Mr. Baruwa and especially the girl he allegedly raped deserve to be pitied because they might be, in different ways, victims of warped psychology and epistemology of sex from childhood which tend to obstruct cultivation of healthy sexual relationships between man and woman devoid of the mumbo-jumbo of religious superstition. Thus, there should be a paradigm-shift away from narrow-minded and obscurantist attitude towards sex to a more open, rational-scientific understanding of sexuality.

Sly Stone was a big popstar. He was lead singer of the Sly and the Family Stone; an avant-garde soul and rock band of the sixties and seventies. He went about with a big entourage; lots of hangers-on who hung on his every word. Sly was clearly fed up with these people licking his boots at every turn. So he cracked a deliberately lousy joke. Then he looked round to see their reaction.

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Last week, workers in Enugu State, under the aegis of the Joint Public Service Negotiating Council, formally kicked against the alleged decision of Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi to procure Toyota Prado Sport Utility Vehicles, worth N11.5m, for each of the commissioners and House of Assembly members in the state.

At its inauguration as a free nation, Nigeria established itself as a federal democratic republic. The founding fathers of this nation thought hard, and long about the options open to a multi-ethnic society such as Nigeria, and knew that it could not, like the Kingdom of Swaziland, be a constitutional monarchy, run on a unitarist model. In 1960, the federation of Nigeria secured political independence as a free nation under the British Commonwealth.