There is a link to the introduction and application of the IMF and World Bank’s concepts of “liberalization,” “privatization,” and the “free market” to the exponential rise of corruption in Nigeria. There was always corruption in government, but before the advent of the IMF conditions, corruption in the public system was at its very minimal; what was known then as corruption would today pale in the face of the systemic subversion that has since buckled public governance in Nigeria.

So, at best, the Foreign Minister is a prestige position, full of glitter, and nothing else. Yet, President Buhari might also argue that it is Nigeria’s voice, its eyes and its ears in the outside world, for whatever it is worth. That by itself is significant – Nigeria speaks to the world through the voice of an Igbo, whose own illustrious father was no less the World Court judge, Charles Daddy Onyeama of Eke. The Ministry of Labour could equally be powerful, and might be in the hands of a visionary minister, the arrowhead for the reform of the Civil Service and the public sector.

Nigerians have been riveted by the scandal allegedly involving former National Security Adviser, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, under whose charge, the former President Goodluck Jonathan prosecuted the war against the Boko Haram Insurgency. The current Buhari administration and his All Progressives Congress party, have so far painted the alleged misuse and misappropriation of a $2.1 billion vote for the procurement of Arms by Colonel Dasuki and his cronies as a scandal beyond all historical proportion. But we know that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. Nigeria has seen worse.

The mish-mash of Nigeria’s post-war history has permitted many sad revisions which in turn has made Nigerian historical studies and its statements therefrom to be lopsided, ethnic, and gnarled. We have tended in Nigeria to celebrate the worst of us, and have confined Nigeria’s true national heroes to the dustbin. Today, only in a place like Nigeria, with its twisted ethos, can a man like Ahmadu Bello for instance, have greater pride of place in the National rolls than Akweke Abyssinia Nwafor Orizu, one of the great spirits of the anti-colonial Nationalist movement.

Ali Okechukwu, Deputy Superintendent of Police, and Public Relations Officer of the Anambra State Command of the Nigerian Police Force, Awka, denied it all. The Joint Task Force had not shot at protesters, and has not killed anyone among the peaceful demonstrators in Onitsha calling for the release of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, and a referendum for the secession of Biafra from the federation of Nigeria.

Dr. Chu S. P. Okongwu in his 2004 tributes to Ukpabi Asika, took an aside in his eulogies to emphasize the following: “The generation born after the civil war will not know that the former Eastern region, comprising East-Central State, South-Eastern state, and Rivers state, enjoyed a highly developed road network, with probably the highest quality road density in sub-Saharan Africa. These had been damaged or neglected during the war. Ukpabi Asika planned to reconstruct and modernize these.

The new Minister of Defence, Mr. Muhammed Dan Ali, has made what might be the first official statement by this administration on the new agitation by Biafrans for a separate country. Nigeria, he noted on his initial statement on assuming office as Defence Minister, is buffeted by “many indices of destabilisation.”

President Muhammadu Buhari’s sacking of sixteen Permanent Secretaries, and appointment of seventeen new ones to replace them seems to me a mistake. The office of the president from which the announcement of this mass removal of the Permanent Secretaries was made, did not give any real details regarding the whys and the wherefores of this presidential action. But that is only part of the problem. Two questions ought to worry Nigerians about this move.

Torch Oritsewenyimi Taire – his friends called him, TOT – was among many things, a man of great sensitivity: an aesthete – not in the mushy, pretentious way of the noveaux riche. A friend of poets and artists; a great lover of beautiful things. He had an eclectic mind. He was a truly renaissance man. I learnt from Torch Taire, more than a university could teach. He was a great repository of the lore of nation. He was friend to powerful men, and he was himself, without doubt, a powerful man. But you would never know it.

At its inauguration as a free nation, Nigeria established itself as a federal democratic republic. The founding fathers of this nation thought hard, and long about the options open to a multi-ethnic society such as Nigeria, and knew that it could not, like the Kingdom of Swaziland, be a constitutional monarchy, run on a unitarist model. In 1960, the federation of Nigeria secured political independence as a free nation under the British Commonwealth.