May 12, 2013 – before the President’s declaration of Emergency Rule in three states of Nigeria. More than ever, and despite the risks and dangers which could result from the measure taken by the President, I still believe that he needs our support to bring this war to an end. If for no other reason than that the opposition has failed to offer a better proposal.

All this indicates that those who look up to religion for guidance on the issue of marriage are liable to make serious mistakes. There is strong evidence from psychology most especially psychoanalysis that obsessive and irrational condemnation of sexual freedom by most founders of religion is due to a combination of superstitious beliefs about sex and thwarting of natural sexual impulse in early life.

It seems the Teflon Don is finally getting his judicial just desserts or so it seems. On Monday when the Italian prosecutors demanded that the former Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, should be handed a prison sentence as well as a life time ban from politics, outside the court building the judgement was greeted with equal measures of cheers and jeers. Such reaction is typical Silvio he, often divides the emotions of Italians over the years and it seem that whatever he does or says, he gets away with it.

Barr. (Mrs.) Olayinka Oladunjoye, the Honourable Commissioner for Education in Lagos State, is the visionary behind the mind-blowing reforms on-going across the state’s education sector. In this exclusive chat with Vista Woman, she talks about her ministry’s strides since 2011, and also its plans for the future. Excerpts:

Different write-ups attract different readers. While some people prefer light-hearted articles that relax the mind, other persons that are often described as ‘serious’ readers are hardly interested in storylines. Rather, they want the point to be quickly but logically made. What such persons tend to overlook however, is the ease with which stories enhance the quality and opinions being made by writers. Indeed, stories can help readers to easily comprehend the issues in focus in a write-up. This is why today’s article is softened with a few stories on prosperity and vanity.

Swimming is a sport that looks deceptively easy; it employs hitherto lazy muscles to labour and the water tricks the joints into acrobatics that is impossible other wise. I find moving underwater the most fun and I stay under as long as possible but I come up for air because I don’t belong there. I am a creature whose primary domain is land. I walk and swimming is but a break form walking.

Philip Chukwuedo Asiodu is one of those Nigerians you might rightly call an old civil service mandarin. These were of the cadre known in the Yakubu Gowon administration in Nigeria as “super perm secretaries.” I think the “super”in the Permanent Secretary came from “supernumerary” and it does locate the stature and situation of the office at its highest bar. Philip Asiodu seemed born to that office.