Last week, Professor Wole Soyinka, our world-renowned playwright and Nobel laureate for literature inserted himself in a very unseemly way in the rage in Rivers state. In many regions of the world, Soyinka is known much more for his defiance than for his art. In fact, he has turned nay-saying into an industry and into an art.

As readers of the “Orbit” are bound to notice, this column has been on furlough for the past six weeks. I came to Nigeria to bury Chinua Achebe, and I had taken a break afterwards to vacation and do some research. I have interest currently in writing the biography of the poet, statesman, leader of the African anti-colonial movement in the 20th century, and Nigeria’s first president, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe.

The quality of civic life in Nigeria is the most critical gap in the development of a free society and a robust democratic culture. Nigeria’s transition to democratic culture after over thirty-five years of military rule, out of its slightly over fifty years of political independence from colonialism, feels like the slow ride of the tortoise.

Philip Chukwuedo Asiodu is one of those Nigerians you might rightly call an old civil service mandarin. These were of the cadre known in the Yakubu Gowon administration in Nigeria as “super perm secretaries.” I think the “super”in the Permanent Secretary came from “supernumerary” and it does locate the stature and situation of the office at its highest bar. Philip Asiodu seemed born to that office.

Frankly, I’m tired of writing obituaries and eulogies. Were death not such an invisible coward, we should go and drag it from its abode, and give it a public flogging for being such an ass – what Nigerians would call a “mumu.”

The Nigerian military operation in Baga has drawn very severe criticism from many quarters for the extent of brutality unleashed in that town in the fight against terrorism. The “Baga massacre” as it is now generally described was supposed to be a targeted operation.

And so, they killed Chudi. What a bloody waste. Dr. Chudi Nwike was my friend. I did not always keep in touch, but I knew, somehow that he was out there; in the great grip of things, bold and idealistic; dreaming of great and worthy political battles. I was introduced to him when he became the Deputy governor of Anambra state, and I found him, among many things, voluble, thoughtful, idealistic, and certainly a man with some political ideas.

Kanayo Okorocha,governor of Imo state, has come a long way from his time as a police leg and commercial school teacher in Jos. He is today, governor of Imo state; swept into office by two factors: a most lascklustre Ohakim administration which had grossly underperformed.

President Goodluck Jonathan,truly found his vocation: with a doctorate in Zoology, there could be no better place for him to put his skills to work than in the Zoo called Nigeria. Nigeria is a zoo, with all kinds animals: the benign and the ferocious; their instincts are the same. At the top of this zoological food chain, are the big animals – the elephants of the jungle – where ever their footsteps fall – the grass was forbidden to grow.

There is the Igbo story of the wood pecker who proclaimed without doubt that he would honour his father in death by pecking down the great Iroko tree. But the day came when his father died, and the woodpecker suddenly grew a boil on its beak. I feel like the woodpecker. Chinua Achebe’s death last week left me tongue tied.