On Friday, September 20, 2013, I was just rounding off my Monday page when a friend from Silverbird media group called me and disclosed that security operatives were engaged with Boko Haram members in a shootout at ApoVillage, near the Legislators Quarters, Abuja.

WHEN news broke last weekend of the killing of nine individuals by the State Security Service, Marilyn Ogar, the Deputy Director, Information, DSS, carefully couched her narrative in classic anti-terrorist speak. Ogar, very much like a disciple of Joseph Goebbels, the notorious propaganda chief of Hitler’s Third Reich, told how two alleged Boko Haram “elements”, Kamal Abdullahi and Mohammed Adamu, earlier arrested “for terrorist activities”, led security operatives to uncompleted buildings, “where arms were purported to have been buried underground”.

Even though it was tucked away in the middle of other highlights in the online edition of the Vanguard of August 19, the headline seemed sensational enough to draw attention.

There is a lot of irritating noise coming especially from the North-West concerning the need for the presidency to return to the North in 2015. This should be discarded as sound and fury signifying nothing.

It is said that when the time for an idea comes no force can stop it. For the Nigerian ruling class, the idea of a sovereign national conference, SNC, was viewed as treasonous just 20 years ago.