Note: Chief M K O Abiola, during the Presidential campaign in 1992-3had promised to ask for reparations totalling several billion dollars from all the countries which participated in the slave trade.

ON Sunday December 27, 2019, I found myself in the taxi park situated at Sango, Ibadan, very close to University of Ibadan and the Ibadan Polytechnic. My old jalopy had inexplicably broken down after I spent a pleasant afternoon with two of my grandsons. From experience, I know that mechanics are difficult to find on Sundays anywhere in Nigeria. The only place is the nearest motor park. So, I did not wait for somebody to say “Let’s go there.” I went on my own.

I STARTED writing  commentaries on the Business and Economic pages of VANGUARD in 1987 before adding the SUNDAY VANGUARD articles in 1994. Most of those writing then are long gone – mostly beyond reach of humans. My great Aburo, Henry Boyo, Old Igbobian like me, followed them just as 2019 was coming to an end. One feels increasingly alone and perhaps the time has come to pass the baton to a new generation of public opinion leaders. I had an MRI on December 26, 2019 and the signs are not very good. I should probably have saved the N78,000 it cost me to drink GULDER and GUINNESS Stout and have a good time before going the way of all humans.

CHRISTMAS is only two days away. And, unless you are one of the tiny    minority of Nigerians who can look forward with confidence to a merry Christmas day, then you must be among the silent majority of Nigerians for whom Christmas has become a painful experience.

In what would, otherwise, have been another dreary week in which one sad report pushed another off the pages of Nigerian newspapers, the report that the Federal High Court in Lagos has ordered the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, to recover pension funds claimed by former state governors while serving as Senators and Ministers from their states after leaving office as governors.