AFTER its executive council meeting in Zurich last Wednesday, Nigeria’s Amos Adamu and Reynald Temarii of Tahitii were formally suspended from FIFA. Adamu, Nigeria’s sole representative in FIFA has, along with Temarii, a Vice President of FIFA, been at the centre of a cash-for-votes scandal that is threatening to bring FIFA’s house of corruption down on its head.

SECTARIAN strife is nothing new in diverse parts of Northern Nigeria. Each dispensation seems to spawn its own type of religious zealots, people with one form of score or another to settle with others in their communities if not the state at large.

Yes, millions of Nigerians have for months questioned the huge amount of money set aside for the celebration of what amounted to them as a non-event against the backdrop of mounting external debt, infrastructural decay and sundry failures in the system- Nigerians had expressed their reservations about the entire celebration.

It came a little as a surprise, if for nothing but its loud echo of life under an odious dispensation, one governed by the ethic of unaccountable power- but it was all the same a little surprising to see media photographs of Igbo leaders locked out of the venue of a summit planned to hold at the Concorde Hotel in Owerri.

About three weeks ago, I commented here on the seeming camaraderie between the presidential aspirants of the Peoples Democratic Party, specifically President Goodluck Jonathan and former military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida. Both men had spoken in a language and manner that suggested they could be fast friends even as they individually had their eyes set on the same prize in the forthcoming 2011 elections.