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.

Without taking away from his personal merits, President Jonathan is in every terms a child of Providence. His rise as a relatively obscure deputy governor of a small state like Bayelsa, to the position of Vice President and, then, President within a space of six, seven years is in every sense the ‘Lord’s doing’.

WHEN momentous events occur we tend to remember what we were doing when we got the news. The news announcing the passing of President Umaru Yar’Adua came to me in Ibadan via a phone call from my younger brother. It was in the very early hours of Thursday, May 6- some 35 minutes or thereabout into the new day.