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.

If you are a woman of a certain age, better think twice before you down those plates of yam, or you may get pregnant with twins. Did you know that a small town in Oyo State called Igbo-Ora has the highest number of twin births in the whole world?

I am not sufficiently grounded in the Catholic traditions to understand why the month of May is devoted to Mary, the virgin mother of Christ.

Jonathan Olatunde Lawrence was a born intellectual. He was blessed with a high capacity for original thinking and the acquisition of knowledge. He was therefore outstanding in almost all his endeavours.

AH! Ejo e ma binu! My sincere apologies for seeming ‘AWOL’. As is wont to happen sometimes, other aspects of my life take on gargantuan proportions and literally subsume everything else. In the last two months it’s been relentless.

For the past couple of weeks, this column has contained criticisms of Mr President’s handling of various leadership challenges.

Every week and every day, many Nigerians will like to discuss about the good fortunes or otherwise, of their country which bears the title of Nigeria since 1914. Even if the word, ‘Nigeria’, to some, is merely a ‘geographical expression’, the country is still geographically, a reality.

Mike Itemuagbor is a sports marketer of repute and can confirm the difference between donation and sponsorship.

IT has been the worst of times in Nigeria; this past month. The harvest of deaths has troubled Nigerians in ways that hack back to the frightening days of the civil war. There are very few places in Nigeria today that do not have the re-inforced presence of security forces.