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.

THIS past week couldn’t have been a particularly pleasant one for Ahmed Yerima, former governor of Zamfara State and now PDP senator representing Zamfara at the National Assembly. The Senate Minority Whip was definitely in the minority when four female colleagues of his decided to take him to task on allegations that he recently married a 13 year old Egyptian girl.

WHEN during the run-up to the 2007 general elections former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, left the Peoples Democratic Party he must have been convinced of the rightness of his action. For someone who had nursed the ambition to be president for as long as when he first announced his entry into party politics in the early 1990s, perhaps the only path left for him after the rebuff from his party was the one that led out of it.

ON 26 August, 2010 it would be exactly seventeen years to the day since Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida or IBB, as he is otherwise known, ‘stepped aside’ as Nigeria’s military leader.