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.

For a graduate of the Abacha School of Torture who by self-avowal had been through the valley of the shadow of death, it was both natural and not asking too much to expect that he would be different. True Obasanjo has not been shown to manage a killer squad, but his military past seems to have clung to him so much that he abhorred opposition, especially where such opposition displayed sufficient know-how that called into question Baba’s know-it-all tendencies.

Just before I got down to writing this, I heard a news report that Adamu Waziri, the Minister in charge of Police Affairs, had advised 139 police officers demoted alongside Malam Nuhu Ribadu to apply to have their demotion reverted.

This is the task for President Goodluck Jonathan who is well-advised to resist the attempt in certain quarters to see him as the candidate of the Niger-Delta. No, Jonathan is not and cannot be the ‘messiah’ of the Niger-Delta. Neither time nor history will favour such impertinence on his part.