Just last Friday, on my way back to the United States, I had called the Minister of Information, Mr. Labaran Maku, to congratulate him on certain aspects of this government’s programme to which he is associated. I had, in fact, assured him of my willingness to help further the cause of this particular project if in the future he needed volunteers.

Dr. Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe was an astute and consummate politician who brought a colourful dash to Nigerian politics. With graduate degrees in political science from the American ivy-league Columbia University, New York, earned in a very auspicious moment in 20th century America, Mbadiwe knew a thing or two about political strategy and horse-trading.

I confess to a frequent feeling of ennui and a sense of futility about Nigeria and Nigerian affairs arising, I daresay, from the large and gnarled picture of its undertaking.

MR. Dimeji Bankole, the young speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives is built like boxer. He’s also been known to have had at least one good brawl in office. Once, in fact, with my good friend and brother, the Honorable Independence Ogunewe, and this in the Chambers of the Federal House – and he did not pull his punches.

In the last two months, there has been a spike in brutal killings of individuals in Imo state. These deaths have been unmistakable contract killings. The manner of execution seems clearly clinical, unambiguous, calculated to create fear and exact maximum symbolic threat.

Last week, the Federal Government announced that it would establish forty new universities to complement the existing ones. The idea, according to government sources, is to expand access to public higher education given the increasing number of new applicants seeking university education in the country.

Nigeria’s national security doctrine has long been based on a theory of good-neighborliness. This doctrine is based on assumptions that Nigeria as a nation is no threat to her neighbours and therefore has no reasons to fear external attack.

Former Vice-President, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, has declared very recently that he paid $1 million monthly to the “American lecturers” at his university, and that it was investment made, and without return yet.

Two statements published in the newspapers recently have just come to my attention. The first deals directly with my person. The other is of a more general kind, and they are all tied to the question of governance in the East. The first, by an obscure hagiographer, Mr. Ethelbert Okere who advises the governor of Imo State on media matters, was a rather puerile attempt to respond to a piece in my column on the subject, “governing the East.”

Michael Joseph Chukwudalu Echeruo, poet, scholar, literary theorist and administrator is one of Africa’s leading men of ideas from the 20th century. His impact on the shaping of the ideas of the African world in modernity is vast and pointed.

Much has been written about the kidnapping situation in Aba; a situation which has basically sacked the city, and made life uninhabitable and brutish. Kidnapping in Aba seems to be the climax of affairs that have brought this great city to its knees.

Somewhere in Nigeria’s new capital city, Abuja, is a street called “Winston Churchill Street” named in honour of Britain’s famous wartime Prime Minister and Nigeria’s former colonial overlord.

Over the Labor Day weekend, the GCUOBA, the alumni association of the Government College Umuahia met in Columbus, Ohio for the now annual GCUOBA-USA conventions.

The great dome of his head framed by wooly white hair. As we sat for a long, lingering breakfast, overlooking a golf course and a mild sun in descent, we went down memory lane, I prodding gently to retrieve the fragments of a remarkable life; a rich and textured life, and long. He said, very humorously, over a generous spread of hash-brown, eggs and sausage, “you see, I eat slowly. I have to be careful now how I chew otherwise my teeth will fall all out.

Igbo people build consensus tediously. The endorsements on behalf of the Igbo by various groups purporting to speak in their behalf, for Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, or any other aspirants will ultimately comedown to that question: “what is in it for me?” And that is as it should be.