It has now entered the official category of “ridiculous,” and possibly, the potential of impeachable constitutional breach. Nearly two months after his inauguration, President Muhammadu Buhari is yet to constitute and announce an executive council. This is a serious breach of presidential power. To be clear, it is a constitutionally grey area, what time limits a president has, before he could present his cabinet to the National Assembly.

For years, pro-democracy activists sold the idea, indeed fought on the idea, that the democratic alternative was the only means by which a free people must organize and govern themselves. Freedom ultimately comes when we have a voice in the affairs of our community, and in the larger space of the nation through effective representation: the kind of representation in the Assembly of the people gathered to determine the ways and means of our national governance.

The Federal government is running on half its lungs: President Buhari’s inability to constitute a government nearly thirty days after taking his own oath of office is worrisome, and does provide some perverse humour for those whose thinking about Nigeria is often in the breach. It is true that the constitution does not give a time bar for when the president can constitute a federal executive council, but the law is quite clear that there shall be an executive council to make for the full governance of the republic.

Chinyere Asika was the first lady of the now defunct East Central State, from January 1970 to the expiration of the administration of her Husband, the now equally late Anthony Ukpabi Asika, by the military coup of July 1975. Mrs. Asika’s death came quietly on Sunday May 3 in Lagos, on arrival from South Africa where he had attended a meeting of the Africa Peer reviews commission. She would have been 75 on June 19th. Mrs. Asika’s death offers two important points of departure for this column: one is that every death of a public personage gives us the opportunity to engage with history; indeed we summon them to history, in much the same way as Wole Soyinka in his first major play, A Dance of the Forest (1960) summoned decolonizing Africa to confront its past in order to avoid repeating a “cycle of idiocy” of which Aroni, the lame one carrying his unhealed wound of history embodied, and which the errant dead and unburied child of that drama speaks to in its unspeakable horror. History is a patient judge

The leadership of the All Peoples Congress (APC) did not quite see it coming: while the party was still bickering over party choices for the leadership of the National Assembly, Dr. Olubukola Saraki and Mr.Yakubu Dogara, engineered something of a legislative coup. In swift, and adroit political moves, they formed a convenient legislative coalition with the rump of the parliamentary opposition, the PDP, and were elected as President of the Senate and Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives respectively, securing victories over Party favorites, Lawan and Gbajabimiala, and thus throwing their party’s legislative plan into free fall. As a trade-off, PDP’s Ike Ekweremadu was returned as Deputy President of the Senate. In actual fact, the position of the Deputy President of the senate has little political weight or significance, and is at best given only for the ride; but it does have just one important dimension: it guarantees the opposition presence in the room where important Assembly matters are to be discussed in a final caucus.

With the inauguration of President Muhamadu Buhari as the president of Nigeria on Friday, Nigerians expect the promise of the transformative initiative on which his party, the APC, ran to be fully put to force. That time is now. At the Eagle square, the president said all the right things, and gave a heartwarming speech. He also set the tone of this government in the simple unostentatious ceremony that dispensed with many flowery rigmaroles, and went straight to the heart of the matter.

Every time I see the publisher and Chairman of the Vanguard, Mr. Sam Amuka, he reminds me of what I’d like to be when I grow up. Spare and study, Uncle Sam seems built to defy time and the vagaries of aging. I have tried to find out the secret. Once at the flats, he said, “well, it’s the advantage of people like me built small.” It might well indeed be. My younger brother, Buddy, an Attorney in Owerri is also built small. I had joked with him last Christmas, that one day, people might say I’m his dad, when they look at him, and see me besides him. Small is good. Great things come in small measures. Like the Beetle, they are built to last. But there is something else to it. I have observed that Uncle Sam, at his age, swims at least ten laps most evenings. He has made it routine.

Zoning to unzone” the words of the legendary Nigerian politician and wordsmith, Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe continues to offer useful political metaphor in these times. But what those words suggest was that zoning political offices at that time reflected the stage of Nigerian politics which was still fragmented by ethnic differences.

I never met Uche Chukwumerije on the personal level, but I met his former wife, a classic Onitsha beauty who was also a former national athletics champion and educator. I was told by those who knew them well that they were well-matched in most things, and that they also drifted as many things also drift.

Rilwan Akiolu, Oba in Lagos claims to be the “owner of Lagos.” He presumes, of course, because the throne which he says is an “undivided throne” is no more than papier mache. The Oba of Lagos, under the guarantees of Nigeria’s republican constitution and in the dispensation of its constitutional democracy, is no more the owner of Lagos than the Akara seller on the streets of Lagos. The Nigerian constitution grants equal citizenship and the rights pertaining to that citizenship to all its citizens without prejudice to gender, ethnicity or status.