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.

ACTING President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday last week finally put the Executive Council of the Federation out of the misery induced by the crisis of confidence that followed the yet unaccounted disappearance of President Umaru Yar’Adua since November last year.

THOUGH the police tells us 150 and not 500 died and became part of the increasing casualty of Nigerians, latest victims of both ethnic and sectarian crises in Jos, there shall be no mourning in our house.

CONTRARY to the Senate’s spokesperson, Ayogu Eze’s advice that talking about President Yar’Adua’s health is time-wasting and Nigerians should simply move on and support Acting President Goodluck Jonathan, Nigerians must continue to insist on full disclosure of Yar’Adua’s health and whereabouts even while supporting the Acting President.

He should put the power vested in his office to good and immediate use. If other Nigerians, including members of the National Assembly, governors and traditional rulers have tried to no avail to reach the President and know something of his health, it should not be said that the Acting President equally failed.

IT was many hours after the actual event, precisely at the very hours the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria broadcasts its flagship news at 7 in the morning, that I would hear the maiden broadcast of Goodluck Jonathan, the Acting President.

It should therefore be no surprise that despite ill health and obvious incapacity to continue in office, at least for now, Yar’Adua has maintained a vice-like, until-death-do-us-part grip on power that has kept Nigeria grounded and on tenterhooks for many agonising weeks. After this, do we still talk of a President Yar’Adua that is indifferent to or does not like power? What else could a power-obsessed politician have done?

Its ready army of recruits are to be found in many of those so-called places of religious miseducation as produce the almajiris, no different from the madrasas of Afghanistan and other centres of fundamentalist religion, now proliferating in the Moslem North. Until Nigeria rises to the challenge posed by such breeding centres of radical insurgency and cuts down on both covert and overt accommodation of criminality in the name of religion, she can’t be anything but a sponsor of terrorism.

THINKING about the corner into which those who rule in the name of the people have painted themselves and the rest of us, I’m forced to ask if this is how we intend to carry on, which is the literal translation of the title of today’s discourse, rendered in pidgin.

THE news that lawmakers in the Lagos House of Assembly were contemplating the impeachment of the Governor, Raji Fashola, came to me as a surprise as I believe it did many other Nigerians who must have followed the activities of the Governor since he came into office in 2007.

THE news that lawmakers in the Lagos House of Assembly were contemplating the impeachment of the Governor, Raji Fashola, came to me as a surprise as I believe it did many other Nigerians who must have followed the activities of the Governor since he came into office in 2007.