Twenty years after these earth-shaking events, Mandela’s profile continues to grow. This year, the United Nations set aside his birthday to be commemorated eternally. In venerating Mandela, the world is also honouring the heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle particularly those who did not live to see freedom day such as Robert Sobukwe, Ruth First, Solomon Mahlangu, Bram Fischer and the children of Soweto whose blood watered the tree of freedom.

It is not by works of righteousness that believers in Christ receive the adoption of sons and daughters of God.
“For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jews nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:27-28).

The activism of a Nigerian university teacher would be strange to his Western counterpart. If today clerics are joining rallies it is what the times demand. Neither Jesus Christ, the Jewish prophets nor the Prophet Mohammed to mention just a few were naturally made for the role history eventually recorded for them. Circumstances led them to it. As they have apparently led some in the media to take on our slumbering, dying and perhaps dead rulers who are determined to bring down the house on us all.

The Americans, British, French, Dutch, and Spanish, clinging to black and native slavery as the model of development, condemned the Haitians for this deep democratic constitutional stance. Haiti , in bold print and audacious policy, established itself as the center of world democracy and the only nation in the western world where all inhabitants were invested with the status of legal freedom and constitutional citizenship.

The critical failure of the CBN is in its key role in managing price stability in the economy; price stability is defined as ”the ability of a Central Bank to moderate inflation, attain stable interest and exchange rates and create a conducive climate for long term growth and development” (Section 2 of the CBN Act 2007). Indeed, the failure of CBN in its role of banking supervision, regulation and currency management are, in fact, the symptoms of failure in the management of price stability.

I had planned to use today’s column to share with my readers my experiences in Angola. Concrete experiences that is. While I was in Angola, I could not write freely on hard news and some experiences that had to do with the teams, especially the Super Eagles.

NIGERIA has gone into another political impasse. An impasse is a situation in which things neither move forward nor backward. It is a time when a major political issue freezes the nation to a spot, and nobody has time anymore to discuss core issues of development. It is like when a major calamity befalls a family.

How can finite and fallible creatures like us ever learn to see things sub specie aeternitatis? No human being, including Spinoza himself, can achieve that impossible feat. Gottfried Leibniz, a German thinker, says that there are three types of evil, viz, metaphysical evil, physical evil and moral evil. Metaphysical is integral to the finitude or imperfections of creatures.

Indeed what went wrong, as the text message asked? Interestingly, that text message represents perhaps the mildest form of dishonour attaching to the person of Yar’Adua that I have heard people voice across the land since the man and his wife departed to Saudi 69 days ago today Sunday, January 31, 2010. Many of the other insults that have been hauled in the direction of the presidency are totally unprintable.

I am used to reading about history being made when there are a hundred or thousand steps and each step is counted as a building block that led to the hall of fame where the records are stored. So there is this painstaking build-up, and accumulation of positive acts of the ones who were part of the history that was made.