It is true traditional rulers have with the time and the wind, started abandoning bitter kolas and alligator peppers and falling for ice creams and chocolates while steadily keeping up with the Kardashians. No one foresaw what time had in store for our Pentecostal churches. Patience , contentment and abstemiousness have been excommunicated. Bliss is coveted and pastors now envy the life of Hugh Hefner. Their predilection for frivolity and controversy , their allergy to rigour, painstakingness and scholarship and their love for money and life have birthed a counterfeit Christianity. Monks must see our pastors now as self-indulgent ,self-absorbed , bottle fed infants, lacking in toilet training. And they won’t be too wrong.

On this day, February 13, General Murtala Mohammed, Nigerian Head of State, was assassinated. Exactly 40 years ago today. He was on his way to work at Dodan Barracks, a distance of less than three kilometres from his residence in Ikoyi. He was killed along with is aide-de-camp, the only company he had. It was not his style to garland his way with a massive escort of despatch riders and armoured cars, in the midst of wailing sirens. Although he had himself seized power some six months earlier, he was casual about the personal protection his position naturally warranted.

IN one of your moves to check my naughty escapades you spanked me really hard and out of anger I grabbed a kitchen knife nearby, charged at you and you took to your heels.

IMMEDIATE past president of Cote d’ Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo was on January 28, 2016 hurled before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague charged with crimes against humanity. He had already spent five years in jail awaiting trial by a court that ordinarily has no jurisdiction to try him as the ICC is not the court of first instance. The ICC is a court of last resort trying only cases national authorities cannot or will not prosecute. This is not the case with Gbagbo whose wife, Simone has already been tossed into a 20-year jail, and son, Michel, to five years imprisonment. If Ivorian courts could try and sentence the Gbagbo family, they can try him also.

My very dear childhood friends, Datta, Kio and Kaine Amachree, recently lost their wonderful mother, Otunba Benedicta Olunike Oluwole. She was born in 1936 in Kaduna and was one of five children of the late Chief Ben A.F. Oluwole – a relative of the Balogun of Ijebu-Remo and member of the Latawa Sagamu royal family – and Mrs Marian Taiwo Oluwole (nee Odupele).