Sports minister Bolaji Abdullahi was still wallowing in his innocence when he promised to visit aggrieved members of the football family to prostrate to them and beg for peace.

LAST week, while I was discussing the ongoing quarrel between the DG of the Securities & Exchange Commission (Ms Arunma Oteh) and the Chairman of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Capital Markets (Hon. Herman Hembe), I said I was bored by the whole drama and made the following remarks:

TODAY’S piece is dedicated to Job Obanor and others like him who are physically challenged in one way or the other but who have refused to be tied down by their challenges. Obanor was a member of the defunct Bendel State House of Assembly in the Second Republic. He is now visually impaired and must be taken everywhere by a grandson.

ONCE it was public knowledge that President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan had a preferred candidate for National Chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, I knew he was interested in the 2015 politics. Normally, every president in power in Nigeria would be interested even if he has exhausted his two terms. If he is not running again he will be putting someone of his own choosing as he vacates office.

IN the end, what the PDP dished was a standard menu of ‘consensus’; candidates were an outcome of a smoke-filled inner recesses horse-trading, which ensured that the power blocs in the party divided amongst themselves the spoils. President Goodluck Jonathan got his man, the venerable AlhajiBamangaTukur; just like the old despot, Obasanjo got his, a pair of them, really and the different governors.

YOU did not hear it from President Goodluck Jonathan, his deputy and the highest ranking northerner, Namadi Sambo, or any Minister, or Special Adviser, but it is now official.

ALTHOUGH right on the front page of The Punch of March 14, 2012, the image was not that visible. It was of a man perched dangerously on the mast of a telecoms company in the premises of the Federal High Court, Shehu Shagari Way, in Abuja.

IN June 2011, I started an exercise on jotting down in my diary the number of deaths as reported by the newspapers everyday. On 22 June 2011, a newspaper reported the following: Two soldiers, 18 others killed in Tiv/ Fulani clash in Beme; an undergraduate murdered by cultists in Bauchi; an ASP killed and five civilians injured in Kano; man butchers neighbour over political argument in Kaduna; bodies of two little siblings found buried under the rug in Uyo.

THE Vanguard Comment of March 14, 2012 titled “Challenges of Regionalisation” provides an interesting approach to the history of the Regionalist Federalism of the independence movement of the 1950s.

Without quoting instances in our country’s chequered football history, many believed that if what happened to Fabrice Muamba in White Hart Lane during an English Premiership match between Tottenham Hotspurs and Bolton Wanderers was to be in Nigeria, then the young man would have died.