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.