Prof. David-West argued that one should not judge Ph.Ds awarded these days at face value. According to him, many of them did not meet the minimum academic standard and are awarded on the basis of dubious, watered-down, criteria. He recalled a case when he was an assessor of a candidate for the award of a doctorate in Virology. His conclusion at the end of the exercise was that “this thesis or dissertation has contributed nothing new to virology.” Yet, the person in question still received the degree.

Tam David-West is well-known nation-wide. Apart from being a former Minister of Petroleum and Energy, and later Minister of Mines, Power and Steel, he is a retired Professor of Virology at the University of Ibadan. Now, although I do not agree with him on several issues, including his uncritical, almost worshipful, admiration of former military dictator, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, his latest comments on the state of Nigerian universities are right on target.

The 1999 Constitution, on page 15, contains the blatant falsehood that “we, the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria…do hereby make and give ourselves the following constitution.” It has many provisions that make Nigeria a distorted federation. For instance, it gives too much executive and legislative power and financial resources to the Federal Government. Again, the Presidential system it stipulates is very expensive to operate.

It is no longer news that President Goodluck Jonathan, has won a four-year mandate from Nigerians to govern till May 29, 2015. He and 26 governors were sworn into their various offices a week ago. Clearly, it is indeed true that the last April elections appear to have better acceptability among Nigerians and foreign observers than the ones conducted in 2003 and 2007 under the chairmanship of Maurice Iwu.

Although ikiri is an ugly animal, the metaphor entailed by the tenacity of its grip reflects Ohakim’s belief that the governorship of Imo State is firmly in his hands, such that it would take a political tsunami for the grip to be pried open by any of his opponents in the April 26 gubernatorial election. Lions are known as kings of the forest, because of their strength and ability to subdue any prey.

There is an unstated or implicit consensus among ndi Imo, particularly those parts of old Imo State that constitute the present state, to the effect that since the late Samuel Onunaka Mbakwe’s governorship ended in 1983, the state has never witnessed purposeful, people-oriented, governance. In other words, the administration of Mbakwe remains the gold standard for judging the performance of any administration in Imo State.

Chapter 13, the penultimate chapter, has as its title “Yus Asaph and Jesus.” In it, Shams states that a certain prophet named Yus Asaph came to Kashmir around 1900 years ago, died and was buried in Srinagar at the age of 120 years. Based on the writings of Ghulam Ahmad, the author concludes that Yus Asaph is none other than Jesus of Nazareth (p. 109).

Chapter 8 reflects the author’s attempt to answer the question, “How did the belief arise that Jesus had died on the cross and had ascended into Heaven?” He declares that Paul (formerly known as Saul), gave a new direction to Christianity by introducing new elements that were not part of what Jesus himself taught his disciples.

The rest of Chapter 2, pages 12 to 17, merely reiterate that the case for belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, as reported in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John cannot be sustained. Chapter 3 offers a plausible explanation of Jesus’ resurrection devoid of supernaturalistic elements.

Shams went further to give a brief history of how the book evolved, beginning with the publication, in August 1939, of a leaflet with the provocative title “The Tomb of Jesus Christ in India.” After World War II, he says, the first edition of Where did Jesus Die? was published. Expectedly, the leaflet and book elicited different responses from Londoners, newspapers and journals.

Before I go into the subject of our discourse today, it is important to make some classifications in order to avoid possible misunderstandings about my motive for deciding to review a book written by a Muslim scholar concerning the death, resurrection and ultimate fate of Jesus, the alleged founder of Christianity.

All this is disturbing, considering the enormous amount of resources, both human and material, that have been mobilized to ensure that the 2011 elections are better than the previous ones. The blame lies squarely at the feet of desperate politicians and inept corrupt INEC officials, although we should not lose sight of the fact that the 1999 Constitution is flawed in many areas, thereby allowing morally crippled unpatriotic Nigerians to exploit the system for their own narrow egoistic interests.

Dear reader, yes, yesterday, the first of the three-part elections this month was concluded. According to the election time-table released by the partially-dependent Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), elections into the two chambers of the National Assembly were slated for yesterday, Saturday April 2, to be followed by the presidential election this Saturday, April 9.

According to Sugata Masaaki, an expert in the religion, “Shinto is so woven into the fabric of Japanese daily life that people are barely aware of its existence. To the Japanese, it is less a religion than an unobtrusive environmental fixture, like the air they breathe.”

Ever since homo sapiens emerged on this planet after more than three and a half billion years of zigzag evolutionary progression of life from what some scientists call the primitive soup, members of the species have been making concerted effort to control nature. In an important sense, civilisation is the synthesis of both the intended and unintended consequences of human activities meant to domesticate nature for the benefit of human beings.