IBE Kachikwu, the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, does not come across as a politician. Even as a long time player in the oil industry his resume proclaims him more of an intellectual or a technocrat rather than an oil merchant and, even less, a power monger.

Quite a few people requested “further reading” after last week’s article. I recommend To Kill a Mockingbird, by Pulitzer Prize winning author Harper Lee for anyone interested in understanding the rise of Donald Trump, the workings of the South in America, racial (or, in our climes ethnic) politics, economic backwardness, a feudal system where poor Whites blame poor Blacks for their misfortunes while ignoring the White chieftains who uphold a medieval “Rankadede” system whereby patronage and keeping literacy levels low ensures a profitable arrangement goes unchallenged. Politics all over the world is basically the same.

THE horror! The horror!” so might Kurtz, Joseph Conrad’s fictional character, have cried were he to come out of the pages of Heart of Darkness—that widely misunderstood but powerful anti-imperialist narrative—and witnessed the Rivers State legislative re-run elections eleven days ago.

AFTER close to 30 years I found myself entering offices at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and I returned with a broken heart seeing what the original Boko Haram (Western civilisation is sin) has done to a once national headquarters of authentic intellectual culture and a hotbed of progressive activism.

THE Rivers State electoral re-run was not an election; it was war and the generals on both sides lived up to the billing. Like in wars, manifestoes or programmes were unnecessary. The All Progressives Congress, APC and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP simply told the voters that they were ready for the expected violence. There were pre-election shootings and bombing. It was a question of how many will be killed or maimed, how many wives will become widows, children that will become orphans, and families that will lose their loved ones. There was no pretense that the gladiators wanted peaceful polls.