Friday morning, on the eve of the grand finale of the CAF Champions league final between Esperance de Tunis and Al Ahly of Egypt, I was at breakfast with Lim Kee Chong of Mauritius and Rachid Medjiba of Algeria.

ALL may truly not be well between former President, Olusegun Obasanjo and the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan. No one says the things he said about GEJ at a recent public forum in Warri unless there is a war (cold or hot) between them.

The Nigerian most dreaded might not even be the leader of Boko Haram. He and his colleagues might soon disappear like the Maitasene – the dreaded Islamic group of the I980s. Religious uprisings never last in Nigeria and have invariably been regional in scope. The worst threat to our present and future might well be Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala – the Federal Minister of Finance who has embarked on raising the nation’s debt ceiling.

Pius Adesanmi, a budding literary icon was the guest speaker at the “Second State of the Nation” lecture organized recently by the Pastor Tunde Bakare-led Save Nigeria Group. Adesanmi, an Assistant Professor at Carlton University, Canada, chose the title “Reparations: What Nigerians Owe the Tortoise” as his theme.

One day, as I was reading Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount yet again, I suddenly heard the Lord say to me, deep within my spirit-man: “Femi, the end justifies the means.”  What does this have to do with the beatitudes?  Can we, should we, justify the end by the means?  Is it godly to do so?  I decided to search the scriptures for the answer

These include the problem of constructing a viable Nigerian nation based on justice, equity and fairness for all ethnic nationalities, post-war deliberate depredation and exclusion of the Igbo and Igbo heartland from the commanding heights of national politics, the economy and infrastructural development by successive administrations at the centre, and the question of proper restitution for atrocities committed during the war against Biafrans by the Nigerian army.

“Those fighting the government in the media are doing so because we have been able to frustrate their efforts in strangulating the economy through their devilish black market and questionable profiteering at the expense of the Nigerian people…What is hurting them is that we have put policies in place where they can no longer cheat the government and cause untold hardship to millions of Nigerians”, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, Minister of Petroleum Resources, in PUNCH, Friday, November 9, 2012, p 13.

When I saw the headline ’22m malnourished in Nigeria, others’’, my reaction was ‘Not Again!’. Throughout our civil war, and many years after it ended, whenever some foreign media houses wrote anything on Nigeria, they would publish pictures of badly malnourished people, especially children with Kwashiokor, along with the news item.

It is no longer news that Barrack Obama is back to the White House for his second term as President of the United States of America. His eventful first term no doubt paved the way for the feat. In earnest, the man’s vision, passion and general demeanour present him as a person who can win an election any day.

A front row seat,watching the best of life unfold in a time when life seemed so easy is a gift. Maybe its nostalgia that is romanticising the past and making it seem that the good old days were much better than the present. I was at a dinner a few days ago and some youngsters came to do a dance interpretation of Fela’s “Suffering and Smiling”.