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.

It’s this idea that it’s either his way or the highway, what Soyinka called ‘The Credo of Being and Nothingness’ that would lead Umar Farouk to want to commit mass suicide in the belief that he is right while everybody else is wrong. In his Facebook journal, Farouk betrays this sense of superior apprehension of religious knowledge despite his painful lack of social skills that could make him bond with his mates, make sense of his own growing sexuality and, maybe, strike up relationships with the opposite sex.

THE name Eldrick Tont Woods does not ring a bell as Tiger Woods, yet both names refer to the same person, the man famously known around the world as Tiger Woods.

I’d begun and nearly finished the article before unforeseen circumstances led to my changing course and choosing to take stock of certain developments in our polity in the course of the year. I’d tried to avoid this because doing it would mean commenting on the bleak picture our country presents at this time of the year in the last few years. Past editions of TALKINGPOINT written about this time of the year would bear out my claim.

TODAY my mind roves around. My mind seems suddenly on exile. In my thoughts I have traversed regions and cannot find a place of rest. I move as if without purpose, without a sense of direction.

THERE’S, perhaps, nothing better than the destiny of a man who has thrust upon him what many struggle, kill or get killed, to get.

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?