A blogger became so exasperated with my criticism of the Christian Church; he decided to launch what would be the definitive counter-attack. “Femi Aribisala,” he declared triumphantly, “is not a Christian!” When I thought about this, I concluded that, using the same logic, the prophets of Israel were not Israelites.

Everybody prays; we pray in times of trouble, when there’s danger and when we really desire something! It’s almost second nature to pray! Praying means we agree that there is a higher power and we believe it can help us! We can tear down every imaginable stronghold with prayer but not all prayers are answered and that in itself could be a stronghold! No one is to blame as even students of theology hardly have the incontrovertible method of prayer but I have found that science and prayer are extremely compatible.

In fact, the delegates went further: they wanted a secession clause inserted in the new constitution that might be generated from the conference. But something remarkable happened after the governor of the region, Hassan Usman Katsina, came around: the delegates left hurriedly for the North their home base, and the conference was adjourned.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article captioned ‘This beauty that makes me sad’. It was centred around my experience on a cruise where I touched on the beauty of nature and our inability as a country to harness and use nature for the common good. It was an article that led to comments on twits, blogs and emails. A friend and reader described it as ‘your soliloquy on the sea’. It was an apt description; why didn’t I think of it?

A lot of issues keep cropping up over the pres-ence of the dreaded Ebola disease in Nigeria since that miscreant, Patrick Sawyer, brought it here from Liberia. What one finds rather disturbing is the fact that his trip into the country was deliberate.