AFTER many nail-biting years of wondering what to do with the national football team, the Super Eagles or Super Chickens as some derisively call them, a Nigerian government finally seems set to begin the process of returning football from an agonizing and disappointing exercise of nerves to a game that has been the source of both personal and collective joy to hundreds of millions of Nigerians.

THERE has been a loud increase in calls for the adoption of the zoning principle from the North. Calls for the application of this unfair advantage has been coming, not unexpectedly, from that section of the Northern oligarchy whose hold on leadership in this part of Nigeria and, indeed, Nigeria at large has become a stranglehold.

The first of these pitfalls is the fact that President Goodluck Jonathan failed to adhere to the recommendations of the Uwais Panel on the appointment of INEC chairman, a recommendation that would have required him to make his choice from among nominees recommended by the National Judicial Council, before sending his choice to the Senate for ratification.

FOLLOWING calls for the application of appropriate sanction on Oba Oluwadare Adesina Adepoju, the dethroned Deji of Akure, who had led a lynch squad to the house of his estranged wife, Bolanle, only to find himself in an unseemly street melee, a roforofo fight in which he was reportedly flung into a gutter, traditional beads and all, by his own ‘subjects’ who came to the rescue of the woman, Segun Mimiko, the Governor of Ondo State, had warned that he would not be stampeded into deposing the Kabiyesi.

For a graduate of the Abacha School of Torture who by self-avowal had been through the valley of the shadow of death, it was both natural and not asking too much to expect that he would be different. True Obasanjo has not been shown to manage a killer squad, but his military past seems to have clung to him so much that he abhorred opposition, especially where such opposition displayed sufficient know-how that called into question Baba’s know-it-all tendencies.

Just before I got down to writing this, I heard a news report that Adamu Waziri, the Minister in charge of Police Affairs, had advised 139 police officers demoted alongside Malam Nuhu Ribadu to apply to have their demotion reverted.

This is the task for President Goodluck Jonathan who is well-advised to resist the attempt in certain quarters to see him as the candidate of the Niger-Delta. No, Jonathan is not and cannot be the ‘messiah’ of the Niger-Delta. Neither time nor history will favour such impertinence on his part.

Without taking away from his personal merits, President Jonathan is in every terms a child of Providence. His rise as a relatively obscure deputy governor of a small state like Bayelsa, to the position of Vice President and, then, President within a space of six, seven years is in every sense the ‘Lord’s doing’.

WHEN momentous events occur we tend to remember what we were doing when we got the news. The news announcing the passing of President Umaru Yar’Adua came to me in Ibadan via a phone call from my younger brother. It was in the very early hours of Thursday, May 6- some 35 minutes or thereabout into the new day.

THIS past week couldn’t have been a particularly pleasant one for Ahmed Yerima, former governor of Zamfara State and now PDP senator representing Zamfara at the National Assembly. The Senate Minority Whip was definitely in the minority when four female colleagues of his decided to take him to task on allegations that he recently married a 13 year old Egyptian girl.

WHEN during the run-up to the 2007 general elections former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, left the Peoples Democratic Party he must have been convinced of the rightness of his action. For someone who had nursed the ambition to be president for as long as when he first announced his entry into party politics in the early 1990s, perhaps the only path left for him after the rebuff from his party was the one that led out of it.

ON 26 August, 2010 it would be exactly seventeen years to the day since Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida or IBB, as he is otherwise known, ‘stepped aside’ as Nigeria’s military leader.

IF the death of Abubakar Rimi could be of any redeeming value for Nigeria it would, perhaps, be in the manner it helps reduce our sloppy approach to many things we do.

NIGERIA is a land of the unimaginable and this is once more manifesting in the utterly reckless campaign by Maurice Iwu, the unlovable chair of our so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and supporters bent on keeping him in office after years of organising what many see as some of the worst heist of the will of the Nigerian people via elections that had been designed to fail right from the moment of conception.

BY the time you are reading this the Senate would have commenced its screening of nominees for ministerial positions into the cabinet being constituted by Acting President Goodluck Jonathan. With the face of the new Executive Council of the Federation out in broad outline, it is now possible for Nigerians to have a general impression of the direction Nigeria is likely to follow in the next 12 months.