One thing that Nigeria is not good at and which many of its citizens seem to overlook is the issue of figures and statistics. It is rather difficult to run into any Nigerian figure that is reliable. Even when it is arranged for us, by outsiders, it suffers the same fate because of the numerous versions by different bodies and also because the helpers do not know many things about us.

This past Thursday, August 16, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida turned 71. He gave thanks to God. Just as the late K.O. Mbadiwe said of himself in 1983 at his official retirement from national politics, he was no longer “K.O,” said the juggernaut, he was then, “O.K;” Ibrahim Babangida is quite OK; he was satisfied with himself, he told reporters at his Hilltop home in Minna, and it was all the doing of Allah.

”In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers . . . we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Her regular Montessori school, The Learning Place, Lekki, had been in existence for six years when two years ago, she decided to include a special unit, The Learning Place Centre. Mrs.Bolanle Adewole, The Director of TLP, who was impressed by the tremendous changes she was able to bring to the life of her eight year old autistic son, knew it was best to help other parents replicate such in their autistic children as well as children with other developmental disorders. In this interview, Mrs.Adewole who is also a member of the Parents Against Autism Initiative, speaks on her work with children, her style of helping children with autism, among sundry issues.

The title of our discourse today reminds me of some lectures in mathematics which I had while in secondary school. I was in Form Three when my mathematics teacher explained to the class Pythagoras theorem concerning right-angled triangles.