This is the concluding part of a two-part piece by Ginny Nwasoria, a public commentator based in Lagos.

THE American Indian proverb, “Respect your brother’s dream” can be put differently and correctly as “Respect your brother’s success”. However, we oftentimes find ourselves in the opposite situation, scorning and slandering both the dream and success of our brother as the call to be our brother’s keeper is moribund.

THERE is much to be learnt from the Nigeria’s decolonisation politics on the issue of opposition parties in electoral and governance politics in Africa. Once the option of revolutionary opposition to the British colonial regime was precluded by Nigerian frontline anti-colonial parties, and agitation for self-rule was premised on constitutional reform of the colonial governments in the provinces of the British Empire, decolonisation as a process became progressive pressure for inclusion of nationalist parties in the running of the colonial government.

Check out his visit to the PDP office last week and others like that. Jonathan on the other hand has been and seems determined to remain a very good student of the IBB school, at least with regards to managing his emotions. Looking then at the manner the PDP has handled questions of the presidential contest within the party so far, one would be forgiven to think Nigerian politics has entered a new era of tolerance.

Clearly this was not the case, and so many people had to pay for it with their life. Even at that, the Police are still not taking responsibility for anything. Their spokesperson in Lagos, Frank Mba, has been telling sceptical Nigerians that their investigations have so far shown no police man put up a road block at the point the accident occurred.

If my memory serves me right, the book was about a young Nigerian job-seeker in Lagos. Each morning he leaves his humble home in search of a non-existent job, and his close observations of the struggles of daily living on the streets of Lagos constitute the backbone of the book’s narrative.

UP until that moment I entered this gathering where monarchs outnumbered ‘commoners’, I had no idea of how royals behave in the company of other monarchs. My moment of truth was the retreat, conceived as a conference and refresher course towards re-inventing and sustaining traditional rulership, organised by traditional rulers from the Osun Central Division in Osu State.

THE headlines were loud the past week that the North has decided to stick by its resolve that the presidency in 2011 be zoned to it. The question of whether the presidency should be zoned to the North has been both a contentious and polarising issue in the many weeks since Goodluck Jonathan became president following the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua.

So the Federal Government has placed orders for the purchase of about 100 units of Peugeot cars for the use of the Police in combating kidnapping across the country?

ON Sunday July 11 we were reminded once more of how precarious life has become in Nigeria when four journalists, including Wahab Oba, the Lagos chair of the Nigerian Union of Journalists and their driver, fell into the hands of kidnappers in Abia State.

WE are surely getting good at being bad, taking one step forward and several backward. And rather than pretend that the Nigeria/FIFA spat has been resolved by Nigeria blinking and grovelling before FIFA while the latter looks away to make for the impeachment of principal officers of the Nigerian Football Federation, the truth of the matter remains that we’ve once more made fools of ourselves before the whole world, showed ourselves up for the spineless people that we are.

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.