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.

They have emerged again with rerouting of constitutional provisions to achieve ends that will definitely backfire. But the one I am sorry for, if he falls for the trap, is Vice President Goodluck Jonathan.

“All men like best to join up with the power that is the first to show its strength”. Xenophon, 430-370 B.C.
(VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p. 197).

We toil, and toil and toil! Then we hoard and hoard and hoard. What for? For the future.
For our old age. That’s the mind set of most human beings. We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we know what we want it to hold. That is, a life of ease and good health, particularly in our old age.

Frequently, a certain segment of Nigerians, particularly those from the Southern flank raise the flag of progressive politics, and claim to represent the sum of all practices of progressive ideas in Nigeria. The North of Nigeria is also thus frequently cast as providing the antithesis of progressive politics, and therefore becomes the veritable face of Nigeria’s antinomy in the consciousness of the South.

In African traditional religion, evil in the form of calamities and misfortunes, is almost always traced to supernatural causes. It is considered as punishment from the spiritual realm for committing what the Igbo call nso ala or abomination.

I had not meant to write of my experiences in the past couple of weeks but by some weird coincidence I got permission to do so by a most unlikely source; the lead actor in what was a tragic-comedy of sorts. Last year had come with its share of difficulties but it seemed to be ending on a great note as most of the issues that made it hard were all resolving themselves just as December was rolling away.