Expatriate workers in the Nigerian oil and gas sector are the highest paid in Africa and 11 most paid in the world, with an average annual salary of N22.246 million ($140,800), according to a global oil and gas salary survey.

RELIABLE sources tell me that President Goodluck Jonathan is becoming increasingly allergic to the advice to which he is subjected on a minute-by-minute basis.

LAST week, Elder Godsday Orubebe, the “Honourable” Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, decided to launch an attack on Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi – who heads the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) as well as Rivers State.

LAST week, I told you about the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study – which was published in the Washington Post. Having analysed the Quality Of Life in 80 different countries, it concluded that Nigeria is the worst place to be born in.

ACCORDING to a report that was recently published in the Washington Post newspaper, Nigeria is the worst country in the entire world to be born in.

I RECENTLY told you that a friend recently told me that when he attended a school reunion dinner in Lagos, 80 percent of the ex-classmates on his table said that they were so unhappy with the status quo that they would gladly flee to foreign climes if they could get their hands on foreign work permits.

IT is customary for columists to be especially reflective about the past, present and future at this significant annual turning point when old years are about to give way to new years. And I thought that it would be interesting to look back at some of the observations I made at the tail ends of 2010 and 2011…with a view to discovering whether anything has changed for the better or worse.

AS regular readers of this page will know, I rarely find anything good to say about the state of our nation. And, sure, there are people who accuse me of being unpatriotic. But this viewpoint is not the norm, in my experience. Most of the Nigerians with whom I’ve communicated in the past few years have encouraged me to keep criticising our leaders and complaining about multiple systems failures that have not only lumbered us with security problems and a high unemployment rate but deprived us of benefits such as round-the-clock electricity, a well-managed oil industry and decent hospitals, schools, roads, etc.

([email protected]) is the most vociferous reader of this column. Highly opinionated, unrepentantly blunt and almost gleefully unsychophantic, he takes his democratic and human rights very seriously indeed and flatly refuses to be as bovinely philosophical as most of us are about the multiple disappointments that the average Nigerian faces.

It has to be said that Nigerian oil barons are not famed for passionately campaigning for the victims of oil exploration.

LAST week, I criticised Anglican traditionalists who have prevented women from becoming Bishops. I expressed the opinion that female and male priests should have equal status and identical promotion prospects in this day and age.

ON Tuesday, the Church of England’s General Synod said “no” to women bishops. Even though the modernisers were only narrowly beaten – by a mere six votes – the traditionalists’ victory is immensely significant, not least because this matter cannot be voted upon again until a new Synod is elected in 2015.

THANK YOU to all the Vanguard readers who kindly sent commiserative emails and text messages when they discovered, via last week’s column, that I had been very ill. Many comments were made about the fact that I only started to recover from my ailment when I was flown out of Nigeria and handed over to British doctors.

I FEARED that Barack Obama would lose the American presidential election but he sailed through; and I am grateful and relieved to the point of tearfulness.

Sure, there have been some interesting and radical new developments in recent years – such as the emergence of the first-ever Niger Deltan President, his appointment of the first-ever female Minister of Petroleum and the fact that millions of ordinary Nigerians can access the internet and own mobile phones.