The year was 1990. I had just emerged from the cavernous bunkers that serve as Unilag’s Engineering Faculty, still dazed from the mauling I had received from the vengeful Thermodynamics exam I had just written. As I blinked in the mid-afternoon sunshine, I suddenly observed what I had desperately hoped not to see.

The Christmas season is special though it means different things to different people. My interests as a growing little boy were to eat rice and chicken, wear new clothes and move around town. Now my interests are in the importance of the commemoration and lessons I can draw from it: One, God the Father’s unparalleled and unassailable selfless and unconditional love.

On Wednesday, this newspaper announced that it had exclusively obtained an “open letter” in which Iyabo Obasanjo, the ex-President’s eldest daughter and a former senator, bitterly accused her father of being a liar who treated his family shabbily, described his recent criticisms of President Jonathan as hypocritical and told the world that she wanted no further contact with him.

As repeated in this column many times, the country‘s problems are many, varied, complex and fundamental. And like the United States of America‘s balance of payments, would always end in fundamental disequilibrium. The main reason is that as a watchdog of the world, its foreign exchange expenditure is always more than the surplus on its balance of trade.

THIS is a spill-over from last week. It is becoming clearer what people mean when they talk of running from pillar to post. In 2011, the ink on President Goodluck Jonathan’s inaugural papers had hardly dried when he started toying with the idea of a single tenure – first, of eight years; then seven years; and finally, six years.