In these parts, death is taken as seriously as life;sometime even more so. Indeed, in Africa the style in which you bury your dead especially one’s parents is a measure of your stature as a man or woman of means, and is a testament to how well (or not) the dead have raised their children. It’s a paradox.

Aching pain in the abdomen, feeling of pressure in the abdomen, pain in the lower back, hips and inner thighs, nausea, and those frequent trips to the toilet are some of the torment women face monthly.

Many followers of Nigeria‘s political development are worried about the year 2015. The prophets of doom have serious doubts about the future of Nigeria as one country before or after the 2015 elections. Many think that the year 2014 (when Nigeria will be 100 years old as a nation) would certainly foretell what the events would look like in 2015. Those who are planning for the centenary celebration are yet to be unanimous on what the celebration would represent- success or failure.

LAST week, I said I thought that people who were attacking President Goodluck Jonathan for pardoning Alamieyeseigha, his former boss, were being too harsh.

ADMITTEDLY, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Kidnapping has been with man from time. In our younger days, at the shout of “Gbomo gbomo”, every child ran inside and locked the door. Gbomo gbomo were the kidnappers of that time who did not carry out their trade for ransom.

BAYELSA is a place of great puzzle and intrigue for me. I find this state and its people rather exotic. Any time I have an opportunity to be in Bayelsa State I never pass it up.

MY earliest encounter with Chinua Achebe was not the usual “suspect”; his trailblazing work, Things Fall Apart. That came a bit later. I had my earliest encounter with Africa’s greatest writer, with Chike And The River. It was set in Onitsha, against the backdrop of the majestic River Niger.

THE dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilise its assets.

SEXUAL offence is therefore a fact of human life, perhaps more so now than in the past. In the particular instance of tertiary institutions, ‘sexual harassment’ is by no means the most serious of the problems confronting them. And this for reasons that there are regulations/laws within the university system, apart from the wider laws of society that can take care of this as that there are more pernicious factors that defeat the purpose for the existence of tertiary institutions than the advertised case of sexual harassment.

Bonny Gas Transport, BGT, a subsidiary of Nigeria LNG Limited, NLNG, yesterday, finalised the deal for the acquisition of six new vessels valued at N254.4 billion ($1.6 billion).