This week, perhaps on this very Wednesday that you are reading this, President Muhammadu Buhari would assign portfolios to the ones that must be considered lucky of the 36 ministers-designate. There have been media reports of anxiety among the ministers-to-be as to which of them would be lucky to be assigned portfolios.

I had my bee-keeping training at the Bee-craft Vocational Institute, Abeokuta, and my entrepreneurial training with the National Directorate of Employment. I was also on scholarship from the Goldman Sach Corporations in the USA to study Entrepreneurship at the Enterprise Development Centre of Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos.

If one is to believe Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution which reads: “The Government of the Federation or of a state shall not adopt any religion as a state religion” then it is clear that Nigeria is a secular state. Section 14(2) (a) further states: “sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom Government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority”.

We all stand before history. I am a man of peace, of ideas. Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalisation and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated.

LAST Thursday was a day most of us wished was not a day. By “us” I mean the community of people of African origin in the small university town of Carbondale, Illinois.