Late at night, the mansion she shares with the man she doesn’t really want gets lonely. So she acquires an attractive lover of her age – a penniless boy who lives on the poor side of town but excites her nevertheless because he not only has “fiery eyes and dreams no one can steal” but “makes her feel the way she wants to feel”.

I sometimes succumb to emotional cowardice; and I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Dr. Lukman – a distinguished father figure and former OPEC boss with whom I’d had a warm relationship for several years – that my decision to absent myself from OGIC was also partly motivated by professional frustrations and political concerns.

In last week’s column, I confessed that I often feel like a square peg in a round hole in this country because I feel that I don’t have a typical Naija mindset.

Whenever I sit down with these beleaguered fellow travellers to discuss our respective predicaments, we wind up agreeing that we’ll probably have more joyful and prosperous existences if we pack our bags and take off to an overseas haven in which people who aren’t hard-edged or shrewd can thrive.

And I’ve also been criticized by a handful of individuals (friends as well as foes), who either disagreed with some or all of the points I made or simply felt that my article was too divisive…and that I should have urged my fellow Ogonis to forget about the bitter mistakes of the past, instead of highlighting internal rifts.