This is the beginning of a new year. For many people nothings is really happening. You all know…. Both at the state and National level (in most states) The budget has not been passed. So, very many people are worried. Some are busy because they carried over some business from the year 2009. I think no matter what you are doing, somehow, the Nations economy is affected by the budget.

Daddy also expressed the view that it would be OK if the then President (Obasanjo) replaced him with a non-Rivers person who was a decent human being.

I will continue to count on experience and bring it to bear where and when necessary. We all lamented our failure to qualify for the last World Cup. I remember when we led in our group and appeared to be coasting to Germany 2006. The then Sports Minister Musa Mohammed was at loggerheads with the Nigeria Football Association.

IN the last few weeks, the nation has been thrown into a bit of confusion arising from the absence from the country of the President, Umaru Yar‘Adua. That the President is ill and receiving treatment in Saudi Arabia is no longer news. What is perplexing is the strange and confusing behavior of the ruling party in sorting things out without rancor or litigation.

One of the main problems of Africa is leadership powered by visionless, self-glorifying, egoistic, power-conscious, unprincipled, mostly greedy, corrupt and vain political elites. But for people like Nelson Mandela who shun power and refused a second constitutional term which was his just for the asking, most people could have argued that this is a genetic African trait.

To ruminate over Nigeria, a nation with so much potential to make good in the eyes of the world is to remember the man who first used part of the above title when he captured the wrenching agony of living in apartheid South Africa half a century ago.

A COUPLE of weeks back, a London based Dubai estate agent was trying to persuade me to put money to a piece of land. There was no doubting the fact that it was cheap, relative to what obtains here at home in, let’s face it, less wholesome surroundings and living circumstances.

THE civil populace gave the military a black eye on January 27, 2010. On that day, Justice Opeyemi Oke ordered the Nigeria Navy and one of its star generals,a Rear Admiral to pay two victims: Miss Uzoma Okere and Mr Abdullahi Abdulazeez N100 million.

It should therefore be no surprise that despite ill health and obvious incapacity to continue in office, at least for now, Yar’Adua has maintained a vice-like, until-death-do-us-part grip on power that has kept Nigeria grounded and on tenterhooks for many agonising weeks. After this, do we still talk of a President Yar’Adua that is indifferent to or does not like power? What else could a power-obsessed politician have done?

IN going through newspapers, this comment attributed to Action Congress party in the Monday March 16, 2009 issue of The Nation caught my attention:

THE University Of the West Indies is in the process of conceiving how best to deliver a major conference on the theme Rethinking And Rebuilding Haiti .I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of is management, ineptitude, corruption.

The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi continues to leave no one in doubt that CBN reforms and sanitization of the banking sector is ongoing. Late in January 2010, the CBN once again unsheathed its sword to truncate the erstwhile unlimited tenure of Chief Executive Officers of banks to a maximum tenor of 10 years!

WATCHING former Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, last Friday answering questions on why he took Britain to war in Iraq, I felt very sad about my country all over again.

I thank God for the gift of life. I thank him everyday. Friday
was not an exception. I told you how I was seconded to Benguela to help fortify the team on ground for what was expected to be world war four in African football.

Hi readers! I was anxious to know how Patrick, Seb’s youngest brother, who had been reluctant to go spend time with his brother in Ikeja on account of his grudge against Belinda, was able to spend more than the two days he had envisaged without an earthquake rocking the place.