LAST August the Governor of Abia State, Chief Theodore Ahamefula Orji issued an order sacking so-called non-indigenes from the public service of Abia State.

THE world was thrown into mourning last week Wednesday October 5, 2011 by the death of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc at the youthful age of 56. Even at that youthful age, it seemed as if Jobs had always been with us since the beginning of time. His contributions at that age gave him the timelessness that wealth or political power does not confer on ordinary mortals.

EVERY Independence anniversary provides us an opportunity to look back and reflect on our journey as a nation.

In recent times, we have been lamenting the dismal results released by the West African Examination Council, WAEC and the National Examination Council, NECO. Members of the House of Representatives considered the matter of grave national importance that it tabled it for debate on the floor of the House.

ON Sunday September 11, 2011, the United States of America, and indeed, the world, marked the 10th anniversary of the dastardly terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on New York City and Washington DC in 2001.

THE headline of an ordinarily innocuous story filed by Daily Sun’s correspondent, Christopher Oji, was “Lawyer Apologises for Lying Against CP”(Daily Sun, Friday September 2, 2011).

Imagine a theater with multiple cinema halls all showing top thrillers simultaneously! That is what Nigeria has become since April. Check: post presidential election violence, Boko Haram, Police Headquarters bombing, Islamic banking, Jumbo salary for National Assembly members, Lagos flood, Kerosene crisis, Al Mustapha comedy thriller, BPE probe, Minimum wage war, Salami and NJC, Single term imbroglio, IBB-Obasanjo beef, the return of Jos killings, Mikel Obi’s fathers kidnapping, UN Building bombing, Ibadan flood, Ondo Road carnage and Ocean surge in Lagos! To try and catch up with all of these is enough to make even a thriller addict dizzy.

MY instinctive reaction when Nigeria declared that we want to be one of the 20 biggest economies in the world in the year 2020 was to look up the members of the G-20.

Someone wrote recently that in Imo State there is hardly any politics going on. What he rightly identified was a war among the army of educated but mostly idle and greedy elite for the lean resources of the state. But what many of the “me-too” commentators on Imo affairs forget (we forget too easily) is that the war that seeped into former Governor Ikedi Ohakim’s four dramatic years in office began as far back as 1998.

LAST week, several national papers lamented the abysmal performance of Nigerian candidates who sat for the 2011 West African Secondary School Certificate Examination. According to reports, of the 1.5 million candidates who sat for the May/June examination, only 472,906, or a disappointing 31 percent, obtained five credits and above in the subjects, including English Language and Mathematics.

PRESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan is proposing a host of constitutional amendments. But one that is going to pre-occupy the nation in the months ahead is the proposal to make the tenure of the President and governors a single term of six years, instead of the current four-year term renewable for another term of four years.

IN the ’80s, the decade of Nigeria’s brightest journalism, Ado’b Obe of West Africa Magazine popularised the phrase, “legitimacy engineering”.

IN August 2010, Ambassador John Campbell published the following views about Nigeria: “Nigeria is in trouble. National elections scheduled for 2011 has the potential to undermine the country’s current precarious stability by exacerbating its serious internal ethnic, regional and religious divisions. Since 1999, national presidential elections have adhered to an informal power sharing arrangement between the Muslim North and the Christian South, thereby avoiding regional and religious conflict.

THE Attorney General of the Federation, Mohammed Adoke, SAN, took what I regard as a courageous stand during his screening by the Senate on Thursday June 30, 2011.

After the Kafanchan riot in 1987 following the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Conference), the editors of Thisweek magazine decided to go beyond reporting the crisis and get a deeper understanding of the cause. Editors were dispatched to various parts of the North. I was dispatched to Sokoto.