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.

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.