THAT’S the truth of our present condition- we get by. Somehow: In the apparent stagnancy of our existence as a country, a people, we manage to move on- somehow. We are now in December, the last month of the year which several months ago we were promised would put an end to our life in the dark.

THE U-17 World Cup football championship has ended and contrary to expectations that Nigeria would win the championship for a record fourth time, the country’s team failed to live up to this last-minute dream.

It was always going to be problematic. That much was certain- from the moment the Federal Government made its offer of ‘amnesty’ to those we’re now obliged to call former militants of the Niger Delta. How, some had asked, do you give amnesty to an individual never found guilty of a crime?

THE race to the governorship election in Anambra, now fixed for February 6, 2010 by INEC, indicates things are not going to be easy in the State. Politics, since Nigeria’s latest experiment with her ‘nascent democracy’, has never been an easy affair in Anambra State.

What was that show of might before unarmed civilians all about? Why was it necessary for the Airforce to transport by road military hardware(?) that could be better airlifted? Where were their cargo planes?

THERE is something definitely rotten about Nigeria which comes from the very top of governance. Considering the high concentration of power at the centre, such rot is bound to and does have spiralling effects on other members of society well beyond its point of origin.

HIS short, truculent neck and thick-set features are a cross between the looks of a buffalo and a rhinoceros. At close range (as I had during his visit to the High Court in Igbosere during the funeral rites for Gani), he seems uncompromising.

DURING the live screening of Lamido Sanusi’s confirmatory appearance before the Senate, last June, I was in a friend’s office. My friend had a visitor, an ex-banker now PR practitioner, who had professional knowledge of the Central Bank Governor. They had worked together at the United Bank for Africa. She had very good things to say about his competence as a banker and knowledge of the banking sector.

AFTER nearly two years of waiting, two nail-biting years during which one dreaded when the news would finally come following the initial announcement of his body’s succumbing to the onslaught of an unusual lung cancer for a non-smoker- after this long wait, the news came at last on Saturday, September 5, that the cock had finally crowed for Gani Fawehinmi.

THE persistent rot in Nigeria’s education sector is nowhere about to end. If anything, the country’s education is set for more bashing as the National Union of Teachers, the umbrella body of primary and secondary school teachers in the country, gave notice of a strike that began last week.

YOU’VE no doubt seen it by now. Perhaps you’ve turned the names over and over again in your mind and have finally committed them to memory. And you sure should, and even consider yourself privileged to have seen this day in which you were given a sneak preview, just a peep really, at the faces of Nigeria’s problem children.

THERE is something about the new Central Bank Governor, Lamido Sanusi, that reminds me of the former Chairman of the EFCC, Nuhu Ribadu. First there is that physical resemblance, a lanky, almost austere frame. They both look fragile and do not cut the burly picture of your typical Nigerian executive.

THERE are few qualities to define a purposeful, goal-oriented leadership as clear-thinking, careful planning and execution. The amount of these qualities a leader and/or government possesses should at most times be indicative of their/its preparedness or otherwise for leadership

By this I mean Nigerians from the North-West and North-East of this country. What I must now call a lazy way of explaining this apparently well-organised and outer-directed violence, is to attribute it to joblessness, poverty or any of those social vices and disjunctions we are too quick to identify as being at the root of the violence. Poverty or joblessness is not peculiar to the North.

The number of political murders has reduced, and the culture of following due process in the resolution of political and other conflicts is being nurtured. Still, it is doubtful if all the election petitions in the world, assuming they are credibly conducted, can shovel up all the mess dumped on us in 2007.