IT’s exactly three years ago this week since President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua died after an unhappy presidency that was from the very beginning marred by ill-health.

IT was April 8 and I was browsing the net when I came upon the news on Yahoo News: Margaret Thatcher dead. The 87 years old former British Prime Minister, the news said, had died at the Ritz in London just seven hours before.

IN its holistic appraisal of corruption in Nigeria, from the individual through family and up to different larger sectors of society, the ICPC Report conservatively estimates that between $4 billion to $8 billion is stolen from the national treasury yearly and goes on to cite the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index for 2011 which ranked Nigeria 143 among 183 countries.

IN the March 20 and 27, 2013 editions of this column entitled “The ICPC/NUC report and sexual harassment in Nigerian universities”, I questioned the validity of the claim attributed to the ICPC chair, Ekpo Nta, based on a pilot study conducted by the anti-graft body and the NUC, that corruption ranked very high among corrupt practices in our universities.

Akuko gagara akuko gagara to fori apata se ’bugbe… Can things ever fall apart in the home of the teacher Chinualumogu the vaulting eagle on the riverside iroko

SEXUAL offence is therefore a fact of human life, perhaps more so now than in the past. In the particular instance of tertiary institutions, ‘sexual harassment’ is by no means the most serious of the problems confronting them. And this for reasons that there are regulations/laws within the university system, apart from the wider laws of society that can take care of this as that there are more pernicious factors that defeat the purpose for the existence of tertiary institutions than the advertised case of sexual harassment.

ON Wednesday March 13, 2013, Rebekah Havrilla, a former sergeant and bomb disposal expert in the US Army appeared before the US Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel investigating sexual offences.

HAD he remained in office Joseph Aloisius Ratsinger would have clocked eight full years on the throne of St. Peter as the 265th Pope of the Catholic Church in April.

ALL Progressive Congress, the political party that was cobbled together from at least four other major parties, is the opposition answer to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, behemoth in a Nigeria where the idea of independent candidacy is yet to gain sound footing however desirable.

ONE look at the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and it’s clear it is one mad house of hostile room mates with clashing ambitions. But these apparently hostile roommates are nevertheless united by their common greed for power and the unmerited perks that come with it.