MY dear Yushau Shuaib, first accept my sincere sympathy for your recent travails. I am happy to glean from your narration syndicated in several newspapers that you were not, after all, fired, but redeployed from the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA, to the Ministry of Information.

WHAT happened in Baga, the border town of Borno State, on Friday, April 19th 2013 was very regrettable. A confrontation between the Nigeria-led multinational Joint Task Force (JTF) and the Islamist sect, Boko Haram, led to the near-total destruction of the fish market town, reportedly leaving over 200 people, mainly vulnerable civilians, dead and about 2,000 houses burnt. It was a typical military expedition.

The concept of moral hazard is defined as a situation where there is a tendency to take undue risk, because the costs are not borne by the party taking the risk.

The media, including me, made a terrible mistake a few weeks ago. It all started from a story in the PUNCH newspaper of April 5, 2013, by one Friday Olokor, titled “Only 27.2% of Nigerians’ll be poor by 2015 –NBS.” The title was totally misleading and other commentators, apart from me, reacted to what, we knew, was a fallacious statement. As it turned out, the Chief Executive of the National Bureau of Statistics, Dr. Yemi Kale, had already sent a correction to media houses in Abuja. Our copy at Vanguard had not reached Lagos by the time I wrote. That was the source of the error on my part.

Several years ago, I was listening to a sermon by Ethel Aderemi, when the Lord suddenly asked yet another of his enigmatic questions. “Femi,” he said, “what is the name of Jesus?” I was dumbfounded. I asked myself: “Is Jesus not the name of Jesus?” What then could be the meaning of the Lord’s question?