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.

You shall live long sir. You will leave positive legacies that will entrench you in the hearts of men and long after you are gone , you will yet live. God bless you sir.
I write to you not in the manner of Obasanjo to Jonathan. My heart is clean.

People who know Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the Governor of Osun State say he is a brilliant man. I have never met him despite my close ties with Osun State but have watched him on the soap box a couple of times and I can attest to his oratorical prowess. But there was nothing brilliant or oratorical about him last week when he appeared on TV trying to defend his inability to pay salaries. He looked incoherent and pathetic.

I am bold to say that this is a season of hope for Nigeria. There are high expectations at the Federal, State and even Local Government levels following the just concluded general elections. While the APC led federal administration has made it clear to the citizens of this country that it is “baking” sweeping changes which are expected to pop out of the oven soon, some states are quite skeptical about the new wave.