On December 26, 1993, I was attacked by armed robbers on the road from Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos. This attack has proven to be one of the greatest blessings of my life.

“Revolutions end up in the hands of madmen. Besides, if the power is great enough, it will make its own mad men by its own pressure” – Saul Bellow. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS ….

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