Oh yes, I can understand the great outing of presenting four books and being hosted by my colleagues in the media. I have said how happy and grateful to them and to God I am. But I am told that I should equally be grateful and happy that someone died! I know we came and we must go, whether we like it or not. But that going has its pains, its pangs.

IF you needed proof of how powerful the media is, it was right there for you to see for yourself when last week Thursday, August 20, the media came out in full force to make a statement, a statement of fact that without the media, what they show those who read them in print and listen to them on radio and watch them on television, no democracy anywhere in the world can work. Oh yes, it was a great and memorable outing.

THE lizard may have grown up amidst ungrateful people when he said that if no one would praise him for the feat of jumping from a high iroko tree and not dying, he would shake his head in self praise. So, when we see the lizard nodding its head in self praise, we look around for a tree it has jumped from or some other feat that needed songs of praise.

The precondition for the military to take part in quelling internal unrest seems now to be hidden and unannounced. But that is what is happening, and has been happening and will continue to happen if we refuse to see the Boko Haram sect as the harbinger it is of a reaping we are entitled to for the total negligence of the duty imposed on government to ensure the security and welfare of the citizens.

In spite of massive collusive efforts to deny the fact, through what we have done to the process of choosing our leaders, the people of Nigeria retain sovereignty. Section 14 (2)(a) of the Constitution is unambiguous in making it loud and clear. It says sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria. Whatever powers are exercised by organs of government – legislative, executive or judicial – must be locatable in the constitution.

WHEN we started this journey on the democracy highway in 1999 and I began to monitor how we were doing, I sang the praises of the new deal, the joy of return to due process, to the orderly and ordered ways of doing things.

But let me say that what I read from all the speeches was his regret that we do not seem to have discovered the joy in affecting positively the human condition. You see, we belong at a level of development where the human condition can be sacrificed to meet the greed of vested interests.

The ombudsman is a monitor of the observance of rules set in a polity for the operation of its affairs. The modern use of the term began in Sweden, according to Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia, with the Swedish Parliamentary Ombudsman instituted in 1809, to safeguard the rights of citizens by establishing a supervisory agency independent of the executive branch.

Writers are more than town criers. They are reminders and have the advantage of looking back into the records in the bowels of time to tell you what they said when the come came to become (if we must revisit Mbadiwe’s memorable lines). On June 29, last year, I wrote a piece, The Niger Delta Swamp.

I READ a disturbing piece of news some two weeks ago and it has still failed to be spiked as stale. It affects our governors, chief executives of the 36 states of the federation. They are bosses of their states, cannot be touched while they are on that high horse as executive governors, as they would prefer to be known by and referred to. Only impeachment, resignation or death can remove them during their period of office. The proviso that they must perform the functions of that office to be entitled to that protection is ignored in our interpretation of their roles.