In the pit of Nigerian politics lies the soul of philistines. A nation cursed with a political leadership without the subtle refinements of culture is doomed to crassness. We see this truth as a matter of fact, reflected in the utter disregard to which the political establishment places culture and matters of cultural policy.

I traveled from St. Louis, to Detroit, to Amsterdam the previous Wednesday on my way to Liverpool. I did not arrive Liverpool. The Delta/KLM flight just managed to complete the first leg of the journey. I arrived at the Schipol Airport in Amsterdam on Thursday morning preparatory to taking the morning hop to Liverpool.

The remarkable ways by which that contact has shaped the Igbo continues to be the basis of reflections by scholars – and increasingly by Igbo scholars who feel the powerful “urgency of now” to call attention to the intricate as well as intriguing situation of the contemporary Igbo of modern Nigeria, in its current relationship with nation and with the emergent world.

Dear Dr. Jonathan. I greet you in the name of the Republic. I hope we still have a republic to speak of, seeing that over the years, the foundational republican idea on which this nation was negotiated and founded in the various rounds of constitutional conferences leading to independence has been fundamentally eroded.

Far more incisive things have been said by those who knew Dr. Stanley N. Macebuh far more closely than I. I should in fact rather say that I did not work with Dr. Macebuh; I came into journalism at the moment of his dramatic ouster. I met only his tails at the door. By the time I arrived the Guardian as a cub, a sea-change had occurred; Macebuh and the great denizens with whom he made the paper tick had exited.

Students of the history of nations are bound to agree that Nigeria has entered a stage or what I call the demonic phase of postcoloniality which demands from us a critical scrutiny. I have been tracing out in an on-going work, a theory of the postcolonial nation using the catastrophe model.

Reflect on this irony: a young army captain helps to organize a military coup and supervises the liquidation of his commander-in-chief and the host governor, another senior military officer, of a region to which he was paying a state visit. The facts are bare: even in a military situation under a properly trained and disciplined military officer, a General must be accorded his full compliments even in death.

The news out of Imo State is not good. There is a sense of failure and a general feeling of siege; a situation that calls us all to rise and confront two important questions: first, how is it that a state so endowed with some of Africa’s best educated people can sit and allow the use of primitive and unregulated power to undermine its civic authority?

Among the most sustained mythologies of postcolonial Nigeria is the myth of a “northern domination” or the hegemony of the north. Many of us buy into this quite unreflectively, and it has become the rallying cry in Southern Nigeria, whenever the issue of political bargaining arises.

THE tradition of intellectual inquiry in Nigeria, in at least, the last 30 years has been at best self-indulgent and unadventurous.

The modern nation is characterized by border crossings and intermingling, by a necessarily mobile, overt and covert copulation of beings in its domain of reality which must subvert traditional affiliations if a nation must grow.

Frequently, a certain segment of Nigerians, particularly those from the Southern flank raise the flag of progressive politics, and claim to represent the sum of all practices of progressive ideas in Nigeria. The North of Nigeria is also thus frequently cast as providing the antithesis of progressive politics, and therefore becomes the veritable face of Nigeria’s antinomy in the consciousness of the South.

T oday, I celebrate the life of a great man, Mr. James Emeziem Nworgu, Classicist and Justice of Peace. News reached me that Mr. Nworgu passed, this past week into immortality. I felt an immediate twinge of regret for I had missed one last opportunity to see him last June when I buried my own father.

The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria may now officially be said to be under hostage to a foreign power – namely Saudi Arabia- and her local collaborators – namely, those within the Nigerian presidency who have conspired to hide the person of the president, Umaru Yar Adua, to prevent a full accounting to the government and people of Nigeria.

Nigerian parents are very busy making money and thinking that that is all it takes to provide a great life for the kids. Many create cocoons of privilege that isolate their children from a larger community of peers, and they live in that bubble of a small, closed society, and become very easy targets, as I am sure the young Mutallab became, of those who give them meaning and tempt them with purpose beyond themselves.