DO you know why what goes for Nigerian politics is such a huge joke? We like to be taken for a ride; in fact, we crave to be duped. We dread asking hard questions or putting the politicians to task to substantiate what they tell us.

AS a republican in a Republic of Nigeria I have not harboured kind thoughts on the value of the institutions of traditional rulership. I saw their survival in an empire as a function of the strategies of pacification and policing of populations ultimately ruled by imperial force.

Lately, the Central Bank of Nigeria in a two-page Press Release, laboured to corroborate the Finance Ministry’s earlier clarifications on “the meaning, structure and management of the nation’s foreign reserves”. CBN defines external reserves, appropriately, as external assets held in foreign currencies by a country’s Central Bank for the “primary purpose of safeguarding the international value of the legal tender currency (i.e. the naira)”.

“I want to use this opportunity to say that we have heard in the news that Mr. President will be visiting Maiduguri in a couple of days. We want to use this opportunity to call on the government, especially Mr. President, to see how he can declare total amnesty to all combatants without thinking twice.

Even a fool, in Nigeria,now knows that the last thing anyone should believe is anything announced by the Federal Government of Nigeria, its Ministers, agencies and especially the President’s Special Advisers on Media and Publicity. When Abati or Okupe appear on television, people switch to other channels.

“The only battle that counts is the last battle”. Richard Neustadt, in POWER AND PRESIDENTS.
Nigerians, of course, deserve President Jonathan; you voted for him overwhelmingly. Even Obasanjo, who, last week, was at his hypocritical best, when delivering a lecture, in which he decried Nigeria’s lack of good leadership, should accept most of the blame for GEJ.

I wish I had been there as a fly on the wall at the time of Jesus. You had to be there to understand the excitement; the pandemonium Jesus caused among the pastors, bishops and popes of the day. You can cause no greater excitement than by doing the impossible. That is precisely what Jesus did.

I know that the temptation to have a big bank account and other trappings of material comfort may be very difficult to resist, especially if such benefits can be had easily just by associating with people that have the necessary financial wherewithal and “right connections.” Yet the Igbo saying that ezigbo aha ka ego (good name is superior to riches) captures a powerful existential insight about life which should guide individual conduct at every level.

Mrs. Mubarak Abiola Agusto-Agoro is the President of Soroptimist International of Eko, an international service group comprising women professionals who aim to empower women and girls across the world. An Accountant by profession, Abiola Agusto-Agoro retired from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, in 1996 after her long years of service.

On Monday February 18, 2013,the federal Ministry of Water Resources organized a Presidential Summit in Abuja. The event was well attended as it attracted the nation’s number one citizen and a host of other dignitaries described on the occasion as stakeholders.