The issue of non-payment of salaries to workers in some states of Nigeria has been kept on the news front pages for two weeks running now. This is a good development that has brought more publicity to the sufferings of Nigerian workers. Not that there was not adequate awareness of this fact before, but we all pretended it was not an issue of concern except to those affected.

As a result, they casually downplay the significance of the civil war for national integration or mischievously misinterpret any reference to its impact on Igboland and the need for restitution as an attempt to create division among Nigerians. But how many Nigerians have thought about the implications of the fact, noted by Prof. Achebe, that there were more small arms used on Biafran soil than during the entire five-year period of the Second World War or that there were one hundred thousand casualties on the much larger Nigerian side compared with more than two million – mainly children – Biafrans killed? If Gowon was serious about his “no victor, no vanquished” slogan and genuinely wanted reconciliation with the defeated Biafrans, why did his government implement extremely harsh measures against Ndigbo after the conflict? For Ndigbo who suffered the greatest from the civil war, whose land was strafed, bombed and devastated, the terrible experiences of 1966 to 1970 remain a recurrent source of sadness and inspiration simultaneously: sadness, because they were the ones that lost almost everything; inspiration, given the inherent capacity of humans to turn adversity into opportunity

I am sure there are many Owolabis up and down the country and many may have succeeded in ending their lives. It is not realistic to expect people to work for nothing and expect an increase in productivity. This is wholly inhumane and insane. Eighteen out of the thirty-six states owing salaries and their coffers are empty.

Chinyere Asika was the first lady of the now defunct East Central State, from January 1970 to the expiration of the administration of her Husband, the now equally late Anthony Ukpabi Asika, by the military coup of July 1975. Mrs. Asika’s death came quietly on Sunday May 3 in Lagos, on arrival from South Africa where he had attended a meeting of the Africa Peer reviews commission. She would have been 75 on June 19th. Mrs. Asika’s death offers two important points of departure for this column: one is that every death of a public personage gives us the opportunity to engage with history; indeed we summon them to history, in much the same way as Wole Soyinka in his first major play, A Dance of the Forest (1960) summoned decolonizing Africa to confront its past in order to avoid repeating a “cycle of idiocy” of which Aroni, the lame one carrying his unhealed wound of history embodied, and which the errant dead and unburied child of that drama speaks to in its unspeakable horror. History is a patient judge

Call it facing the realities of change that seemed impossible before now and you may not be wrong. Let us again remind the NNPC that refineries are national assets that should be guarded jealously. With potentials for up to 6000 investment opportunities when we refine a barrel of crude, our refineries are strategic for energy, technology, employment, skills, increased GDP and government revenue.